Telarus: Recent Episodes
Telarus
Educational Podcasts tailored for today’s successful communication technology consultants. Our content is designed to make you more expert in consulting businesses for UCaaS, CCaaS, Cybersecurity, Mobility, IoT, Connectivity, Voice, Cloud, and SD-WAN.
You won’t want to miss this today as we have the legendary CX Solution Architect, Meagan Thai of Telarus on the call. We discuss how Omni-channel is still so critical to understand, what some of the latest trends partners need to be aware of, and huge tips for more success when talking to customers to put yourself in their shoes!
Hey everybody, welcome back to a brand new episode. Today we're talking about how to unleash CX excellence and journey into the Omni-Channel world. Today we have on the wonderful, the amazing Meagan Thai also been called legendary CX solution architect of Telarus Meagan thanks for coming on and doing this. Thank you, Josh. Good to be here. Does that mean I'm old? No, no, no. Ageless, ageless, timeless, whatever you want to call it.Meagan I want to kick this off first about you. I want everybody to get to know you, right? We always talk about what are people's journeys, how do they get into this? So let's hear your journey. What's been your path into this space? Did you always set out to do this? Did you stumble into this? Love to hear it. Yeah, never would have imagined I'd be doing this decades ago. So yes, legendary. I've been around for a few decades. I don't think people know this about me, but I have a degree in child development. So I used to work in that industry. Now some people will say, Oh, it comes in handy for what you do these days. But I was in that industry earlier on, you know, my 20s, early 20s. And you know what, the parents were kind of difficult to manage, the kids were great, but the parents not so much. So I wanted to change and I got a break into sales from from a family member says, you know, I think you'd be good. We will come in, you know, come in, we'll train you on how to do this. I'm thinking sales. What? Okay. So I went in, I was groomed. And back then I it was a cable harnessing company restarted manufacturing cables and wire harnesses for nor tell meridian systems, that kind of stuff. Little did I know that was going to be my path, right? So that's I got my first shot in sales doing that. And I would do account management, direct selling and didn't really enjoy direct selling so much. And then I got a taste for partner selling what we call the channel today. But back then it was so new. And this is probably in 2001. Back then it was called alliance. It was an alliance partner program. And no one knew what it was, including the team that was hired. But when I started getting a taste for, hey, how do you help partners sell this technology? And it was T ones and DSL, right? Internet services back then. And I just enjoyed it because I loved working with partners, hand in hand. And I can go to the partners say, hey, where's this order? You know, where you put pressure on them versus putting the pressure on me to get the order from the customer. But I really just enjoyed the relationship and the educating and just working side by side with a partner for the same goal. And the rest is history. So I've been doing that for gosh, what 20 plus years now, selling in the channel. Love it. Love it. Nor tell man, see, it sucks in it sucks you whether you're playing on it or not. That's right. So so let's talk about our here we are in 2023. You know, we've had a lot of episodes where we talk about different segments of contact center and customer experience. We talked workforce management, we've talked all these different things. What is omni channel mean, if we're just defining this here in 2023? But also, you know, why is it still so important? Yeah, it absolutely is important. It's funny, because so when I started with till areas about five years ago, and back in 2018, we had to define we had to properly define what omni channel meant. You know, it's a way to seamlessly move your customer interactions between different channels of communications, whether it's voice, SMS, chat, whatever,
Listen in today with Christian O’Brien from Atlas IP. Christian dives into his unique back story and how he’s gotten to his current role. We also dissect something that’s a common denominator with most businesses, and that’s licensing and Office 365. Christian talks about how he’s successfully navigated these waters and just might share some pro tips about how to get current customers and prospects interested in your pitch!
Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. On this week, we’re talking about cloud. We’re talking about specifically why licensing and security and infrastructure are also critical for Microsoft. Today, we’ve got the wonderful Christian O’Brien from Atlas IP. Christian, welcome on, my man. Hey, Josh. How’s it going today? Better now that you’re here.
Let’s kick this thing off, man. I think everybody wants to hear about your background. Tell us just a little bit about you. We’re going to get to Atlas in a second, but tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into tech? How did you get into sales? Any crazy winding path, or have you just always set out and fill us in? Yeah, sure. I can go way back. I actually am a big sports fan, so when I was in college, I actually wanted to be a sports broadcaster.
Major was mass communications.
Realized that’s not the road I wanted to go.
I did a business minor, realized that sales was for me a little bit loose. Started as a BDR at a small cybersecurity firm in Boston.
Then I jumped to Fuse, which was Unified Communications Platform.
Ended up in the channel where I met Atlas IP, a bunch of different other partners. Then when the 8×8 purchase of Fuse happened, Atlas IP reached out to me and said, “Hey, Christian, what do you think about becoming a partner?”
I worked with these guys forever, know the industry, and thought about it, and then realized, “Hey, these guys bring a lot of value to their customers.” Obviously, the commission is you can make as much as you want. There’s a lot of freedom in it. You know what? I’m going to take a jump towards it. Here I am a year and a half in, and definitely a good decision. I love it. Now, I got to ask, I heard the accent there.
Boston, and you got the sports background. You have a lot of sports options in Boston.
What was your favorite?
Oh, football for me. Football through high school. Didn’t get the opportunity to play in college, but massive Pats fan.
If you don’t, I probably will say wicked at least twice during this podcast.
Just for people who aren’t used to it, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. I love it. All right. Now, tell us a little bit about then your role at Atlas, and really who Atlas IP is. Sure. I’m a technology advisor for Atlas IP.
There’s about 10 of us at the company run by Nick Prosser and Brian Robertson. They’re the presidents. They started the company about 10, 12 years ago, I believe.
Really focused in at the beginning on moving PBXs to the cloud.
Since I’ve been on here a little bit before I even joined, they’ve decided to really dive into different technologies.
Once you have a client selling UCaaS or CCaaS or something like that, there’s a bunch of different opportunities that you can really provide them.
For Microsoft, for example, who provides your Microsoft licensing for security? That’s a whole other branch of revenue for us and just opportunities to talk to the customer. We’ve been really trying to be more open with the technologies that we’re pitching to our clients and just basically listening for those trigger words into different technologies other than UCaaS but that’s still pretty core competency over here.
Awesome. I love it.
Let’s talk about that. You mentioned licensing. Let’s jump in here a little bit. When we think about cloud and infrastructure, migrations, all that good stuff, what’s a misconception that you see when you’re out there talking to customers?
Sure.
A misconception is, and let me break this down a little bit.
When I’m prospecting into accounts, a lot of the times we are trying to get a small win. We’re trying to start the conversation. We’re trying to put buzzwords in front of the customers. A lot of the times what we’re doing is through CSPs that we work with through Telerus, we’re saying, “Hey, we could probably save you 5% to 10% on your Microsoft licensing.”
Some of the misconceptions I get from the client is, how can you do that for like-to-like services?
How is the support going to be?
How is that transition from going from Microsoft Direct to a CSP?
Also, just to touch on the licensing, some of the misconceptions might be around security.
When you go into the E3, E5 licenses, a lot of it has to do with email security. But essentially, you can really get a lower cost option for maybe a better solution from a bunch of different email security partners. Those are some of the misconceptions. But yeah. That’s good. Now, let’s talk about, once you’re in that conversation, let’s say we go beyond licensing.
You mentioned, I think, a really good point that I love when I hear partners, “Hey, we’re going to get in for this.” We realize that if we do a good job with that, which we know we will, it’s going to give us the opportunity to do other things for this customer. So we’ve got to figure out how to address those, which is why you’re here.
If we look beyond licensing, where else are you finding they need help? Are we talking migration? Are we talking cloud, off-prem? What are you seeing?
Yeah.
It depends on the customer. Every customer thinks or has a different way of thinking.
I work with customers that are moving their on-premise to the cloud. I have customers that are in a hybrid cloud, but they want to be more scalable and go towards an AWS or something like that.
But mostly, I think it’s more in the urgency is a little bit more from an on-premise system to moving towards the cloud is usually what I see.
Really getting into those conversations from just that Microsoft licensing is just, “What else are you guys using with Microsoft? Is it Azure? Is it AWS? Are you guys on-premise?”
Then that’s when you start getting more information towards to drive to that conversation. Really, just be listening in that.
I think some of the strategies that we see are, as you uncover, as you’re listening for those pain points or you’re listening for just points, do you drill down in that and go, “How’s that working? How’s that going?” I’d imagine there’s somewhat of a checklist in that for you, right? Sure. Yeah. But there is also a thing to where if you’re in a conversation about, say, Microsoft licensing,you want to make sure, and they’re interested in that conversation, you want to make sure you drill down into that first.
But when you’re having those conversations, Microsoft can basically do a lot of it, like almost everything. They can do a lot of different things. When you drive and dive into, “Do you have E5 licenses?” If they do, great. Are you guys using Microsoft for your voice or for your PBX?
There’s so many different ways and branches from that Microsoft conversation to where you can dive into each one of their technologies.
I think once you dive in and find out, “Okay, this guy’s interested for,” or “Girl’s interested for Microsoft licensing,” let’s expand that conversation to exactly what is a Microsoft licensing doing for them today. Yeah. Good point. Let’s talk about maybe pitfalls, gotchas, some of the rabbit holes in here. Is there anything, if I’m a partner and I’m listening to this and you’re starting to convince me, “All right, I can do this. I can tackle this. I haven’t done this. Maybe I’ve focused in a different technology area.” What’s a pitfall in this? What’s a roadblock that’s going to come up potentially that I need to be ready for? I wouldn’t necessarily say roadblock. I think it really just depends on the companies that you’re prospecting into. For Microsoft licensing, just as a partner perspective, if I’m looking to make money, am I going to go to a sub 100 customer trying to sell the Microsoft licensing?
I can. If I’m in that conversation already, will we make a lot of money on that? No. Is there better conversations to have in that account? Probably. But if you’re looking into trying to save people on their Microsoft licensing, have that more of an in-depth conversation, you can get to hire employee count companies and have a little bit of a deeper conversation because that’s when they have E3, E5, E1 licenses.
They have the business standard licenses. It’s a little bit more complex.
That conversation means, the licensing conversation means a little bit different. It’s a little bit different to customers that are a little bit higher in the employee count range, if you will. Makes sense. More likelihood for sprawl. Yeah. Makes sense. Then they just go, “Oh my gosh, I can’t keep up with this. I need your help.” If you know Microsoft licensing, yes, let’s have a conversation.
Let’s walk through an example here. Talk to me about a deal that you got involved in. Where did it start? What was the problem?
How is that gone?
Sure. I’m really piggybacking off this wedge in terms of getting discount Microsoft licensing.
What I was saying on the last question is, you want to target bigger enterprise organizations because they have the bigger enterprise Microsoft bill.
This morning, I was reaching out to save 5%, 10% on your Microsoft licensing. I actually got a response from a Fortune 500 company, from the CIO being that, put his whole team on an email chain with me and said, “Hey, I would love to save 10% to 5%, 5% to 10% on my Microsoft licensing. Why don’t you guys set up a call with Christian, see what he has, and get back to me?”
I think just based off that, if you can get into an account in a conversation just with Microsoft licensing, you don’t need to have all the technical aspects of what each license does. It helps, but if you can get in there as a wedge, find out exactly what they’re using their Microsoft licensing for, then you can really pinpoint, “Okay, so what are you doing with your phone system? What are you doing? Are you guys in the cloud?”
There’s so much meat on that bone just from a simple entry strategy to prospecting. Yeah.
It’s funny, I was chatting with another partner on this, and it’s funny what we think is difficult in our world sometimes is totally different of what a customer thinks is difficult in their world. You’re looking at this going, “I get licensing. I understand it. I know what to do with it.” You’ve got a CIO here that’s in charge of a million things. He looks like licensing is incredibly complicated. If anybody can come in and help me with this really hard thing, then absolutely. You get in, you crack the wedge with the CIO on licensing, you save them a few bucks, you’re a hero, and then all of a sudden, the things that he thinks are maybe even easier, you’re going, “Oh my gosh, those are simple.”
Of course, if he can figure these out, he can get that. You’re just such a natural one to take the rest of that business. I love that strategy. Yeah. One thing I’ve learned about being in the agent partner world is all it really takes is just getting somebody on the phone because we can sell so many different things. There’s a million different things we can sell. When you’re focusing in on a singular aspect like Microsoft licensing, there are so much different conversations that come out of that conversation based on security, phone system, or even the cloud, like I said.
It just really opens up the conversation to really more. That’s why I would urge someone like me joining is really keep your eyes open to learning new technologies, asking the right questions, and really just finding any way that you can just have a single conversation in a net new account.
Yeah. I think the funny thing in this too is that there is a preconceived notion outside looking in, if we’ve never sold these things before in the channel, that that’s got to be really hard. It’s got to be a lot of moving parts to it. The funny feedback from partners that have grown up selling one or two specific things is when they go and do these and after they execute on a few, they go, “In the end, it was much easier. I don’t have outages. I don’t have turnips. It’s different than I thought it was. I make more and I help companies in a different way.” So it’s cool to hear that. Yeah, for sure. They know that you can sell all these different technologies. When they have a project saying cybersecurity, they’re going to reach out to you.
If they have a project in, they’re looking for a new circuit, we can sell it to them.
Really flexing some knowledge on the customer and the different things that you can sell is only going to benefit you. Might take a little long to figure all this stuff out because again, there is a million things that you can sell.
But that’s why it helps to have the essays at Telarus helping you. If you ever have any fear of going into a conversation and not knowing what you’re talking about, those are the perfect resources to bring on a call.
I wouldn’t let lack of knowledge in an aspect or a subject hesitate you from asking about it. Love it. Awesome points. Bring us in. We love getting into some crazy stuff.
As we think about, I’m another partner listening to this and I’m thinking about going into it, but I’m not sure. Maybe I’m not fully comfortable yet. What are some questions that you might give those partners if they’ve got existing relationships? Maybe they’ve sold other things. Maybe going back to some of your early points or any, I’m a big questions fan, so I’d love to make sure we always drop questions on this. What are some of those questions that you would ask or give them to ask? Sure.
To just start off, I think it is very important to obviously keep that relationship going.
Especially if you have a really good relationship with that client, you can set up monthly, quarterly business reviews of really how is the technology I just sold you doing. Is there any problems with that? Other questions is just around, I think the biggest one is cost optimization is a huge.
driver for my customers right now. Really, what I would say is just asking them, “Hey, is there any IT cost optimization initiatives happening at your organization?”
Yes, great. Tell me a little bit more about that. Once you start understanding what customers have in terms of their vendors, what they’re spending on them, then you can really take a look at it and say, “Okay, well, I know that they are spending say $30,000 a month on their AWS bill. Could we go look at a private cloud vendor to alleviate some of that?”
Oh, you’re spending, you have 300 different E5 licenses. Those are pretty expensive. A lot of people buy Microsoft E5 licenses for the email security. Well, there’s great email security vendors that might be a little bit of a cheaper option for you that probably will have more robust requirements or not requirements, but one of my features, there we go, Josh, thank you.
I think it’s just really asking about and really understanding what do these clients have internally, what vendors are they using? What are they spending on them? That opens up the can of worms into, “Yeah, I think I’m paying way too much for my Microsoft licensing. I think I’m paying way too much for my phone system.”
Then that’s where you can really spread your roots into the account.
Love it. All right. Final question here.
This is fast-moving tech. There’s a lot of things going on. Microsoft is dumping a bunch of money into this. We’ve got all kinds of cool technologies coming out. What’s your envisionment? It’s probably hard to say much past 12 months, but any change in strategy that you would advise anybody on if we’re looking at the next 12 months or be aware of anything else, just your perspective of what you think comes next? Sure.
Little story for you. I came in, obviously, into the agent world as aUCaaS vendor or aUCaaS specialist, if you will. All I would do when I first got here was try to sellUCaaS.
What were people emailing me back about? Security. Every single time. It’s the funniest thing. I’m talking to my boss and I’m like, “Hey, I’m in only a couple of theseUCaaS conversations, but every single time I’m sending aUCaaS email, I’m getting, “Hey, do you guys,” and we get on the phone with them. Really, their concern is about security. I think that is a huge market that not a lot of people are really tapping into or really asking the questions around.
That’s really the sweet spot right now, I would say, is cybersecurity. Really understanding.
There’s a bunch of different ways to do it. There’s a bunch of different theories on which technologies that you need. I would dive into cybersecurity for sure because that’s really what my customers are coming back to me for. I love it.
I think the timing on it is good too because we’ve obviously got all these great AI things coming out and when new things and cool things tend to come out, people want to put security on the SaaS provider and forget that they still have to design security into it. It’s their data when just because you put things out in public doesn’t mean the public is secure or the vendor is secure. You have to consider all those. Great point. I think that puts a bow on it.
Licensing security. We realized why it’s critical. Licensing is at the center of what everybody does these days. 90, however many, percentage of businesses out there have Microsoft licensing. I think you’ve helped really drive down why this is all critical because it’s at the epicenter of what every business does. Yes, very well put. Awesome. All right, my man, Christian, that brings us up to the end. Really appreciate you coming on, man. Awesome. Thanks, Josh. Everybody that wraps us up, Christian O’Brien, Atlas IP. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering, cloud licensing, security, and infrastructure. Until next time.
Join today as we dive deep into the world of Microsoft with Sean Ferrel of Managed Solution. We talk licensing, Azure, desktop, Azure CoPilot, and more. Sean does a great job breaking down where partners can help, common misconceptions, and how some accounts just continue to grow with all the different products Microsoft has available and Managed Solution has expertise in!
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is next level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we're talking about cloud, we're talking about Microsoft. We're talking licensing, security, infrastructure. As much as we can possibly pack into 30 minutes to do this today though, we have on Sean Ferrell, founder and chairman of Managed Solution, who you may know in the Telarus portfolio. Sean, welcome on man. Sean Ferrel: Oh, Josh, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. I'm excited to give any advice. I can Josh Lupresto: love it. Let's, let's talk about, let's talk about you first. I want to hear about your journey. Did you always start out in tech? How did you found this company? How did we get from, from nothing to to here. Sean Ferrel: God, 20 years. We'll just start there. It's, it's, I'm getting old. I wouldn't say the [00:01:00] company's getting old. I'm getting old. But I was, I came to San Diego and yeah, I love tech, but I actually love the business side of running a services organization first. So it was outta school. I mean, I started at, you know, grassroots, living in a dorm, to be honest. And so 20 years later I'll, I'll call it a lot of different evolutions of the company, you know, in, in short kind of hitch star wagon, as if you will. I had to look at what was happening in the world with, with the big guys, Microsoft, with what was happening with the consumer, with Amazon and what was happening with search with Google. And in the end, when it came to tech, we sort of said, we feel like Microsoft's doing a great job. So fast forward, you know, 2023, you know, we're what's called a highly specialized Microsoft partner. They kind of did away with this concept of gold and. You know, we have to carry thousands of certified people, or I should say certifications within engineering. And and it's been a fun journey. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we're kind of tag lining this thing. Like we want technology to have a positive social impact. 'cause a lot of it doesn't. And so whatever that might be, [00:02:00] if it's gonna help a human being, you know, we're here to help him. Love it. Josh Lupresto: Love it. So, so break it down for, for, for anybody that is not familiar with Managed solution. Talk about what you're doing, what your focus is, and we'll get into to some of the weeds here in a minute. But, but break it down at a high level first. Sean Ferrel: Yeah. I mean, so there's, there, just think about it. Simply put, you've got two businesses within one organization or across the country. So we own a US based help desk, a true 24 hour a day. Level one, level two, level three, very technical help desk. We can work directly with suppliers or, or I guess manufacturers like Microsoft and Amazon and some of our partners. But it's, that's, that's one thing we do. And we do it for a lot of companies. Typically, you know, mid-market, a hundred employees and more. But we have a lot of s m B accounts that we deal with, and we do it within the channel. The other side of that is, you know, for better, you know, sake of consulting, we work with Microsoft directly, so there's 500,000 Microsoft partners in the world, Josh, and in that we're in the top 132 I think this year. So it's pretty [00:03:00] special. So you combine those two things and really, you know,
Did you ever think as a partner you'd be able to sell Starlink? Did you ever think you'd be able to get fiber based speeds from a satellite? Well, the time is finally here. Listen is as we have Mike Kowalski, Telarus Sales Engineer and Edge expert discuss how some of these opportunities have come about and what journey towards this technology has been.
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that's designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is next level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome to a new exciting track within cloud. Today we're talking about licensing. So more specifically, why are licensing, security, and infrastructure so critical for Microsoft and beyond? And on with us today, we have the wonderful Mr. Mike Kowalski, regional sales engineer, cloud specialist here at Telarus. Mike, thanks for thanks for coming on, man. Mike Kowalski: Absolutely, Josh. Thanks for having me. Josh Lupresto: Mike. So I, I wanna kick us off. You know obviously we know a little bit of your journey kind of as how you've got here. You've got a cool background in data center and cloud and, and, and, and all kinds of different things. But maybe just kick us off with some, some life lessons, some business lessons here. So, as you've kind of evolved, you've learned a lot of things throughout your career. Gimme just [00:01:00] one or two lessons you've learned along the way, like I said, business or technical that, that you've learned that would be helpful. Mike Kowalski: Really, I've been in this space for such a long time that I think the common thread is a lot of things used to be given away in technology, not thinking that they had much value. And what I've seen over time, and I, I think the story goes that Bill Gates wrote this operating system for a client and he went to sell it to 'em and they're like, ah, we don't want to just keep it. And, and thus Microsoft was born, right? Nobody saw the value in it. And those early systems that they shipped, Had a CD on it, you could install it on your computer, you can install it on your neighbor's computer. They just didn't see the value in the actual licensing component. They thought they would just be selling more hardware, I guess. More of a package. So through my career, I've seen businesses really try to streamline that monetization process from a business aspect. But I think also technically, They're trying to [00:02:00] create more options that better fit how each business utilizes licensing. So it gets a little convoluted, I think. We'll, we'll come across that a couple of times during this conversation, but I think in this day and age, it's still not set. Things are still changing, things are still evolving, and some people might think it's a good thing. Other, the other people who really have mastered the old program throw their hands up in the air, like, okay. I just got used to this. Now what's happening? So Josh Lupresto: yeah, good point. We were talking about this before, right? It, it changes fast. And that's, that's part of the value. And, and, and actually speaking of that, right? Speaking about value, just a level set, right? People that know, you know, that your, your role is, is your regional engineering, right? You're there in California, but you also have a, a, a cloud focus as well. Give us a background for anybody that has not met you, your evolving role and, and, and how you help partners do what you do. Mike Kowalski: Started in infrastructure, physical infrastructure. Customer owned computers, customer owned facilities. And that's evolved over time to obviously people pushing things [00:03:00] out into data centers and still owning their computers, and then even pushing that into customers owning their own equipment and then having somebody else manage those,
Tune in today with our special guest from Auckland, Giles Potter of Great Outcomes! Giles drops golden nugget after nugget as we tackle the argument of AI in the Contact Center and its role in Quality Assurance. You'll hear about Giles' path from the automotive sector to starting his own business to ultimately help customers improve their Customer Experience! There are tons of tips and lessons learned you won't want to miss.
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next level Biz Tech. Everybody. Welcome back to the final track. On this episode, we are talking about what everybody wants to hear about, of course, ai. More specifically, we are wrapping up the track titled, is AI better than a Human Being for Quality? In the contact center amongst the contact center agents. Nobody better than our farthest reaching guest ever on the podcast. Mr. Giles Potter from Great outcomes coming to us from New Zealand. Welcome on my man. Giles Potter: Thanks very much, Josh. It's great to be here. Coming in from Auckland today. Josh Lupresto: Love it. Thursday here. Friday there. It's still, it's always gonna get me. I think I bring that up every time we talk. Absolutely. Giles. So you know, we, you know, we know that you've got a [00:01:00] lot of expertise in Context Center. We could narrow this down into a lot of different things and we're gonna get to some good some good content here. And just a second aboutAIand CX and all that, I always like to start off with, How did you start out? Have you always been in contact center? Have you always been in tech? Did you wash dishes and say, I want to get into technology. Where did it start? How'd you get here? Giles Potter: Oh, no, I wasn't in tech at all. Not at all. I actually started in marketing as a, a young man in my early twenties. I wanted to be a marketing manager and, and one of my early jobs was every boy's dream working in a car manufacturer marketing finance agreements at, at car dealerships. So we used to go off and do exciting things in the weekend, like supporting the, the dealer racing teams at exciting race tracks around the country. So yeah, that was really fun. But it ultimately led to technology. Josh Lupresto: So how do you, how do you get the tra and I'm a car guy, so I, I, I mean, part of me wants to hear more about cars, but how do you make the transition from [00:02:00] the auto, the marketing world to firing up great outcomes, right? And doing what you've done to build the business up. Giles Potter: Yeah, look look at actually looking back, it was a pretty natural line, but it went from marketing car finance agreements to then saying, so hold it. There's a whole lot of customer service in marketing and and operations and fulfillment. If you're gonna sell lots of car finance, you're gonna actually service them as well. So, hey, you go and look after that big customer service operation as well as it. At, at the beginning. So at a point in my career, I swapped across to working for a. Finance company is part of a bank. And they said to me, oh, and by the way, look after the contact center as well, will you? And that was the first time I failed in life around like, oh my God, this is much harder than I thought. And I met failure. I'm flat in the face. Josh Lupresto: I love it. I love it. Now, now, how do you, how do you, if we, if we, if we flash back [00:03:00] a little bit here, right? Failure hits you in the face. Where's the, where does the inspiration in that come from? Right? Is it lessons learned? And you go, my gosh, I could do this, I could make it better. Where how do you get into the space? Giles Potter: Well, look, it's one of those situations where I. As a young man or or a young woman, you know,
Listen in today as we discuss the hot topic of AI, specifically AI in the Contact Center, and if it's better at Quality Assurance than a human. Ashish Nagar, CEO of Level AI, joins us today as we dive deep into their real-time QA offering and how it sits on top of other contact center offerings. We talk about Generative AI and how it solves some of the most common problems in the contact center and turns them into revenue-generating machines!
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next level Biz Tech. Hey everybody, welcome back. We got a fun episode for you today because it's never boring to come in and talk about AI. What better time than now, right? Listen, our topic today is we ask the question here, is AI better than human being for qa? Contact center agents. And if you don't know what QA is, I bet you can spell it. I promise it's not as scary as it might sound. We're gonna go over that today. But today from a guest perspective, we've got the CEO of Level AI on. We've got Ashish Nagar Ashish, welcome to the call. I man. Ashish Nagar: Thank you so much, Josh, for having me. Josh Lupresto: I'm, I'm excited. You, I feel like this could be a, you know, we're, we're, we're trying to make this a 30 minute podcast. I feel like you and I could talk about this for four hours, but they, they make me keep it down. So I'll, I'll do my [00:01:00] best to keep us reigned in, but excited to have you on, man. Excited to kick this off. Same here. Alright, so I want you to take us back a little bit here. We want to hear a little bit about your personal background, your unique story, and how you got in this space. Ashish Nagar: Yeah, so it's actually very interesting Josh, and thanks again for having me. So I have been working in the space of voice AI and N L P for almost the last 10 years now. So I, I was doing a startup which is kind of c you know, Siri early version of Siri, which we sold to Amazon Amazon's Alexa team. And was working as a product leader in Amazon's Alexa team for a few years when Alexa was growing up, was, was growing a lot. And the project which I was working on towards my last assistant at Alexa was making Alexa talk to any human for 20 minutes on any social topic. So imagine if you walk into a room and you find the one of those devices there and just like, Hey, how was the. How's the NCAA [00:02:00] tournament? Like how's March Madness? Mm-hmm. And anything which you can talk to a human being on and, and how can we make Alexa know about everything, have a free forming conversation and be engaging and all that stuff. And on that project I was working with research groups from around the world to make this happen, and then I realized all the challenges which are there in the space to make question answering work, better machines, to understand humans and so on. And then realized that Google, Amazon, Facebook, open AI are all working. For these mass solutions. Right? But nobody's working in the enterprise. Mm-hmm. Who make a world class solutions. And we saw that the technologies which were there before us were all very basic. And, and so that's how I got into. The enterprise AI space and what we first started doing, what our first product was actually a bot for frontline workers, like nurses, technicians retail sole workers. And when we showed it to all the customers, they were like, can you first [00:03:00] apply this in the contact center? That's where most of our problems are. That's where we are getting all of these voice calls and other thing. And our question was, but don't you have. Incumbent solutions there, you know? Yeah. I don't wanna take names, but you know, and all these existing solutions there. And they were like, yeah,
Interested to hear more about how AI and ChatGPT are being applied in the Contact Center? Then you won't want to miss this talk track. Listen in as we discuss with Telarus Contact Center Solution Architect Jason Lowe. Jason outlines key evolutions in the contact center technology space, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and all the supporting tools, along with what happens to a business if they fail to adopt them. We might even hear about Jason Lowe's secret talents as a singer and DJ!
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech. Hey everybody. Welcome back. Joined here with a special guest in the studio today, Mr. Jason Lowe joining us to talk about AI in the contact center. Is it better than a human or not? Jason Lowe, welcome back on man. Jason Lowe: Thank you for having me back. Josh Lupresto: Exciting stuff. And today we're talking about, you know, what's really front of mind. It's ai. It's the contact center. There's copilot, there's all these cool things that we're gonna get to, no spoiler alerts, but your role here at Telarus obviously is the solution architect over the CCAs practice. So we're gonna get some exciting point of views, I think from your perspective. Excited to do that today. Okay. Okay. So I assume that everybody watches every episode, but in the event that there is one person that maybe didn't [00:01:00] talk to us a little bit about, you know, How did you get started in your tech career? Have you always been in tech? How did you make it here? Jason Lowe: Well, when I was a kid, I really got in, this is when like personal com. I'm that old. Yes. Well, I, when I was a kid, personal computers were just starting to be a thing, and so I really got into them and got into doing all sorts of fun stuff Right out of high school, I went into a very technical type role and ended up progressing to a role where I wrote code for like a decade. And then I went through some educational changes to make myself a little more qualified to get into some better positions and progressed and finally got a role at what is now called NICE CX one. But when I joined the company, it was called U C N back in 2000. Yeah. So I was there for about a decade. I, you know, spent a little time at another company called talkdesk and, you know, another stop here, there until I finally came to flares. Josh Lupresto: I love it. So, so I want to hit you with a little bit of a curve ball here. [00:02:00] Oh, dears, flashback. Because I've also heard that you have been a dj, you have been in a band. One fill us in on that, but more importantly, why, why am I asking that? Because I think it relates anything that you've learned along that way that has helped you in this space. Jason Lowe: Okay. I came from a musical family, had a mom that was an opera singer, had a dad that was a guitarist songwriter. And so I just kind of, music has been a part of my life all my life. So when I was a kid, just moved to Utah, there was this dance club called the Ritz, and it was a big red bowling pin on State Street. It was right there. Yes. And it was a new wave dance club for 16 and older. And I happened to wander in when I was 16, and by the end of my. 16th year, I believe. I had gone up to the owner and said hey, when are you gonna let me dj? And he goes how about next week? Because someone had just quit. So I just became a DJ and I DJ'ed there for a number of years. My music career, I kind of, I had a song on the radio locally in Utah for like a year [00:03:00] but didn't really do anything more with it. Got back into other musical projects. And then back in 2009, 2010, With the adv, advent of Facebook, started doing some more DJing and now I DJ on a regular basis, so it's a lot of fun.
Today we're joined by Chris Keojampa from our partner FCS in Texas. Chris has a phenomenal background and not only discusses how they scrapped and started FCS, but dives into their strengths in retail, collaboration and we go through some key struggles he's been able to solve with retail & Microsoft.
[00:00:00] Josh Lupresto: Welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech. Hey everybody. Welcome back. We are wrapping up a track today an important track. We're talking about wifi, we're talking about Microsoft Teams operator connect all kinds of cool stuff about penetrating the retail market. And today we've got on with us, Chris Keojampa from FCS. Chris, welcome on. Chris Keojampa: Hey, thanks for having us, Josh. Hi. Josh Lupresto: So, so Chris, before we get this thing started and we start talking nerdy about teams and operator connect and wifi and all that fun stuff I just wanna hear your story. I, I would love to know and love to, to have the listeners here, how did you start out in this space? Did you, did you start out, you know, waiting tables and then wanting to get into technology? Was this your destiny from day one? Fill us in, man. Chris Keojampa: No. Funny story. I [00:01:00] mean, I, I, I'd bartended and waited tables throughout college, right? I graduated with a bachelor's degree in in biology and also a bachelor in business management. Still didn't know where I wanted to go from there, right? I just knew that I was a, a person that got along with all walks of life and just loved talking to people. And oddly enough, you know, everybody jokes around about, you know, Craigslist, right? But oddly enough, I found my first telecom job on Craigslist on a no platform. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was pretty funny. And I had interviewed with both C Von and Cogent cogent was the better option and the actually the one that gave me an opportunity to start an industry. I think I was born at a, a very good time, or, you know, in the eighties. Just cuz I got to see the paradigm shift from, you know, what technology looked like before it is today. You know, going from, you know, nobody really having, you know, mobile phones, you know, everybody thought pages were cool, right. To seeing how everything has evolved from. The old trends to how it's come [00:02:00] into the digital transformation age, and as it continues evolve and evolve. And I just took it from there, right? I, I knew I had to put my name on, you know, on the billboard and telecom and say, Hey, Chris Gil, job is here. But you know, things good things kept on coming along. Met my business partner Robert, probably about 13, 14 years ago. We the company's been in business for 10 and a half years now. And it was a time where it's very different from how most traditional, I'd say, trusted advisory firms start. They start their business today because it was a little harder back then. There weren't spiffs, there weren't anything of that sort to help you propel your company from a financial standpoint into. Yeah. You know, to, to stability in essence. Josh Lupresto: Yeah, you just had to grind it out in deals, right? Like, I mean, there's no escaping Chris Keojampa: that. Oh yeah. No, I mean, Robert and I have a great story. I mean, when we started, I went back to waiting tables, you know, moving back in with my parents. I mean, who wants to be that guy, 32 years old, you know, where you living based in my parents, I guess. Right? So I had to forego a lot of things for two [00:03:00] years, working 60 hours a day. Robert came from Oklahoma, had, you know, 60, $62 to his name in a black pack backpack, you know, knew that he wanted to do something different besides just, you know, working for. You know, a company so we can put our heads together.
Did you know you can help your customers can monetize their Wi-Fi? Listen in as we have Shawn Nace, Sales Engineering Manager of Telesystem, on with us to talk about a new product they have that allows just that. It works with just about any existing hardware they have, and it puts revenue back in the customer's pocket and in yours! You might also hear about some of their new IoT and security solutions too!
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech. Everybody welcome back. Today we are talking about something different. We got secrets for you. More. More specifically, we've got the top three secrets to help you help the customers. Monetize their wifi platform and you're probably thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't even know I could sell wifi or, or, or venture down that road. I've never done that. Don't worry. We're gonna cover all that. We're gonna get into it. And today to tell us about some of these secrets here we've got Shawn Nace with us, and Shawn Nace is the sales engineering manager at Telesystem. Shawn, welcome on, man. Yeah thanks Shawn Nace: for having me. Josh Lupresto: So Shawn, first as we kick these things off, we'd like to hear about everybody's background. Everybody comes from all kinds of different places. Sometimes this industry sucks us in sometimes. We didn't know we were gonna end up here. Sometimes we wanted to be here [00:01:00] from the day one, and we just knew. So we'd love to hear just your personal background story. We know where you're at now cause we just, we just mentioned your title, but where did it start for you? Shawn Nace: Sure. Where did it start for me? So in college I studied business and yeah, I always. Had a fascination with technology. You know, always loved the newest gadgets and so forth. But I realized kind of late in my college career that I didn't wanna I didn't wanna work with numbers. I had a concentration in finance. I realized that it probably wasn't for me. So I ju I jumped on the opportunity to join a a C Life in Pennsylvania or outside of Philadelphia years ago, and kind of worked my way up through the ranks of support, eventually running a knock at a CLEC called line Systems. And then, Moved over to sales as I kind of just had had a, a real desire to get in front of customers and demo solutions like number one hosted PBX was new and you know, we all had to demo these cool little user interfaces. I was the kind of the only two guy for that. So sales ended doing was just a logical regression for me. I've loved it. So, Josh Lupresto: so fill us in a little bit about for anybody that doesn't know, [00:02:00] right? I mean, today we're gonna, we're gonna hone in a little bit on something key that Telesystems does. But, but first of all, just tell us a little bit about who Telesystems is, what you guys are, what's all in the portfolio, and, and kind of what the go to market motion is. Shawn Nace: Yeah, thanks. So we're a national voice and data provider a service provider that's been working with, we've been working with Polaris now I think for I think five or six years. A lot of people, you know, know us for having a really extensive portfolio, whether it's, you know, best in class switching solutions powered by Meta Switch or BroadSoft type two access with DDoS protection. More recently, where we're really getting a lot of traction is with things like cybersecurity, where our extensive managed wifi solution that includes a bit of iot little bit of iot offering on top of that. So We're definitely not your household name, but we're I'd say the best kept secret in telecom and we're the words, the word's getting out there. Josh Lupresto: Let's talk about that. You know I think sometimes when we think about.
Listen as we talk with technology leader Sarah Freeman of Attollo Tech in Arizona. She talks about her complete flip from automotive to technology sales and where it accelerated from there. Through this segment, we'll get into wifi, analytics, and secrets to help customers also learn how to improve their business and monetize them as well! Later in the segments, we'll talk specifically about struggles through retail specifically.
Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome back to a brand new chapter. We're talking about wifi, we're talking analytics, and the title of the track today is What Are the Top Three Secrets to Help Your Customers Monetize Your Wifi Platform. And hopefully by now listening to that, you're going. I can do what? And we're gonna break that down for you. So today we have got Sarah Freeman from Attollo, a tech partner of ours. Sarah, welcome on. Thank you, Josh. Sarah. So I, I, I got a lot of questions. I know we're gonna talk technology and all kinds of fun stuff but before, I would love to know everybody's path, how you get into this space. Was technology always your destiny? How did you get started? Did you do something completely different and stumble into it? How did it suck you in? Give us the breakdown. Sarah Freeman: [00:01:00] I was selling cars and I got sick of selling cars in my early twenties. I bought myself a gateway computer and I started looking for jobs on Monster and I actually had another job lined up and I thought, I'm just gonna go to the, this interview and check this place out. It sounds kind of cool. I know nothing about technology. I had just bought a gateway less than a month prior. And I got there and all the cars in the parking lot were cool. They had Corvettes and Porsches and you know, Mazdas and just all these really cool sports cars there. And you know, beavers, oh, what is this place? I walk inside, you hear everybody on the sales floor having fun. They had fun music playing on the overhead. And I looked around, I sat in the interview and I, the first thing I said to the, to the manager interviewing me was, I don't know what you guys do, but I wanna work here. And he got a kick out of that and that, that rolled me down the lines into working there. They were an HP reseller and I was hired to bring on the used Cisco networking product line. So I was [00:02:00] actually a hardware broker for the first 15 years of my career. Josh Lupresto: Got it. Beautiful. I love it. Nice cars. I would've gotten Sarah Freeman: it too. Yeah, right. It was nice cars and, and fun on the sales floor. Josh Lupresto: Yeah. All right, so, so tell us a little bit about a tolo tech. What does it mean? When did you start it? And, and, and what are some of your focuses? Sarah Freeman: Attollo means to Elevate or to Rise, and I chose that name. It is Latin partial to Latin, and I chose that name when I was running my multiple warehouses in the, in the hardware industry. I grew up and, and had my own businesses. I was running multiple warehouses. I was looking to add more to my portfolio, and at the same time I was feeling the pain of. Moving my own stack to the cloud. Which UCaaS provider do I choose? You know, the, the internet issues, all of the things that a small business has to go through to, to digitize, to move it to the next level. And it was painful. So I started looking at, you know, what can I add to my own portfolio in this process? And I read a Gartner report that said [00:03:00] everything as a service gets, makes 14% margins. Where here I was making a 4% net. Ah, and I thought, okay, we're, we're, we're doing a total pancake flip here and moving completely over onto the services side.
Listen in as we talk to Jeff Deverter, Chief Technology Evangelist about a new and evolving topic of Cloud, Containers, and Kubernetes. Jeff lays out his destiny and passion for technology growing up his entire life learning from his father who played a key role at IBM for 30+ years. He also gets into three key ways to talk about helping customers modernize regardless of where they are, on-prem, partial cloud, or even struggling with legacy app designs, you'll learn how Rackspace can help!
Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we are Talking Cloud, and more importantly, we're talking about three ways that you can help your customer with Kubernetes. And you may not know what that is yet but we're gonna get into it and we're gonna break it down. And more importantly, we've got Jeff DeVerter, chief Technology Evangelist from Rackspace on with us today. Jeff, thanks for joining, man. Jeff DeVerter (02:12): Josh, I am honored to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation, Josh Lupresto (02:16): I always like to kick this off with a little bit of background for anybody that doesn't know you, maybe it's blackmail that we could use against you later, but something I, I, I love to just kind of hear how everybody got into this space. Some people knew they wanted to be in tech from day one. Last guy I just talked to was a boat mechanic and didn't love that. And, and here we are now. So, so fill us in for you. How did you get here? Jeff DeVerter (02:38): Well, then maybe this one will be a first for you if we're gonna go way, way back to the very beginning. So let's go back to high school. So I grew up in in a, in a family where, you know, the dad could still have one career for 40 something years. And he was an IBM-er through and through first job out of the Navy, IBM last, last thing he did before he retired, still working for I B M and had an amazing career. Did some incredible stuff. He started as the guy who would go in and fix the cooling systems for the big tape drive systems that was storage back in the, whenever that was early sixties. And and so, needless to say, technology was just a part, whatever it was, was part of my growing up. And, but I was also into music. Jeff DeVerter (03:25): And so as a, you know, a middle schooler, high schooler thinking, what do I do? Do I go get into computers? Do I do I do to do something in music? And so I was a senior in high school. We'd been moved down to Austin, Texas, and I go into, as a senior, whatever advanced placement computer science was in those days on a green screen. And I sit down in the fall and I think, can't stare at that screen for the rest of my life. That's green and that is boring. And so, so I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a run at this music thing. I had a smart guitar teacher. He said, Jeff, you should really think about the technical side of, of music cuz maybe you're not the best guitar player in the world, . So I went in to learn how to be an recording studio engineer and producer. Jeff DeVerter (04:05): That was, that was gonna be the job. And ended up down in Houston, Texas and intern at the studio grow, you know, kind of grow up inside of this studio get married along the way, end up buying this recording studio. And the first thing I do when I buy a recording studio is put in a computer network. Why not Harken back to my father who's still working for ibm, excuse me. And os two warp is around in these days. And so I put in this couple of computers and network, and I think networking sort of fun. I, I think I could do this sort of thing if I didn't ha have this other day job. So I go on and do music for a number of years.
Listen in today as we talk to Chad Mowery, Cloud Solution Architect at Telarus. Chad talks about some cutting-edge cloud services such as Kubernetes and a few ways it can help your customers modernize in cloud. You'll find a few helpful tips, some basics around containers, and great conversation starters to open this door with your customers.
Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We are kicking off a new cloud track, and we're gonna get nerdy on you for a minute, but that's okay cuz we're gonna try to make it fun. The title of this week's track is what are the top three Ways Kubernetes can Help your Customers? And if you have no idea what Kubernetes is, that's okay. We brought the smart guy on today, Mr. Chad Mowery, cloud solution architect at Telarus to help us break it down. Chad, welcome on, man. Chad Mowery (02:16): Thanks, Josh. The pleasure is mine. Thanks so much for the invitation. Josh Lupresto (02:20): So, so Chad, before we get in and start talking about Kubernetes and containers and advanced cloud and all kinds of good stuff I want everybody to get to know you just a little bit. This is kind of my favorite part of the show is where we get to hear everybody's journey. Where did you come from? What did you do? Have you always been into tech? Did you start out you know, scrubbing concrete and cleaning floors? And then wanna get into this? Or give us your journey, man, how'd you get here? Chad Mowery (02:47): Wow, I don't know that we have time. Actually, I, I also wanted to back up and, and you, you mentioned at the beginning there that we were gonna get nerdy. So I I sometimes that's a compliment. Sometimes not so much. I'm pro I I choose to take it as a compliment though. My journey started. Yeah, I think cleaning bathrooms maybe, maybe maybe I should go back. So first, first computer I ever had was right out of high school, windows 95. So I've, I've loved technology computers ever since then. I remember as a teenager working for my uncles and they, they made jokes about being me being a car salesman. And it was funny because I, I would've been considered an introvert at the time, right? As a, as a teenager. I, I guess I, I probably really wasn't exactly, I don't know if closet extrovert is a real thing, but I don't know. Chad Mowery (03:50): It just just changed over time. I, it was probably eight years from when, and I distinctly remember that joke for some reason. It was probably eight years between when they made that joke and, and any, and, and later. And there I was working for them in their small autocare business as their service manager, service advisor. You know, I was handling all the, the customer experience, all the scheduling, you know, all the, all the selling of services et cetera. Also happened to be doing the it, I mean, it was a small shop, so they had one, one computer, and the database was like super tiny. But, you know, that's, that's kind of where it started. Actually backing up a little bit I guess to take a page out of Stein's book. I, I actually went to Bible college. Chad Mowery (04:38): So before I, I, I worked for my uncles just doing cleaning bathrooms for years while I was, while, while I was a teenager and then, and then going to college, and then went full-time after that. And, and before I went full-time for them as a service advisor, I had started going back to school after Bible college for my associate's degree in network administration. Because I had loved you know, as I mentioned earlier, I loved computers and technology, and so I wanted to, to do something there, I think. But working for them as a, as a service advisor and working with people, I realized that I, I just,
Don't miss this episode where we talk to Joe Mauk of C3 Technology Advisors about UC, Contact Center, MS Teams, and more on this episode titled: Direct Routing or Operator Connect with MS Teams - Which is better? Joe dives in about his history from a customer perspective along with his transition as the initial UC/CC Expert with C3 and crushing a huge deal only two weeks into his start!
Josh Lupresto (00:00): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We've got another, uh, exciting wrap up on a chapter today. We're talking more Microsoft Teams direct routing operator connect, and, uh, whatever else Microsoft wants to come out with here by the time this podcast drops. So, uh, today we've got on the amazing Joe Mauk of C3 Technology Advisors to talk to us. Joe, thanks for coming on, man. Joe Mauk (02:10): Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh. Josh Lupresto (02:12): Joe, first step in this is, uh, we gotta hear your journey, man. Uh, we, we wanna know where did you start out? Have you always been in tech? Have you been in something crazy and got sucked into this space? Uh, tell us about your journey. Joe Mauk (02:25): Sure. Yeah, I mean, I probably took a little bit different over a route than most people do. Um, I actually went to college for, um, criminal justice. I was gonna be a state trooper, and as I was going to class, people started saying, Hey, you know, 40% of Michigan State troopers are ex-Marines. So I started thinking, I'm like, you know, I probably need that experience, but I am not a marine . So I took the Navy route. Uh, so I spent four years on the USS George Washington, which is an aircraft carrier, and, uh, worked in the weapons department. So I was in charge of, uh, keeping, uh, the ship secure and then also moving bombs and missiles from the magazines down below up to the, the hangar bay up, up, up top to, uh, give out to the squadron. So, uh, yeah, it was, it was actually, um, once I got out of the Navy, um, by my wife's stepdad, had all of these old, uh, 3-86X computers, , and I was messing around and, you know, upgrading from 4K of RAM to eight K of Ram and, and my mom of all people, she said, you know, why don't, why don't you do something with computers? Joe Mauk (03:34): Um, might be a little bit more safe than being a trooper. And, and I said, you know, you, you might be right. Uh, so that's how I got into it. Um, but the funny, you know, funny story that I'll share with you as far as when I was in the Navy, um, you know, we, we went everywhere in the Mediterranean area and, um, we stopped in Palma, Spain, which is an absolutely gorgeous island on the south side of, of Spain. And, you know, Navy guys, you spend 30 days on the ship, you finally hit land, what do you do? You go out and have some drinks. Yeah, around town. We're on the boardwalk and this beautiful beach, and we see this entourage walking towards us. I'm like, who, who is that? It was, it was actually Muhammad Ali. Josh Lupresto (04:15): Oh, get out. Joe Mauk (04:17): I got a picture with Muhammad Ali. Now going back to what I said, what a, what a Navy guys do when you hit, when you hit land, we can proceeded to go out and continue to party a little bit. And, uh, somewhere that evening, I lost the camera. So I did meet Muhammad Ali, I got a picture with Muhammad Ali. Um, but unfortunately I have no proof that I met Muhammad Ali in Palm of Spain. So Josh Lupresto (04:45): I don't know that anybody's gonna be able to dispute that. I love it. Joe Mauk (04:48): . No, no, probably not. Josh Lupresto (04:50): That's awesome. So, so tell us then about, uh, how, how does that transition and, and, and kind of how did you come into C3 and then really give us a little bi...
Long-time channel friend Shelby Cooper joins us today and talks about Microsoft Teams as we pick apart their deployment options. Do your customers want Direct Routing, or is Operator Connect the new direction they want to go? What are the differences, and where does Fusion have success. Listen in today to find out and learn even more about the ever-changing Microsoft Teams deployment options and how Fusion Connect keeps it simplified!
Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. Today, we are talking about something that comes up all the time, Microsoft Teams, but we're gonna dive in a little deeper. We're gonna talk about direct routing. We'll talk Operator Connect. Lots of good stuff to unpack here, but today I'd like to welcome on. Good man. Shelby Cooper, VP of Channel Sales from Fusion Connect. Shelby, welcome on. Shelby Cooper (00:36): Josh, what it is, brother . Sorry. Thanks for having me on, man. It it's fun to be on podcasts that you listen to. Josh Lupresto (00:44): I get invited to podcasts, and it's like I have to go do research and figure out who the heck that is and what they're talking about. But with dio, I'm like, oh, I mean, it's like getting invited to the Jay Leno show. It's a big deal for me. Josh Lupresto (00:57): His cars are way cooler than mine. I have one. He's got a lot. He's got a lot. Maybe I'll take it though. I'll take it. Uh, all right, man. Let's, let's kick this off with your personal background. Uh, this is my, one of my favorite parts of this show is being able to understand where everybody came from. Some people this industry sucked him in, as we know, some just destined to do this. So I would love to hear, uh, whatever kind of cool blackmail or anything interesting you have in your story. Uh, how'd you get here? Shelby Cooper (01:26): Uh, it, it's, uh, it's not blackmail cuz I wrote it in my bio. Uh, I'm just kidding. But, uh, look, I was, uh, a struggling college kid and like all struggling college kids, you have priorities. Mine was try to figure out how to get some beer money, . Um, I successfully found, uh, through the college job applications, I found an opportunity at a company called Confer Tech to be a nighttime phone operator. Um, little did I know it was for conference calls and it was in multiple languages, and my typing skills were not what it should have been. But I talked my land to the job, even though I only spoke one language and I spoke it. Okay, not even really well. Um, and after sitting there, you know, and looking out the window, I don't, I, people probably forget this, but when you are at a corporate office, the parking lots get segregated almost. Shelby Cooper (02:23): You know, not on purpose, but they just do. And it's like, there's some, usually some really nice cars in one, one part of the parking lot. And then there's the guys like me that were driving an old pickup and things like that in other parts of the parking lot, maybe some station wagons and minivans, things like that. But there was this one row of cars right out my window at the office, and it was all Mercedes and Beamers. And there were some high end things that I didn't even know how to pronounce at the time in that line. And I asked my, my director at the time, I said, who drives those cars and what do they do? And because I'm thinking in my head, I'm like, I'm changing my major. Like I gotta get into whatever that is because I don't see these kind of cars in most places. Shelby Cooper (03:07): Turns out they were the salespeople, . And so I integrated my way through coffee breaks and did lunchroom times and things like that, and figured out who the salespeople were,
Listen in today as Mikey B, Telarus CX Solution architect underscores all the differences of how your customers can procure Microsoft Teams, along with the value props of each. Not only will he address different customer environments and how to sell them, but we'll learn storytelling and hear how Mikey's early path to Shakespeare comes in handy!
Josh Lupresto (00:01): Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We are kicking off this track talking about Microsoft Teams, as if you haven't heard enough about Teams. You haven't because there's new stuff and we need to talk about what's important, why it matters, and no better to do that than bring on somebody. Really smart. Mike Baillargeon, Telarus solution architect. Mikey, welcome to the show. Mike Baillargeon (00:39): Thanks, Josh. Super happy to be here. Josh Lupresto (00:41): So the title of this track, Mike, is Microsoft Teams. Is it direct routing now? Is it Operator Connect? You know, we're gonna get into that now. How do we, how do we pick that? So, so I think as we go through this, we're gonna answer that for the partners and, and kind of walk them through that. And as we kick this off, what I wanna start with is I wanna start with you personally. I want to hear your background. Anybody that doesn't know you, I, I find that that's probably a really small list of people, but anybody that doesn't know you, help us understand where did you start? How did you get here? Have you always been on this path? Did you, did you get sucked into this world, like some have? Fill us in. Mike Baillargeon (01:20): , thank Josh. So I was an English major in college. I wanted to bring Shakespeare to the masses, , that was, that was my end goal. But a funny thing happened on the way to that path, and it was called being a substitute teacher for six months. And I gotta say, if you, if you're a parent out there with kids in school, those teachers worked so hard. And in the six months I was a substitute teacher, I decided maybe I should get a minor in engineering and math , because I, I, I could handle the English. I, I love the, the, the English language and reading and poetry and all that goes with it. But the teaching part's actually the hard part. So interesting. My wife and I, we, we were married and up here in New England, and we decided we wanted to leave the cold for the sun. Mike Baillargeon (02:14): So we moved to Phoenix, and we lived in Phoenix for about 20 years where we decided, you know, that cold might be okay. So we left the, the, the sun and moved back. And what happened was when we moved out there, like a lot of us, you know, right outta college, you just, you know, pick up, pick up the newspaper back then Josh, I'm a bit of an old guy. Yeah. Pre indeed. And there's this opportunity. Do you like to talk to people? You know, do you have good customer service skills? This job is few. I'm like, great. Sounds amazing. And they were paying like eight bucks an hour. I was like, this is awesome. So what that job was, by the way, was a call center rep at a thousand person B p o. Nice. The second hardest job in the world besides teaching is being a call center rep. . Mike Baillargeon (03:04): And I learned that pretty quickly. So while I was there, I made good friends with the IT team because I saw what they did. I'm like, okay, they're, they're walking around the building. They're, they're at these high level meetings that, you know, I want, that's where I wanna be. I wanna be where a sausage it made. So I, I, I started talking about, I'm like, what do you guys do? And what, what, what is this? They're like, oh yeah, we're with a telecom admin. We have an AT&T now, Avaya,
Listen in as we talk with Telarus Partner Thomas Hamilton of HamBTC about propane tanks, connected cows, air quality sensors, and more. Thomas talks about how he’s shifted his focus to helping customers with their Mobility and IoT strategy. You’ll hear about how he got his start door knocking in the Bronx to owning his own successful company brokering different technology solutions, and some things that he’s learned along the way to polish his skills!
https://youtu.be/RT8ShY9celQ Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Hey everybody, welcome back. Today we are wrapping up the topic, interesting topic titled, what Do Propane Tanks, cows and Air Quality Sensors Have in Common? I just wanted to make this title as crazy as I possibly could for people to go, what in the world is that? I have to watch it. And what we got on with us, we got on with us the wonderful Thomas Hamilton of HamBTC to help us wrap up this one. Thomas, thanks for coming on, man.
Thomas Hamilton (00:41):
I truly appreciate you inviting me on. It’s, it’s a honor and I feel like a blessing to be here.
Josh Lupresto (00:46):
Oh, dang. Oh, hi. Geez. I can’t let you down at this point.
Thomas Hamilton (01:11):
I got to technology sales. So about 17 years ago I was looking for a new path something similar to sales. And I, funny enough, I, I answered a Craigslist ad looking for door to sell door salespeople, and it turned out to be a company that was had partnered with Verizon for a feed on the street program, b2b doing pot, selling pots, fs, dsl, doing the winbacks, things of that nature. And that’s where I got my start knocking doors in, in, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens in the Bronx going door to door. And, and I, that’s always been where I’ve been accustomed. I’m, I’m a really good face-to-face person, so I, I just took off with it. And then somebody told me about the partner program, and when it was time, when it felt like it was time to jump ship, when it only took a summer to figure it was time to jump ship, I, I entered the partner program. I started interviewing some tsb and I found one that would worked for me. And I was with them for many years before I, I was again honored to find Talos.
Josh Lupresto (02:21):
Love it. All right. I want you to take me back fellow door to door, man. I, I, I feel like you learn if you do that one, you can do anything in life, but two, you learn so much. If you look back to knocking doors, right? Just out there in, in what’s gotta be one of the toughest areas, what is the biggest thing, whether it be personal, professional, what did you learn, if you look back on that, that maybe you leveraged now or just kind of helped you along the way?
Thomas Hamilton (02:50):
I think, as you said, you know, door to door for a lot of people is very tough and very scary. Perseverance ingenuity figuring out where to be where to make your move. Knocking doors in Manhattan.
Thomas Hamilton (03:45):
And then you get through the nose, you get through the nose to find the yeses. So when I took my, my door knocking skills on the road from New York City and moved it to Charlotte, North Carolina in the Carolina area, I, oh my God, these people down here are so nice. This is a cakewalk
Josh Lupresto (04:24):
Oh, man, that’s beautiful.
Thomas Hamilton (04:31):
But I, I think the greatest thing about door knocking I, I’ll I’ll say this is from my standpoint is I can read you, I don’t have to try and read you through a phone call. I can see your face. Yeah, I can see your interests. Oh, your kid’s kid plays little league. Mine, mine too. You know, oh, you, you like football. I, I, me too. You know, and I got, I can do all that now. That’s the first thing I do when I step into somebody’s office is I’m scanning everything I can possibly use to, to make a connection.
Josh Lupresto (04:59):
Beautiful. That’s gold right there. Okay. tell us about who is Ham, B t C? Where did the business start? Just tell us about the business.
Thomas Hamilton (05:09):
HamBTC, Hamilton Business Technology Consulting. I started HamBTC obviously which just took my experience and wanted to make it a, a, a nice legal company with my dad’s name, last name on it to make him proud. And I’m proud of, I’m proud of as well. I am a co consultant, 100%. That’s what I do. I work with customers from smb up to enterprise. And that comes from, some of that comes from door knocking. I’ve gotten some medium, nice, medium sized customers, or bending some actually enterprise opportunities because I spoke to the low man on the pole and I found my way up. And so I started out with connectivity voice services. I’m now working in doing more cybersecurity opportunities looking and working in more IoT opportunities as well. And now it’s just kind of a, I I’m, I’m, I’ve attuned my ear to whatever problem or solutions that my problems my customers are having and finding solutions for that.
Thomas Hamilton (06:19):
So that, that just take means, I gotta listen to folks like you constantly to find out what, what those new solutions are. Because you know what the worst feeling in the world is, is two or three months later and you’re talking to your customer, just having a casual conversation. And he says, oh yeah, I just implemented this. Oh yeah, they work with me. Oh, I just implemented that. Oh yeah, I could have helped with that. Oh, I’m sorry. I would’ve come to you Thomas. I didn’t know. Oh, well I didn’t know either. So it’s, you know, so it’s said, staying on top of everything. Yeah. And let my customers know that, hey, if you have a a business technology issue, ask me first. And, and I have customers that will do that. Hey, Thomas, do you do this? Or can you help with that? And that is, that is our business.
Josh Lupresto (07:04):
So, so, you know, as a partner of Telarus, what we’re talking about the broader mobility and IoT now, but you know, where, with where you started historically, how do you look at something like this, this broader area of mobility and IoT?
Thomas Hamilton (07:19):
I see it as an opportunity opportunity for discussion and conversation. I see that it, and just learning more and more about IoT, it transposes so many different industries. There’s, there’s more than one, two or three opp different kinds of opportunities out there. I don’t know if you want me to go into them, but, but that’s, that’s what I got from got from listening. They’re always new IoT, solutions out there for problems that folks didn’t know they had, or problems that they wish they could resolve.
Josh Lupresto (07:55):
Yeah. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll make ’em keep listening and, and we’ll get to the we’ll get to the example here in a minute. So talk to me though about, you know, the innovation. We, we, we had a lot of questions that we ask on this podcast about paying attention to innovation, what’s coming next? What are some of the things that you’re working on to focus and, and just keep pace with the innovation, right? I mean, you’re out there talking to customers. We were talking about some things that you’re doing before we started the recording. But maybe walk us through just, what are you doing just to keep tabs on innovation while still doing what you need to do? Go sell
Thomas Hamilton (08:30):
Listen to your podcast, the
Josh Lupresto (09:23):
Good. Okay. So, so let’s get back to the crazy topic, right? The, the, the topic of this one is how do, and, and, and really what do propane tanks, cows, air quality sensors have in common? So look, I mean, we, we’ve talked about the connected cow, right? How to be able to detect where the cows are, the body temperature, the cow, the milk production. And so, you know that seeing that graphic before, and it gives a good representation of things that maybe people don’t think about that IoT helps with, whether that be sensors or connectivity or, or, or whatever. So I’m gonna leave this really broad for you. How do you, how do you tackle that with the, you know, with the customer in need? Does, do you see the customers knowing what they need? Are you the one telling them kind of sparking ideas with that? Or how do you approach that?
Thomas Hamilton (10:12):
Right now, I’m in a mode where I’m more so sparking ideas letting customers know, Hey, there’s a technology out here that could assist with that. And, and I, like, I think the cow thing is really, really cool. I don’t have the agricultural customers yet, but just the whole technology behind being able to monitor the health of the cow monitoring, how much production they are they’re doing, being able to track data. And data is king. We always say it, you know, having more information is better than having less information. Propane monitoring. I, I think that is such, so important. I, I, I know going to a Home Depot to go switch out the propane tanks in New York, and I’m thinking, I was like, wow, it says flammable. It’s sitting in the back of this gas station parking lot, or it’s sitting here out in front of the Home Depot.
Thomas Hamilton (11:04):
Is it safe? Does anybody know if it’s getting too hot? Cool. you know, yes, they have, there’s one guy with the key that they gotta track down in Home Depot somewhere. Yep. But what if it’s one’s missing? I think, you know, those sensors can give you that kind of information. And I think that’s, it opens up possibilities. You know, what I, and, and, and that’s, I think that’s the main thing for me is, is open up possibilities. And with so many possibilities, we can have deeper conversations with our customers, which lead to different opportunities.
Josh Lupresto (11:38):
So we’re gonna get, coming up here, we’re gonna get to an example in just a sec, but maybe before we get to that example, let’s talk about ROI. I, I, I think when we see people and sometimes we approach them with a new technology or something they didn’t know that they needed, their brains go to like, okay, well what’s the return on this? Right? Maybe they’re not thinking like that. So when you’re talking to people and you’re getting excited about this technology, what is the ROI conversation like? I mean, does, are they asking it or is ROI driving it or business problems driving it? What, what kind of seeds are you planning or conversations going in there?
Thomas Hamilton (12:12):
So if I, if I may, I’m gonna use an example that I, I got from Epic. I l I went to go visit their facility. I’m in South Carolina these days, so I went up to their facility that’s right on the Charlotte border and I, they let me tour it and just the air filter center. They had that box that, you know, that helps with the mold, the mildew, and the smoke smell. And showed and discussed with me how it can be used in, in property management situations because I have property management companies in my portfolio. And also I, I, you know, discussed with someone who I knew had maybe 10 to 12 Airbnbs and, and how, how he utilizes something like that. And just to have further conversation. Sometimes it’s good to hear from, from the, from the supplier side and then hear it from the customer side.
Thomas Hamilton (13:05):
And this act person actually knew about this technology and said it saves him, because if somebody smokes in one of his Airbnbs, you know, he could lose that Airbnb for three to four days. And that was the conversation I was having with Epic, was that a hotel could lose a business for three or four days. And if it, and if it’s $200 a night, then that’s six, $700 in revenue. Especially in a, in a time crunch where let’s say, you know, we’re in March Madness and you know, the room are packed, you know, it’s probably 99% occupancy. You can’t afford to lose a room or three rooms or four rooms because people are having a great, great time. You know, so to have a box that could get your room back available and anywhere from, from six hours to, to 12 hours versus three to four days of airing it out, that, that the possibilities are there. And that’s the conversation I was having with, with a friend of mine who had the, the Airbnbs was like, yes. He’s like, it’s, it saves him money. It saves him money, and it makes him money. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (14:12):
Man. Love him. Good ROI. Okay. All right. Example time. So walk us through an example that you got pulled into. You know, I’d just like to get into the weeds into these, right? So people can see kind of what the nuts and bolts are. So I’m just gonna throw out a couple things, right? If you can cover one or two of these, was it, when you got into it, was it exactly what you were told the problem was gonna be? Did you replace it or did you put in the kind of technology that you thought was gonna need to be put in? I mean, I kind of like to, to hear how did you get into it and what was it really that that was needed in there? So maybe just walk through that.
Thomas Hamilton (14:49):
Wow. So I’m thinking of an example of what one of my credit unions I think the conversation started at you using i o t for weapons detection. I’m sure you’ve heard of that one. And it went from weapons detection to detecting when somebody’s on premise and they maybe shouldn’t be when somebody’s outside the premise. I found out my customer has an issue with vagrants defecating near his side door at night or shooting up at night. And the centers could help with that. Alerting, alerting them, alerting the officers that, hey, somebody’s, somebody is near the credit union side door. I think the other conversation was dumpster fires as well. And I’m, and honestly, as a somebody who specialized originally in connectivity, I’m not thinking about dumpster fires. I that’s, that’s the fire alarm guy. I don’t, yeah. You know, I don’t help you with that. Or, you know, even security on the outside, you know, I’m not thinking about that either. And just have to be able to have those opportunities. And like I said, it, it started, the conversation started with, well, hey, I, I heard of it’s technology that, that can detect weapons and detect someone, somebody has an unholstered gun. And that started the conversation and it just led to quite a few other places. I think we also talked about the room. I’m sorry, what’s the room? What Josh what’s the room where all the technology is?
Josh Lupresto (16:23):
The IT closet,
Thomas Hamilton (16:24):
The iIT closet, the server room. Yes. Thank you very much.
Josh Lupresto (16:29):
Thomas Hamilton (16:31):
Josh Lupresto (16:58):
Hmm. It’s good. Oh, that one definitely gets a all right. So, so walk us through then, final couple thoughts here. If, if, if I’m a partner, and I haven’t ventured into this area yet, you know, you’ve, you’ve ventured into this area, what would you coach another partner on as, as far as how to talk to this with their customers? Right? Is it, are, are you just teeing it up via certain couple questions? I mean, what, what advice would you have?
Thomas Hamilton (17:25):
So if I was a new partner going out I would, first I would take a look at the industries that I’m working in and, you know, primarily, and then I would ask questions of, of the suppliers. Okay. How could you, how do you help in these industries? Like I said, I, I’ve, so I have property management, ma management companies and real estate companies in my portfolio. I got great ideas on how to approach them. I had credit unions. I got great ideas on how to approach them. I have restaurants, which are different ideas. Walking, you know, you wanna censor for your walk-in refrigerator, you know, you wanna censor for your AC unit on the top cuz nobody wants to sit in a hot restaurant. And, and you can’t. And, and if your cooler goes out on your day, on your day off, now you have thousands of dollars of spoiled food.
Thomas Hamilton (18:18):
I I just, there’s so many other things. Like I had a sorry, I had a opportunity in a, a community center and they had lots of land and they, they’re concerned about people coming in the community area. Community center’s land at middle in the middle of the night. They also have a daycare, so they want to know where the kids are and they, they need the kids stray away. And all that is under IoT, ot. And it’s amazing what can be done. And then I know we, we didn’t even get into construction. So I mean, there are all these different opportunities in different industries. So I would say to someone, if you focus on a specific vertical or two or three, I would start talking to some of the suppliers, well, how could you help me in that, that that vertical?
Thomas Hamilton (19:09):
What are some of the things that other customers in that vertical have done? Just ask. And they’ll give you the questions to ask your customers. And then that’ll open up a door for not only IoT services, but some of the traditional services as well. That’s one of the biggest things that I, I take away from hearing you and Chris talk. It’s like, okay, so now we put in the IoT centers. Well, okay, we need better connectivity to support those IoT sensors. Okay. But now we need to secure them with security. And it’s like, oh, everything is just a loop. And it just brings you into one conversation, into another conversation, into another conversation, which, which it brings up revenue for us. So just what our goal is.
Josh Lupresto (19:51):
That’s good. I think that it feels like to me that, that puts a little bit of bow on the title of this whole talk track. You know, we asked this crazy question of what do all these tanks and cows and sensors and everything have in common? I think the reality is what they have in common is they’re creating a, a a lot of potential unnecessary work and unnecessary, extra cost. These items short of any sensors or any notification or any alarms or any alerts that are unified together that can correlate that data back to the customer, right? They’re, they’re, they’re causing unnecessary problems for the customers. So when we start talking about these sensors and the data, to your point, and adding that onto these items it tells a story and it helps the business be more efficient and, and helps ’em, I think, modernize and think of it in the way that they didn’t.
Josh Lupresto (20:39):
And I, I love your idea there of figure out where your customers are, your prospective customers are. And you know, just like back in the day of when we were selling uc, you’d go door to door and you’d look over the counter there and see what kind of phone system they had or you’d, you’d call into the business and see where you got stuck. I’d love it. And that worked great for a lot of people and people use the heck out of that. And so I I, I love it. Double down on this strategy. I, I think that’s awesome advice.
Thomas Hamilton (21:08):
Definitely. I I, it’s funny cuz I, I’ve looked over the counter. I still look over the counter. What
Josh Lupresto (21:13):
Kinda phone is that?
Thomas Hamilton (21:14):
That a Mitel? Is that NHC? Who is that? The old Nortel. Okay. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (21:21):
That’s right. Put it in the cm. Absolutely.
Thomas Hamilton (21:23):
Josh Lupresto (21:42):
Absolutely. Okay, final thoughts here. Think future as we look at this, we think, you know, 20, 24 and beyond, you know, we, you’ve done a great job. I think educating people on what to look at how to have these conversations right now. So if we look out just a little while, you know, the next year plus, you know, from your perspective, anything gonna change or, or anything that is gonna change that you think will impact any of the advice or any of the talk track we just mentioned?
Thomas Hamilton (22:16):
I think as, as IoT sensors becomes more prevalent and more common, the conversation will change just as to, instead of explaining to somebody what it could possibly do, you’re now just telling them, Hey, this is what I have. The same way as you brought up what UC, when you see first came out, we were explaining, explaining, explaining in order to sell. Now it’s, well, can it do this? Can it take text messages? Can it can voicemail the email they’re asking you if it has these features versus you’re telling them what features are available. And I think that’s what the conversational will just change because customer knowledge will improve.
Josh Lupresto (23:03):
I love it. We’ll wrap it up right there. Okay. That’s all I got. Thomas, man, thanks so much for coming on. We covered a lot of good stuff today. Really appreciate it, buddy.
Thomas Hamilton (23:11):
I appreciate you again for having me. Thank you so much.
Josh Lupresto (23:14):
All right, everybody. That wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh lupresto, SVP of Sales engineering Thomas Hamilton, HamBTC. We’re done talking sensors and IoT. Until next time, this is Next Level BizTech.
What do Propane tanks, cows, and air quality sensors have in common Listen in today with special CEO guest, Ken Mills of EpicIO. Ken talks backstory, but more importantly, the evolution of the company and how they’re assembling and productizing some key IoT solutions that many businesses need and have life-saving potential. While the title may sound wild from agriculture and produce to medical and RSV season, those are all things your customers are asking for help with!
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Everybody. Welcome back. We’ve got a wild episode for you today here. The title of this episode is What Do Propane Tanks, cows and Air Quality Sensors have in Common? And you’re thinking that’s, that’s not CCaaS. That’s not security. When the world are we gonna talk about today we’re not gonna give it away, but we’re gonna get to it cuz they’re all important and it’s technology and it’s fun. So today I would like to welcome on back to the show as we did a fireside chat a while back. Ken Mills, CEO of EPIC iO. Ken, welcome on.
Ken Mills (00:45):
Thanks, Josh. You know, a long time listener, first time caller,
Josh Lupresto (01:00):
Love it, man. Let’s jump in. I, I want to hear your, your personal background story for anybody that that is not gonna go. And, and listen to our awesome fireside chat. I thought, thought we talked about some cool stuff, and we did the studio. Give ’em a little bit of a background. Just you personally, you know, how, how did you get into this? How has everything come together? Where did you start out and, and, and, you know, how did you get where you’re at now?
Ken Mills (01:20):
Yeah, I think one of the most interesting aspects is my mom is the nerd of the family. You know, she read every manual still does you know, reads every blog, watch, every watches this, every Apple keynote you know, she is on top of what’s going on. And I just kind of picked that up as a kid. And, you know, we were early in the bulletin board days you know, with 56 K modems when those were cool. Mm-Hmm.
Ken Mills (02:06):
And I’m just a big nerd at heart. And so, you know, I jumped at a chance to join Cisco Technologies way back when after the.com bust when they were looking for a number of growth areas and non-traditional markets. So they started this what they called emerging technologies team, where we were out there looking for new adjacent businesses, either new customer segments, new technologies, new acquisitions, and we built a team to go build those, go-to markets and build those businesses where most of the people we talked to that we said we worked for Cisco, they’d be like, oh, I know the food company. Like no different Cisco you know, Cisco networking. And, and so, you know, we didn’t have that brand power in these adjacent markets that we had in routing and switching at the time. And so it was fun.
Ken Mills (02:49):
I learned a lot about how to, you know, take technology from an idea into, you know, an actual market and, and grow it. And then I got to spend you know, I did that for almost nine years, and I got to spend almost seven years at e EMC Corporation, which became Dell Technologies in doing the same thing. So we launched a number of video businesses, computer vision businesses, iot business a number of different things. And so I was very fortunate to be part of a very fast growing team a across the globe. And, and I was the general manager of those businesses for a number of years, and about 2 billion in revenue, and decided to do something more entrepreneurial and partnered up with a private equity firm and, and decided to leave a cushy tech job at the time.
Ken Mills (03:31):
And, and in the middle of Covid, or the start of Covid, which was my wife thought was a terrible idea probably was a terrible idea. She’s probably right. And, and jump ship and, and, and do this. So, you know, we brought together three companies in, in 2020 around iot. Within tele site acquisition. We brought together deep vision for our computer vision skillset and team. We acquired Broad Sky, which most of the folks they’re listening to this probably recognize that name more than any other which rounded out the connectivity aspect of our business. So we can launch this concept that I’m very passionate around, which is helping the world be a safer, smarter, more connected place. And so we wanted to have all of the technology that enabled us to do that in various compelling ways. And, and that’s what the combination in tele site Deep Vision and, and Broad Sky brought together. And, you know, we wanted to launch as a new team with a new mission and a consolidated strategy across the company. So we rebranded under EPIC iO and that’s who we are now, and we’re excited about really bringing together into market those real products and solutions that hopefully help make the world a safer, smarter, more connected place.
Josh Lupresto (04:41):
Love it. Great story. One important thing in there, our spouses are always right, and the sooner we learn that, the happier we’ll be, I’m happy on
Ken Mills (04:48):
Valentine’s Day, right? I mean, is that
Josh Lupresto (04:50):
Ken Mills (05:27):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, the Lego blocks is a great one, right? And we talked about it a little bit last time, and it’s one of my favorite talk tracks. I’m sure Taylor and the team can, can recite it. But, you know, I believe that we’re in this phase of the technology bell curve of adoption. And, and if you haven’t ever looked at that, there’s a great book by a gentleman named Jeffrey Moore who wrote books, business books in the seventies call around technology adoption and crossing the chasm and, and how to get technologies to the mass market. And, you know, one of the big lessons in his studies that, that I, I was very fortunate to learn at Cisco as we worked directly with him and his team, was this concept around called Whole Product. And, you know, that’s a pretty kind of weird term.
Ken Mills (06:06):
So I try to make it simple and say, pizzas you know, when people think of a whole product, pizza is the, is the easiest analogy, right? A whole product of a pizza is the cru, the ingredients, the process, the delivery, ordering everything that you need to get that pizza to your door and enjoy it. It’s all figured out for you. You don’t have to do it, right? It’s, it’s simple, it’s repeatable, it’s scalable, and, and it tastes the same pretty much everywhere you order it. If you order it from the same chain, you know, that’s a whole product approach to, to pizza. Customers are looking for that same concept when it comes to AI and iot, and even connectivity solutions like private 5g. They’re not ready to go just buy the Lego blocks and put ’em together on your own and, and hopefully get the end result that you want. They need a more off the shelf, more, you know, whole product experience, much like a pizza. So, you know, I like to say customers aren’t, don’t wanna buy Legos. They wanna buy pizzas. And that’s what EPIC iO is trying to do, is build as many repeatable pizzas in these complex use cases as possible.
Josh Lupresto (07:02):
I love that. I love that example. So if I think about what, what my, you know, my kids are of a younger age and I think about what they look forward to and what I looked forward to at their age, right? And for me, it was Little Caesars, it was Blockbuster, and it was the, the AOL dial up, right? That, that was the, that was some of the Friday nights. Yeah. And, and now you, you bring up the pizza thing, but I think that’s an important thing to call out, because what I want, what I want our partners to understand is h how do they take all of the great things that you have? How do they take what their customers are doing and help them innovate? Because what what we’re finding is, you know, we expect the customers to know exactly how to innovate.
Josh Lupresto (07:39):
And the reality is that’s our job, is to help them decide what can be innovated. And I, you know, you mentioned the pizza thing, and so the, you know, the, the, the thing my kids are into now is Friday night Dominoes, it’s right here. It’s five minutes from my house. But I just think about the innovation of the pizza tracker, right? Mm-Hmm.
Ken Mills (08:14):
Yeah. It’s, it’s a we talk about this forever, right? It’s about finding the problem that is important enough to the customer to put budget behind it to solve. And, you know, there’s a lot of studies out there from all the major analyst firms. You know, one of the biggest reasons people do not move forward with AI and I R T projects is they don’t know where to start, and they don’t know what the outcome is gonna be and kind of how they’re gonna get there, right? They don’t fully grasp the journey of, you know coming up with the idea what the problem solution looks like, how much is it gonna cost, and what’s the value I’m gonna get after I spend this, this money. And so, as consultants that we all work with, and we work with these customers, we have to help them build that story and build that vision to understand, you know, how they’re gonna get there, right?
Ken Mills (08:58):
So, you know, the end result is a pizza you get to enjoy, but there are steps, right? You know, you have to, you know, build the crust, you have to put the cheese on, you have to pick the toppings, you have to cook it for the right amount of time, you have to do all these things. You have to deliver it in, in a proper time, so it’s still hot and enjoyable and a box that, you know, can stand up to the, a whole process. So all those things have to be figured out. And us as consultants and, and Epic iO with our, our, our partnership with the agencies and, and advisors out here is, is that we want to help them bring that innovative idea to the customer and help them think of a way to solve it in a way they hadn’t really thought about it before.
Ken Mills (09:29):
Because the reality is nobody’s picking up the phone saying, I want to buy a new server to make my pizzas better. Right? They’re no one’s picking the phone saying, I wanna buy new 5G connectivity because I need, you know, to open up the next, you know, big retail chain. Like they’re thinking like, I need reliable point of sale. I need, you know the pizzas to be consistent. I need to know that the ingredients are safe and that they’re, we’re not making anybody sick so that we don’t lose money and have a, a rep a reputational hit. Right? Those are the problems they care about. So they’re not asking for any specific technology. They’re asking for you to help them solve a business problem. And the quicker we get to that business problem, then the technology in a sense is important, but the pieces that make it up aren’t as important as the outcome. And that’s what we really focus on is Epic iO, is, is we may use one sensor for one use case. We may use a totally different sensor for another use case. The customer doesn’t care as long as the sensor data is reliable and repeatable enough that they can make a business decision, knowing that’s gonna be accurate.
Josh Lupresto (10:27):
Right. Great point. Let’s, let’s call back on those sensors for a second here. Yeah. We’re talking about, you know I, I think the idea that inspired this title is that we saw a visual one day of, of the connected cow and all of the, the pieces that that contains. And I think that was one of the first things that opened up our idea of how we could really grow this mobility and iot practice of the ways that, that people have been doing things and what can be done to modernize those. Now. So, so I know we’re talking propane tanks, we’re talking air quality sensors, you know, fuel level sensor, whatever. Any of that. I, I would love to hear from your perspective, pick apart any piece of that or any multi-part of that that you’ve done together, and just talk to me about how do they tie together and what does a deployment in something like that even look like once you get the business case understood?
Ken Mills (11:15):
Yeah. You know, the agriculture industry is amazing as a whole when it comes to iot and using big data and information to get better crop yields and you know, less waste and quicker time to market and less, less spoilage, and all these things that go into making sure that we have food on our table across the country and across the world. It’s, it’s amazing how innovative our farmers are. So it, it’s kind of crazy how quick to the, to the jump they were on this technology. And they’re also some of the ones that are pushing back on things like repairability and, you know E EVs an example, a tractor that can’t run 24 7 is not useful to a, a farmer, right? These are things that we don’t think about for your car that’s very different for a farm. So, you know, when you think about propane tanks, cows and connectivity and so forth, you know, I, I have seventh grade boys, sixth grade boys, so it’s hard not to put the obvious one together, right?
Ken Mills (12:07):
So you have cows that create methane, naturally. Methane is very explosive. So you want an air quality sensor to really recognize that level of, of methane and make sure that you don’t have a leak with your propane. And then you have a very serious situation and you have a barbecue that you didn’t plan and, you know, that could be bad, right? So, you know, being able to have that sensor quality, that sensor integration is really important. You know, we work with one customer that had their farm burned down, actually. It wasn’t and it ruined all of their turkeys and killed all of the turkeys or that, that were, that they were gonna use for Thanksgiving. Like literally they went for two years, they were outta business essentially. Fortunately they had saved some money and they were able to weather the, the storm, but their whole business was done for, for multiple years.
Ken Mills (12:53):
And it happened because an air compressor sparked and went unchecked and then created a fire that then caught the big refrigerator on fire and then burned it all down, right? So, you know, it was a chain reaction of, of events. So, you know, that this, this farmer automatically is like, Hey, how do I prevent that from happening again? Like, what can I use to, to prevent that from happening again? And so we worked with a combination of iot sensors and computer vision to analyze heat signatures to make sure that the heat isn’t getting outta whack, along with understanding the power surges that might be occurring on the air compressor, which could cause a spark. And then we can correlate those two data points, the computer vision data, and the sensor data, and bring that into a multi-sensor enhanced AI solution, like deep insights, which is the software that we sell and then analyze that to determine, Hey, we have a situation here.
Ken Mills (13:44):
You need to shut off this compressor so that it doesn’t create a fire and cause further damage. Yes, you might lose some part of your of your turkeys due to spoilage, but you’re not losing the whole farm, right? So you know, those kinds of things apply not only to a Turkey farmer, but can apply to that Domino’s facility, right? Maintaining, yeah. The refrigerators for all the ingredients for the pizzas to the grocery store, to the hotel, to the school, to the wherever, right? So that use case is very horizontal, even though it had a very particular outcome.
Josh Lupresto (14:16):
Yeah. And I think a pre-warning too, I mean, to your point, if we could save you that sometimes people just have to look at this, or they want to look at this as just a math problem. Again, I can’t, I can’t do this if I can’t cost justify. What’s the roi? Well, the ROI is that if we’re charging you a small amount for this sensor, the alerting, the analytics and that saves you hundreds of thousands of dollars, is isn’t this a, I mean, the delta’s massive, right? How, how is this even an ROI conversation at that point? So I’d love, I love when you can put out some very basic roi that certainly helps too.
Ken Mills (14:44):
Yeah. Who doesn’t buy AppleCare on their iPhone, right? I mean, those people are crazy. You know, why would you want to pay $200 to replace your screen? Or, you know, $50 to buy the insurance, whatever, right? So, you know, it, it’s it’s one of those things that mathemat Yeah. That when you have a problem that you know, the cost is big, if you don’t have the right protection, then you know, you, you put yourself in a bad situation. I mean, in the reality, we sell physical virgins of insurance policies no different than your home insurance or your car insurance. You’re, you’re buying data that’s gonna give you the warning and the protection from a, from a risk that you may not get. But if you do get it, you need to know about it right away. Yeah. You need to solve it quickly.
Josh Lupresto (15:24):
Well, that’s a good, I’d love that. It’s a good way to look at it put myself in the frame of, of a partner. If, if I’m going out and saying, okay, you’re, you’re helping me understand some of these verticals. We obviously think of mobility and iot, we think of manufacturing, we think of agriculture, we think of commercial, medical, all these things. But a a as you think through that, and you, we go back to the deployment question, what percentage of customers do you find out there, you know, you went into some of the metrics about how this, we correlate this sensor against this data and give you an alerting. What percentage would you say of the customers are really even thinking at that level? Are, are, are they just, do they even know that there’s necessarily a problem? Right? I I, I wanna help our partners understand what, what type of customers are we walking into where they really even think there’s anything wrong to start with?
Ken Mills (16:13):
Yeah. So this might be controversial, but my opinion is if the customer doesn’t know they have a problem, they’re probably not the right customer today. You should put them on the, for, on the list later Yeah. To call in, right? Because the customers that know they have a problem, they’re already looking for solutions. And there’s a lot of customers that know they have problems. And so I, my, my guidance to the partners is go find the customers that already know there’s issues and bring them as a way to solve it in a, in a innovative way, in a reliable way that they can, they can consume versus trying to convince a customer that they have a problem if they haven’t quite materialized or, or figured out what it’s costing them yet. So maybe that’s not, is, is maybe it’s more controversial than others would like, but I think there’s enough, there’s plenty of opportunity with customers that already know what’s going on.
Josh Lupresto (16:57):
Well, yeah. I mean, partners wanna get, they wanna get to a no faster I think they don’t, they don’t wanna be drug out, right? They don’t wanna try to force an opportunity out.
Ken Mills (17:04):
Yeah. And my team, you know, and I know Taylor’s been a part of this conversation, we’ve debated this, like, well, tell us the ROI of all these things. We can go to these customers and say, here’s how much you’ll save if you buy this today. And my pushback is, if the customer doesn’t know that they’re losing money, then us educating the ROI is we’re too, we’re too early. Like, they need to know that there’s risk already. And they need to be feeling that pain or be already or nervous of that pain to really be ready to make a decision. A good example. That’s a big utility customer we worked with. You know, they were spending thousands and thousands of dollars on manpower and fuel to go manually check all these tanks and, you know, it, it’s just what they’ve always done, right? And the reality is, is some guy drives out there, checks the tank, it’s empty, he leaves, someone comes and fills the, the tank, you know, 30 minutes later it’s still empty as far as the anybody knows.
Ken Mills (17:53):
Cuz that’s what he, that was the last time he checked it. Another person comes in, tries to put something in that tank, it’s full. Now that person has to go to another facility. They charge the customer fee because they wasted their time. And there’s all this frustration expense that that is, you know, they already knew they had that problem. They already knew this process was not working. And so when we got there, they were like, look, can you just solve this for us? And we said, sure. And so we put together, again, another combination of computer vision and sensors to correlate activity levels and when the site is being utilized so they could better plan for the sites. And then we also gave them fill levels and, and AI to understand when it’s gonna be full and likely how long it’s gonna be before it’s full so they could do better route planning.
Ken Mills (18:35):
You combine those two things together. Now they have digital transformation that just occurred in their facility and solved a big problem. They already knew. They never asked us what sensor did we use. They never asked us which camera did we use. They never asked us any of those questions because it didn’t matter to them. They asked us how much does it cost, and is that cost enough or low enough to make sense for us from a business perspective to offset the the problem we know we have. And the answer was yes, and they bought it and they just renewed for another five years. Yeah. So that’s a great example.
Josh Lupresto (19:04):
We love that. We love that. No, I was gonna go into the example next, so that’s perfect. What, how is that, how is that relationship with that customer after, I mean, it seems to me like you dramatically revolutionized how that customer can go to market and build their business and think about things in a different way. What do you, sh this is not a commodity sale, this is not a transactional quote line item, but you changed the way that, that that partner looks at their bus or that customer looks at their business. What, what changes for you from that customer’s perspective after that?
Ken Mills (19:36):
Yeah, it’s obviously a very sticky healthy relationship because you’re solving a real problem. So we, we launched a new organization around customer success. And so we have a customer success team that now takes on these customers once we turn them on and, and, and know that the customer is happy and everything’s working, and they’re working with that customer on a quarterly basis, understanding, you know, what’s working, what’s not working, how many tickets do they have? You know, here’s some new things we could do. Here’s some other ideas and things we could solve. And we’ve already expanded that customer to other use cases because we’ve had those conversations on ongoing basis and we’ve built that trust that we could solve a really meaty, tough problem that they’re coming to us with other challenges. And, and I know you’re gonna ask about it later, but that’s how we got into biosecurity, right? That’s the, that’s the whole genesis of that product,
Josh Lupresto (20:23):
Huh? Let’s, yeah, that’s exactly where I was gonna go next. Let’s jump into that. I mean, we, when we talked to, when we had you in the studio, we talked fireside, you had some cool things coming out, some decontamination stuff. Talk, talk to me about that. What, you know, I know we’ve, we’ve pinpointed on sensors and, and, and analytics and AI vision and all kinds of awesome stuff. But, but what else is there? Talk to me about some of the other stuff you got cooking.
Ken Mills (20:42):
Yeah, I mean, we’re overachiever, we’re very dirty. We like to solve as many hard problems as we can. That’s just who we are as a company and as a leadership team. And one of those is, is biosecurity. So, you know, it’s our post-it note for like 3m. So most people know the story that the post-it note was an accident. They were trying to build an entirely different compound, and they came up with a post-it note idea. And they almost threw it away. Now it’s a multi-billion dollar business, right? It’s probably one of the most recognizable things that 3M does. And so we, you know, we hope that the biosecurity is our same level of success, but, you know, really started out as an iot problem. We had a partner in Panama and they had a customer who was shipping bananas from Guatemala to the States.
Ken Mills (21:26):
And the bananas were dying in high, high yield rates. And, and they were losing a ton of money. And they said, Hey, we, we, there’s this process of ionizing the air that’s already been proven for 20 years, but we can’t make it consistent in these containers. Can you help us with iot solve this problem? And we said, sure, of course we can. And so we got our smart team together and folks, and we built a, a solution with connectivity, IOT sensors, deep insights, our software, the whole thing. Edge compute put attaches the containers and they shipped them from, from Guatemala to the us. And, and all nine of the containers that we had our equipment on lived all the, all the bananas lived. And that’s why we wear shirts that say, saved the bananas. And the one that didn’t have our technology died you know, that 80% failure of, of spoilage of the bananas.
Ken Mills (22:12):
And so we said, wait a minute, this is pretty cool. Like, we didn’t, we didn’t really think about this use case. And the, and the customer said, well, we really want a product. We want something that is like a whole product back to that whole pizza, right? We don’t want to put all these parts together. We want to buy something. And so we said, well, we don’t have a product. They said, well, go build a product and come back to us and we’ll, we’ll do this at scale. And so we spent the last year building the biosecurity product, which is the first version that’s called the Epic Aura. And essentially it is a combination of that, that same technology, edge compute, connectivity sensors and and our software on the backend in the cloud that creates recipes that ionize and disinfect the air and all the surfaces to kill things like Listeria, Panama Disease, Mersa, covid, sars, you know, e coli, salmonella, you name it, staph infection.
Ken Mills (23:07):
So we, we’ve tested with multiple universities and done many, many microbiology studies and tests and validations and academic reviewed research to validate that this actually works as well as we say it does. And the results have been overwhelming. So we spent, you know, literally just the last year taking this idea that we did with a customer and then making it into a pizza that they could buy and consume. So now it’s ready and available and, and can be built and shipped and delivered as a product. And, you know, we already have schools, we have gyms, we have food processing facilities, we have egg hatcheries, we have athletic facilities in D one colleges. We’re talking to a major league baseball team right now and a major league basketball team. We are talking to you know, you name a vertical patient rooms, daycares.
Ken Mills (23:58):
I mean, we have literally all kinds of use cases out the, out the wazoo as there are tons of challenges with you know, people worrying about keeping their space safe. Mm-Hmm. And people are now much more aware cuz of covid that, Hey, wait a minute, maybe our room and our air isn’t as safe as we thought it was. And RSV has been pretty deadly this year for children. And, you know, our solution kills rsv, right? So it kills any airborne dynamic. And the reason we came up with a solution is there’s been UV around forever, but UV is, is really great. It’s actually a hundred percent effective if you use it at the right distance from the light. But if you get too far from that light, or you have something in front of that light between the light and the object, the effective rate goes from a hundred to like zero and a heartbeat. So you get you end up with something that you think is safe and it’s really not, you actually have a false sense of security and a false outcome. So we wanted to build something that was a lot more reliable and a lot more effective across the entire surface area. So that’s the that’s the aura. So, you know, we’re, we think it’s a, that is truly something that can be bought, you know, delivered, put in a box, installed and then off you go. So that is a very consumable solution.
Josh Lupresto (25:06):
Love it. So, I mean, in, in the end of it, it, it, I was gonna say let’s pick a use case, but it seems to me the, the size, the scale, the environment, the, the, you know, wherever it might be, the disease, the concern, it seems like it has to play for all of those things, right? And it’s kind of custom to fit whatever it is has the core aura in it. But the reality is it can fit any of those use cases. Yeah.
Ken Mills (25:27):
Yeah. The only place it doesn’t fit to always be fair, right, is we wanna, we don’t wanna send partners down the wrong path, is any space that’s open 24 7, cuz we have to have the space has to be empty because it’s, you need to make it safe. And any space that’s massively open, so like a huge right gym or huge, you know, massive cafeteria, you know, probably not a good use case for it. But if you wanna do a classroom or cold storage or a patient room or any of those other facilities, perfect, perfect
Josh Lupresto (25:56):
Fit. Yeah, I love that. I mean, there’s so much too, obviously from a medical, medical side, but you think about the weirdness of where we are with inflation and cost of goods and shipping and produce and shortages. I mean, I, I have to imagine there’s such a vast amount of people looking to figure out how to save cost on that and not perish, you know whatever the consumables might be. It’s
Ken Mills (26:16):
Great service. Yeah. We, we actually increased in the banana use case, the shelf life by 27 days. So we’re working with some food banks right now to help them do two things, kill any potential mysterious salmonella or e coli or bacteria that might make their constituents sick, which are some of the folks who don’t have access to healthcare or don’t, don’t are too far away from healthcare. But so that’s a big problem, right? So they want healthy food to these folks, but they also want the food to last as long as as possible so they can get help as many people as possible. So it’s a great double benefit that we’re not only, you know, helping make sure the food is safer, but available when they need it for those that need it most. So that’s one of the projects I’m most excited about, and we’re actually donating equipment to some of those facilities to, to make it even more cost effective because I believe in that, that dynamic, so much, much like I know Talos is, is big in philanthropy. So, you know, something we try to do where we can and, and help where we can Love
Josh Lupresto (27:09):
It. Great stuff. All right. Top that one.
Ken Mills (27:40):
Yeah. If I could put it the simplest terms, you know, in one of our, our CTO uses this analogy, right? And he uses it on an intersection for a city project. If you had someone standing at an intersection 24 7, what would you want them to see and write down? And one, once you understand that dynamic, we can build the sensor profile to give you that information that you can act on. That same type of question applies to many other use cases. So if you had someone standing here objectively looking at your operation and you wanted them to write down and identify tr trends or issues or data, what would that be? You? And once you understand what those use cases are and what that those data sets are, we can build the right sensor portfolio to give you that real-time access to that data that then you could turn into business data that you can make business decisions on. And that’s ultimately what, what people need. So the next question is, once you understand what you’re gathering is what information is needed to make a decision? Like what’s the threshold? What are the factors that come into play that, that really will ultimately tell you need to do something? And that’s where we create the logic around our enhanced AI that says, here’s what we’ve gathered, here’s the logic applied to that data, and that logic then generates a result that you can generate an outcome from. So that’s the process.
Josh Lupresto (28:55):
Love it. Okay. All right, Ken, final thoughts? So this is, this is definitely one of those areas that continues to innovate, evolve, change. Yeah. So we can’t look out really far because Right. Who, who knows where we’re at. We all, we all have robots in our house in three years. Yeah, right? We’re at now, but so as we wrap, we just look forward, I don’t know, 12 months, right? Where do you see, do you want to give any advice partners to look out for anything, anything different other than kind of having the conversations that we’re asking them to have right now? Anything to be prepared for things that you see coming down the innovation curve, things like that, that you wanna make us aware of?
Ken Mills (29:30):
Look, I mean, you know, we’re historically low unemployment. I know the news might give you indication otherwise, but we’re still historically low in unemployment. If you tried to hire someone lately, I’m sure you can appreciate that. I know we have I know Tores has, right? It’s not an easy market to get to get the best talent. There’s a lot of people looking for that. So, companies, cities hospitals are looking for ways to automate processes as much as they can. So the thing that we know is gonna change and, and accelerate, right? And what Covid has, has actually accelerated dramatically, is the dis is the understanding that automation is, is here, and the need to automate is as much as possible is here. So robots, you know, discrete robots, you know, multi-use robots, AI intelligence to help make decisions like chatGPT is changing the world of content.
Ken Mills (30:16):
You know, these things are coming and, and they’re coming much quicker than any time in history. So if I’m an advisor, channel partner, I’m looking for ways that I can get ahead of that digital transformation curve, because it’s been talked about a lot, kind of like the very early days of cloud, cloud was talked about forever before it became real, and then it became the thing, you know, this now, digital transformation is kind of in that same phase, right? Where it’s been talked about forever. Now it’s real. Customers are really looking to buy and deploy and make things happen. And we’re working with customers right now that the advisor channel has brought us, that that’s exactly what they’re at, right? How do we automate this process in our quick service food environment? How do we automate this process in our school? How do we automate this process in our city? How do we automate this process, you know, in our factory, right? All of these things are happening all at once right now. So getting ahead of that curve and being, being willing to have that conversation is gonna be a, a huge opportunity for the channel. And I think this channel is gonna be right there at the front with every ahead of the rest of the curve.
Josh Lupresto (31:17):
Love it. Great stuff. All right, Ken, you dropped some knowledge on us here. I think people are gonna be excited about this, learn some stuff and definitely reaching out to you guys. So I really appreciate you coming on, man. It’s always a blast.
Ken Mills (31:29):
Yeah, Josh, always, anytime, man. I’m a, like I said, big fan. Glad to be on the show and, and thanks for having us and being a great partner of ours. And, you know like I said, you know, don’t be afraid of the big data.
Josh Lupresto (31:39):
Love it, man. Love it. Okay, everybody that wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Ken Mills, CEO of EPIC iO. Until next time.
Listen in today as we have a return guest and host of his own podcast Chris Whitaker, also VP of Mobility & IoT on the show. Chris goes on some key comparisons to battlefield strategies he leverages today with building out the practice. He talks about how we’re tying all the solutions together, pulling us business drivers and ultimately solving that with sensors and ideas customers hadn’t even thought of. There’s so many great ideas, you don’t want to miss out!
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We got a crazy title for you today. The title of today’s episode is What Do Propane Tanks, cows and Air Quality Sensors have in Common? And you’re probably going, what? But anyway, we’re gonna get to that. We’re gonna answer this as we get going. Today we have the wonderful, the amazing VP of Mobility and IoT, Chris Whitaker from Telarus back on Chris. Welcome back, man.
Chris Whitaker (00:42):
Yeah, I am glad to be back. And like, you know, I say all the time, anytime you get like-minded people with similar goals together, amazing things happen. So here we are. I, I think we have similar goals, you know, we, we wanna win, you know?
Josh Lupresto (00:55):
I think so. I think so. I love it. All right, man. So listen, this is the part of the show where you get to take us back. Give us something in your background, some unique story. Maybe some people heard some things about you before. Tell us something we don’t know.
Chris Whitaker (01:11):
Oh man. So there I was knee deep and in grenade pins. Mel, that’s not a real story,
Chris Whitaker (01:58):
Now sounds again very militant, I apologize. But, but regardless, you know, they needed some help. They were in a bad, bad spot. And they needed help. And what they would do is they would, they would give me their coordinates. They would tell me where they were. They’ll tell me, tell me what’s the nature of the problem they’re having? You know, was it the enemy forces coming on them, or tanks coming on them, or, or you know a trench line in the open with enemy soldiers, whatnot. So they would tell us, Hey, here’s where we are. Here’s what we need. Here’s what we’re looking at. Here’s what we’re dealing with help. And we would take all that information and calculate and determine where we need to send these rounds, what type of rounds and how many rounds. So I, I love that story cause they just occurred to me. It’s like, wow, that’s kind of what I do today. You know, I take that call from the front line, they tell me where they are, they tell me what they need, what they think they need, what they’re looking at. And then I get with my team, the mobility team, the sales engineering team, and we calculate, Hey, what’s the best answer here? What should we send down range to solve for this problem? So hmm. That’s a big part of who I am. And I I just love how they kind of relate.
Josh Lupresto (03:06):
Love it. Yeah. You’re, you’re doing your best you can to work with the information that you have. And at the end of the day, it’s you that, that has to help figure it out. I love it. I love it.
Chris Whitaker (03:15):
You know, Jason it, as you were, you know, as I finished that up, it occurred to me, cuz every now and then we got bad information. We got the wrong grid coordinates. True story. We literally dropped rounds almost a mile from where we should of what time all the calls of one digit was off. So I think that again, what it, it relates, man, we need the right info. You know, if we don’t have the right info Yeah. Things can go awry and, and it could be a bad outcome.
Josh Lupresto (03:43):
Yeah, good point. Very, very true. In our day to day. All right. So, so let’s let’s say somebody’s tuning in. They, they didn’t go and catch the other episode that you were on. May maybe just do a little bit of a reset for us breakdown. You know, we, we’ve got all these engineers here. We talk a lot about kind of what our focus and our role is. But, but walk everybody through kind of as the VP of mobility and IoT in this emerging practice where all kinds of things are changing, trillions of dollars is gonna be spent. From a customers perspective, what is the focus of your role?
Chris Whitaker (04:15):
Man, well, first all, if you didn’t catch the last episode, stop right now and go back and listen to it. Cuz it was, it was a doozy man. In fact, all your shows are doozy really good and doozy. But I don’t know where that word came from. That’s a, that’s an old
Josh Lupresto (04:28):
School’s take. We’ll allow it. We’ll
Chris Whitaker (04:29):
Allow it. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s a, it’s a family show. So so yeah, you know, I’ve kind of I find myself, you know, two years into this role again, been a, you know, longtime friend and, and fan of Telarus as a supplier my past life. Going back to I think 2011, it’s a little over, yeah. Going know what, 12 years or so. But today I feel like you know, I have three roles here at Telarus. And I’ll tell you those three. And then, then, and then there’s three more points I’m gonna make. But the first role is partner enablement. You know, partner enablement. Second role is colleague enablement. You know, cause a lot of my colleagues come from a true telecom background, and even they’re like, mobility IoT, what, what are you talking about?
Chris Whitaker (05:10):
So, you know, helping, helping my partners help with my colleagues. And then as important, helping our suppliers. You know, I’m, I’m a internal resource consultant for all of our suppliers going, Hey, here’s what we need to win. Here’s the information we need from you. Here’s the support we need from you. So those three things are important. But from a partner perspective, you know, I’d like to break it down to as to how the why, the why. You know, so the, how very partner focused, how do you do this? What’s your go-to-market strategy? You know, we, me and my team, you, I say my team, my teammates, you know, there’s five of us, you know, advanced solutions, CCaaS, UCaaS, cybersecurity, cloud, and then me, IoT and mobility. And, and I love the, there’s a whole nother story how I can talk about how we, there’s a, a line that kind of weaves us all together.
Chris Whitaker (05:58):
But you know, how, you know, a lot of our, our team e even go as far as helping our partners do interview processes to hire someone, to be a specialist in one of these disciplines. So, you know, that’s what we do for the partners. You know, how to go to market, how do you do this? How do you create your own practice? How do you lean in and make one of these advanced solutions a big part of your offering versus, you know, gimme your phone bill, I’ll save you 30%, get you something better. Right? Right. Again, that works. But let’s face it, if you wanna go deeper in what intent account, you need more, right? Yeah. So that’s how, or the what this podcast is a great example of the, what is the technology. Let’s break this down. So many of us in this space kind of grew up in our technology careers.
Chris Whitaker (06:40):
Again, simple connectivity, you know, whether it be, you know, back in the day of t1 s and prs up through coax and fiber now, and, and you know, dare I’ll say even all things wireless, you know, microwaves, cellular satellite. So, you know, we can help you break down the why, help you do that technology overview. And a part of that is a supplier overview. Cuz the technology is great, but if you don’t know who you can go to to get it from, then what’s the point? So, so go to market the technology. And then I love the last part. The why, why is all that important? You may ask, it’s the revenue. How do you make money with this? How do you take it? My, my friend Greg Plum, Illa guy, I love his yes, thank you. How do you take it from promise to profit? Now the promise of what this product and this solution delivers all the way to now the customer’s profitable, you as a partner are profitable cuz you’re earning commissions. So that’s really, when it boils down to it, that’s, that’s the big deal. That’s the big why. How do we go for promise to profit? And, and that’s what my role does for all things wireless, mobility and internet of things. And of course, my colleagues, that’s what they do in their disciplines as well for, for what they do.
Josh Lupresto (07:55):
Love it. All right. Let’s talk about changes. So if we look forward, right? Yeah, I know, I feel like I should’ve, I feel like I totally should have prepared better and had that soundtrack. What do you think changes coming here in, in 2023? Right? I mean, I’m, I don’t, don’t walk me out too far because we’re gonna talk at the end of this about beyond, but, but just about right now, any kind of changes that you see right now in the short term for mobility and IoT, and then any strategy for, for the partners, right? A little bit of secret sauce for them to hear.
Chris Whitaker (08:26):
Yeah. Well, you know, just in the last six months a few things, a few observations as I mentioned, have been in this role for two years. The first year was kinda like phase one, just trying to get the word out. Hey, hello, you know, the open signs out front. We, we can now do IoT and, and advanced wireless solutions. So spend a lot of time just kind of getting that message out. But in the last six months, it’s been amazing. Even yesterday, I was at a Gear Up event in Atlanta, Georgia. And the lights are coming on, you know, the moments are happening that I’ve been waiting for, you know partners coming to me going, Hey, I need to talk to you. I finally get it. You know, I’ve heard you three or four times. It kinda reminds me of the sales cycle too, Josh.
Chris Whitaker (09:09):
Yeah. You know, there’s a lot of stats that say, you know, most companies, no one only makes a buy-in decision on the first one or two calls. It’s like the fifth or sixth or seventh call, you know? So I think our partners are probably no different. You know, it takes, it takes hearing the message 3, 4, 5, 6 times before it goes, ah, I get it. And I was talking with one partner yesterday, and literally in, in, in this five minute conversation, there were three moments. He’s like, oh my God, you just gave me another idea. Oh my gosh, you gave me another idea. All of our partners are working with enterprise companies or mid-size companies, even SMBs can benefit from all these things we’re talking about. So yeah, there, there’s more going on. I mean, you know, the, the word ai, the acronym ai, artificial intelligence actually had someone ask me yesterday, so what is AI again?
Chris Whitaker (09:52):
I was like, okay, how much time do you have
Chris Whitaker (10:31):
So making surveillance more proactive, put geo fits geofencing in there, you know, facial recognition, weapon detection, actually, you know, looking for someone with a, a, a green shirt on and a black backpack and a white ball cap. And you can tell the ai, this is what I’m looking for, and it will show you everything. So, you know, that is pretty big for, you know, retail manufacturing, even agriculture, car dealerships, medical. I mean, it’s really pretty much wherever there’s a camera, there’s a need for some kind of AI video solution. And, and that’s pretty exciting.
Josh Lupresto (11:03):
So I’m gonna take you back here for a second. When I was selling vacuums door to door the biggest thing that I found helpful, because it turned out people did not wanna buy a $3,000 vacuum without being persuaded a little bit, was how to handle objections.
Chris Whitaker (11:39):
Right, great question. And there’s two areas that I, we’ll call it, two buckets. Two buckets that I kind of tend to, you know, the mobility wireless, and that’s all things with a sim card, you know cell phones, tablets, watches, gateways. And then the other bucket is more the advanced solutions, emerging technology enabling technologies of internet of things, which is a huge bucket, by the way. I think it’s a bigger bucket. I had the, it’s more like a, that’s just a bigger bucket. We’ll leave it at that. So yeah, I hear these, I hear these objections and these reasons a lot, you know, from the mobility side, Hey, it’s not much money in it. It’s complicated. Nobody wants to talk about that. I don’t want to get in the cell phone business. I’m not gonna be, you know, I don’t want nothing stock cell phones and have to break, you know deal with breaks, broken screens.
Chris Whitaker (12:28):
People are forgetting their passwords. I mean, all of these aren’t like, you know what, you’re valid. I wouldn’t wanna do that either. But the good news is, you don’t have to anymore. I mean, years ago that was the case. But with our suppliers today and our mobility team, you know, we can remove a lot of that heavy lifting and a burden away. I mean, does it, does it mean it’s simple and easy and there’s no problems? Of course not. You know, why it’d be lying. But again, we have the expertise and the relationships with all these, whether it be the, the major carrier wireless carriers or all of our mini aggregators. We we’re slowly but surely just kind of chipping away at this to make it a more profitable. In fact, we’re seeing a trend. We’re seeing a trend. Even the carriers, you know, trying to go back, you know, try to get to that re recurring residual model.
Chris Whitaker (13:09):
Historically, the big carriers have been just all up front, and no one’s too excited about that. I will tell you this, the largest deal last year, you know, this is a big announcement. I don’t know if this has been in the release, but we’re, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna go there. The largest deal last year was mobility. Mobility was the number one deal last year. And I wish I could tell you that these kinds of deals are falling from the, from the trees, but they’re, but they’re not. But they’re out there. I mean, if this partner didn’t have the, the wherewithal in the foresight to go, Hey, let me, you know, let me dig into this. Let me ask the questions. Let me look into this and, and figure out how can Dores help me with this. So it was, it was a massive deal.
Chris Whitaker (13:50):
400,000 plus MRC. It was just a, a really whopper of a deal. And, and even I was just looking at our numbers this morning from February, I mean, a huge month on February. And the average deal size is just going up, up and up. No, I mean, it used to be literally a couple hundred bucks here and there, then a couple thousand here and there, and now it’s like eight, nine, 10,000, 20,000, 25,000. And the other area, by the way, yes. So yes, cell phones are a big part of it. Mobility SIM cards, but wireless expense management. Hmm. Manage mobility as a service. So even if you don’t change any SIM cards, you don’t change any hardware. There’s money to be made mobility by just asking the question, how do you manage mobility in your business?
Josh Lupresto (14:31):
The, the time on that right now, right? If you look at the weirdness of the last 12 plus months, the current economic climate, I think the timing on that is huge. Where I don’t know that a lot of people have thought of that wireless expense management in the same way they know traditional telecom expense management. So I think your point there is huge.
Chris Whitaker (14:49):
Yes. I mean, it’s it’s massive. So, you know, all we, we, and we have a great collection of suppliers in this space. All you need to do is just get, you know, one or 2, 2, 2 cellular wireless bills are better than one. Cuz obviously, you know, one could be a you know, have different variables at play there. But if you have two, that’s great. You know, they can do an assessment and, you know, come back to you before you even get on the phone with your customers. Say, Hey, by the way, if they were our customer these last 60 days, we would’ve su we would’ve saved them 20, 30%. Yeah. And they wouldn’t have had to worry about, you know, cuz maybe, maybe they are a company that has someone in accounting or someone in it, which makes a lot of sense, reviewing a phone bill, but most often no one’s reviewing the phone bill.
Chris Whitaker (15:35):
Cause it’s a hundred, 200, 300 pages. All these different codes that mean nothing to the layperson. And they just look at the bottom of the bill, go, okay, it’s says $10,000. Well, we got budgeted $12,000, so hey, it’s below budget, sign off on it, send it to accounts payable. Problem solved. No oftentimes they’re overpaying so much. So, you know, you as a partner can help there. Yeah. And you’re, you’re, you’re spot on, man. What CEO or C level is not looking for ways to save money today. It’s always been the job of this sea level to be profitable and look at the bottom line. Yeah. But probably more so now than in in many years. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (16:11):
So let’s talk about l Let, let’s come back to the topic of this podcast for a second. That, you know, the question is, how do propane tanks, cows and air quality sensors, right? How do they all tie together? And, and, and why do they matter? I mean, you know, we, we’ve seen in, in years past, we’ve seen a visual of the connected cow, right? We, we can check the milk output, we can check the temperature, we can check the location, all of these things, right? And we’ve talked about, rather than sending out a tech to the check the propane tanks at all the different locations, we can have it notification when it’s low. We can embed 4g, 5G in there, air quality. All those things. Help me understand, you know, how, how do these things tie together, right? How, how do we help partners view that it isn’t just, and, and maybe it’s okay if it is just a sensor here, a sensor there to start. How do you look at these things, right? Do they all need to tie together? Should we be talking about these things separate? And, and maybe just without getting too far into the weeds on an, on an example, cause we’re gonna, we’re gonna push you for an example here in a second. Well, how does a deployment, if we go do a cow or we do the propane, or, you know, whatever, walk me through some of these,
Chris Whitaker (17:18):
Man. Gosh, you’re right. Where to begin and how much time do we have? I love this question. It always comes down to, by the way, you know, we don’t sell IoT solutions. We don’t sell connected cow solutions. We sell outcomes. We’re looking at the outcome. So every business has a different desired outcome. And this is where it gets challenging. This kind of goes back to the last question too, of, you know, what kind of objections are you hearing? You know, we talked about mobility, and I’m gonna kind of bring that question into this question as well. But when it comes to IoT, you know, a lot of partners, like, wow, it’s just so complex. Christian know, you talk about three, 400 different sensors and solutions. I’ll just stick with SD WAN and UCaaS and, and cybersecurity. These are, I got these.
Chris Whitaker (18:00):
But what you’re talking about is just so wide, such a, a, a wide range of topics. But it’s about how can the company become more efficient and effective using technology. So that’s how we, you gotta boil it down. Don’t, don’t overthink it. And I do have some great examples I’ll share with you in a moment. But but the connected cow, just real quick. I was visiting data to go down in, in, in Florida Robinson, Tori great, great guy. And, and I was telling him about a partner that had a large cattle opportunity, 400,000 head of cattle. And, and it was in Columbia of all places, but it was American, US based company. And they, and I was just sharing with, I was like, wow, you know, this is great. Cause he asked me, how was it going?
Chris Whitaker (18:47):
I said, man, this is great, man. The, the funnel’s growing. The opportunities are growing. I mean, we just got, I just got off a call with 400,000 head of cattle. He goes, are you kidding me? And he, he opens up a cabin. He pulls out a harness for a cow with a, it is like, it’s like a, you know, a smart watch for a cow measures, you know, temperatures. You mentioned how many steps they’re taking, where they are. And they’ve had the RFID where every time they went through a, a, a corral gateway or whatever, kind of measured, identified where they were. So cool, cool stuff there. Yeah, but I digress. So what was the question again,
Josh Lupresto (19:19):
Chris Whitaker (20:22):
Wow. Another great question, Josh. And, and by the way, it, it, it’s not lost on me how fortunate I am. I mean super grateful and lucky that every day I get to wake up and, and do just that research interview folks talk to suppliers. Just this week went to a Comp TIA community and council forum, and spent two days with some great, brilliant minds in this space. I do all that. So our partners don’t have to, I mean, our partners are trying to close deals, right? So to your point, I mean, I went to mobile Disrupt Mobile World Congress. I’m always trying to identify what’s the next thing and is there, are we missing anything? And, you know, and of course, one thing I will point out, I mean, sometimes there’s some great technology out there, but if it’s not channel friendly and channel ready, sometimes we just need to wait on it. It’s like, Hey, great technology, great solutions. I know we’ve had this conversation many times, that’s great, but if, if it’s not gonna fit in our, in our program we’ll wait till your, till you get your channel program up and running. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (21:27):
Yeah, yeah. Fair point. And we would rather do that than have bring something in because it’s cutting edge, and then have them go, wait, pay somebody forever. That’s crazy. You know? So definitely a big part of the process in there to get them to understand the importance.
Chris Whitaker (21:46):
Yeah, these suppliers, they’re open and willing now, I mean, years past, I love hearing the stories from Adam and Patrick and Richard, you know, going, you know, you know, 5, 10, 10, 15 years ago, some suppliers wouldn’t even take their call. They, you know, they had to deal with some, you know, support specialist person. Now you had C levels and, you know, the, the global VP of channels now coming to us going, Hey, what can we do? Can you, you know, help us build out our programs? I mentioned that’s one of the three areas that I’d spend a lot of time on, is helping these new startups have great technology going, look, here’s the things we need from you. Once you have ’em come back to me, then we’ll talk. And they’re like, got you. And then three or four months later, I get that email. Chris, I think we’re ready. Can we review again? So that’s encouraging.
Josh Lupresto (22:28):
Love it. All right. Let’s talk about examples here. So in this part, I wanna talk about, somewhere you got into the weeds you know, you see a lot of things. You, you talk to a lot of different providers. You talk to a lot of different partners, and you see a lot of different needs and use cases. So walk me through you know, pick a win or two wins, or, or, or, you know, I don’t one that jumps out at you. And I think what would be great to help is, is how maybe they had lower expectations and with what we were able to put together, come in, kind of crush those expectations. But then the gold here is what did it solve for the customer?
Chris Whitaker (23:05):
Yes. Yes. See, that’s a, it’s like, you know, going back to what’s my favorite child, right? I mean, there, there’s some great ones, but the one that jumps out that I shared with Illa this week, that, again, light bulbs were going off across the room. I’ll change the name of the locations to protect the innocent, but we the mid last year, I guess now it’s six, eight months ago, we had a partner that brought us in. And we were working with a large amusement park. And as a technologist, you know, going, Hey, there’s a lot of technology in the amusement park. You know, every, everyone has expectation of fantastic wifi everywhere is important. Let me manage wifi on the amusement park, any public spaces given nowadays. But they were going through discovery and, you know, ask that question, Hey, what you know is talking to the director of operations, you know, what’s one of your biggest problems you’re dealing with right now?
Chris Whitaker (24:00):
What, what’s, you know, what’s the problem of the day? This, you know, you guys are talking about in your leadership meetings. He goes, believe it or not, I don’t think you can help me with this one, but it’s staffing. We just can’t get enough people to work, you know, in the middle of the summer at the amusement park. Just can’t get enough people. And he goes, well, that’s interesting. You’re right. I’m not a staffing agency. I mean, I could probably, you know, help hook you up with some folks, but by the way, what task are not getting done? Cause shorthanded, and what a great follow up question, by the way, that’s called a diagnostic question. You know, there’s questions and there’s diagnostic questions, right? Diagnostic questions lead you to the opportunity. So the partner goes, yeah, what, what what’s not getting done? He goes, well, it’s probably a lot of things, but the one right now that I’m getting the most complaints on is the trash cans in the park.
Chris Whitaker (24:45):
We have over a hundred trash cans, and our, our patrons pay a lot of money to come here. And the last thing they wanna see is a trash can overflowing with bees buzzing around and it smells, and there’s sticky soda spilled on the, you know, at the bottom of the trash can. No one wants to see that. And, and I can’t, and by the way, my employees, no one’s really excited about going into trash cans. The partner goes, wow, that’s, that is, that’s it. You know what, I might, I think I can help you with this. What if you knew which trash cans were full, which ones were halfway full, and then which ones the deem need to be emptied? If you knew that all on the say, I don’t know, smartphone app, would that, would that help? Well, yeah, I guess it would. I mean, I, I wouldn’t have to have, by the way, 12 employees needed 12 employees to make sure all these a hundred trash cans were empty.
Chris Whitaker (25:34):
Whoa. Another floor 12 employees. And he said he was always about four or five short. So there was always some trash cans not getting empty. So they deployed this solution, you know, and IoTt solution, a trashcan sensor, if you will, that could measure the volume, you know, of if it was full half full or not full. And those devices talked to the gateway, which talked to the cloud, which sent it back down to a smartphone app or a tablet, and gave them a, a dashboard and prioritized the trashcans in order of which ones were overflowing. And, you know, so forth. Three employees from 12 to three, come on. And, and, and here’s why I’m really excited about it. Cause okay, see, like, that’s great, Chris. They know which trash can is empty now. Great. That’s awesome. I mean, not to mention going from 12 employees, think of the payroll for that down to three, and able to use those employees elsewhere in the park.
Chris Whitaker (26:29):
But here’s, here’s, here’s where the, the data gave them some more information. They started to realize, Hey, white, these five trash cans are always the fullest. Maybe we need more trash cans over there. Maybe, maybe we need to redesign and think about our trash collection points in this part of the park. And by the way, they also noticed, you know, it was an indicator of where everybody was at. You know, they kind of knew, cause they had cameras and they had other people counters, but it was, again, the more data points you have to validate a, a a metric, the better. So they realized that the bathrooms, we, you know, where there’s trash cans flow up, the bathrooms need to be cleaned more often. You know, we need, we need to be sensitive to that. And the trash cans and those bathrooms probably need, need sensors as well. So they were able to just collect additional data on, on the activity in the park off from monitoring trash cans.
Josh Lupresto (27:16):
Wow. Great stuff. All right, beautiful.
Chris Whitaker (27:20):
And by the way, that’s what I love about this whole story, Josh, man. I mean, there is no one, I mean, there’s no real trend. I get asked all the time, what’s, what’s the hottest I of t I’m like, what depends which vertical you’re talking about.
Josh Lupresto (27:30):
Yeah. It doesn’t, it doesn’t work like that. You’re right. Yeah. I mean, just think about, think about what ideas people are gonna get from hearing your trashcan example, right? I mean, just that people need to be able to liken and take in a, a parallel of that to whatever industry, whatever conversation, whatever customer, whatever business they’re talking to. I, I think you could use that 10 different ways and inspire another idea. It’s awesome. Absolutely. Okay. Final couple thoughts here real quick. So I, I, if I’m a partner, I’m getting excited, I’m getting comfortable, I want to go talk about this more. What would you leave them with here, before we get to the final question? What would you leave them with? What’s the talk track again? Maybe you, you kind of alluded to it in the beginning, but I won’t steal your thunder. What do you want partners to walk away with in, in how they talk about this technology to their, their current customers, their prospects, whatever.
Chris Whitaker (28:20):
Yes. Well, you know, first of all, acknowledge that it’s here to stay. I mean, you think about your home, chances are you have a ring doorbell, probably a Nest thermostat, may have some cameras. You have a smart tv, most likely maybe even have a refrigerator connected to the internet. And you just think of everything connected to the internet in your house. And then those same partners go, I just don’t understand IoT, you do. You really do. It’s not as foreign as you think. So that’s all the same benefits and features. We, we enjoyed our house. It’s available to businesses now. So first think, think bigger and broader when it comes to doing a, a due diligence or discovery session with your customers. Just go a little bit deeper, ask those diagnostic questions. You know, another favorite one to have is, Hey, look at your operating budget.
Chris Whitaker (29:06):
Do you have complete visibility where every dollar goes? And is there a part of your budget you wish you could control a little better? Just a great open-ended question. It it could take you to a lot of different places that you would’ve never thought of now. So now you got that business owner going, yeah, that’s a good question. You know, I’ve noticed, you know, this part of my budget keeps growing. I’m not even sure why. I mean, chances are there’s a sensor or an IoT solution that will help with that and give ’em that visibility, give them that data. Again, mobility, same story. How do you manage mobility? Are you comfortable with the amount of auditing being done on your mobility bill? So I, I think that says just, you know, understanding that both mobility and IoT, the one thing they have in common efficiency and effectiveness, it makes us more efficient.
Chris Whitaker (29:52):
Could you imagine if we didn’t have our smart phones? I mean, gosh, no. How much work do we get done on these things to quite efficiency and effectiveness? Yeah, cow probably, I mean, probably at the number one invention of the last, you know century, I think that has made us more efficient and effective. Yeah. Think of anything we get done on our phones and, and of course you, it is proof and you go to the airport, our restaurant, you look around, what’s everyone doing?
Josh Lupresto (30:18):
Good. Okay. Final thought, man, I want to think to the future here for a second. So if we look out, let’s call it as, as Chris is pondering, if you’re not watching this on video if we look out, let’s call, you know, 20, 24 and beyond, where we’re talking to sensors, gateways, all this great technology, is there anything, you know that you want to say, this is coming next, right? We, I’ll leave it to you. Whether that’s ai, whatever it is, anything you want people to be aware of, of just, hey, pay attention. You might hear this in the near future and you need to kind of understand that.
Chris Whitaker (30:56):
Yeah. A few thoughts on that fact, I, I think I’m gonna go back to my buddy Greg Plum. He’s are my mom. We spent a lot of time together at CompTia. He does Ted Talks and you gotta check ’em out at, at ted.com. But he has one on what would George Jetson think. And I love, it’s a great talk cause you may not know this, but first of all, I hope you even know what I’m talking about. The Jetsons, the cartoon, the Jetson, I guess was in the seventies. I’m not even sure what year was out, but I, I watched it growing up. So it’s a futuristic cartoon. Yeah, futuristic cartoon they live in, in the future. But George Jetson was born in 2022, you know, so we meet George Jetson in the cartoon. He’s 40.
Chris Whitaker (31:38):
So we still got 40 years, or 39 years to get the wage. George Jetson was, you know, flying cars, living in apartments, you know, you know, thousands feet above the ground, robots, you know, 3D printing, you know, things just appearing. So he breaks down all this technology and it is pretty fascinating. So but the one thing that, you know, I’m, again, automation. I mean it scares people sometimes, but they think it’s gonna take jobs away from folks. But let’s face it, I mean, the one thing that most workers today would, you know, and business leaders, you know, there’s not a lack of work. I mean, you know, rarely do you end your day with your to-do list, fully checked off, everything’s done. Think about it. You know, so, and what we can automate, whether it be through software, robotics even driverless, you know, autonomous vehicles, you know, we’re starting to see shuttle buses and even long haul, we, we, we gonna call Jason Coffin and I wanna call a few months back where the company’s actually developing 18 wheeler trucks that go between large warehouse thinking about Costco and bj, you know, BJs are, are yeah different big large warehouse stores, you know, cause it’s, it’s a set route.
Chris Whitaker (32:46):
They go every day at the same time. Hmm. And a lot of challenges there. You know, 5G is helping ’em with a lot of that. Edge Comput is helping with a lot of that. It’s all cloud driven, you know, private 5G and whatnot. So all the technology’s here, you know, it’s just a matter of, of it is every, I feel like every month is getting more and more refined. So you can see more robotics, more automation, even autonomous vehicles. And especially in the area of like shuttles and where it’s set path. I think autonomous vehicles, you know, you’re, you’re your Tesla, you know, we talked about this. It, it can kind of self-drive itself, you know, to a degree. But are you really, you know, can you really not have a steering wheel in the car? You gotta have that steering wheel still there.
Chris Whitaker (33:25):
Yeah. So we’re not quite there yet. This, the technology is, is is there, in fact even, you know, Greg’s talk around, what would George Jetson think? George would be happy. I mean, cuz you know, we are, we, a lot of the technologies needed to live in the George Jetson era exist. A lot of them are maybe halfway baked or 75% baked. But, you know, the way it’s evolving, there’s a saying, the technology doesn’t move fast until it moves fast. Well, I feel like, man, this picking up steam picking momentum because the cost of connectivity is going down, the cost of sensors is going down. We know more. I mean, AI’s really accelerating all these conversations. So every now and then I do come across to somebody that’s like, old school, still got the clipboard. Yeah. Still got the flip phone and they’re resisting, you know, resistance as futile, as as it’s the line.
Chris Whitaker (34:16):
Yeah, it’s coming. And, and it’s not all, it’s, it’s not evil. It’s good. This is good stuff. It’s helping us become more efficient and effective, get more done with our time and deliver better outcomes. That’s how you have to look at this. That’s what all of our partners, by the way, can I just give our partners a a big run of applause? I mean, you make a living helping others make a living, by the way, that’s what we do too. So, I mean, it, it, it, the, our, our our intent, our our motives are pure, our heart’s purest. It’s a good thing. It’s a good place to be. Use a technology to help folks make a living, to make a, a better outcome.
Josh Lupresto (34:49):
Okay. And that’s where we wrap it, Chris, so many knowledge drops, man. I really appreciate you coming back on. Thanks. thanks again for doing this,
Chris Whitaker (34:56):
Man. My pleasure. I don’t know about the knowledge drops, but I got a lot to say as you could tell, man. Hey, if you want hear more, you know. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (35:02):
It’s good. It’s good stuff. Hey, if they wanna hear more, where do they go, Chris?
Chris Whitaker (35:06):
Yes. Oh, it’s funny. You should ask. Thank you. My, my second favorite podcast after this one is, is Mine
Josh Lupresto (35:36):
Love it. It go check it out. Lots of great content there, verticals, all, all kinds of good stuff. Great. All right. Chris, take us out. Appreciate you coming on, man. I’m Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Till next time.
Listen to this special episode where we talk with Telarus Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Patrick Oborn. We talk about his winding path to founding Telarus, then get into key strategies he has seen partners embody that truly 3x, 4x, or even 10x their sales and their business. You won’t want to miss the first of many sales tips and strategies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaNwkEOfD0 Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome. We are back here with a special episode with a special guest, longtime listener, first time caller, really important person, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Telarus, Patrick Oborn. PKO, welcome.
Patrick Oborn (00:31):
Thank you so much for having me, Josh. I, like you said, longtime listener, love, love this podcast. It’s amongst one of my favorites. I’m not saying that just because you’re here right now, but cuz it’s a little truth. You, you do a very good job of bringing on people that can, that can deliver information that helps people’s businesses. So, congratulations on a very successful podcast, my friend, season two, I believe, um, pushing season three here, real close and, uh, too many more successful seasons. I think if you continue to do the job you’re doing, you’re not only gonna keep growing this thing in terms of, of quality of content, but in terms of audience and everything else. So I’m starstruck to be here with you and thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh Lupresto (01:08):
Love it, man. Uh, thanks for giving me a job. This is gonna be fun.
Patrick Oborn (01:12):
Josh Lupresto (01:15):
All right, we’re talking special episode here. Uh, you know, we usually have these three part tracks where we talk about, uh, you know, perspective on the technology a supplier, and then really get the partners purview on it. Today we’re talking about how to 10 x sales. Um, we get a lot of these questions from partners, A lot of tips, a lot of tricks. I feel like we could pack this into 50 episodes, right? And who knows, we might. Uh, but today we’re gonna boil it down from your perspective. We’re gonna run through some of the normal stuff, but then we’re gonna spice it up with, with some of your input, which I’d love, cuz you’ve got so much passion and energy and good stuff to share in this. So, as we always do, when we kick these off, let’s talk about your background, your path to starting to Telarus. And I want to hear anything good and anything bad, and anything I don’t already know.
Patrick Oborn (01:59):
Fantastic. Well, when I was growing up as a teenager, my dad owned his own business. He was a part of a three-way partnership. It was called OTA Physical Therapy, obo, TrackMan Aston. They had 15 locations across Southern California and they had a really, really nice business. Um, he later on in, in development of the business, he kind of got out of sorts with, uh, his partners and stuff, and basically was telling, telling me, Patrick, whatever you do, don’t start your own company. It’s a pain, it’s a hassle. There’s stress. The employees are always the first to get paid. The business owner’s always the last to get paid. There’s risk and, and you know, God forbid something doesn’t go right with your partners, it’s a, it’s a total train wreck. So just go to college, get a good job, save up for retirement, live a good life.
Patrick Oborn (02:41):
That was his advice to me. So I I, I did that thing. I, I went to college. I studied, I was a math and engineer geek. Um, I had, I had interned a few summers in my dad’s physical therapy offices. So when I went to college, I kind of thought I was going pre-med or something like that cuz both my parents are physical therapist. Um, my wife is a physical therapist, so surrounded by physical therapy, um, you know, rehab, uh, hips, knee replacements. Um, um, I thought maybe I’ll be an orthopedic surgeon. I’ll fix people up and then send them to physical therapy, right? So, wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. Um, but as I interned with my dad, I realized that people didn’t wanna pay their bills. Like I, they put me in the collections department. It was fantastic, you know, calling people, letting ’em know, Hey, this is not covered by insurance.
Patrick Oborn (03:25):
You need to pay this. And I was like, you know, I really want to go into an industry where I can use my talent, where I can guarantee it. I’m gonna get paid. Not necessarily a lot of guarantees in healthcare. If you’re gonna do all this work in half, the people are gonna stiff you. So I, I went to my, my, my counselor at, at Brigham Young University where I did my undergraduate and I said, what, what’s the major that I can make the most money at? Like secure money where I can apply my talents, like math, physics, you know, that kind of stuff. And she said, chemical or electrical engineering. I said, I, I’m really bad at chemistry. Let’s do electrical engineering. Not even really knowing what electrical engineering was. Um, long story short, I got a master’s degree in, in computer chip design.
Patrick Oborn (04:08):
So I went back to California where I’m from and I got a job at TRW Space and Defense, now Northrop Grumman designing, um, classified communication computer chips, right? Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (04:58):
What are words that entrepreneurs don’t want to hear? Slow down.
Patrick Oborn (05:01):
But I didn’t know as an entrepreneur just quite yet. And so, um, in order to make more money, uh, I, I did everything I could at work and I found that I was, you know, I don’t wanna toot my own horn, but I was pretty smart. I was top of my class. I, and it wasn’t that I understood stuff more than other people. I just understood it at a faster philosophy, right? I just, I just got it quick. So I got my work done in short order, and one day I went to my boss and I said, Hey, boss, um, I, I don’t have anything to do. Like, I’ve, I finished this project you gave me six months to do in four months, so what did I do for their two months? And they said, well, we can’t give you another project is yet, just look busy,
Patrick Oborn (05:36):
So during my look busy time, I started teaching myself how to code. Um, uh, unfortunately, I, I opted to the math and physics routes of all the electives at BYU. I should have in, in retrospect, done a lot more computer science, but I didn’t. So I bought myself SQL for Dummies, HTML for Dummies. Yes. I read it, started throwing up some websites, and then as soon as as I started throwing up websites, I started to get really interested in internet marketing. Like, how do I get people to those websites when I get them? How do I convert them into customers? And so that’s what I started to do. And, um, I, I, I started a website called cheap rates.com. It’s still there today, but we took, took it down. It’s just too hard to maintain. But I realized that out of the airfare and the home security systems and the cellular and, and everything else that I sold, long distance, calling cards, call back, dial around, OnePlus, all of that stuff toll-free, it paid residual income.
Patrick Oborn (06:29):
And so that’s the first time that the, the telecom, the residual income, light bulb, light, you know, went off in my head. And I said, hold on a minute. So I started to really focus all my efforts on driving traffic to those, to those products. Um, the company that captured my traffic and converted it into dollars for me, um, a couple months later actually reached out to me and gave me an unsolicited offer to come and code their whole website. And I said, yes, under one condition, and that is that I get to keep my agency do, do not make me walk away from my agency or I’m not gonna take this job. And they said, fine, that’s, you can keep your agency. That was earning some good money. So I took the job, um, I started working at home way back in the 1990s, 1998. Um, started working at home. Um, and it was fantastic. I’ll never forget the day where I told my parents I was gonna quit my job that I had spent six years studying for, got security clearances for, and I was gonna work for this internet company.
Josh Lupresto (07:24):
Yeah. What is this internet
Patrick Oborn (07:25):
Thing? The interwebs man? The interwebs. Yeah. It was, it was a crazy time. So it was, it was really early on. And the thing that that captured my imagination was trying to find information that was floating out there mm-hmm.
Patrick Oborn (08:16):
And so I suggested to my boss one day, Hey, why don’t we open a commercial division where we can leverage all of these affiliate relationships? We out there, we have out there to drive commercial, telecom and internet leads as opposed to just residential. So yeah. So I have my background in residential. Um, I built all their backend systems. I said, let’s do this. And my boss politely said, that sounds like a great idea, but we’re not doing that
Josh Lupresto (09:16):
Patrick Oborn (09:19):
And he laughed because he was an auditor at kpmg and then later on a controller of a, of a startup tech company, and he is like, commercial telecom, what the hell is that
Josh Lupresto (09:35):
It’s all that matters.
Patrick Oborn (09:36):
So, so yeah. So we, we, our, my first, my second question to him was, how much money do you have in your savings account,
Josh Lupresto (10:33):
Was that? Yeah. Where was that moment? Where was that moment in there? Was it that moment of when you realized, oh my gosh, we, we got something special here. Like, what was that turning point for you?
Patrick Oborn (10:42):
Um, it, it really came when, when they said no, and I saw it like, clearest day. It’s like, I’m telling you, you’re gonna be in a car accident. You need new tires, I’m telling you it’s gonna happen. And they’re like, we don’t believe you. And I’m like, all right, I’m not gonna be part of the accident. I’m gonna remove myself and, and, and build another vehicle that has those nice tires on it. So I, I knew that would be big. I knew that, that people would want more internet, right? And so, um, people always ask me like, what’s, what’s the vision of, of a, of a founder of a company? Well, really it’s, you know, in retrospect, the last 20 years, it looks like we made most of the right turns. We made most of the right choices. But, but in reality, we could really only see one or two year out.
Patrick Oborn (11:25):
Yeah. Right? So we knew that at the time, a, people were gonna want more internet. B, they’re gonna wanna know how much it costs, and c they’re gonna wanna know where it’s available. Because even back then, the availability was much, much worse than it is now. Like, you could be on one street and have great internet on the other street you’re on DSL and dial up. It was awful. And so, you know, figuring out those problems and figuring out how to consolidate that information to one place so that the people that worked with us could have a competitive advantage, right? They could be faster, they could be more knowledgeable, they could be more efficient in their sales motion, and, and, and consolidating that into one easy to use software platform. And so it’s really funny, if you look at the, the TSB that are out there, uh, Telarus is not started by people who are in the business who just morphed out and just kept growing it, right?
Patrick Oborn (12:11):
We were from outside of the business coming into this space. And the things that really jumped off the page to us were all of the inefficiencies that existed. All the things that maybe if you were, if you grew up here, you just accept as, as normal. Because that’s how they always are. We came in and those things stuck out to us, like a s sore thumb. It was like, okay, let me get this straight. You don’t know what you’re selling. You don’t know where you’re selling it. You don’t know how much you’re charging, and you don’t know how much commission you’re gonna make on the back end. Like, how, how does,
Josh Lupresto (12:40):
And you in this business, and you’re going, guys, I’ve, I’ve figured this out. Like the answer is right here. Oh my gosh, we could do something great.
Patrick Oborn (12:47):
And so, yeah. So we didn’t come here for the technology. We came here for the opportunity to organize information. And that’s what I think a lot of people don’t see when they look at this channel itself. Yeah. And especially when they look at h Telarus, I mean, your job Josh, as a sales engineer is to, um, organize information, right? Through experiences, through trainings, through interactions, right? And then, and then take that information and to be able to push it back out into, uh, a very proprietary, very valuable, um, information stream. Very valuable advice, say, based on my experience, which is a lot, um, based off my training, which is a lot, C I S S P AWS certified. I mean, you’ve gone through all those things, right? Plus you add on top of that the frosting, which is actual real world interactions with customers. The information that you have organized in your brain is, is really more important than anything that, that we could offer here at Telarus.
Patrick Oborn (13:38):
And so figuring out a way to, to compartmentalize and, and consolidate that information is really why we’re here today. And, and, and this is an area that I think a lot of partners miss out on. I think that in this business, just like we kind of change the paradigm a little bit, right? From let’s just get out there and hustle our network and just get ’em to order their stuff through us. That was, that was version 1.0. Version 1.0 was a network marketing, let’s be honest, right? Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (14:12):
Right. We’re gonna, I want to come back to adding value. Yes sir. I wanna start with motivation. Yes. So we’re gonna get, I know you’ve got some, uh, some really good unique strategies that, that we’re gonna talk about of how to add value, how to 10 exit, all of those things.
Patrick Oborn (14:24):
Real fast. Can I finish that story?
Josh Lupresto (14:25):
All right, go ahead.
Patrick Oborn (14:26):
When I told my parents I was leaving, they mocked me. They thought I was a dumb decision, right? With with, you know, kids sometimes they’ve got these grandiose things. My parents didn’t understand internet and they didn’t understand residual income. They didn’t understand any of those two, two things. So when I started working on it, my first check came from my first affiliate company and my dad was like, wow, you’ve been working all of your free time, your total side hustle, all of it on that computer. He called it working on that computer all day. You’re not coming down to eat with us. You’re not hanging out with us. You’re on that computer all the time. And I got a check in the mail and my dad actually said, Hey Cheryl, come here. Patrick just got a check from his little internet business,
Josh Lupresto (15:09):
How much Patrick?
Patrick Oborn (15:10):
Open it up, how much is it? $18 and 58 cents. Yes. And he was like, wow. He goes, son, I knew you were smart, but this, this is like genius level. Do you spend all that time and effort? And I said, but dad, it’s gonna be $18 and 58 cents plus the commission I earned last month, plus the commercial I earned this month, plus the commission I’m gonna earn next month. Plus he didn’t understand that. He literally told me, you would’ve been better off to spend that time at McDonald’s cuz you would’ve made 10 times more money. And so every time we had a polar partner summit back in the back when he was alive, um, I would invite him. And every time when Adam started his big pitch and everyone’s in the ballroom, I would just whisper to him McDonald’s
Josh Lupresto (15:54):
Patrick Oborn (15:54):
And he knew what I was talking about.
Josh Lupresto (15:56):
That’s right. That’s awesome. I have not heard that story. That’s great.
Patrick Oborn (16:00):
Alright, well, while we’re, while you’re crushing it with motivation, uh, I want to keep on that theme. So you’ve had a lot of, I mean, besides obviously being part of founding this, driving it to what it is now, but you’ve had some great, you know, personal motivation, right? You’re, you’re running 800 miles a day, all these great, all these awesome things that you’ve done these a hundred milers, but I’m, I’m just kind of curious for, for the partners, what are one to two, whatever lessons that you’ve learned personally, professionally, in all these crazy accomplishments that you have that are helpful, you think, to motivate the partners to push it to the next level to do the things that we’re about to share secrets on with them?
Patrick Oborn (16:40):
I think one of the things that I suffered from, especially early on was imposter syndrome. You know, Adam and I showed up at Channel Partner show, our company was four or five years old. We had a brand new business model, which was really tool based, online based. It wasn’t human network based, so to speak. It wasn’t multi-level market based. It was based on a couple of key things. And people told us, you’re, you’re, you’re just gonna, um, not, um, you’re gonna commoditize the market. You gotta sell our products on value. And I’m like, people don’t really care what value your product. They care what the capabilities are. They care what you’re gonna charge. They’re gonna care how you support it, how you install it. That’s what they’re gonna care about. They’re not gonna care about the value that you keep referencing. And so, so talking to a supplier or talking to a partner about a business they know a lot about and, and kind of telling ’em they’re, they’re not wrong, but maybe they’re misinformed or maybe they just don’t see the, the vision, the the, the total vision of what it could be.
Patrick Oborn (17:36):
Um, that was hard because how do you, how do you build your credibility when you’re new at something? Yeah. And so that’s something where, where we really struggled. And even today, sometimes I, I get up on stage and I, I have those doubts in the back of my mind, like imposter syndrome. Like, you’re getting up, you’re talking about cloud, you’re talking about security. Dude, you started creating a, a website that compared long distance minutes, like rates, like how are you qualified to be here speaking? And, and the same thing with, you know, you, you alluded to the, the ultra, uh, endurance running, you know, for a long time I just tried it, thought it’d be a healthy habit, wanted to go see nature and, and everything else. And I was just happy to be there. I was happy to be mid back of the pack in the middle of the pack.
Patrick Oborn (18:15):
And, um, I didn’t really see myself as an endurance athlete. I saw myself as a weekend warrior that’s just out there trying to, trying to give it a go. Right? And then I hired a coach two years ago. I said, look, Patrick, if, if you wanna stay middle of pack, that’s great, but if you want to like, push the envelope a little bit and see what you’re capable of before you’re 80 years old, right? Cause you’re not getting any younger, um, like take it serious. And so I hired a coach and he changed my diet around, he changed my workouts around, and it was a lot harder, took a lot more discipline, but I started seeing actual results when I thought plateaued. And so I busted through that plateau. Things started happening. And um, and this year, like right after Partner Summit, ironically the day after partner Summit, all those nights with no sleep and stuff, I went and I ran a 100K ultra, the Cachina Mosa 100K.
Patrick Oborn (19:03):
And I won first place overall, not like first place age group. And I was like, and once that happened, every race I show up to, I, I think I look around, I go, I’m gonna beat you. I’m gonna beat you. I’m gonna beat you. I should at least, I should at least finish top five in this race. Like, right? Like, I have that confidence now that I never had until I put in some work and I saw, I saw a little bit of success. And once that, that, that success hit, it’s like putting the key in the door lock and it just ch just unlocked. And so same thing with business. When, um, and there wasn’t like that crystal clear moment in the Telarus, it was just a gradual, people started coming to us. They started asking us for, for more advice, asking us for more information, asking us for more tools.
Patrick Oborn (19:43):
And the great thing about the residual business is it creates more money the month before than, than than the month before. And so we, we had the, the luxury of having money to invest and figure out how to get better. And eventually, you know, I call it, it’s the very unsexy, you know, planning a tree and growing it, and eventually your tree’s gonna be, be strong enough to support a hammock, right? To support some weight. You don’t really know when that moment is until you actually tie the hammock up on and test it out. And, and, and now I think, I think Telarus really got to that point when we combined with your company carrier sales, Josh, because we were kind of stuck. We we’re not stuck, but we were, we were following that same online model for 12 years, 13, 14 years, right? And, and we were really missing out on the enterprise deals.
Patrick Oborn (20:32):
We were missing out on the big lumen deals. We were missing out on the big contact center deals. And we realized, hey, if we’re gonna play in the space, we either need to get better or we need to go buy the talent that we need to plug those, those holes. And, and you guys just stuck out like a sore thumb. I mean, it was just like the obvious match. We were, were transactional and automated. You guys were not automated. You guys staffed and built for expertise in different areas and we like, that’s gonna be the perfect marriage. And so, but again, like I said, you, we see the road, it’s like there’s a fog out there, right? We can see maybe 500 meters, a thousand meters at a time. We can’t see 50 miles out. Fair. But I, I think as long as we know where we’re going, eventually, the, the exact, um, tact we take, the exact road we take to get there is, is a little less relevant.
Patrick Oborn (21:18):
I mean, it’s, it’s very relevant and, and impactful now. But if you know where this train is headed, if you need no need to go west and you’re headed east, like red flag, right? Yeah. But if you are headed west and you’re going northwest and you’re gonna meander back to the west and you don’t know exactly where the road goes, man, that’s what you wanna be on. And so that’s really what we’ve, what we’ve done. We, we, we get credited a lot for being visionaries and getting this company to where it is now. But, uh, and in reality it was, it was take it one mile at a time and listen to your partners. Listen to the people that are on the front freaking lines of battle mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (22:05):
Good stuff. I love that. Uh, let’s talk about the first step here. Let’s, let’s baseline it, right? I mean, you think about who’s listening to this potentially, this could be partners that have sold a specific technology in cloud, but maybe didn’t venture into contact center or vice versa. Or maybe somebody that is thinking about doing this that is a, at a current affiliate marketing company and going, wait a minute, I’ve got all these relationships. I could come do this. Right? Step one, right? Our, you know, people understanding our world as it exists. Some people still don’t even know that it exists. They think direct sales is the only way, or I go buy my, my gear from a, a, a certain gear company and, and that’s it. And that’s the only way. So what of the partners that you have seen be very effective in communicating their value to a prospect? Let’s say it’s a new prospect. What’s the, what is that pitch? What’s the strategy? What have you seen really work well in that part of it?
Patrick Oborn (22:58):
I think that is a fantastic question. It’s an area where everybody needs to figure out what their value is. And what I like to tell people, I said, look, you know that you’re doing something right when the customer thinks of you as a part of their team, not a sales rep, right? Direct reps are out there all the time. You cannot have your customers pigeonhole you into that direct rep plug. Like, that’s not, that’s not your whole, that’s not what you do, right? You are a part of their team to advise. Now how is, how is advising a thing? How can advising be valuable? Especially to customers in many cases that don’t think they need your advice. Mm-hmm.
Patrick Oborn (23:49):
Because most people like nodding their heads, right? Do No, no, that’s a no. You are not a technology broker. Know what you are. You’re a technology information broker, right? Because as you talked about on prior podcasts, especially in Security Cloud, it manage services. Where, why are, are companies having a hard time staffing, right? Because these people are incredibly expensive. It doesn’t make make sense to have a credibly expensive person, limited to just your company. They get bored. Like they’re not, they’re not exposed to all the technologies that they want to be exposed to. And ultimately, where do these people end up? They end up at our suppliers. They the suppliers are it. And, and our suppliers are multiplying and replenishing the earth, right? There’s over 400 now and growing because there’s more suppliers coming in on the consulting side. I mean, there’s so many different areas of technology that require consultants.
Patrick Oborn (24:39):
So that’s where all the talent is. So, so how do, do customers match up all of the things they’re working on with all of the talent that’s out there, right? You need information, you need, um, case studies. You need people who have, have maybe tried that consultant before and put in a review about that consultant, kind of like, you know, um, uh, any type of review board y you have to take all the information that’s out there about the capabilities as the suppliers, which are, are numerous, right? The quality of the suppliers that are numerous, um, and work with somebody like Telarus, right? Where we vet each of these suppliers, we make sure that they are quality, right? You will never be embarrassed by putting one of these people in front of your customers, but also giving you the tools and information you need so that you can be that broker of information of who can do it, who can do it well, who can do it on time, who can do it on budget, right?
Patrick Oborn (25:32):
And, and really help our customers augment. Because right now, every customer, every business is a technology company, right? When you’re battling for customers, when you’re, when you’re out there battling for market share, when you’re out there sometimes battling for survival or battling the regulating authorities or battling whoever, they’re in battles, right? And, you know, um, by virtue of of being the information broker who can help them, in which instance. And so if a partner can communicate to clearly enough to their customer, look, I am a technology information broker. I can give you, remember this pitch. I can give you information that you cannot find in Google. I love that. I can give you information that you cannot find in Forester. I can give you information you cannot find in Gartner, right? That is why you need me, right? Cuz I will help you make the decisions that make sense for your business to keep you in budget and help your projects progress everything else.
Patrick Oborn (26:23):
But more importantly, I can help you, Mr. Customer, be an all star because I’m on your team and you get credit for being my boss. I’m just funneling information to you. I’m funneling a list, list of suppliers that you need to talk to, the questions you need to ask them, um, the things that you need to vet your, um, uh, uh, technology world. So each one of our, each, each customer out there has a so many projects, so many needs. Um, some of them are technological, some of them are, are human resource staffing and, and other resource related issues. Some of ’em are budget, some of them are legal. Like they’re our cus the customers out there, they face so many of those things. And so if a person can convince a customer, I need to be a part of your team because I bring information you cannot find anywhere else, that is the pitch. And I think a lot of people are still get pigeonholed into the sales rep, pigeonholed into the go, get me a quote, right? You’re, you’re like, these are things that, that Google, like there’s plan of technology out there that they can do some of these things. So I think that’s where people miss and combine that with the imposter syndrome. And it’s like, well, how am I really, a technology information’s crazy. Like they don’t believe it. They look in the mirror. What? And tell yourself
Josh Lupresto (27:28):
What’s the worst thing that happens, right? If the worst thing that happens when you ask these is if you get, that’s scary. If you get a no, great. That’s scary. Let me move on and stop wasting time with a customer that I don’t need to. And you brought up a really good point. If you can get past the imposter syndrome thing. I looked back at three or four of the really large deals that we’ve done that have, have timbered up and have grown and grown and grown. And we’ve sold multiple products to through, through one two man shop partners. They all started out as, yeah, I don’t, I don’t really think that we need you. We kind of manage all of this in house. I mean, you guys seem nice. I appreciate you being here, but we really got this, you know, that kind of standoffish IT team, right?
Josh Lupresto (28:04):
And we’ve taken those accounts and because of the partner’s willingness to do exactly what you just mentioned, sell more, sell more, sell more. And it, it was, it was an eye opening moment for me that we had earlier this year, we were sitting down with an enterprise customer that we’ve been selling to this partner for three, four years. And it, it was a business review. He brought his whole team in and this is the guy that’s been there signing the contract, signing the LOAs, that is the sole purchaser that we thought knew us, knew the partner really, really well. He was like, Hey, I got just one quick question. How do you guys get paid
Patrick Oborn (28:42):
It’s because you’re doing consulting level work. People typically bill for.
Josh Lupresto (28:46):
Four years into the relationship. That tells me how much of a bang up job and how much value there is if we get it right and get the recipe communicated. So I love that.
Patrick Oborn (28:53):
Yeah. And there’s, there’s a caveat to that too. There’s, there’s coming in too hot. Yeah. Like coming in, like I know everything. I’m gonna help you, everything else. And you know, you’re telling someone that you need that they need help that probably doesn’t think they need help. Yeah. And so you have to temper it with, hey, let’s, let’s give it a, let’s, let’s start out small, just like you said. I mean that’s, that’s the key. Start out small, find a beach head and expand from there. If you come in spilling all the stuff that you can do, and I’m your security guy and I’m your cloud guy and I’m your everything guy, people are like, whoa, time out. I, you just sold me some voice a couple years ago and now all of a sudden, like, like your, your everything technology? Like, so people have to understand what that is. But if they can just start with the basic concept of technology information brokerage. Yeah. Um, I’m your, I’m your conduit to, to people that can do certain things for you, they can do them, them well because we have a collective experience that we’re, that we’re putting into our, into our, um, into our recommendation engine.
Josh Lupresto (29:48):
. And to you brought up a really good point. Play the long game. Yes. This is not a short term. These trees take time to grow, um, play the long game. And I think you’ll add a ton of value into that relationship. It will, it will pan out. Because to your point, we’re in a weird economic time where these people are pressed, these customers are pressed to do more with the same or less resources. And we’re seeing a lot of those conversations. We were already seeing them before this weird economic climate because it was just hard to find people. Now people are getting squeezed out at some of these companies. And so they have this tech that is sunken in. They may or may not be ready to buy new tech. They might, but they also just need help in maintaining and managing and building and, and best architecture, design, all of those things. We’re seeing all those conversations right now. Um, yeah, it’s a great point you bring up.
Patrick Oborn (30:35):
Yeah. And technology’s really interesting space and it’s really a space that’s not so much driven by technology, ironically enough. It’s it’s driven by human resources. And as soon as people start to understand that, as soon as our partners start to understand that it’s, it’s how do you, how do you connect your customers with the resources that they need, um, that they may not be able to maintain in-house anymore. That the days of having all your resources in-house probably long gone. We’re talking legal, we’re talking accounting, we’re talking everything except your core business now almost needs to be outta house.
Josh Lupresto (31:05):
And you bring up, uh, it’s funny you bring up resources. That’s my next question. Hey, so my next question is, again, this is about how to help people improve their close rate. And, and with that we obviously we have to overcome difficult things and have conversations we might not be comfortable with. But I think sometimes, you know, now that, that we’ve grown and scaled so much, there is a lot of resources here, right? We, we’ve got everything from an engineering to advanced solutions to partner support commission, all of this stuff. If you look again back at your snapshot of partners that are successful, is there a, is there an under underutilized resource? You know, is it one resource? Is it a lot of resources at Telarus? What do you see partners that are underutilizing, if you could say, gosh, I wish you guys would, would, would just use this more.
Patrick Oborn (31:47):
So I have a two part answer to that question. First I wanna talk about just stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with Telarus. It’s just the, the bedside manner of the partner and how they are communicating with the customer. So, so when you go in and start to engage with a customer, you need to find a problem that they have that they don’t know about. That’s, that’s key number one. So I talked to a partner the other day and they had just signed, coincidentally, a large physical therapy firm,
Patrick Oborn (32:35):
No, no. What the, what the agent did very smartly, he texted their main number. Hey, is it okay if I come in tomorrow for an appointment? Do you have any open spots in the afternoon? And guess what happened? That text came back as undeliverable… And so he’s like, look, your competitors can accept text appointments from their customers. You cannot. And the customer didn’t believe that the agent, the customer’s, like, that’s, that’s wrong. They’ve been telling me this works cuz he’s the ceo, right? So he’s not necessarily the tech guy. I said, and, and the, and the, uh, agent said, pull out your phone and text your biggest physical therapy location, your biggest office. Text them if you can come tomorrow for an appointment. And his bounced as well. And that, and, and the CEO was like. He’s like, and the agent said, congratulations, you can’t communicate with over half of your potential patient, your your customer base, right?
Patrick Oborn (33:34):
So, so it was again, illustrating a problem that they didn’t know they have it. Every cu every company has one, every company has one. You may call their call center and sit on hold for 10 minutes, right? That means they either have a workforce optimization problem, they have a queuing problem, they they have something, something is off, or they, or they haven’t put AI in front of it so they can eliminate 70% of the calls that could be self self-serviced, right? So there’s always something there. So if, if our agents can understand how to figure out what that problem is. Second thing is, is understanding the resources att Telarus, because being part of being a technology information broker is understanding what problems could potentially exist over here and what solutions you can marry them up to and match them up to. So, uh, understanding the different types of engineers that Telarus has that that we can bring in the different types of tools.
Patrick Oborn (34:27):
Maybe you don’t, you’re not ready for an engineer yet. Maybe you just want to go through a quick security assessment, right? Just ask ’em a couple questions about their GDPR compliance or pci. I was on the phone personally with a customer, um, the other day who wanted to have a security conversation, but the agent was definitely terrified. He’s like, I’ve never had a security conversation. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m suffering from imposter syndrome right now. I would really appreciate it if you would just use the tool, use the Telarus, uh, assessment tool and, and guide the customer through it so I can hear right? And I can hear what it’s like and then I can do all the assessments on my own after that. So I said, fine, let’s go. And I started talking to the customer. Instantly the customer um, um, entered into a defensive posture, right?
Patrick Oborn (35:07):
He thought, I was like, why are you asking me all these questions? I said, listen, listen, I’m your defense attorney. Like I can’t defend you. I can’t help you. Like right, or like a doctor. I can’t help you if you’re not honest with your physical condition right now. If you lie about symptoms or things that are going wrong, like I can’t treat it and worse, I may, I may misdiagnose you with something cuz you didn’t give me all of the symptoms that you had. So I said, listen, in the spirit of just openness, okay, just be transparent. This is, this is not gonna go to your boss. This is not gonna impact your job, job rating or your pay or your promotion or anything like that. Just be as honest as you can and we’re gonna give you an assessment and you can choose which part of the assessment you wanna run upstream or which part you just want to use your own whatever.
Patrick Oborn (35:50):
So we went through and I said, you know, you know, some of the questions like, do you have a sock and sim? And he is like, uh, I know we need to do that and I’m trying to get one in by the end of the year. Can, can we, can we assist you? He’s like, yeah, that would be okay. And then we got through another question. I’m like, you know, you are a a medical facility. Are you HIPAA compliant? He goes, I think we are. I’m like, okay, well let’s put you, you know, yeah, I said, you process credit cards and copays. Are you PCI compliant? Uh, yeah, I, I don’t know Patrick. Um, I’m the IT guy. Like, is PCI my job? Like, like, so it wasn’t even a technology question. It was like, who’s a responsible for this type of question? And I said, yeah, you run the firewalls, you run the network.
Patrick Oborn (36:33):
That’s the information that carries the credit card data. Yes, it’s, yes, it’s you, but don’t worry. We have access to people that can come and help you get PCI compliance so that your job’s not at risk, right? So your company’s not at risk for, for losing their PCI compliance. And once you lose PCI compliance, guess what, buddy? No more credit cards for you so that that could impact your business. Pretty, pretty big time that you can’t collect credit cards at the point of when the patient’s at. So it was, it was, it was a combination of technology knowing the things that I was gonna bring in, knowing the things that, that we could connect that customer to, but it was also understanding the mindset of the customer, right? It’s not shoving all this stuff down your customer’s throat. It’s having honest conversations with them. It’s, it’s simple things like building trust with them and getting them to open up to you because once they open up to you, then, then you can really do your job.
Patrick Oborn (37:22):
Then you can really have the opportunity to connect them to the engineering and, and all the other resources that Telarus has to offer. And one of the biggest values that we have is that we have relationships with lots of suppliers, but it’s not just the relationship itself, it’s understanding the quality of that supplier. Understanding Yeah. How they perform in the real world, right? And that’s information that your customers are never gonna know. They a they’re never gonna find all the suppliers that are out there. Cuz quite frankly, a lot of ’em come to us, Josh mm-hmm.
Patrick Oborn (38:05):
Like the customer engagement with the, the sales rep column, um, is over 50% of, of the whole entire sales interaction satisfaction, right? So it’s understanding what your customer’s fears are. It’s understanding how your customer’s paid, understanding that the person you’re talking to may not be the decision maker, but he may wanna raise from the decision maker, or it’s understanding all of those politics and all the nuance in addition to the technology. And that’s really where our, our industry, that’s our whole job. Our whole job is to make people look good, make good decisions in a way that is, is so non-transactional.
Josh Lupresto (38:37):
You bring up Great point. I wanna throw two things in there. One, it’s, it’s simple and it would, you wouldn’t think that it would be so effective, but I love when we use and partners use the word augment, right? Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (39:22):
They’re hard to get and understand that value you make. No, but I have this value, I have all this great stuff I can tell you about, but you’ve gotta find that hook right at the beginning. I’m gonna throw out, and I, I really should get royalties on this book, but I don’t, but it’s such a great book. I still throw it out and it’s only like 15 bucks on Amazon. There’s a great book out there called Power Questions by Andrew Sobel. It’s, it’s a really simple read. It’s big yellow cover. You can get it on Amazon, but I think it it, what it does, it’s, it’s a bunch of situations and it comes from a guy with a financial analyst background. So, you know, it, it’s, it’s in a sales role, but it’s not exactly our role. But the idea is the same. Don’t just walk in with an agenda of what you think needs to happen.
Josh Lupresto (39:59):
Because what the book talks about is it says, here’s what happens in a scenario of this sales rep that walked in and said, Hey, Mr. Customer, I’m real excited. I wanna talk to you about, you know, improving your, uh, customers that aren’t paying by, you know, three to 15%, right? We’re gonna help you recoup those costs in the, you know, in the, uh, uh, physical therapy, right? When you’re sending out those bills, blah, blah, we’re gonna help you get ’em paid thinking that’s the agenda that you wanna come in. You think that’s what they’re gonna go? Versus, um, if you don’t have that information and if you come in and you say, Hey, Mr. Customer, listen, I I would love to talk to you about helping improve some of these, you know, three to 15%. I think we can get some of your pays down, some of your payers responding quicker, but is that an area that you wanna cover?
Josh Lupresto (40:36):
Is that the key initiatives that you got focused on or kind of given some of the changes that are happening right now, is there other things, other big business initiatives or technology initiatives that you need to, to, to solve and just stop and listen? Um, that was a huge eye opening book. I, I love some of the things in that that just helps us think differently. And I think you, you’ve, you gave a great story of the examples of when partners do that, we see a lot of great things happen. And that’s how you get in and you three x you five x that sale because you find all these things that nobody knew were there and nobody knew you could help ’em with.
Patrick Oborn (41:06):
Yeah. Especially now, I mean, a lot of the technology decisions aren’t even made by the technology decision makers, right? They’re made by other departments. They’re made by the board of directors who said, we will be, um, cybersecurity resilient. We will pass our audits, we will get our cyber insurance policy together so that the, the interests of the shareholders are protected. Right? We didn’t talk about carbon black, we didn’t like, we, we didn’t talk about technology. Yeah. We just said the company needs to, to do these things. And so if you can get your, you know, the people you’re talking to, to cough those up because you’re asking those right questions, it like, they gotta figure out what are their initiatives. They gotta figure out what do they wanna be when they grow up? They gotta figure out if they’re in, in, in offensive or defensive mode right now due due to the economy. Are they growing their number of locations? Are they just trying to hold onto the ones they have and really lower costs or just kind of weather the storm? Like you have to figure those things out in advance because, or, or, or at least ask those questions and find out what those things are because those will lead down into so many little, little technology conversations. But you, if you start with a technology conversation, there’s a one in 10 chance that you’re gonna be off.
Josh Lupresto (42:14):
Great stuff. All right. Um, I don’t think we have a crystal ball here anywhere that I can see, but if we look into Patrick’s crystal ball Yes. You know, you, you gave a great point that I think it’s hard to look out in the beginning, right? When you were building this thing out to look out really far and given the, the rate of change and how crazy fast everything changes right now, I still, I, I certainly agree it’s, it’s hard to look out, but if you look out, let’s, let’s say just look out a year, look out maybe two years max, what’s your, what’s your perspective on what the future looks like? The, the changes, the technology, any, anything strategy wise that you see anybody shifting that’s gonna be more effective or different or just anything you wanna put out there to be aware of as we wrap this up?
Patrick Oborn (42:57):
Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, my, my simple answer is this. When, when you look out into the technology landscape and you figure all of the different things that your customers are gonna have to take into consideration, right? It’s not just connectivity to the internet. It’s not just how they’re gonna communicate with their customers. It’s not just how they’re gonna, uh, advertise, it’s not how they use social media. It, it’s, it’s everything, right? And, and as Telarus grows more and more of those, those people that are what we call the digital workspace, those digital workspace infrastructure providers, they’re coming to us and saying, Hey, you guys have built this phenomenal distribution system, sell my my widgets, right? And so what, what widgets are we talking about? What more can be be put in there? We have, well AI companies are great. They’re like, Hey, can we get in there and help you, you know, fast track some of those phone calls or, or scan through some of your files to pull out information faster.
Patrick Oborn (43:53):
Um, workflow or work process automation, uh, that is a huge one. Uh, people are coming and saying, Hey, you need a call center in India or, or Philippines. We can connect you with that. So there’s bpo there’s point of sale, right? Like you’re already talking to the company that runs millions of dollars of, of POS transactions. Why aren’t you getting your, your 3% of that or whatever. Like, so you’re gonna see more and more, um, technologies coming in here, which means you have to either a, become expert in more and more technologies, which is brain busting, right? A lot of people feel like they’re maxed out as there is with one or two technology, um, swim lanes or two partner with the, the TSB that has the capability to not only go and vet those suppliers, but organize the information of their performance so that you can then be the technology information broker and take that information back to your customers.
Patrick Oborn (44:44):
So there’s almost no part of their digital workspace or digital workplace that, that you can’t help them with. And so their, their needs are not only growing, but our capabilities are growing and they’re growing fast. And so keeping up with that is hard. I mean, you look at the uht polar supplier management department in and of itself. I mean, they’ve got divisions now. They’ve got people that specialize in certain providers and certain service categories. It’s, it’s, it’s a lot. And then, then, you know, from my perspective on the, on the product side, we’re going through and we’re, we’re creating SKUs, we’re creating individual categories of every product, right? Every product even down to the OEM level of everything that we have access to. And Josh, it’s tens of thousands of SKUs and growing is probably gonna get into the hundreds of thousands of SKUs. And so how does a person keep, keep track of that?
Patrick Oborn (45:33):
You just have to partner with somebody like a Telarus that is dedicated to finding those relationships and, and, and, and, and really systematizing those in a way that you can easily pull information out and be the hero to your customer. There’s no way on the planet your customers are gonna have access to all of the information that they’re gonna need to figure out which POS goes to, which network goes to which SD wan, it goes to which firewall provider, which puts them in compliance with X number of compliance for, for North America, for their industry, for it’s, and it’s all a connected chain and the chain is getting bigger, it’s getting more complicated, but that creates opportunity for our partners to be more valuable. And so I see more providers, I see more providers in more areas and I see more opportunities for us to, to, again, going back to the very first thing I said, to centralize all that information in one spot that customers can’t get access to, but our, our partners can.
Josh Lupresto (46:25):
Beautiful stuff. Okay. Patrick,
Patrick Oborn (46:28):
Did I mention flying cars? I, I forgot flying cars. It’s coming.
Josh Lupresto (46:31):
We’re selling cars. Hey, I know we joke about that, but why not? We’re selling charging stations. We can do that. Let, we can get you doing that.
Patrick Oborn (46:38):
Charging stations and video surveillance.
Patrick Oborn (46:43):
There’s literally nothing we can’t sell if as long as our partners focus on creating their own value in their customer’s mind. If their customers are thinking that they are part of their technology team, that’s your product and, and companies like us will figure out what, what to put in store shelves. We’ll, we’ll go out and work with our upstream providers and make sure that you have everything on that shelf that you need Yeah. To service that customer.
Josh Lupresto (47:05):
Good stuff. Okay. I’m questioned out. Patrick, man, I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you doing this. Lots of good nuggets in there. Lots of just motivation, inspiration, and then some strategies. So excited to do this. We will have to have you back on for more of these. I feel like we could talk for about three hours on this topic, but thanks again, man. Appreciate you coming on.
Patrick Oborn (47:21):
And thanks for having a, a tremendous podcast. Tremendously successful, interesting. And uh, keep up to fantastic work, Josh. Love Next Level BizTech. You’re doing an awesome job.
Josh Lupresto (47:28):
Appreciate the Kudos, man. All right, everybody. That wraps us up for this week. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering, and this has been Next Level BizTech.
Listen in as we get deep in the weeds of Advanced Networking, SDWAN, SASE, and more with Daniel Beckworth of WhiteOak Solutions. Daniel has been deeply entrenched since the early days of SDWAN and we listen as he talks about the evolution of SDWAN, what to look for, how to avoid customer roadblocks, and most importantly, how to make your customer be the champion!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK5FgDOz4v8 Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we’re talking about some good, super nerdy, but important stuff,
Daniel Beckworth (00:39):
What’s up buddy? Love that intro in the music. I was impressed. Well done.
Josh Lupresto (00:43):
Daniel Beckworth (01:10):
Man, cut grass. That actually, when I think we all go through those moments and working in it where you feel a little burnt out sometimes, you’re frustrated with the state of your career. I think we can all admit we feel that, and I, I think it’s healthy for all of us to have that job that we dream about whenever days are going really bad, and mine actually is cutting grass. So yes, there’s something peaceful about that. Or just working at Home Depot. That’s my other dream, right?
Josh Lupresto (02:26):
So this is funny. You are, we, we started a trend. You there, there has now been two potential practicing theologians that have changed into tech. So whatever reason it, it, it’s working. We’ll take it. Lots of good background, lots of smart people coming into this space, so I’d love to hear it. I did not know that story. Awesome. Yeah.
Daniel Beckworth (02:46):
Yeah. Just blessings for everybody.
Josh Lupresto (02:50):
Daniel Beckworth (02:50):
And then and then, you know, I jumped into it working with traditional VARs and system integrators that’s very popular in my neck of the woods in, in Alabama. And so I, I cut my teeth in that space and and then I was able to transition over to the agency side of the house, and it’s been a tremendous learning experience.
Josh Lupresto (03:13):
So, so tell us about the business. Tell us about White Oak. Who are you, what do you do? What’s your focus? Maybe bring us up to speed.
Daniel Beckworth (03:20):
Yeah, certainly. So the focus of the business is a couple of key areas. So obviously you’ve got the traditional elements like telecom with much more of my focus being on the customer engagement and customer experience, so here, contact center. And then from there the equal focuses on next generation networks. So providing those superior levels of managed services and being able to meet the business needs because staffing is, is obviously an issue. And then cybersecurity. So I wanna be, ensure, I wanna ensure that I can help harden your environment and protect your users no matter where they sit in the wild or wherever they sit in the country or across the globe. So, equal focus on, on those things with a lot of my business falling and infrastructure as a service and all the things that fall into that space.
Daniel Beckworth (04:11):
But the business model’s pretty simplistic. So I’m vendor agnostic, and I, I truly mean that in, in the most simplistic of ways. I’m your third party advocate. I don’t care who the vendor is or the name on the box, that’s not important. I’m looking to listen to I mentioned earlier, creating that real human connection. Listen to your requirements and what you struggle with. Map that to the vendors who are actually gonna meet your needs and can provide a solution that they can actually execute upon. And then help you negotiate with those vendors, implement that solution, and then ensure that support is superior in an ongoing format. And that’s the entire goal of the business.
Josh Lupresto (04:53):
Beautiful. All right. Well, we’re gonna call on pieces of that now. We’re gonna, we’re gonna jump into the good acronym soup here. So there’s a couple components of this and, and I want to set the stage maybe to where this technology started and what it was marketed to us in the channel as what it was supposed to be. And then we’ll talk a little bit more about how it’s evolved as we get into kind of some of the questions. So if we look at SD WAN software defined networking, we look at SASE, secure Access Service Edge, SASE’s a newer term, right? But yeah. It, it feels like in the channel, this idea of SD WAN was introduced years ago, and it was marketed as, you know, one of those Sunday, Sunday, Sunday things. It was, do you have customers that have expensive MPLS networks? Then SD WAN is for you, let’s decouple it. Let’s put in diverse connections and, you know, let’s give you visibility into the network. So I, I, I’d like to get your perspective on how do you define this kind of broader SD WAN network first, and maybe, you know, some of those, some of those flavors, right? How do you look at it? And then we’ll talk about, you know, what, what really was your first deal in this? And then we’ll, we’ll evolve that.
Daniel Beckworth (06:00):
Yeah. I was an early adopter on on selling sdwan. So even back in 2016 and, and earlier those projects were on my desk and, and already had a focus in that area. And you had a lot of traditional players or or folks who evolved out of their traditional networking practice. And, and back then even some of those solutions were kind of SD WAN light, and that’s still how I categorized a lot of the vendors in this space today. But, you know, it was initially oversold or, or really emphasized the cost saving aspect mm-hmm.
Daniel Beckworth (07:14):
And now we’re gonna see the technology, which it is just, it’s taking over like wildfire and it it’s just the industry standard at this point.
Josh Lupresto (07:23):
So, so if I, if I bucketize this for a second, and I know the other, you know, the other part of the title of this episode is a little bit of, is there importance to having a global backbone? Right? And, and, you know, there’s the age old engineering answer. Well, it depends. Yeah. But if, if we first maybe put software defined networking in a couple buckets, we think we’ve got a, we’ve got a bunch of vendors with OEMs that fit into this segment that is over the top, whatever circuits you have, whatever connectivity you have, here’s one bucket, it’s over the top, right? So an agent can come in and wedge with that. Then we’ve got the idea of, well, we’ve got our aggregators and those types, and some of the telcos that sell the connectivity and the SD WAN, right? So it’s a you know, it’s optionality there to help you wedge in. And then really that maybe that third bucket in those who provide these complex layer two backbones to eliminate some of that middle mile global, you know, concerns, things like that. Do you, do you look at it that way from a bucketized perspective or, you know, there, there’s obviously a lot of different flavors in that, or do you think we’re missing anything in, in analysis, you know, in that, that direction?
Daniel Beckworth (08:25):
I think those buckets are very helpful. And, you know, you have to understand that end user’s consumption model as well to understand well, what are their requirements of how they financially want to consume this and how they wanna package it. That’s, that’s one aspect that you have to include in your overview or your discovery with that end user, because that does matter, and it will narrow the field of vendors that you can utilize. Some of the other elements that you wanna think about is like, what are the actual feature set and capabilities of those platforms? So you’ve gotta get down into the, the weeds a bit to understand, because not all SD WAN vendors are like, for, like, there are certainly what you typically hear referred to across the industry as SD WAN light. So it’s vendors who, and think of traditional firewall manufacturers or products like, and, and not to be mean by products like Meraki or Fortinet mm-hmm.
Daniel Beckworth (09:16):
They don’t prioritize some of the advanced next generation networking capabilities. They’re gonna have a heavy focus on the traditional security elements of a, of a premise-based firewall, and they’re really gonna prioritize those elements, and there’s a place in time for where that fits. And then you’ve got some other products like Cato or Silver Peak, or Velo Cloud, which is now VMware SD wan, who have different methodologies for how they send packets across the network and how they prioritize applications over packets. And that can matter as well. It depends on that customer consumption model and what’s the actual workloads that they’re trying to maximize.
Josh Lupresto (09:56):
Good. Love that. All right, let’s get into time capsule here for just a second. We’re not gonna go too far back, but I want to go to one of the first deals that you sold in this, in this space, right? You know, you talk about those landing on your desk, curious about what it looked like, what the customer ask was, you know, whatever you can tell us about that deal and kind of what did you learn from it?
Daniel Beckworth (10:16):
Yeah, so it was in the the law firm legal space. So think of a company that’s gonna have, you know, 10 plus locations. And those are very traditional consumption models. They like CapEx purchases over operational expenses. But much more progressive end user who was trying to understand the new ways that you could consume telecom and how they could minimize their expenses. This was an end user that heard all the hype in marketing about SD WAN that was being pumped into the the ecosystem by the vendors. And they immediately thought, well, I’m gonna slash my NPLS bill and I’m gonna save 75% of my costs outta the gate. So we, we initially approached the project with cost saving in mind, and what we initially recognized early on in, in that first project was, we’re really just moving one pile of money to another pile of money, and there’s not gonna be this insane cost savings that the vendors led you to believe that would come into place. But, you know, there were some cost savings. So the then user probably saved about 25% off of their overall telecom expenses, and it allowed them to enter into the future where their data center was gonna live in multiple locations, including hyperscalers and premise based. And it allowed them to move into a more of an edge computing style environment, rather than being a traditional hub and spoke. So there were a lot of benefits that we were able to discover through the process that you didn’t hear the vendors prioritizing at the time.
Josh Lupresto (11:55):
Good point. Let’s talk about customer relationships here for a second, and we’re gonna get to challenges next, but I want to talk about before we get to the the, the cons. I wanna talk about the pros of, as you get into these very non-com commoditize, these non-transactional conversations, right? You’re talking about some real core advanced networking, integral to the business type of conversations. How does that help you and, and, and how do you feel that that evolves your relationship with the customer? Because sometimes, you know, it feels like you, you get a lot of these people that say, oh, I didn’t know you could do that, or didn’t, you know, once they find out you can do that and you can help them with these things, how do you feel that these conversations help your relationships evolve?
Daniel Beckworth (12:38):
Yeah, certainly. So what I find to be the most meaningful aspect or the most meaningful way that I can engage an end user is to try and solve their problem. So take my sales hat off and, and I’m not thinking about pitching a product, and I don’t come to the table with a vendor in mind that I’ve just got to sell you. If I step into the engagement with the approach that I’m gonna have an open mind and open ears, and I’m gonna listen to you, that’s it. I’m gonna start with that approach, and then I’m gonna go solve your problems, and I’m gonna knock that out of the park. If you do those things for those end users, that leads to more engagements, more projects, more opportunity but you’ve got, essentially, you’re earning that through every step of the way, and you build a deep sense of trust.
Daniel Beckworth (13:26):
And I, I can’t overstate how important that level of trust is. It, it is everything in that engagement and that moves you from simply being a transactional vendor, which I don’t wanna be, that I’m not, that that’s not the space that I wanna play in. And I find very, very little value in working within users that want transactional style purchasing. I’m here to be an advocate for you on your behalf, and I’m in the, the accounts and the, the customers where I have those sorts of relationships. I’m treated as another member of their team, which is the best place that you can possibly hope to be.
Josh Lupresto (14:02):
So you know, you bring up a great point about this, this idea of this trust factor. Some call this a strategy of or what I’m about to say, some call it a strategy of the takeaway approach. I don’t look at it as necessarily a closing tactic from a takeaway approach perspective, as much as sometimes we’ll get a customer really excited about, okay, I need to do this, I need to, I wanna do this, I wanna do this, and they’re ready to buy UK and software define networking and security, and, and they go, okay, cool, let’s go. And you, and I know that if we try to do all those things at the same time, it’s gonna completely fail and it’s gonna blow up our relationships. And so sometimes the, the, the craziest thing that we can say to a customer is, I love that you love that. I love that you, you wanna do all these things, and those are great, but I don’t think we should do all them right now. And in the back of their minds, they’re thinking, wait a minute, minute, but don’t you make money on all this stuff? And you go, I do, but you’re not gonna like me if we push forward on all of that. Right? What, what’s your, do you see some aha moments when you have conversations like that of the trust is just permanently built after that?
Daniel Beckworth (15:04):
Yeah, so I’m, I’m working through an engagement right now. That’s a great example of that, where I’ve found what what has deepened my relationship with this end user is my willingness to say like, that’s not the best idea. And and I’ll give you examples of why that’s not a good idea and how this could be painful for you. And even the willingness to share, like, Hey, I’m gonna let you inside the kimono and show you how this vendor might be problematic or, and where that vendor’s problematic. And the willingness to share the bad news is almost as important as pitching the good news. You, you’ve gotta have bo both sides of the coin and show that you’re willing to get into the trenches with them. You’re essentially treating that business as if it’s your own, and you’re trying to understand the landmines that that end user might step on, and you’re waving the flag to alert them and let them know that there’s problems ahead. Let’s create a roadmap or a clear path of success, and then help them execute on that. So, to your point, sometimes it means prioritizing one project over the other and delaying some projects so that you can execute and be successful with the number one priorities.
Josh Lupresto (16:14):
Yeah, good point. So what, you know, when, when, when you’re having some of these conversations, what, I guess, what are some of the unexpected challenges here? And, and what I wanna weave into this outta your reply is really what do you say to the customer? How do you approach these? You know, I’m a big questions fan, right? I always like asking the right questions that get people on the right track, but what are, what are some of the challenges that you face in these conversations and, and, and how do you get through them?
Daniel Beckworth (16:42):
Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s a ton of challenges and there’s a ton of questions that you, you face in, in all these engagements. You know, a lot of it focuses around what I find in especially a place like Alabama is you have all these legacy or traditional businesses who have these very traditional consumption models. They traditionally think that I’ve gotta go create an FTE for this product or this role. And so you’re having to navigate around some of those aspects and, and especially the concept of kingdom building where mm-hmm.
Daniel Beckworth (17:40):
So you’re weaving that complete story into the narrative so you can help them successfully execute on all of their goals. And, and some of the questions that, you know, we’ll traditionally see, or some of the obstacles that we’ll see is, is that consumption model. So is it a CapEx or an opex? Who’s gonna manage this thing? And what’s the ongoing complexity and how do I overcome some of those challenges? What you also see in a traditional place like Alabama is those legacy networks. You know, early on SD WAN was really easy to roll out in greenfield environments. That was an easy one. But where we initially saw challenges were some of those very complex cobbled together legacy networks, and the workloads were very complex, and it, it was very problematic. So you had to approach that in a very sensitive nature so that you didn’t break everything.
Daniel Beckworth (18:33):
So, ongoing challenges and obstacles, you know, with SASE what we’re trying to understand now is where are people gonna work? Are they gonna be in the office? Are they gonna be hybrid? Are they gonna be working from home forever? We don’t really know. Those are still challenges. And then we’re trying to overcome the obstacle of understanding how do we secure those end users, and how do we simultaneously keep the expenses down? Because and you’re very aware of this, and what you probably see in the partner community is application sprawl across these environments, and that it multiplied during the pandemic. And over the past two years, we’re now organizations on average have between 200 and 300 applications that those end users are expected to utilize and maintain. And what we’re finding is overall productivity is going down because of the amount of applications that we’ve gotta use. So how do you narrow the focus on that, reduce those applications while simultaneously securing that workload and those applications that the end users are expected to utilize? That’s a challenge.
Josh Lupresto (19:37):
Yeah, no, you bring up a good point, right? And, and as we evolve this SD WAN and, and add-in things like SASE and casby, it seems like there’s this, there’s this idea of, again, funneling and aggregating either of the applications or aggregating aggregating all the tools that are using to manage it. I mean, how do you, how do you see, right, and what, what’s your perfect scenario as you run into the things that you just mentioned, applications, sprawl, users all over the need for edge compute, trying to fix latency, secure it all. What’s your, what, what’s your magic if you could, if you could get everybody to kind of do this and move to this or understand it, how do you feel that SASE is a, is a leverage in that strategy
Daniel Beckworth (20:18):
Adopt a hybrid cloud strategy period? The assumption that everything has to go live in a hyperscaler is crazy. Both from an expense management perspective as well as utilization. That’s, that’s not the best strategy for most end users. Also, the assumption that everything should stay on-prim forever is antiquated. You should assess every workload that you have and understand the best place for that to live in terms of the financial impact to your business, as well as how is it gonna improve the productivity of your end users. So factor in the edge computing and hybrid cloud model, and adopt that as a strength for your business because it will help you in totality. The other is we should also perform assessments of all the applications that our end users are utilizing, because I can assure you that there’s duplication inside of those applications that are utilizing, and we’ve got to consolidate those things so that we can improve the productivity of our end users. So we have too many tools that aren’t being utilized. We can save money and productivity if we’ll consolidate those things. And that will also ensure that we can secure those workloads in a much more easy and simplistic fashion. And, and, and it’s really just scale at that point. It’s, it’s easier and more cost effective to secure a smaller footprint than a sprawled out footprint that just makes common sense. Right. For
Josh Lupresto (21:45):
Sure. For sure. Maybe last question in this, before we get into to some of the final kind of examples and talk future, where do you see, you know, the idea, the, the, that we mentioned in the beginning of a global backbone you know, you, you threw out some, some options out there, right? There’s the catos, there’s the Aryakas, you know, these, these guys that have invested in really fine tuning connectivity from point A to difficult point B across the globe. Where do you find that those really get to show their value, those backbone solutions?
Daniel Beckworth (22:17):
Yeah, so I’m increasingly bumping into more and more end users that have a global focus and global footprint. So it’s, it’s extremely challenging for them. So think of the retail and the manufacturers and, and all these large enterprises. As, as we scale up into those businesses, those folks are gonna have end users and customers literally scattered across the globe in some instances is they, they even likely have offices scattered across the globe, and they’ve traditionally had to cobble those things together. So companies like Cato and Aryaka, and, and you can see this from some of the uc vendors in the space that are continuing to expand in markets like Asia-Pacific India, China, and, and they’re making that a massive focus. So that is only going to allow us to scale across the globe and service those end users. And I can’t overstate how important that is and to factor that into your equation. So companies like Aryaka and Cato specifically, and Sdwan and the SASEe space have done more than any any other vendor that I’m aware of.
Josh Lupresto (23:26):
Yeah. Good, good points. I think as you’d look at that, I mean, the, the, it’s, it’s interesting in that sometimes I think on the surface that it appears that there’s a lot of people that do this and they all look the same, but when you whittle it down, you know, and you say, okay, who do we have that that really has global backbone? Backbone? Certainly there’s a, there’s a list there, but when it is the macies, the catos, the ear, these, these are people that have really invested into saying, I can get you from point A to point B. Don’t worry about it. Let me take it off your plate. And I think to maybe kind of wrap this thought up, it does play into some of that trend that we’re seeing in other, all the other technologies of, I don’t have enough people to do this, or I lost my staff to do this. I need to be able to, I, I’ve sunk cost into some of my gear, so I can’t replace it all. And I don’t have, maybe I don’t have the, the, to your point, it’s not always a good idea to just say FTEs are the answer. Maybe I outsource that a little bit. So lots of, lots of good, I think headwinds to your point you know, adding to that from an ITO perspective, that opens up opportunity for this.
Daniel Beckworth (24:25):
Yeah. Especially trying to hire globally. How do you do that in today’s era?
Josh Lupresto (24:29):
Daniel Beckworth (24:34):
You can barely find people in your back backyard. So trying to do that globally is an insane challenge. And, and part of the restriction that you see in traditional or legacy businesses is that concept or idea of protecting those FTEs and protecting those kingdoms. We, we’ve gotta move out of that mindset. Yeah. Because if you look at the open recs inside of it, across the spectrum, like there’s plenty to go around, that’s a, a famine mindset. And managed services will be the answer that gets us over the shortage that we’re experiencing. And so people have to have the willingness to let go of some of that control, but it does require that you invest the time to find the partner that’s actually gonna service you well over time. And to your point what’s really going to narrow down that list for you is understanding your requirements. So when you start thinking about your global networks and global strategies, if you’re an end user, that requires that it does narrow the playing field. And there are great vendors who have made massive investments, both in terms of time, talent, and financially to build out those platforms, and it’s very meaningful.
Josh Lupresto (25:48):
So let’s move let, let’s move here to an example. So what we see sometimes is that, you know, we get a lot of asks of, Hey, I need you to get on and talk to this customer about this one thing. And a percentage of the time it ends up being just that a percentage of the time we end up uncovering more, and then another percentage of the time it ends up being something completely different. So I would love to hear you know, a semi recent example of one of these situations that you walked into, SD WAN SASE, you know, somewhere in that, that neck of the woods that, that you helped really make a transformation. What kind of tech did they have? What were the pain points? How did you uncover it? What did you learn, you know, all that good stuff, and what was the outcome?
Daniel Beckworth (26:28):
Yeah, so I was actually working through a customer engagement opportunity, and it, it morphed into a SASE and Sdwan conversation. It happened to be an international company with offices literally globally as well as across the continental us. So truly global company with tons of end users and some complexity obviously, and, and how they service those end users. And so, by focusing so intently on how they service their end users, it naturally led into conversations of how they could improve the overall performance of that network. And it’s a company that still had a very traditional MPLS model that they’d been relying on for decades. So this is an example of a company that did have some massive cost savings that they were able to recognize for moving from traditional MPLS to a DIA strategy and layering in an SD WAN solution.
Daniel Beckworth (27:31):
So we’re actually in the middle right now of trying to select the SASE vendor that’s gonna be the best fit for them for their ongoing needs. And that’s, I mean, it’s a complex engagement, right? You’re having to understand the requirements of numerous business units from marketing to sales reps to support staff and backend end users who literally sit across the globe. That’s hard. So if, if you, if you take that consultative approach of one, trying to understand that end user’s requirements, and then map those requirements to the best solutions and fits, and then even go through the POC phase, let them test that out and let those vendors prove the best option and solution, you’ll walk away with a, a slam dunk, and you’ll see how those opportunities morph into more and more engagements, and you’re able to continue to serve those end users in new and bigger and better ways.
Josh Lupresto (28:27):
Good example there’s a term that I keep thinking of the last couple podcasts is that you know how before you get in a big sweaty lawsuit they, they say, please go through arbitration first. Yeah, I feel like sometimes our role, when we talk about these multi departments, we talk about procurement and we talk about the business leader and we talk about the tech team and, and, and it used to just be that the decision is made with the tech team and everybody’s gotta use it whether you like it or not. Mm-Hmm.
Daniel Beckworth (29:14):
Yeah. So in, in some ways, we’re playing therapists for all the different verticals inside of the organization. And the way I personally view my my role in this equation is as the guide. So if you think of it in the classic narrative or story framework, which is my approach for how I’m I sell I’m not the hero in this equation. I’m, I’m just simply the guide. My end user gets to be the hero. And my job in the equation is to help assist navigate the roadblock so that they get to be the champion, and they get to slay the dragon at the end of the story, and we cap off the story with them being the greatest. So yeah, that’s where I find the meaning and the value for my role. And where I find the end users who simultaneously perform the best, they have a very similar approach internally.
Daniel Beckworth (30:01):
So they’re going to those individual business units, they’re polling the audience. And this is an area that i, I also take part in, and it’s, it’s where I try to lead the conversation. So for example, I, I’m engaged in a complex customer engagement experience right now, and what I’ve requested and, and where we found the best successes is interviewing the, the individual business units mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (31:04):
Love it. The tyrants of it,
Daniel Beckworth (31:47):
Yeah. So on the partners who haven’t stepped in this space yet I’ll say that curiosity is the edge that makes life good. And just because you haven’t done it before should not be the barrier that stops you from diving in and educating yourself. There are so many resources that are available, like plug for Telarus, like just hop on the Telarus University and you can learn about this technology. And it’s not that difficult. It’s not the crazy learning curve that you might think it is. And the, the real encouragement that I would share there is like, is that if you wanna serve your customers, and, and that should be your ultimate goal, it shouldn’t, your primary focus shouldn’t be just making money and stacking your bank account. If you’re guiding a North Star is serving that end user, this should be a priority for you.
Daniel Beckworth (32:37):
You should invest the time necessary to learn this technology and it will pay off in dividends because you are going to slam dunk all of those services that your customers need and it’s gonna revolutionize them. And then in terms of where the industry for SD WAN and sass you’re going the next 12 months, you know, there’s gonna be a ton of evolution. We’ve seen a ton of evolution from when the market first started. The first project or first SD WAN deal that I ever pitched was kind of a fascinating experience. We ran through the demo, ran through the benefits of the product, and when we concluded the end user, I’ll never forget this, they said, well, that’s cool, but it’s black magic and never work
Josh Lupresto (33:18):
Daniel Beckworth (33:20):
And so we’ve gone from that phase of and this is kind of the traditional phase of new knowledge where people, it’s immediately ejected and then people finally start slowly co coming around to it and then it’s just adopted. And it’s the industry standard. SD WAN in 12 months will continue to be the industry standard moving forward. It’s not a question of if or when it is right now. And it is happening. The things that I’m personally trying to look out for is how these vendors are going to evolve and how some of them are going to consolidate over time. We’re gonna continue to see the consolidation and mergers of these products in the space, especially with those sdwan vendors trying to combine themself with SASE vendors. So are they gonna build their own? Are they gonna acquire, that’s gonna be a crucial question that we need to pay attention to because it’s gonna dictate and determine where the market goes.
Josh Lupresto (34:14):
Good stuff, always the inevitable consolidation, the practices, the growth, the mergers, acquisitions. I love your great, great points, great things to look at. Daniel Beckworth, that wraps us up for today. Appreciate you coming on, man.
Daniel Beckworth (34:26):
Josh, my man, always a great time with you. I really appreciate you having me on. And thank you for all that you do for the Telarus family and all the partners out there.
Josh Lupresto (34:35):
Appreciate it. Thank you, sir. All right. Daniel Beckworth, White Oak Solutions that wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Listen in today as we talk to Ryan Livesay, SVP of Solution Engineering at Arayaka. Ryan takes us on the journey as he went from aspiring goals of the PGA tour to the world of WAN and Advanced networking and to where he is now running Engineering for Aryaka globally. You’ll learn exactly what SASE is as it relates to the convergence of Security and the WAN. Ryan breaks down some crucial examples and how to approach the customers while peeling back the onion of all Aryaka has to offer. There’s so much packed into this episode, don’t miss it!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. We’re getting into some juicy stuff today. We are talking about SD-WAN Advanced Networking. We’re talking about SASE, and if you don’t know what that is don’t worry, you’re gonna learn. We’re gonna talk about that in global backbones. So, today with us to kind of explain all of this, we’ve got the SVP of Solution Engineering from Aryaka, Ryan Livesay. Ryan, welcome.
Ryan Livesay (00:38):
Thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh Lupresto (00:40):
So I, I wanna hear some background here. Hopefully you got something I can use against you as a blackmail later on. But listen, I, when we get on this part of the show, some people have had direct journeys. They know exactly what they set out and how they wanna get there and how they wanna be. Other people come from fields that are completely unrelated. We love both sides of that story. So give us the journey. We now know your title at Aryaka, but how’d you get here?
Ryan Livesay (01:04):
Great question. So came outta school with a finance degree, finance and accounting. Small school. Went to work as a, as a beam counter. So literally, Archer, Daniels, Midland, 50,000 employees globally, worldwide. And, and I figured out pretty quick. Took me a couple years, but I figured out pretty quick. I don’t know that I want to do this. And I was also a golfer in college, played four years football and golf, and, and so ended up small school D three. But nonetheless, I continued to get better and better and was hanging out with a tour player, and I decided to chase the dream. So I quit that bean counter job three years outta school, moved to Florida, passed the, the wife at that time of, what was it? Probably 5, 5, 6 years we dated. And, and she, we, we were getting married in, in six months.
Ryan Livesay (01:47):
I said, are you good with me quitting this job and moving to Florida and we’ll just live down there and, and it’s an hour, never kind of chase the dream deal. So she was supportive of it. We moved to Florida, did that for about a year and a half, and, and spent a heck of a lot more money than I made. She was working in the, in the office equipment business down there, slinging copiers. And we both wanted to be pharmaceutical reps. Went to a career fair, and they said either you go office equipment sales, or you go telecom sales. And lo and behold, I end up in the, in the wonderful world of Telecom in 2002 at Allegiance Telecom, and spent seven, eight years there with xo and then moved on to EarthLink for another seven years. And, and here I am at Aryaka today, four years later, heading their engineering group. So
Josh Lupresto (02:27):
I love it from the PGA tour to here,
Ryan Livesay (02:45):
Yeah, EAs was founded in 2010, and back then the, the business, obviously that was kind of in the pre SD-WAN era. So the, the business was, was founded by some former Cisco engineers, and they created a, a business plan to provide WAN optimization as a service. So back in that, that era, you obviously you had Riverbed providing those compression and de-duplication and caching algorithms. And Aryaka engineered these algorithms primarily in this pop based core network that’s incredibly beneficial for us today. What they did early in that era was was software defined. What today is one of our big differentiators in a, in a layer two global private backbone that we operate that takes the uncertainties of the, the internet out publicly. So we evolved over those years to SD-WAN, to now SASE. And so it’s been a journey, but a 13 year, very successful journey now eclipsing over a hundred million in annual revenues.
Josh Lupresto (03:39):
Ooh, congrats to that. Those are good numbers. And, and it’s been interesting. So you guys always have really set yourself apart, right? Through the SD-WAN era, what it started out as, what it’s evolved to, and we’re gonna get into that. But it always has been interesting, and, and it’s, I think it’s been very easy to describe how you guys are different. Your, your story is easy to understand where, hey, you know, if you’ve got global, you’ve got middle mile concerns. We have that, we have that built. Don’t go try and build it on your own. Right. It’s not cheap. We did that and we perfected it. Alright, so, so walk us through a little bit about, now we’re gonna jump into the SASE side of things. Define for us, you know, for everybody listening out there, what SASE means and, and how has that changed your journey, or how has that added to kind of the journey in the architecture at Aryaka,
Ryan Livesay (04:27):
You know, with, with SASE and how you define it. I think you can look back to at SD-WAN at its inception and, and how did people define SD-WAN 5, 6, 7 years ago? You, you’d asked that question to anybody, whether they were in an engineering role or a sales role, and that you’ve got a different definition out of it. And I think today the, the same can probably be said for SASE. So, but what in general, you, you, you, when you, when you think SASE, you, you have to think convergence and network and security with Gartner and how they’ve defined it, that one common denominator with regards to the security that you typically see is, is cloud-based security. Has, these workloads have continued to migrate to the cloud. Whether you’re in an infrastructure as a service or a SaaS consumption model, doesn’t make sense to have these legacy networks where you’re hair pinning traffic through some head ends through a data center, you know, through a firewall. And generally the answer is no. So what users have typically done is, is, or, or InfoSec groups have done, is pushed the security closer to their users around the world. So that in our simplest definition is, is what we see around SASE, is the convergence of network and specifically cloud security.
Josh Lupresto (05:30):
Love it. Where do you feel, all right, l let’s talk about competitors for a second. What do you feel, you know, for the partners listening to this, we want them to understand who you are, what you do, but we also want them to understand maybe some of the, where are you different? Where do you feel, you know, now that you got such a mature platform out there? Maybe that’s the not not leading the witness, but where do you feel you stand out here from differentiator perspective?
Ryan Livesay (05:55):
Yeah, we’ve been described by the like system Gartner analysts and other, other analysts and, and firms that we’re one of the most mature and advanced network as a service tax in the business. So again, when you look at the lineage of this 13 year history of our business there is, there is some great success stories that we’ve had you follow. We’ve, we’ve got a lot of CIOs that have literally taken aryaka to multiple places in their career. So I think when you look at the partner reputation of our business, they’ve said Aryaka is historically very, very good, but also can be very expensive. So we’ve tried to redefine who we are within that channel community, be more relevant in, in places outside of just maybe China, for example, is we were perceived as this niche player to go fix some China issues at one point to where now we’re, we’re doing a much, much better job as becoming that global land standard for, for companies.
Ryan Livesay (06:46):
So our, our difference is really, again, you don’t have to look much past the network to understand fundamentally, that is the, the biggest difference with Aryaka, this foundation that that, that our, our initial founders built on was this layer two core network. Again, taking these un uncertainty of the public internet out, the transformations that we’ve had have been incredibly successful around truly replacing MPLS. So you, you think of MPLS and why did companies keep MPLS for so long, for so many years because it worked. And as you’ve transitioned into these public based networks and looking to do more cost effective transport methods like VPN or, or SD-WAN, well, things again, change when you, when you introduce separation between workloads and, and where those users sit across the world. So Aryaka can deliver this truly end-to-end class of service capable network using cost effective internet at the edge with this middle mile.
Ryan Livesay (07:38):
That is everything you’ve had in MPLS. So, you know, we’ve got roughly a thousand customers around the world and, and not one of those customers after about a year, right? There’s always that little transitional period where we support MPLS on the front end of that, that transformation journey. But they end up cutting the cord on MPLS entirely. So in many cases, it’s been dual MPLS cores that they’ve had with multiple providers providing that diversity within internet on top of that incredibly costly. So to, to truly replace MPLS utilize that cost effective internet proxy, that traffic very close into this deterministic layer two network, it’s, it’s a, it’s an unprecedented solution out there in the marketplace.
Josh Lupresto (08:15):
Love it too. Love to see an you know, you guys have never wavered from channel friendliness. You know, I think that that has to be called out right now. You’ve got Patterson, you’ve got a great team over there leading everything out. It’s always good to see that continued investment in the channel, right? So kudos to you for, you know, you guys just doubling down on that. That obviously that means a lot to partners and a lot to us.
Ryan Livesay (08:37):
Yeah. If it didn’t work right, we’d have to change. We’d have to, we’d have to revisit our growth strategies. But the bottom line is we’ve been embraced by some partners over the years, right? It’s not, we’re not doing business with 75, 80% of the partners out there, but the ones that have that have, have taken the time to understand thus and position us with those right fit customers, customers, it’s been a great partnership. So it allows us the ability to run a little bit leaner in terms of our, you know, what our, our, our sales engine looks like. So yeah, we’ve, we’ve built a great team. I think around Craig, he’s done an awesome job to reignite the channel programs around accelerate methodology. He’s got, in addition to specifically focusing around the throttle programs, everything has to do with foot on the gas, right? With Craig mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (09:25):
Love it. All right. So we’re gonna do a little bit of you know, a look back versus a look now as we, as we jump into the next couple questions. So let’s look back first, walk us back through your first journey into SD-WAN, whether that’s Aryaka, whether that’s companies before walk us through, you know, kind of what was that experience like? What, what did those, you know, what, what clicked in your mind and what did you see in this?
Ryan Livesay (09:50):
What you saw out there was, was change. Again, as we talked about, right? This, this journey to cloud, the cloud now era that we live and breathe in every day pls only networks didn’t make sense. And you, you look at the journey that these customers have been on, they’ve added internet. When they add internet, they’ve gotta add security, right? And, you know, so you’ve got this, this multi-path architecture out there of some PLS networks with some internet, and you’ve added security and what’s it, what’s next? Well, SD-WAN, right? So you, you add this box in typically out there to provide a little bit more intelligence and past selection and certain things around that nature. So that was the journey for, for much of us. So I, prior to my tenure here, I’ve been with aryaka four years now, but prior to that I was with interface security, and we were very very retail focused, right?
Ryan Livesay (10:35):
Had some large 10 plus thousand retail accounts out there. And and MPLS was, was really never you know, it was, it was never consumed by those guys because they were so price sensitive out there. But but SD-WAN was, Hey, we want, we want the intelligence of making this this right path decision. So but we had to do it very price sensitive, and we were positioning Fortinet out there, right? And, and you look at Fortinet and what they’ve done around incorporating some next generation SD-WAN features into their their, their Fort Guard U t M solutions, and it fits the box, right? Or it checks the box. It, it fits the mold for a lot of customers and what they’re looking for in their next generation SD-WAN architecture, Aryaka, you, you know, it, we’re, we’re not apples to apples to a lot of those box based players out there.
Ryan Livesay (11:20):
So and we say that it’s not a price, it’s not a price only play that we position ourselves on around this core network consumption model. We’ve adapted to be more price sensitive. We’ve incorporated a layer three architecture into our flexcore fabric that gives us a, a still better than internet performance out there with tier one ISPs in those pops to egress the traffic out, similar to some of what we see in other, other Aryaka competitors. But, so we’ve had to evolve as well. But that’s ultimately I think you, you, you have to look at, at, you know, what are the right architecture is for these customers in their journey, right? What are the price points that they’re looking to achieve? And then from there, you guys, as trusted advisors, make those, those decisions on on what’s the right, right. Technology platform for them.
Josh Lupresto (12:03):
So let’s talk about challenges in the conversation. The, you know, we like to help the partners understand, you know, one, the tech stack, what it is, what it does, what it solves for, right? And we’re getting through some of that, but what about the, when I talk to my customers, how do I get them to understand if they need this, right? So maybe walk us through challenges you’re facing in these conversations with customers. How do they look at this? Do they look at it as a product they know they need? Are they trying to get justify roi? You know, walk us through the hard parts of these conversations with customers.
Ryan Livesay (12:35):
We probably in, you know, growing up in the, in the telecom era that we have, we probably haven’t done a great job at at really digging and probing into the application stack. And I think that’s ultimately the, the best advice that I can give today and the whole discovery process is really understanding these application flows. And from there you’re designing the right network architecture to support those, the right security posture to protect those applications. And I think that’s ultimately, again, as, as, as partners, as, as these trusted advisors of these clients, they’re looking for us to, to really understand their network and to understand their network. You need to understand the application flows. And when you understand those application flows and the pains associated with those application flows, now you’re building the right solution to fix those problems. So,
Josh Lupresto (13:22):
So you do you find it’s just then a okay, tell me about the application. How is it performing? Walk us through, you know, maybe you’re getting to that, what some of that uncover uncovered peel back stuff goes.
Ryan Livesay (13:33):
It is, right? And you know, again, this, so many of these applications, you know, when you look at, at, at SAPs, at Oracle instances, have they migrated these into the cloud? If they haven’t, how many tenants do they have? Where do these sit in terms of data centers? How close are these two the workers around potentially the world, you know? And the more you introduce, and as I mentioned, the separation between where that workload resides and where the user sits, typically, the more challenge there’s going to be, you’re introducing hot potato. If you’re building in, if you’re, you’re routing that type of application flow on an internet based architecture. You see hot potato out there, right? Where one carrier passes that traffic, do it, do a trace route and watch how these, these packets are handed off from one carrier to another. And when you’re doing so, you’re increasing latency, which those spikes in latency cause jitter, those jitter, the, the jitter brakes application flows.
Ryan Livesay (14:21):
So we really try to understand the application flows, right? Where that, where that tendency exists for the application, where the users reside. And from there we’re engineering the solution around how we’re, we’re fixing it. I’ll give you a a good example. We’ve got a customer, a prospect that we’re nearing the finish line on today. They’ve got a legacy Cisco call manager architecture, and they, they literally have to build a static route in their CloudGenix platform that that prohibits that I p t fell over into the public side, right? Because of, of where that call manager sits and, and that user. So they have to hard code that route to stay MPLS, regardless of what the intelligence and that sdwan platform says, Hey, we want, we think this is a better path. It, it doesn’t function right over the public side. So those are instances where we’ve engineered a combination of these SD-WAN treatments on our edge in addition to this layer two core to be able to honor those diffs serve tags no different than you have in an MPLS network for 15, 20 years. So understanding those problems around the applications and the challenges that they’ve got, that’s when ultimately I think you, you’ve, you’ve figured out, you’ve cracked the code on really what the best solution is to engineer for them.
Josh Lupresto (15:30):
And, and are you seeing, you know, with, with what you guys have evolved to from a convergence of, you know, when meets security and, and kind of ties all that together. Is it any vertical? Is there any certain types? You know, if I’m, if I’m a partner listening to this and I haven’t tackled a lot of business with you guys, and I want to jump in, where would you steer me? Or, or if I’ve got a hundred customers in my base and they’re all different verticals and sizes, what would you steer me to?
Ryan Livesay (15:55):
For us, you know, we look at our customer base right around the segments, and, and we’ve done a good job to really understand that and, and, and then focus our, our prospecting that, that whole b d r effort for us to control the platform, not just rely on a partner to say, bring us this opportunity, right? But hey, what can we do to go and drive activity within this specific right fit vertical for us? And then we end up introducing, we’ve got BDR specific to the channel. We’re handing some of these opportunities off to our partners. So, but we’ve done a really good job at stratify that and manufacturing, semiconductor biotech, pharma transportation, logistics, these types of industries for us are absolutely really, really good fits. And the reason why they’re really, really good fits is, again, typically they’re going to be globally distributed across the world.
Ryan Livesay (16:43):
So for us, you know, you look at the internet in the us right? Like I said, we’ve introduced this very cost effective solution in the US and and R L three flexcore solution is really real. I mean, it’s almost box based type of pricing for with, with a still middle mile that’s far better than the internet, but the internet does it break here in the us we we’re fortunate to have pretty darn good infrastructure here to where VPN can be feasible over the internet, go introduce global routes, and, and things are, are very, very different in, in how that internet’s gonna perform compared to a hundred milliseconds coast to coast, or less than a hundred milliseconds coast to coast here in the us. So those globally distributed enterprises for us, they’re, they’re slam dunk, right? Fits when you have a transformational cio. If you have somebody that’s just, that’s not in their driving chain, that’s not innovating, it’s, it’s not, you know, that’s just gonna do the status quo stuff. They’re never gonna embrace aryaka because we’re so different in that respect. So, but that’s really, those are the, you know, there’s five, six verticals that we just, we have tremendous amount of success in.
Josh Lupresto (17:46):
Love it. Okay. one, one thing before we get to, I, I wanna go through a more recent example, right? Somebody that you saw a massive transformation into, we’ll get to that. But is, is there anything you want to call out right, from a specific integrations or anywhere that you excel at maybe open up a little bit of vi visibility to kind of what’s in the stack, what you can integrate with? Maybe just walk people through just a couple pieces of, oh, well, we’d love to integrate with this technology, or we have some of this core architecture in the background. Anything you wanna call out just to make people aware in case they’re not aware of what’s behind the scenes a little bit?
Ryan Livesay (18:20):
Sure. Absolutely. No, great question. Again, I hammered, you know, kind of the whole network piece of it. So for us that’s, you know, that’s where it starts. That foundation is the foundation and this physical pop based architecture to, to be able to participate in Equinix, fabric provision, express routes and direct connects and all that. Make it really clean and easy at the network layer. That’s one thing. Security, we haven’t really talked about security. So this whole SASE journey, what, what’s unique and different about Aryaka and, and, and twofold. One, we have this best breed approach plus this unified SASE solution. So we’re fully committed to developing all of our own IP around, you know, and you’ve seen the SEC cloud acquisition and that that that German team that we’ve acquired to help us develop this security stack and, and unify it into what is that core DNA of Aryaka making these security decisions literally in the same stack, so doesn’t require that hair pin, but we’ve also productized and supported this best of breed approach.
Ryan Livesay (19:14):
So partnerships with the likes of Checkpoint to be able to fully commercialize their solutions, both for Harmony Connect, which is the cloud side plus quantum edge, which is virtualizing their, their next gen firewall on our INAP stack. If that type of security posture makes sense for companies, we’re capable of doing that. If you’re a Palo shop today, we’ve got full IOP certification to be able to support a virtual machine Palo on the aaps and, and actually even manage that. We’ve got expertise inhouse to be able to provide us with co-management access to your Panorama instance. Let us take some of that responsibility off your plate. So these are the, you don’t see that often, right? Where there’s a combination of best of breed and will work completely with those cloud architectures like Zscaler, Symantec will be able to tunnel securely off our boxes into those cloud platforms plus Palo and Checkpoint that I mentioned, in addition to then this, this committed journey that we’re on to develop these best in class security solutions with our own ip. So that ultimately, I think is a big differentiator versus forcing you to say, here, you have to consume, if you want us, you have to consume our security stack.
Josh Lupresto (20:19):
Love it. And that is the value of SASE and a global backbone. Awesome stuff. Okay. All right, wrap us as we get to the last couple parts here. Walk us through a, a kind of transformational example. You know, you brought up a really good point, right? A transformational CIO absolutely makes the difference in helping people see how to take a company into the future. But walk us through an example, something that you got pulled into. Did it look like once you got in there, what it was originally described to you as what kind of tech stack did they have or what kind of problems did they have? And then what did you put in place and how did it fix it all?
Ryan Livesay (20:54):
When you, when I say transformational, right? And, and the contrary can be probably an operational CO, but that transformational c i o when we get in there and start doing discovery again, you guys are, are often the sound boards for, for these opportunities and whether we’re right fit. So some of this is very well qualified by the time it ever hits our plate in, in a, in a qualified lead. So but that, that transformational c i o what he what what questions we’re gonna ask is, is where you’re at in, in your, in your journey to cloud and, and understand their what’s the end state really ultimately look like for them? And when we hear we’re done, we’re done with MPLS, right? We’re gonna cut the cord on that. And we get through our story. We, we have literally 30 minutes to just do a high level overview of Aryaka and talk through those differentiators.
Ryan Livesay (21:41):
You see these light bulbs go on. And again, my four years that I’ve been here, I can literally it’s probably gonna take my hands and toes to count the times with VPs? Even the, the CIO levels that have said, had no idea anything like this existed, John. And and it’s not that we know we’re gonna win that business at that point, right? But we’ve, we’ve got a, we’ve got a, a, a deal we’ve gotta fish on. And, and it takes, you know, months and months of journey to secure that business. But, but ultimately that that commitment to cutting the cord on MPLS is, is, is first and foremost. And then also understanding again, what’s that security posture look like? So it’s not often that day one, we’re in there with InfoSec, but InfoSec nonetheless, it’s always gonna have a seat at the table nowadays.
Ryan Livesay (22:24):
So, you know, are they, are they one, one organization? Ultimately you have a CIO and a CISO in many cases, but they have truly unified and, and are now sitting and collaborating more than probably ever before because of this convergence that we see out there. And again, on this journey to cloud, where, where do we want these security decisions to be made at? So for us, the, the real world example that I can give you is, is, you know, there was a, an awesome success story of a cio. Actually he was VP of emra, but he was with a global manufacturing company, about 110 sites. And they were, not only were they still in acquisition mode, but they were also in divestiture mode. So you have this, this company that’s growing, but also selling at same time, right? These strategic assets that may or may not make sense with, with the direction that they’re on, but he was committed a hundred percent to transforming the MPLS network.
Ryan Livesay (23:12):
And they were, they already had some internet circuits out there. They mentioned, you know, I mentioned the, the the firewalls and the, the SD-WAN appliances that weren’t working, that they knew were not the right platform for the in-state, that they wanted to go to security all over the place, literally all over the place. From Sonic Walls to some WatchGuards here, to some Forex here, to some ASAs here to, it was an absolute mess. And the solution that we engineered in there was, again, this middle mile core network solution. It, it’s very easy to consume with site licenses and core subscription. We give these guys the flexibility to move subscription around across the world where they, where they want to. We obviously tied into that infrastructure as a service model, building express route, and direct connect into their AWS and Azure instances. And and then security.
Ryan Livesay (23:56):
We standardized. We, we ended up establishing a consistent security policy virtualizing a checkpoint architecture for them as NextGen security today. We built VPN licenses for every one of those. Now, incredibly relevant hybrid workers, right? As we know that user application experience, whether you’re sitting in an office or or, or often your home environment somewhere, they’re looking for it to basically build that consistent experience. So we had to build a VPN architecture. We do that over our private layer two core network, and then you also wanna make those securities decisions for browsers on corporate issued devices. So building in that secure web gateway is part of the architecture that was the end state. And I think it’s important to note that that is often what you see today. It’s this combination. It’s not a hundred percent cloud security, and it doesn’t have to be bold. Yeah, it can be a combination of cloud security, plus you still want to take a, a complete north, south, east, west preventative call, you know, measure on, on how you’re protecting those branch architectures. It doesn’t have to be bolt. And I think that’s an important note to make.
Josh Lupresto (24:55):
Good, great stuff. It’s really good visibility into it. All right, so, so as we wrap this up here let’s, let’s say now I’m a partner. I’m stoked. I want to go sell this. I’ve got customers in my base, they’re global, they’re backbone. I I think you led into some of this already in a, in a really good way about peeling back the onion on application performance. Any other final questions that you would give partners who maybe haven’t ventured into this? Maybe they’re in cx, maybe they’re in cloud infrastructure sales, maybe they’re somewhere different. They’re not comfortable selling this yet. Obviously they know they’ve got our engineering team and your engineering team to kind of help them. But what’s the question said or what would you tell the partners of how to approach their customers with this talk track?
Ryan Livesay (25:38):
Great question. And, and that example that I just gave the VP of enf, r a is now promoted to senior vice president that was 110 sites. He’s now senior vice president and of a company that’s 500 sites. And his solution, I mentioned earlier, we’ve had these CIOs that have taken this architecture with him everywhere. The senior VP of infra is literally on a rinse and repeat schedule with that same transformation execution that he just made on that, on that company. And, and he’s pulling us along with him. So you know, for these partners that haven’t sold this thing again, if you’d like to, to ever speak with a partner that has, and you know, I’m gonna put y’all, put you on the phone with somebody that literally overnight has and will take this SD-WAN, this Aryaka SD-WAN solution anywhere with them in their career.
Ryan Livesay (26:30):
We have had that reputation of white glove best in class customer experience and partner experience for so many years. And, and that hasn’t wavered in terms of our commitment to to, to execution. So we’re, we’re fortunate to have a, an executive leadership team that is willing to make whatever investments that, that are necessary in, in our customer experience. So at the end of the day, you have to, you have to trust the ability for our solutions to perform for your customers and, and support their transformation agendas at the end of the day to reach that instate. That’s, that’s critical for everybody to get to. And, and that’s really where we shine. Don’t have to look much past Gartner peer insights. You know, we don’t fit perfectly well into WAN edge, right? Because again, there’s so much of this intelligence that sits in the core for us, Gartner is basically said, yeah, you guys don’t fit in this little SD-WAN box, right?
Ryan Livesay (27:24):
Because there’s so much more here that we can’t take into consideration. Cause we’re evaluating only this edge based architecture. But look at us in, in peer insights, peer insights is, is literally that’s what the customers are saying, not what the analysts are saying. It’s what the customers are saying. And for the last three years running across every region, Europe, Asia, and the us, we’ve won these voices of the customer awards and we’re not paying any customer to write reviews on Aryaka. So there’s a true white glove fanatical approach to execution across that lifecycle journey from literally day one project management provisioning to what does this look like at the end state for these customers and how they’re consuming us. So, love it, love it. Give us a chance.
Josh Lupresto (28:04):
Find global, find multinational, ask about the application, and you will probably find an Aryaka opportunity. Love it. Okay, Ryan, final thoughts. Get your crystal ball out. Let’s look out 12 months, 18 months. Do we choose option? No, let’s call it door A. Do we choose door A, which is listen to everything that you just told us in the last 30 minutes and go do that. Or do we choose door B, which is, do all of that and consider what you think might be changing in the next 12 to 18 months. Any, any thoughts on Ryan’s crystal ball? Does anything change tech stack, customer stack? What do you think? Your humble opinion
Ryan Livesay (28:46):
Again, it’s with what we saw in the pandemic digital transformation accelerated probably where we thought it might be five years from now, right? But so that 18 month window, we’re gonna continue to see that accelerated digital transformation. And by digital transformation, again, really just we look at what’s happening with this shift in the application and the applications from some data center to the cloud. I think what’s an interesting point to make though is, is we might even see a call back, right? And by that I mean consumption on this infrastructure side. While it was really sexy on paper for a lot of companies, because of that transitional shift from capital expenditures and how you manage and operate data centers to this operational work, we’ve seen customers that have have called back saying, we’re we’re gonna have to go dump $2 million back into these data centers because it’s gotten completely outta control with how much consumption we’ve got on this cloud platform.
Ryan Livesay (29:46):
So CFOs are looking to to, to CIOs to change and, and you know, and, and IT execs are basically saying, well, well, we’re gonna have to go back to where we were. Well then that’s just a model that’s gonna be more, more extendable to us in, in how we’re consuming. So as much as we know that journey to cloud probably won’t slow, particularly around the SaaS adoption things, I think the infrastructure will begin to, to settle a bit. So with that is things going to are, will, will, will we continue to see the security more in the cloud? It is my belief and opinion, yes. I think that it’s going to make sense around CASB solutions, right? Around secure web gateway architectures for these workers, whether they’re in an office or in their home. So I don’t think, I think the cloud security piece and SASE adoption will continue to accelerate, but I think on the infrastructure side, we’re gonna continue to see a shift probably a little bit back, particularly where the spins have just accelerated to a point that it’s a problem. So that’s my my opinion of where we’re
Josh Lupresto (30:47):
Love it. All right. And we’re gonna leave it at that. Ryan, you dropped a lot of knowledge on this. I’m gonna have to go back and listen to this a couple times. This is good stuff. Appreciate you coming on, man.
Ryan Livesay (30:56):
You bet. Thanks for having me, Josh. Appreciate it. Thank you guys for the partnerships.
Josh Lupresto (31:00):
Hey, you bet. All right, everybody wraps us up for today. We got Ryan Livesay, SVP of Solution Engineering, aka I’m your host, Josh, Lupresto SVP of engineering at Telarus. This is Next Level BizTech. Till next time.
You won’t want to miss this episode on SDWAN and SASE! Listen in as we have Josh Haselhorst, an industry-leading SDWAN expert, and we talk about the importance of SDWAN and Global Backbones. Josh clues us in on how he made his way into the technology scene but also gives us a glimpse into the future with a new phrase, “Software Defined Everything”, and AiOPS. There are so many great things, you’ll have to listen twice!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We’re talking about SDWAN advanced networking, SASE global backbones, a whole bunch of stuff. You may know what that is, you may not. Either way, we have got the, the world renowned industry Best subject matter expert here. Josh Haselhorst Telarus sales engineer on Mr. Haselhorst. Welcome.
Josh Haselhorst (00:39):
Well, thank you, sir. I’m glad to be back. These are fun to do.
Josh Lupresto (00:43):
So before we get into this today, before we kick it off, I wanna remind everybody that we’ve got a lovely sponsor that is supporting us on this. Today’s episode is sponsored by Aryaka, and if you don’t know, they’re a leading global provider of SDWAN and SASE Solutions. So if you’re a business out there struggling, slow, unreliable networks, they’re holding your company back you wanna consider Aryaka global managed network solution that they have that gives you agility, gives you speed, all the things that you need to compete in today’s landscape. So, enough on that we’ll come back to our sponsor later. I wanna kick it off with you. You know, it’s been a little while since you’ve been on the show, Mr. Haselhorst. So I wanna talk about, remind everybody how you got started in the career. Anything different that we, that, you know, any secrets out there about how you kind of got to where you’re at.
Josh Haselhorst (01:30):
You know, that’s funny. I actually got a question from from one of our suppliers the other day, and he, he asked us kind of the same thing. Is he, what are the, what were the steps that it took to get, like your certification level and where you’re at today and whatever. And it’s, it, it’s kind of a, I guess a, a long drawn out, funny story. I’ll try to con collapse it. But, you know, people go, you know, get outta high school and you go to college and you go get your degree and then, you know, you maybe go get your bachelor’s and then you go get your, your master’s in, in a cybersecurity or computer sciences, or maybe go even crazy or get your pd PhD in computer sciences, right? Yeah. I didn’t do any of that
Josh Haselhorst (02:04):
I, I didn’t know anything about tech, right? I, I, grad, I’m old, right? I’m, I’m 49 years older. I turned 50 in August, but I, I graduated high school, joined the Navy. Cuz I had literally no idea what else to do with my life. I knew I wanted to move out of the house. I knew I wanted to see the world, but I, you know, I joined the Navy and become a, a, a jet mechanic after years and years, right? When I got out of the Navy my parents lived in Colorado. I was at point MAU in, in, in California, right? Rough duty station, get up in the morning, surf every morning, right?
Josh Haselhorst (02:44):
Yes. Yeah. So without four roommates, you can’t live there, right? So went to Colorado and my, my stepdad taught me how to run heavy equipment at Denver International Airport. So I’m gonna be a heavy equipment operator. Well, it got cold in Denver,
Josh Haselhorst (03:41):
Then ended up, you know, after a few years, becoming a boat mechanic. And then, then I started racing the boats and you know, anyway, cut two years and years later, met my wife my wife and I, you know, living together. We got, we got married and then after we lived together, right? So I, cuz I do everything correct,
Josh Haselhorst (04:27):
You know, trust me with your life. I, I, no, I’m horrible at that. So that didn’t really work out. I B m was hiring at the time and I thought, well, I don’t even know what that is, right? This is, this sounds like computers and stuff. But they hired me for some unknown reason. I guess they needed a body that could, you know, breathe and walk without falling down. So I, I took the job
Josh Haselhorst (05:16):
So then you’re thinking about company use cases and product placement and what fits where and why. And, you know, it just kinda started evolving from there. And luckily I worked for a bunch of, you know, manufacturers, big VARs and integrators that, you know, back then, they’d send you to school. I mean, you don’t have to go to Harvard and all this other stuff. They would send you to these, you know, technical deep dive schools for weeks and months and get these advanced certifications. And it just started growing from there years and years later. I’ve been doing this for 23 years now, right? Years and years later. I don’t sell anything anymore. I simply teach we coach and advise, we talk, talk to, you know, partners, selling agents, resellers, VARs, MSPs, end users, and, and really just kind of listen to the business and the use case of what are you trying to solve.
Josh Haselhorst (06:09):
And then, okay, what technology fits that use case. But more importantly, what supplier supports and manages that technology, the way the use case needs it supported from a business and risk management operational standpoint, not just, you know, blinky lights and whose logo is on a metal a metal case in Iraq. That becomes irrelevant now. So the job today from a pre-sales engineer, SDWAN cybersecurity engineer guy here at Telarus, to, to listen to understand that use case and not only help the IT team, but help business and operations around risk management as well. And so we’re marrying business with it, which prior to, I don’t know, a few years ago, business leaders thought the job of everything from it, was it. And what they’re realizing now is SDWAN Cybersecurity, all these other things that’s 10% it, well, it’s 90% risk management business operations.
Josh Lupresto (07:08):
I, yeah, I, I I love the story. I love the color there. And, and you kind of lead right into the next thing I was gonna ask is, you know, when you originally came on board, the idea was be know a little about a lot because we don’t know what’s gonna get thrown into you, right? As, as you’re working with partners and, and, and customers alike, how or why do you feel that that role has had to evolve to what it’s had to evolve to over the last couple years? What’s driven that?
Josh Haselhorst (07:34):
Yeah. So even us, you know, when we’ve, when I first started here at Telarus, right? I think we had three of us in pre-sales engineering, right? And we had to know everything a little about everything, right? Software, hardware, switch route, it, it, it, you had to know a little bit about everything. But the way it’s kind of rolled in, in the way we’ve expanded internally is now we are just, we are a team of engineers. I believe we’re at 14, 15 coming up, right? It, we are still that you gotta know a lot about a, you know, a little about a lot. You actually gotta know a lot about a lot. But more importantly, you’ve gotta be highly certified in specific disciplines that you are going to concentrate on. Because we’re not the smartest guy in the room. I can’t know everything about everything, but I can know absolutely everything about my little piece of the world, right?
Josh Haselhorst (08:21):
And then if I need a, oh man, this sounds like voice or this sounds like contact center, then I grab one of those engineers that live and breathe in that world, right? So a lot of times, like our partners, our agents, or even the end users in these calls, we’ll have multiple of us on, because there’s usually multiple projects and a lot of moving parts. And me personally, I want the best of the best in that discipline to talk about that discipline. I don’t want a generalist, I want a monster, right? And that’s kind of what we’ve built and that’s how the organization has, has, has morphed. Really
Josh Lupresto (08:49):
Love it. All right. So, so let’s talk here. Wan you know, this years ago, you know, we, we, we talked before about kind of what the general evolution of how we got to kind of why SDWAN, right? And it was, you know, it was failover and it was resiliency. Now we’re talking about SASE and adding that. Walk me through here, from your perspective, how’d you first learn about this whole broader SDWAN and SASE landscaping? Maybe just, you know, for anybody that’s not familiar, let’s define that.
Josh Haselhorst (09:19):
Interesting. So I, I think my first evolution into this SDN, SDWAN world, I mean, in my day, way back server storage world, right? We were doing things like data, compression engines, reputation filtering. We were doing things like load balancers, which oh, by the way, oh yeah, that’s SDWAN too. But that was kind of the origination, right? But really in the SDWAN that, that our world recognizes up to a certain point in time was things like voice failover and, and, and video, you know, perfection and application performance and stuff like that. And, and my first dip into what they call mainstream SDWAN, which is marketers went crazy, right? So SDWAN, just so everybody knows on the call, is not an actual thing. It’s a theoretical idea. Theoretical design based around risk management and risk tolerance of business critical applications, right?
Josh Haselhorst (10:08):
It can be anything. So it can be failover failback, because I need, I got an application that, you know, if internet one fails, I need to be on internet too, and I can’t manually push a button. Well, that qualifies, right? So any of those fail over failback scenarios qualify as SDWAN. But really where I got into it was I was with a voice vendor, a voice manufacturer, and I was a sales rep that ended up doing my own installs, so became my own engineer. And we would get to this point of this whole cloud voice world of, Hey, internet is not that great, and voice isn’t wonderful over this whole interwebs thing. So we’re gonna stick with our PRIs and our SIP trunks and our PBXs, right? And usually when you got to the point of you deployed this cloud voice solution, world’s gonna be wonderful.
Josh Haselhorst (10:59):
It’s easier to deploy, easier to manage, but the, the traffic patterns and the quality’s not amazing, right? So now end users are gonna call ’em to support and support might go in there and try to fine tune some things and try to fix some configurations. And then ultimately it comes back to that sales rep or the install tech. You know, this thing is horrible. I won off my contract, yada, yada, yada. And so SDWAN to us was a fix. Oh my God, if you deploy this magic box now, the thing I sold you months ago will actually work correctly,
Josh Haselhorst (11:45):
So it was a, it was a bandaid to keep from people trying to get outta their contracts and suing, right? Yeah. And, and then it was a thought of, guys, why don’t we do this proactively? Why doesn’t it just come with the solution so we don’t have customer service issues? So that was really my first dig into the, okay, this could be a magic little box. Now it is a networking apparatus, right? Which means I need networking back, back then. I need networking skillset to be able to do these things in the, in the installation or whatever. But the automation of it was there too to where you didn’t have to be a command line genius to do these installs. Yeah. My only problem with it was the upfront piece of, you know, if we brought in multiple circuits from disparate vendors and we link aggregated and tied those circuits together, and then, you know, we, by deploying things like SDWAN, and then we rolled out these session-based or flow-based applications, the customer service department is not gonna give flooded with trouble tickets and calls because it actually works. So why didn’t we do it in the first place and build a resilient, redundant, secure network first? I don’t know. I don’t know. Money ideas, thought process. So now it’s flipped, is we’re gonna build that redundant, reliable, secure network first, and then all these other things that we want to do, just become an application. It just made it simple. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (13:14):
Great, great point. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna come back a little bit to the modernization and, and, and how that’s helped customers. But real quick, I wanna get back that quick, like what I promised at the beginning word from our sponsor here. So, you know, thinking about Aryaka for a second, being a leader in SDWAN and SASE solutions, look, they’re committed to helping businesses achieve what peak network performance scalability. And they’ve got a cloud native platform that gives you, like you mentioned, application performance, faster time to value and reduce complexity. And upcoming, actually, you’ll, what you’ll actually hear from is Aryakas Unified SASE offering the innovative network solutions on the next coming podcast with Ryan Livesay, who is the SVP of Solutions Engineering at Aryaka. I don’t wanna give a spoiler alert, but in that episode, we’re gonna talk about pressing challenges that are facing businesses, trends, strategies, how to optimize the network, and how Aryaka is kind of leading that way.
Josh Lupresto (14:03):
Last but not least if you do wanna stay up to date with the latest industry insights and technology trends, be sure that you go subscribe to Ariana’s Dreamers and Doers podcast. And in that they talk about industry experts they bring on best practices, lessons in leadership, and more. So don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from some of the best. They’ve got some good stuff on there. All right, back to the show. Let’s talk evolution here for just a second. If we define now where we talked in the beginning of what SDWAN was and some of your first experiences in it, and then we saw all this rage and, and rave about SASE, and this is gonna be the next big thing, I think we were all caught up in the midst of tools, tools, tools, tools. So when people originally started asking about, geez, what’s SASE? I found myself just kind of using the word convergence to, to some of these tools, right? So I’m curious from your perspective, if we think about a customer’s environment, what the customer is going through, how do you feel that SDWAN with adding in SASE to this, helps them evolve and helps them modernize?
Josh Haselhorst (15:12):
Yeah, no, great, great question. So the origination, o o of SDWAN was what we talked about, right? Your link aggregation, your application performance, right? Better uptime than just q o s policies, right? Automatic reroute around anomalies type situation, right? And then the advanced firewalls, the next gen gen firewall guys came in and said, wait a minute. I’m doing the entire perimeter security world and I’m doing routing. Why can’t I do realtime advanced routing as well as doing that perimeter security, right? So now I’m an advanced firewall that does SDWAN. Oh geez, I just became a secure access service edge, didn’t I? Now these terms, we hear SDWAN, SASE CASB, ZTNA, SSE remember what they are? They’re, they’re terms and their theoretical ideas, they’re not a thing anymore. These are, these are things that marketing companies flood your customers with.
Josh Haselhorst (16:06):
And we’ll talk about these things here in a, like, things like ZTNA, oh my God, I gotta do Z zero trust. Well, there’s 13 different ways to do this, right? So you mentioned the word convergence. So the origination, the intent of SASE was let’s collapse these environments. Why do I have a firewall here? And a router over there? I’ve got my email encryption tool over there. I’ve got my EDR, XDR tool over there. I went and bought this deep packet inspection thing over there. Then I went and got, you know, direct connects to connect me to my cloud services over there. And pretty soon I’ve got 27 tool sets now for an operator that’s got a hundred guys in it, and each one of us dedicated to their specific discipline, right? That’s my firewall guy. That’s my endpoint guy.
Josh Haselhorst (16:47):
On and on. This, this works, this is fine. But what had happened is, especially through pandemic, is we started collapsing not only the environments, but staff Yeah. Is now, you know, I had 13 Josh Luprestos, and now I have two, and my 13 Josh Luprestos used to support, you know, 250, 300 guys. I got two now doing it. But yet you still have those 19 tool sets. No, let me ask you this. If I gave you 19 different portals, 19 different management interfaces, could you possibly do your job correctly daily for my organization? You might have all the best breed products in the world, the greatest architecture in the world, probably every certification. And I know you’re smart as a whip, every certification on the planet, you’re s the smartest dude in the room. It’s not about smarts and tech, it’s about scalability. I can’t possibly manage all of these interfaces.
Josh Haselhorst (17:40):
It’s no longer possible. And then I can’t troubleshoot anything. And then, by the way, boss, you’re asking me to do desktop support and web design, and you’re asking me how do I, you know, know, use technology to create revenue? Man, I don’t know. I’m, I’m in the attic pulling cable. I, I fixed Sally’s mouse pad because, you know, she spilled coffee on it. Where’s the time? So that collapsing these environments into give me one interface, give me a single pane of glass where I can see all my, you know, perimeter security, my policies, my URL and content filtering, my connected ips, my top users, my top applications. Let me troubleshoot, let me, they see things like latency and jitter and mos, but don’t make me log into 14 different things in order to do this. And that was the evolution. And then the next evolution was, okay, back to the operations standpoint, you just gave me lean it, I don’t have a security operation center.
Josh Haselhorst (18:31):
I don’t have guys 24 7, 365 eyes on glass with nine data analysts doing incident response in real time. Well, good lord, what do I do about that then? Because, you know, I look at my firewall logs on Fridays. Well, good, cuz you know, threat actors only work on Fridays, so we should be covered. The thing is, is especially with, with the security mechanisms that are going on, is these attacks happen every day, all day 24 7, 365. They’re way better than us. And if I don’t have eyes on glass and I know you do in your security blog or your security security podcasts about, you know, cyber insurance and what are the requirements and all this. But this is, this is, to my point of, you said the word converged. I need to be able to converge not only my WAN architecture and my application behavior controls, but I need to be able to converge my cybersecurity tool sets as well, but still have those data forensics guys, those data analysts guys that are protecting my environment in real time, whether it’s best of breed product and service chaining or not.
Josh Haselhorst (19:31):
Right? So then I’m a SASE, and then now that I have 24/7/365 sock eyes on glass with guys like incident response teams, what am I now, oh, that’s another marketing term. Now I’m a CASB, I’m a cloud access security broker, right? So convergence. Yeah. The other word I like is I don’t like, I hate it. You hear me all the time. Digital transformation. Well, if I’m doing everything digital, I’m doing everything cloud, how can I have operational efficiencies If I’ve got 19 different products and 19 different portals to manage ’em? I can’t. It’s impossible. No matter how smart the guy is.
Josh Lupresto (20:06):
Yeah, fair point. Let’s, let’s talk for a second about some of the hurdles, right? I, I would like people to kind of understand that have not gone through a discovery process like this because you’re with partners and in customers doing probing discovery calls all the time. What are some of the challenges that you see along the way? And then how do you help people talk through that? Or at least understand that maybe it isn’t a challenge and you know, this is how you would see roi, something like that. How do you quantify that?
Josh Haselhorst (20:36):
Yeah, so when we’re talking to technologists technologists have a a, a certain thing in mind. They got a work order. Boss man says, I need this business result. And now I go start doing due diligence around that technology. Back to the word convergence. We need to, we need to figure out a way to converge business leader conversation with technologist conversation. And that’s the biggest challenge today because the IT guy, let’s just say I’m the system admin, or let’s say I’m the telecom guy. My business outcome is to get my products and services that I’m bringing in-house to my users to work perfectly, to work seamlessly and work simply, right? In a security world, we got this term usable security. I can’t just throw a bunch of security countermeasures at my business leaders and expect that they’re not gonna find workarounds around them because it, it’s a pain and it’s another process, right?
Josh Haselhorst (21:32):
I have to do this easy and elegant. This is kinda how UCaaS and CCaaS came about is, is let’s, let’s converge everything. Let’s integrate all tool sets into these platforms. So it’s easier to mal manage. It’s simple and it’s elegant. But my business leaders, I need to make their job simple and elegant also. So if I go buy a bunch of switches and routers, I go buy a bunch of firewalls or buy a bunch of cybersecurity countermeasures that may be good for me and my IT team. But what did it do to the business as an organization as a whole? Did it open their eyes to best practices? Maybe I went and got a backup recovery archive solution. Am I following in accordance with best practices? Well, an IT leader may not know if they’re following it to best practices based on risk management and risk tolerance of the organization.
Josh Haselhorst (22:18):
But if we can marry it with OT and IT with OT and the business leader office, the C-suite, and all be lockstep in what the next evolution is, these projects are easier not only deploy to manage and to get budget approved, because now we’re not even talking about tech, we’re talking about risk management, right? Can I mitigate a risk? Do I need to transfer a risk to a third party? Can I avoid this risk? Right? and is there a financial risk around that? If we look at everything we do from SDWAN cybersecurity world, right? And think about the risk management approach from the business leaders to it, these projects now get eyes open of, oh my goodness, okay, I wasn’t following best practices. I wanted to roll out UCaaS, but I didn’t build a reliable, redundant, redundant, you know, connection. What’s the risk of that? Well, the risk is back to that usable right? Is I’m gonna deploy, you know, this, this UCaaS system to all my users and they hate it cuz it’s choppy. So now they use their cell phone. Yeah, I just wasted my organization’s money because I did not have that 100% adoption rate, which was the risk of financial risk. So we have to eliminate that, but the only way to eliminate risk or to even talk about risk is to get the business leaders and the IT leaders in the same room on the same page.
Josh Lupresto (23:39):
Good, good point. All right. Getting to the tail end here, just a couple more questions. So walk us through, now that we’ve kind of built up the idea, we, we, you know, SDWAN is mature. There’s a lot of different flavors. We’re now talking convergence, a lot of different tool sets, and we bolt sassan, the title of this track ride is, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna answer here in a minute, the value of global backbones. But walk me through an example, right? We’re talking SASE, we’re talking SDWAN. Gimme an example where you just were part of a major transformation because of this technology. What did the environment look like when you walked in? What was the problem? What did you learn? And then ultimately kinda what was put in place.
Josh Haselhorst (24:19):
Yeah. I’ll even talk about kind of a, a recent one, right? And I’ve done a lot of Aryaka, I’ve done a lot of everybody, but I’ve done a lot of Aryaka, to this point in this specific use case, right? Is I had a global operator locations in Indonesia, Spain, Newfoundland, Australia, mainland China, couple locations in us, right? And they were using old school DM VPN, which turned into Cisco iWAN, right? But it was a way to interconnect all locations, right? Using routing tables instead of, you know, switching technologies, right? Basically kind of virtual MPLS if you will. But they were still doing things like distributed file shares. So the guys in China would come back to the LA facility for specific files or applications or whatever. And you know, well no matter what kind of circuit I have, you know, speed of light is speed of light, but multiply that by distance and guess what I have now?
Josh Haselhorst (25:12):
I have latency. So the issue was latency. And this was kind of the advent of edge compute, right? It’s, oh my God, let’s just get ’em closer to the edge so they don’t have to backhaul all the way over, right? But I needed to, I needed to mesh all of these locations together. I needed to get away outside of mainland China, away from the government eyeballs, you know, sucking down all packets and, and inspecting, cuz that just slowed everything down. I needed to quit back hauling and hair pinning two locations that tend then get over to Azure, if you will, right? So I needed a network topology, not necessarily SDWAN yet, but I needed a network topology that would connect all of my locations and, and kill that middle mile latency game, right? So this is what a backbone operator does, right? Some of ’em call ’em NAS providers network as a service operators, some of ’em call ’em MPLS as a service, right?
Josh Haselhorst (26:00):
But this is what a backbone operator does, is instead of me getting MPLS or me trying to create mesh in IP sec and hub and spoke and all this other stuff myself, I just become a node of their private layer too. And now they’re taking me to the nearest edge resources. They’re doing things like automatic pop reroute, right? For example, I’m in, I’m in Arizona, right? And maybe my nearest pop, you know, from a, from a carrier hotel to say one Wilshire in la Well, what happens if one wilshire in LA goes down? Cuz that’s never in the world ever happened, right? It, it happens. Well, could you automatically reroute me to Portland and then get me over to Azure West so I can still continue to do my job without getting high latency? Well, a lot of operators are, well, no, no, it the pops down, the pops down this way.
Josh Haselhorst (26:45):
I can do automatic pop reroutes and I can become a note of somebody else’s MPLS. I always say, what’s the biggest baddest network on the planet, the biggest, baddest network on the planet
Josh Haselhorst (27:31):
So I’m gonna need SDWAN too. Well, by the way, yeah, Aryaka does that also. So we can put you on the Aryaka backbone and then we can put a app, an appliance inside each location and now what we’re doing, link aggregation, Port correction, dynamic pass selection, pick a color of a UCaaS provider, it’s gonna work perfectly, right? So we started with, I needed better middle mile, lower middle mile latency to, I need local link aggregation at a hundred percent uptime. And then it was a, we’re gonna start moving our on-prem applications into multi-cloud regions. I’m gonna put some over in Alibaba. I’m gonna put some over in Oracle Cloud, some in ibm, some in Azure, aws, G ccp, whichever ones were right for those specific applications, right? But now how am I gonna connect to ’em? So then they were thinking we’re gonna go direct connects or, and express routes and all that other stuff.
Josh Haselhorst (28:16):
Well, yet, what did I just say about, you know, that convergence. Now another portal, another piece, another complexity. By the way, platforms like Aryaka, since I’m on their layer two, they are my multi-cloud OnRamp. So it’s already there. I just have to turn it on. So really we took the, I have a, a firewall that kind of does SDWAN and I need direct connects and I need layer two and I need layer three and collapse that environment into a no. You need one architecture that you can centrally manage your IT guys, your cybersecurity guys, your networking guys are all using the same exact tool set. No more silos in the organization. And oh, by the way, all these other Next Level, next gen applications that you want to bring into your organization to make you money using it, to me, they’re just applications now connect to ’em, turn ’em on. Easy, easy, right? So simplification and elegance, but then collapse their environment. I think if they were gonna go best of breed, which is probably what they were talking about to begin with, I bet they would’ve been hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments and all just adding complexity this way. They created simplification and elegance. And I bet doing everything in an all-in one was probably a quarter of the cost of doing siloed.
Josh Lupresto (29:32):
Love it. Love it. Great example. Well that, that definitely answers the question, right? If you remember the title of this track for everybody was SDWAN in Advanced Networking. What is the value of SASE and Global Backbones anyway? And I’m not even gonna recap it because I think you just put so many reasons into that example of what the value of somebody that has a global backbone is there’s, there’s 15 reasons in that last bit that you had alone. So, great stuff in there. All right two final thoughts here real quick cuz we wrap this up. First thought I, if I’m a partner and I’ve you know, my, my customers are looking to modernize a little bit here. Maybe they didn’t do SDWAN n maybe they did do SDWAN, but they’re, you know, maybe tools are sprawled out there. I want to approach my customers. I don’t really know where to start. Is it a security conversation? Is it a network conversation? I’m a big probing questions guy. So if you, if you have a partner that, that listens to this and says, Hey, I wanna go see if I can tee up a couple discussions for you, what would you recommend that I go, you know, what’s my quick talk track to the customers, my prospects?
Josh Haselhorst (30:34):
You know, I, I always go back to why, and, and, and I say the word why and I’m putting my risk management hat on in right now, right? Is, you know, a client comes to a partner, Hey, I need a, a secondary internet circuit for what? Why? Well, I’m gonna roll out an application that needs failover. Okay? Do you need that application to be in a hundred percent uptime or is failover fail back tolerable based on risk management? Oh God no. I needed a hundred percent up. Okay? Cuz now we just opened the conversation. Now we, we know we have to talk SDWAN, but then we have to get into the weeds a little bit of, does your existing firewalls, can they do SDWAN by just maybe an OS or a firmware update or, or can they not? Maybe we can protect the investment up front and just say, listen, you just have to turn on that control.
Josh Haselhorst (31:21):
Or maybe, okay, it’s time to upgrade, but then we hear, oh yeah, I’ve got these older firewalls that are long in the tooth. Well guess what we just did? Well, we sold ’em a circuit, we talked about SDWAN, but now we’re gonna replace their firewalls too, which now starts bringing us into that SASE CASB conversation. So how do I have these conversations? They’re really easy. It’s just asking the customer why, why do you need another circuit? Cuz I’m gonna go you guys, oh, what ucas are you looking at? How do you need it to behave? How do you need it to perform? Right? What is the risk tolerance around these applications that starts dictating what kind of SDWAN is, is is correct? Do I have remote users? Should I be looking at ZTNA, SASE, or CASB? What that starts kind of dictating, but what is the easy button, Josh?
Josh Haselhorst (32:01):
The easy button is the customer. When the customer comes to a to a to a partner, he says, I need blank technology. He may not know back to that business in operations world. He may not know the backend conversations that the C-suite is having. Maybe that C-suite is saying, listen, in, in three months, we’re gonna integrate Jira or Orcada or Salesforce or Service Manager, or we’re gonna do Kubernetes or whatever. He may not know that, but Boss Man said, listen, you olarisneed to get a secondary circuit. If we know what the applications that are coming down the pipe are going to be the next evolution of the organization, then we can start properly, properly determining risk management around those applications, which then determine which platforms are correct. Sometimes we can protect the, the initial investment. Sometimes it is a forklift upgrade, but it all depends.
Josh Haselhorst (32:51):
So I guess the easy button is not so easy because the customer’s googling this and he sees 927 options, like everybody that’s listening to this call, go do yourself a favor, go Google Zero Trust. You will see 927 different options, different methodologies, different ways. Well, the customer’s doing that too. So what is the value of TSB in the world? What is the value of like Telarus and Telarus engineering? The value to that end user is he’s looking at so many different options. He doesn’t know what’s perfect for his use case. So I need to reach out to my broker, my agent and say, Hey, listen, I’m trying to do this. Can you get the engineering team on a call with me to help me determine which one, which platform is correct? And then that supported the, the, the supportability world, right? How do I need it supported?
Josh Haselhorst (33:39):
Even if I’m a specific platform, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the people I bought that platform from support that platform the way I need it supported based on logistics and operations, right? And that’s where customers make mistakes. When we’re teaching customers the same thing. I always say that. I say, I say this every single time I have a meeting. 100% of customers will buy the correct countermeasure in the incorrect sequence 100% of the time. So they need you. They, they need that selling agent to say, listen, maybe I just wanna bounce an idea off you. Let’s get the engineering guys to the table and let’s put that risk management hat on and say, okay, what’s the risk of this? Is that okay? What’s the risk of that? Is that okay? And, and, and then, and determine what is, what is that perfect solution? What is that perfect fit?
Josh Lupresto (34:25):
Love it. All right. Final thought. This is a hard one because, you know, to your point, this technology has changed a lot, but I want to look at our crystal ball here. If we look out 12 months or so you know obviously you’ve given a, you’ve given a great talk track to help people understand this, to go back and maybe have some additional conversations. But if people are planning out their next 12 months of prospecting and customer conversations and just, you know, working on projects and doing QBR with the customers is there anything that you want us to consider from a future perspective? What, what do we need to be aware about that might be coming down that they might be getting asked about? Walk us through, you know, 12 to to 24 months. Anything we need to be aware of additionally?
Josh Haselhorst (35:07):
Yeah, yeah. And, and, and this, this platform I’m going to talk about is actually out there in the market. Now it’s not highly marketed because it’s still in development. It is not perfect and re ready for, you know, GA and is. It’s, but the idea and the theory’s there, and it is already available in, in, in some, in some shape or form. But picture this, we talked about that convergence of IT, OT operations, C-Suite, right? C-Suite has their own applications that they use to manage their businesses. HR has their own to manage their businesses. It has their own to manage their business. Cybersecurity, networking. All these pieces of the organization are also siloed. And they have their own technologies that they use, right? Sales divisions use things like Salesforce and IT support teams use guys like, you know, CAEA or jira. What if all of these applications from C-suite business applications all the way into booking my janitorial staff?
Josh Haselhorst (36:06):
What if every single application from my entire organization got collapsed into like a digital front door? Meaning one portal, one orchestration, almost like our sup, almost like our supplier webpage, right? Oh, I wanna look at SDWAN and click it. Boom. There’s all of your SDWAN platforms and there’s the management and orchestration of it. Ooh, I wanna look at my cybersecurity. Boom, there’s all of your firewalls and orchestration into manage of it. Incident response systems, backup recovery and archive systems, ticketing and alert systems, all in the same single pane of glass. One interface to manage my entire organization, Mr. Lupresto, we’re talking SDE now. Software defined everything. Not SDWAN, not SASE, not CASB. SDE software defined everything. And these platforms exist. There are, there are companies out there that are, that are developing it at a rapid pace and pretty soon back to that best of breed in protecting somebody’s investment.
Josh Haselhorst (37:04):
I’ve got endpoint over here and I got MDR over here and EDR over here. What if we could take that investment and suck it all into one management interface? Maybe I wouldn’t have to do forklift upgrades. Maybe I could, I could protect that investment. But now I just created simplification and elegance to manage my entire organization and operation. And then when we talk about converging the business leaders and train of thought with it, guess what they’re saying? They’re using the same platform I’m using. So they get to see the risks, they get to see best practices, they get to see my chats. When we talked unified communication, that was the whole point of UC, right? Is to collapse everything into one platform. But what if I could integrate my uc stack into this also? So my telephony, my security, my business operations, my manufacturing, everything, my sayta systems, everything is in one management orchestration.
Josh Haselhorst (38:00):
And now when a ticket comes in, it goes to that team and that person, it goes to the telecom guy, it goes to the correct teams at the correct time when the incident happens, there’s a study out there. This was done in a retail franchise environment, a quick service restaurant, 2000 location, quick service restaurant. They said any incident a switch port was out. A an access point went down the phone system’s down, internet went down. It would, they, they would, the study said it would take 20 minutes for anybody in support to respond to that anomaly, right? 20 minutes. So doing stuff like this, the study found that I go from 20 minutes respond time to any anomaly, to a five minute respond time to any anomaly. The dollar figure for C-suite, the dollar was that 20 minute response time on that 2000 units.
Josh Haselhorst (38:52):
Those 2000 operators was roughly two $20,000 per minute in a downtime situation. Now, if you could take that $20,000 per minute in a downtime situation, remember it, 20 minutes to respond to five, you just went from $20,000 per minute to $9,000 per minute. You think the CFO and paying attention to those numbers love. And that’s what, that’s what this next evolution is gonna be, is it itself is gonna be almost irrelevant. You still need the same tool sets, but now we’ve gotta manage them in a, in a ergonomical converged way. So it is, it is UC, it’s, it’s unified technology as a service. And I’m gonna coin the phrase SDE. Nobody
Josh Lupresto (39:35):
Said I love it. I love it.
Josh Haselhorst (39:36):
That’s great software to find everything. It came from Haselhorst just saying
Josh Lupresto (39:40):
SDE, AI ops and more. All right, man. Well look that we, there’s a lot of stuff here to unpack. You’re gonna have to go listen to this a couple times. Haselhorst, appreciate you, man. Knowledge drop as always. Thanks for coming on.
Josh Haselhorst (39:52):
Absolutely love it. Call me anytime for the partners out there. Reach out to your engineering resources. We’re here to help.
Josh Lupresto (39:59):
Love it. Okay, everybody that wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus, Josh Haselhorst sales engineer, and all things SDWAN. Till next time. Thanks everybody.
Listen in as we talk Work Force Management (WFM). We define what that toolset is, what its value is, and how it’s evolved. Frank Wassenbergh of Cloudlinx, an expert on WFM, joins the podcast as he talks about his customer tips and tricks. You might even hear about Frank’s flowing blond locks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObQ4-HL6QpU Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Le Presto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Good morning. Welcome back. We’re talking about Contact Center, but more specifically, we’re diving in deep to contact center today because we’re talking about WFM, if you’ve heard about that before. Better known as Workforce Management. So we’re gonna get into this a little bit with a foremost expert here, Frank Wassenbergh of Cloudlinx. Frank, welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks
Frank Wassenbergh (00:38):
For having me, Josh. I look forward to it. And I love the foremost expert title that I’ll claim for the day. I love it.
Josh Lupresto (00:44):
Let ’em prove you wrong. I dare ’em.
Frank Wassenbergh (00:48):
Josh Lupresto (00:49):
So so, so Frank, I, I, I always like to kick these off. I, I just want to hear everybody’s backstory. I, I think that they’re, you know, some people have linear paths and I find that a lot of people have really windy, funny paths in life. We, we’ve talked to people on this show that, that have come from you know car lot auto attendance to you know, washing boats and everything in between and somehow ended up in this world. So I would love to kind of hear your story of just how did you get started?
Frank Wassenbergh (01:17):
So, you know, I mean, I, I went to school for basketball, really. I mean, I wanted to play basketball in college, right? And I kind of came outta college with no real direction on what I wanted to do in life. And I bumped into a woman in a parking lot on my way to a recruiter’s office, literally going into the Long Island, into the recruiter’s office to get a job interview. And I’d bump into this woman. She’s like, well, what are you doing? I’m like, I’m gonna get a job interview. And she’s like, we’re hiring. Come work for me. And I started with a company right after that, like two days later with a company called Net 2000, terrible name. It was 1999, you know, and I was like, what are we gonna do next year? You know, it’s just a terrible name. And it was my first taste of technology sales.
Frank Wassenbergh (02:00):
And for a long time I was in kind of that commoditized, PRI, MPLS. And I left there quickly and went to a company called bcm, BCM one now, and ran sales there for a long time. Kind of grew through the ranks, grew through the company, had a good long run there. But for the most part, it was mostly kind of master agency work. It was mostly PRI, sip, MPLS sort of work. And it was, you know, for the most part, a relatively straightforward sale. And one of our, my good clients when I left there, came to me and said to my two partners and came to us and said, we are really looking at a new contact center, and we want you guys to do it with us. We want you guys to help us find it.
Frank Wassenbergh (02:48):
We trust you tremendously, and we’d like you to help us find it. And we jumped into the, into the kind of the fray, doing an RFP for them and learned it with them. And just had this fantastic experience with contact center, because in our, in our last, in my last kind of, of the, you know, the path of that winding road, I was doing something that for the most part, two or three people would know we did in the organization. And we fell in love with this contact center space because the, the, the, the people we dealt with were the C-suite all the way down to the agents. You know, we interviewed 50, 60 people when we did it, and kind of decided that this is where we wanna take ourselves when we, you know, we put on our big boy pants and grow up a little bit. And for the last six, seven years, this, well, the last seven years, this is what we’ve been doing. The, the career kind of got to this point after a lot of training, I would say, and dealing with a different type of sale to this, which is truly a really conversational and a really consultative sale. And it’s, it’s been what fits the three of us. It fits our model really well. I love, it fits our mold well,
Josh Lupresto (03:53):
Lo love the windy path. And if you can, if you can get, if you start in RFPs and you can make it through and not give up through that process, then I, I think you can do just about anything. We’ve all been through
Frank Wassenbergh (04:04):
The world’s toughest thing is writing an rfp and then not the world’s toughest thing, but, you know, the toughest, one of the toughest things technology is to write them and then get seven back from vendors and sit there and trying to make sense of these things and decipher who’s really good at it and who’s really lying to you and who’s telling you just really good at answering RFPs. But man, it’s, right, it’s, it’s a, it’s a long road doing RFPs.
Josh Lupresto (04:24):
Yeah. And you know, we talk about the value of a partner a lot and I think, you know, getting, getting customers to understand that and how we do what we do, and it seems like we’re always educating the broader marketplace on that and, and, and mean. Yeah, it’s hard for us. I can’t imagine being a customer and trying to do a formal process like that where you’ve kind of got this wall off project. I just can’t imagine trying to do that on your own, right. It just, I think it underscores the value of the partners and, and this whole program so much.
Frank Wassenbergh (04:51):
I, I agree. You know, it, it’s funny when you look at it, right? You take two sides of the same coin. You got the IT department who for some way, shape or form is trained in technology, right? They can go out and find a technology. You take something as simple as MPLS or as complicated as MPLS, whichever side of the coin you wanna land on there. But you can go and get really concrete answers, put it on a check sheet, mark it off and say they can do that jumbo frames or whatever, you know, they can do that. You do it on context center project and you’ve gotta run an RFP for that on top of running the call center day-to-day. And you can’t just get an answer that’s, yes, we can do chat and click it off, or yes, we can do ai.
Frank Wassenbergh (05:34):
There’s just too much going on where you have to go five or six layers deep in the questioning to get an answer on it. I mean, we had a client the other day that had an answer for, yes, we can do chat, but the vendor can’t transfer to a live agent. And you’re like, well, what’s the per like, I know it’s a chat bot, I get that, but you make an assumption that you can transfer to a live agent. Cause it’s kinda like a table stakes kind of thing. Yeah. And the vendor’s like, no, we, we, we can’t get you onto a live agent. It is what it is
Josh Lupresto (06:03):
Off the island.
Frank Wassenbergh (06:05):
Well, yeah, it’s off the island, man. It’s off the island.
Josh Lupresto (06:09):
That’s right. So, so, so tell us a little bit about Cloudlinx I mean, you gave us some of the, kind of the history of leading up how you did it, but tell us a little bit about the business what you’re doing, what your focuses are, how you go to market, all that good stuff.
Frank Wassenbergh (06:21):
So we focus really in the 90, if you look at our pie chart of sales and our pie chart of effort, 95% of our, of our pie chart is focused in the contact center space. Because, you know, if you look at where we’ve been and what we’ve done for a long time, we’ve, we still get a good amount of m NPLS that’s out there, a good amount of broadband deployments. But our focus has been solely on this side of the business. My partner, Kevin, Mike, and I has been on contact center services. So we do the str everything from the needs assessment, current state analysis, the strategic procurement of the services, which is writing an RFP, analyzing the RFP, managing the strategic use case demonstrations, implementation and ongoing support for contact center services. Most of that is migrating technology con cons technology clients to the cloud.
Frank Wassenbergh (07:09):
We have a process side, you know, if you really, the people process technology, we have a process side by which people come to us and say, Hey, make this better, or, Hey, our process is broken, let’s fix it. But the, the majority we’re trying to do in this day and age, especially where things like Genesis, Avaya, and Cisco are still trying to figure out and making major changes in the market, is helping clients get to that contact center in the cloud environment. And it’s, you know, we work with clients that are, you know, a thousand on down to 45 seats. And sometimes the level of work for the one is the same as the other mm-hmm.
Frank Wassenbergh (07:55):
And the people doing the work are myself and my partners. We don’t sub it out to anybody. We don’t do any extra work with third party consultants. It’s all in-house. So when you come to Cloudlinx for helping in this migration process, you are working with us from the start to the finish. We’re the ones running the meetings, we’re the ones writing the RFPs. We’re the ones analyzing it. And our clients really see some value in it. And it’s a, it’s a much more focused sale and a much more focused effort because when you buy into the fact that, you know, we’re good guys and we’re really looking after our clients and we don’t care which vendor you go with, our sale is done and there’s no more pressure on the client, you just have to b believe in the fact that we are doing it for you. And that finding a vendor for us, it’s, it’s an easy process at that point.
Josh Lupresto (08:40):
Right. Good stuff. So, so you talked about, you know, how, how you got into this space. You talked about kind of the first deal that, that you saw from an RFP perspective. But let’s dive in a little bit to, you know, your, your first experience into, to workforce management. Maybe first of all, I mean we’ve talked a little bit about what the contact center experience is, but maybe define for us what, what your version of workforce management is and, and really what your first experience and an opportunity with that was like.
Frank Wassenbergh (09:06):
Sure. You know, workforce management, even the short time that people have really looked at that kind of online tools to help you out with that, it’s morphed. And now you’ve got kind of workforce management and workforce engagement, which is bringing in the QA into entirely what your workforce is doing. And depending on who you’re talking to and whose product it is, they call it one or the other. But for me, the, the, the workforce management in its traditional sense, taking QA and putting that on a shelf for now, but we can bring that back in. It’s really about understanding what your people are doing and when, how your clients can, helping your clients get to the right agent at the right time. And allowing managers to structure the day so that they optimize where their people are, are and where their people are working for clients.
Frank Wassenbergh (09:50):
And it’s not so much a like a time clock when it’s done right. It allows the agent to be part of the flow and part of the process and part of what their day’s gonna look like. It allows them to say they’re gonna be late. And it allows the manager to, to adjust their workflow dynamically. It allows them to say, I need help here. It allows them to predict and forecast where you’re gonna be working. And for us, it’s been, it’s been a really powerful tool for anybody over, I think the smallest client we have right now with it is, is 45 agents. And the biggest one we have, you know, is a couple thousand seats doing workforce management. Cause it becomes daunting.
Josh Lupresto (10:26):
Yeah. I I, I can’t imagine one of my first experiences getting into tech was working in a call center and doing tech support back in the day for dial up. And I just, I mean, I, I knew the folks that I worked with and I, I can’t imagine trying to depend that all a hundred percent of them are all gonna be there every day.
Frank Wassenbergh (10:45):
Spreadsheets. Yeah. Listen, at the end of the day, you know, there’s good people, there’s bad people, there’s good agents, there’s bad agents. And if you’re a, a manager trying to do that on a spreadsheet throughout the day, you know, people can just log themselves out. People can just say they’re busy. People can say they’re in after work time. You know, it, you need the ability to manage the staff to, to, to, for yourself, you know, for your own sanity and try to do that yourself. Like what you were saying, like as, as starting in that business, you gotta learn the context in our industry before you can tell ’em how to fix it. And, and workforce management tools are really helping people with that.
Josh Lupresto (11:18):
So, so how do you more if, if we quantify that a little bit and take that a step further, how do you help the customers quantify? I, I think you quantify the need or maybe more qualitatively, but how do you quantify the need? And I guess how do they, how do they get to see the ROI? How do you explain that business case for ’em?
Frank Wassenbergh (11:35):
So the, theROI calculations in contact center is, is kind of a fine art really, because there’s a lot of soft costs on top of the hard costs. You’ve got a lot of productivity costs, you’ve got a lot of productivity gains and losses and you could have, you know, and, and I think that’s why workforce management has taken on the, a larger role now of workforce engagement and QA is being pulled into it. So you take it off the shelf, you bring it back into the conversation now, now you’re trying to understand what they’re doing when they’re doing it, but also how they’re doing it, how well they’re doing it. So we put a lot of work into how, not just simp something simple like how long a call is taking, right? We look into the screen recording and saying where they’re navigating, what are they doing, how many hours are they spending throughout the day in, in, in dead zone?
Frank Wassenbergh (12:19):
How many ti how much time do they have not talking cause they’re searching for stuff or filibustering and just having general conversation cuz they enjoy talking to the people. And our clients are not usually the clients that say, well, it’s interesting. There’s been a big shift in the market where people don’t really care how long you’re on the phone with people for the most part anymore. You know, back when long distance would cost 20 cents a minute back in the day I’ll date myself when I had long flowing blonde hair. But long distance you can be an expensive thing. It’s not so much anymore. And they’re all about that experience with people. And I think what, what we’re trying to do with people when we start getting into cost justification of these tools is yes, the price of these tools has come down, but it’s still a multiple and a factor of how many agents you have.
Frank Wassenbergh (13:00):
But it’s all about that return on the experience from that client. Because if you, if you’re not so focused on how long they’re on with the call now you’re focused on what the, what they’re doing when they’re on that call, right? And making sure that you have your best people answering the right conversation and getting into the right problem so they can fix it. And we put a ton of effort into the ROI studies in that, that level so that these tools aren’t looked at as an expense anymore. They’re look at as a revenue driver for people.
Josh Lupresto (13:28):
Good points. Maybe talk to me a little bit about, you know, I think when we’re talking to partners and you know, they’re trying to figure out is this customer that I’m going after or are they trying to replace the whole suite of contact center and this tool and that tool and that tool and, and so it, yeah, I think in a perfect world we’d love to say, Mr. Customer rip out everything you have and have this fully integrated suite because all the tools will talk to each other. And you talked a little bit in the beginning about the value of a fully integrated WEM versus versus not, right? And, and, and maybe there’s not a right answer to this. I think it, the answer is that it, it just depends on where the customer’s at from a, from a tech investment perspective for the most part. I I that seems to be the ca common case.
Frank Wassenbergh (14:10):
No, I mean, everybody looks at these omnichannel providers and says they can do it all. And there’s a decision that has to be made on a client, on whether they want to look at the omnichannel provider and have one throat to choke or one back to pat, or they want to piece it together with best of breed technology. And that’s a as philosophical discussion at a technology level for a call center managers you really want to get into in this regard, right? Fair. Because the more you’re piecing stuff together, the more integrations you have, the more potential problems you have, and then the more you put it together, you’ve got the single threaded solution, which makes sense and the story’s seamless and everything’s tied together, but you are pigeonholed or limited to what that supplier can offer. So our clients kind of come to us on both fronts and it starts off with that philosophical discussion on how many vendors do we want to manage, right?
Frank Wassenbergh (14:59):
And if you look at this from that all in one, all encompassing workforce engagement platform, there’s some great people out there that we interview on a regular basis that just do that. And as long as they can get the call records through an api, you know, they can be 15 minutes behind, they can be five minutes behind the analyzation. And if that’s good enough for most call centers, why not kind of pull that little box off a shelf and use that while you’re using the omnichannel engine for somebody else, right? It it’s, it’s an interesting world to kinda look at philosophy you buy into.
Josh Lupresto (15:28):
Yeah. Great points. Good stuff. So, you know, my, one of my big kind of favorite things as an engineer is to talk and, and, and ask questions. That’s one of the things that I’ve learned early on was just ask questions. Just listen, understand what they’re going through. And so I’m, I’m curious in the conversations I want to, I want to, you know, get away from utopia and it’s always great and it’s always awesome and everything works to, what are the problems that you face, right? What, what are the things that get thrown at you that, that either customers push back on cuz they don’t understand or just what are some of the challenges in these conversations to get to, to, that you help see customers through?
Frank Wassenbergh (16:07):
So it, it’s funny, right? You, you’re kind of going down the road we like to go at first, right? We very rarely come in and say in the first day, this is the vendor of choice, this is who they’re gonna go with, right? It’s very odd. It’s very, very rare that we can do that, right? Because once you start the initial conversations and we work kind of bottom up, we like to talk to the agents first and then work our way up and we think we get a better, more honest feedback and then we can bring and deliver problems on upstream as opposed to that’s not what your manager said. You know, we, we kind of work from, well your team is struggling with this. And the goal in that regard, the way you’re going with that kind of questioning and understanding is you have to get the, the C-suite on the same page as the agent.
Frank Wassenbergh (16:46):
And that’s nearly an impossible thing to do unless you’re spending time kind of having those conversations, right? And you, you can run the gamut of I can’t get my signature into an email in a cohesive way that’s uniformed all while I’m on up through, when I log into my QM portal. The duration of a call is different than when I log into my WFM portal and I see them and it’s, and this QM call says it’s a four minute call and WFM says it’s often two and a half minutes. You know, you’ve got a myriad of problems that you try to fix. And it’s all about understanding what’s gonna make that agent’s life better. So we don’t necessarily go top down because a big chunk of where we put our time and effort into is if, you know this kind of core philosophy to us, if you put the agents first, everything else is easy, right?
Frank Wassenbergh (17:31):
Put the agents’ needs first and everything else will kind of flow after it because now they’re being recognized for what they are revenue generators, they’re the face of your brand, they’re the face of your mission, mission statement. And the problems that we solve are just, they’re just, they’re just so numerous. But once you get the c e O to buy into the fact that, that they need to be enabled, things just happen and things just start lining up and all of a sudden those problems start to be taken seriously. And it’s not that, well that’s your problem, just throw another body at it because nobody wants to throw more bodies at that, at the call center. Right? If anything, they wanna reduce the bodies and you know, sometimes, you know, we work really hard not to be the Bobs from office space, you know, coming in and being like, you know, how are we gonna get rid of people and what do you do with your day kind of thing.
Frank Wassenbergh (18:12):
And Oh, you’re Michael Bolt. Yeah. We try really hard not to do that, but it’s a more, a matter of let’s optimize this, let’s make your life easier across the board. And you find that the agents are the first ones to come to you and being like, Hey, you know what? I’m not getting adequate training. I have calls that I’m dealing that I think are awesome, but my manager’s not reviewing them. Cause the managers are reviewing them manually and only gets to 3% of the calls. You know, and all the way on up to the manager saying, I’ve tried gamification and it’s failed and I’ve thrown it aside and it’s just sitting there and, you know, we put a, you gotta put a lot of time into pacing this out and adopting technologies that make sense in that regard. So the problems are so big in the call center cause you’re touching so many things.
Josh Lupresto (18:51):
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great point. I I’ve been in so many of those examples where, you know, the, the executive team sits out and says, Hey, I want you to accomplish this vision. You know, we think we need this and this and this, and these are the problems. And you talk to the agents. I’ve spent hours in those in the, in the pit. And it, it’s fascinating that information that the agents have is absolute gold. Because there’s nobody else better with the most accurate information, right? And, and the internal CSAT scores are really what matters. If you can drive those up and you get to your point, the, the agent, the way that you put it, I think was great, right? It’s the agents that matter and that makes everything else easy. I love that. It’s great.
Frank Wassenbergh (19:30):
Well, I mean, I can put it back to you. I mean, you’re, from an engineering standpoint, you see these products get built, right? And like take, take a, take an agent enablement tool, like some sort of tool pick, pick the vendor name of it, but I want my agents to have coaching while they’re on the call. You do a complex sale, like articles to be pulled up. How many times have you seen people say, we want that kind of a agent enablement tool or an agent empowerment coaching tool, but their knowledge management system is a mess and they don’t have a way of organizing it or streamlining those
Josh Lupresto (20:01):
Things. Yeah, it’s garbage or it’s laggy or somebody has a great idea to create it and it’s not updated, the information’s not relevant or it takes too long and the agent feels you don’t, having these pregnant pauses in there, is this gonna be awkward? And so yeah, like how it, it’s kinda like those Instagram posts, right? How, how it, how it should be and then how it is, you know, in reality with my 82 Trans AM or something, you know, versus my Bentley
Frank Wassenbergh (20:27):
Josh Lupresto (21:14):
Yeah. Good stuff. All right. As we get to the last couple questions here, you know, we, we talked to the beginning about your first experience with this. You, you kind of defined wfm i’d, I’d love to hear maybe an example, and we can leave customer names out of this, but, but walk me through something where you really saw a massive transformation after you were able to get through all the things that you’ve talked about. You were able to deploy that technology you know, from a WFM perspective. Be curious to just hear about an example like that and kind of the, you know, what, how are they doing it before versus when we got done with it, right? As we’re going through it, here’s what it looks like now.
Frank Wassenbergh (21:53):
Sure. It, it’s interesting and, and you know, it, it’s a different answer on an inbound versus outbound call center, right? Those are two very different kind of looks and feels depending on what you’re trying to reach your goals are. So we’ll take kind of like an inbound call center. We, we had a client that was managing about 150 agents with a BPO in there. And they’re trying to take most of their client, te most of their agents and kind of put ’em all into a BPO their, their strategy was to move it to an, an entirely BPO on fire for whatever the case was. And they were close to finishing it up. But the problem was they had that, the 30% of the agents that were in the BPO their time was very different than the people in-house. They were longer the BPO than their people in-house.
Frank Wassenbergh (22:33):
And try selling that to somebody where we’re gonna go to a BPO and they’re longer and they had a different set of tools and then than the client did for managing this. So we did was we gave one workforce management tool across the BPOs and across the internal people we’re able to justify the hours and bring it down. And we, we, we saw a 30% reduction in agent call times just because we were managing it tighter. And we were able to mirror these two together, which led to a huge reduction in savings, a huge reduction in cost, and a massive increase in savings for them just because we had one singular tool. And as they went forward, they were able to not just go to that one bpo, they brought in a secondary big BPO and leverage ’em together. And having that uniformity of tools allowed that savings to increase and kind of leverage it so that they could say, you know what?
Frank Wassenbergh (23:21):
This group is doing better. Let’s push more calls to that group than pushing ’em to that group. Because that’s one of the things that gets kind of missed in these conversations. That uniformity of tools and with this client, giving them a 30% reduction in spend was tremendous because it allowed them to do different things. They, they took these people here that they were outsourcing the positions to, which is kind of the, the thing nobody likes to talk about. That’s a potential that can happen. When you really get, get into that, that BPO mindset for transactional stuff. They took all of the transactional annoying calls, the repeat calls, I need a form, I need a password, and put that there. And these agents now all stayed employed and all focused on complicated questions that needed help. And they turned them into outbound agents as well, and they able to generate revenue for them. It was a tremendous savings and then a tremendous revenue gain just because they were able to level set what everybody
Josh Lupresto (24:11):
Was doing. Look, I love that. And, and I’m, you know, if that’s the, if that’s the how it ends, I’m curious in an example like that of, of how did they identify that they needed something or did they not know what, that they had a problem? Like w how did that deal start?
Frank Wassenbergh (24:27):
Yeah, so, you know, you kind of come to this, this deal came to us and the client said, listen, we have two different systems that we’re using. We have two different, we have a BPO that’s in place. We have our team in place. We’re using two different phone systems. We’re trying to manage QM across the board. And they said, it’s just not working right? We’re doing qm, we have QM leaders and we’re ma we’re manually reviewing calls. So at best, when you’re manually reviewing calls, you’re getting to three, 4% of those calls. Yeah. It’s just, it’s just a fact. You talk to any context, I imagined you’re like, it’s the most arduous job in the world and I have to do a couple calls every day for an agent. Takes me an hour and a half to review a single call because of the scorecards and blah, blah, blah.
Frank Wassenbergh (25:01):
And now you’re at three, 4% of the calls. They knew they had a massive problem because at the highest level they said their calls are taking way longer than our calls. So they took the problem and they said, we have a strategic directional shift we have to make, they’re handling the same types of calls as these people are. How do we strategically structure? It’s that we’re using their time better and they turn them into more of a transactional engagement. Now, BPOs are great, PPOs can do more of a complicated engagement. But this client had a strategic vision to say, I wanna turn them into transactional. I want to bring our people in here. I wanna get a secondary bpo o And they recognized that they couldn’t do that unless they had a uniformity of, of, of qa, a uniformity of workforce management and a uniformity of the all the tools that were there. Cause the example we talked about earlier where my w fm says the four minutes call, my QA says a two minute 35 second call. Those a kiss of death for a recording, it’s a kiss of death. So we, they came to us, just said, there’s a problem. We want to go at this. And this one we actually brought in two different vendors. Somebody for the omnichannel engine and somebody for the qa, just API them together.
Josh Lupresto (26:02):
Beautiful. Love that example. Good stuff. Okay. so, so if we look forward here, if we, if we pull out, you know, Frank’s crystal ball you’ve seen a lot of evolution in this space. You’ve seen
Frank Wassenbergh (26:15):
Joke, see that, see that bald joke you made right away?
Josh Lupresto (26:16):
No crystal ball, not balded. We’re I’m, hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna lure people in to, to come watch us to come see Frank’s flowing lock. So I’m gonna, don’t worry that’s coming back. So, so as we look into your crystal your, your fortune prediction machine, we’ll call it that where does this go? I mean, what do the next 24 months look like? Do we, do we just start kind of waiting through the fact that people have made a lot of technology purchases in the last couple years? I mean, what if you’re, if you’re giving advice out there on, on how to approach, you know, customers and talk to them about this tech, wh where do you think we go from here?
Frank Wassenbergh (26:55):
It it’s that, that’s a great question, right? I mean, that’s a really powerful question. The next 24 months to me are the most exciting, right? There’s been enough announcements in the market from big, big suppliers, the genesis of the world, the Avayas, the Ciscos, they’re making announcements that have really changed the landscape, what has been the, the, the stall work suppliers for the last 30 years, and they want to push clients to cloud. So you’ve got this massive wave that’s building now where a lot of people want. And you know, you talk to look at Wall Street and where they say these CCaaS vendors can go, the next 24 months are really gonna be the drive and force behind this. So I, I’m looking at one massive opportunity in the next 24 months, but I’m also looking at, it’s such a, this industry is not something that somebody just jumps into and says, I wanna start selling this.
Frank Wassenbergh (27:43):
Like I sell broadband. You can’t do it. You can’t open up the kimono and say, you know, pick a watch any watch. They’re all the same vendor. It’s not the same thing like internet circle. Like you’re not selling internet now. So the, the, the opportunity is here because clients need to make shifts. They need to do something different. They don’t know where to go, they don’t know who to trust, and they’re trying to figure out who to trust right now. And you take Genesis for example. Genesis is a great supplier and they’re kind of slow rolling it. They did a great job giving their clients enough time to make informed and intelligent decisions, but clients now have a fork in the road. To go back to your analogy before, do I just go and stay with that same supplier or do I go and interview more and how do I do that?
Frank Wassenbergh (28:24):
So I think the opportunities here, and what I think you’ll start seeing is once vendor, once the, the clients have kind of gone all in, they push their chips to center the table, you’ll, you’ll start weeding through who’s the weak AI vendor? You’ll start weeding through who’s the weak WFM vendor. You’ll start weeding through who’s the startup CCaaS vendor who can’t keep up with the, with the change. And you know, the, the investment in technology is massive. You go to a CCW trade show and there’s 68 AI booths there, right? Yeah. It’s amazing that people are trying to do ai and I think AI is being applied wrong to these, these conversations. But the next 24 months are really gonna yield tremendous returns for all of defenders because technology is now kind of, everybody’s catching up with it, and now it’s a matter of who can implement it, right? Who can, who can, who can engage that client, right? Who can, once the sale is done, get it installed properly and not make the client have buyers remorse.
Josh Lupresto (29:19):
Love it. Great stuff. Okay, Frank, that wraps us up, man. I really appreciate you coming on and doing the show with me today.
Frank Wassenbergh (29:26):
Well, thank you, man. Josh, I’ve gotta tell you, it’s, it’s, it’s great to chat with you. I thought this was a great conversation and, and anybody that stayed this long I really wanna thank them because, you know, man, I can wander and I can ramble. So it’s great to hear it.
Josh Lupresto (29:38):
Listen in for an information-packed episode on the importance of Work Force Management in the Contact Center as we chat with Chuck Krogman, SVP of Global Sales from Playvox. They have a unique positioning in the market as they were born in the cloud, are very API friendly, and have a full suite of products. Don’t miss it as Chuck makes it easy to understand how to turn every $1 dollar into $4!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWHotZZepIc Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Everybody. Welcome back. Today we are talking about Contact Center, but more importantly, workforce management. So if you tuned in on the previous episode, you got to see the wonderful Jason Lowe talk about it. We were in the studio talking about the different aspects of, of really workforce management, laying it out, his approach to it, some of his experiences. Today we get to be joined by Chuck Krogman, who is SVP of Global Sales at Playvox, and we get to hear about Playvox’s perspective and Chuck’s journey. So, Chuck, thanks for agreeing to come on, man.
Chuck Krogman (00:46):
All right. Well, Josh pleasure to be here. And I already feel a little intimidated. I’ve known Jason Lowe, as we affectionately call him J-lowe for many, many years. And he’s a, he is a tough act to follow. But appreciate you for, for the invite and participating today.
Josh Lupresto (01:01):
I have faith in you. I think it’s gonna be great. Don’t be scared. So, hey, Chuck, I, I want to hear first about just you, you know, before we get into Tech Stacks and WFM and all kinds of cool acronyms, just tell me about you. Give me your, your story, you know, your personal journey. Where did you start? How did you get here and, and, and, and how did you get to where you’re at now?
Chuck Krogman (01:23):
Yeah. actually I, when I look and just kinda look at my own personal journey, it kind of just maps right along with a lot of the customers. From a, my entry and from a technology perspective, I, I kind of moved into the technology sector in, at a time installing, supporting and maintaining large, you know, premise based call centers for for Rockwell. And it kind of moved up through, I took a bit of a journey as probably many people in your studio audience can testify too. I was with 13 years with ShoreTel and Mitel when the whole voiceover ip IP telephony kind of took off and was hot and continued to progress, moved over to the cloud, was with some, some great c a s providers with both Five Nine and Talkdesk and and now here kind of more specialized in a really exciting and growing segment of the market in joining Playvox just a little over two years ago. So it’s you know, it’s been a, a nice, as I said earlier, I kind of made that move from premise into, into a uc solution, into backend to contact center. So it’s been it’s been a kind of fascinating,
Josh Lupresto (02:37):
I love it. I love that you rolled with the journey, right? I mean, you’re, you’re in a spot that stood and, and, and it was what it was for a while consistently, and then all kinds of crazy evolutions. So it’s probably been fun to, to see all these different evolutions and who knows where it goes next. We’ll, we’ll get into some of that, I suppose.
Chuck Krogman (02:52):
Yeah, yeah. I, I will say you know, one of the gauges is it’s really tough to get your wife and kids to, to really understand what you do. I think I’ve heard it simplified as much as, oh, my dad does something with phones. And I said, let’s just stick with that, cuz and, and I also did see as my kids are growing up, you’re, you’re not really a popular career for bring your dad to school day. You know, the lawyers and the police and fire firefighters always kind of take a much greater command for those. But from a career and a progression and working with channel partners, it say it’s been, it’s been tremendous.
Josh Lupresto (03:26):
Yeah. I’m with you. I’ve, I’ve given up my kids just relegated to I get paid to talk on the phone, and you know what,
Chuck Krogman (04:00):
Yep. It was actually probably midway through my career at ShoreTel where we were starting to move more toward not just pushing UCaaS solutions, but also saying, Hey, you know, we do have an offering here in terms of call center. And as we started to get further and further into the, the contact center offering, knowing that we were seeing it’s pretty sticky and it was also part of a revenue generating, customer retention type opportunity. And so it was about midway through I started to have a discussion, you know, with particular customers and raising you know, as they looked at their staffing models and kind of just throwing bodies at things. And, you know, as I built my confidence up to ask just a simple question, well, how are you staffing the people? And how do you decide how many you need and when, and it, it really the response was typically, you know, a lot of spreadsheets and just Google sheets and a little bit of kind of finger in the air, look around the room, see who’s on the phone. And, and just by asking that simple question and then, you know, leveraging, you know, some of the folks, our solution consulting team and others that was, that was kind of my initiation into it, was just simply asking you know, pretty basic question.
Josh Lupresto (05:17):
Love it. Love it. My favorite, I’m gonna plug it again, my favorite book out there, power Questions. I, I’ve really missed out on getting royalties for this, but it’s, that’s what changed the game for me. Just always have an inquisitive mind and ask, you know, what is this? Why does it matter? Why do you care? You know, what do you, how are you doing this? Great. Love to hear that. Okay, so, so set us up now, current state workforce management. Tell me in your perspective, wh what is it, where is this industry? And then let’s lead us into kind of where Playvox fits into that and why people need this product.
Chuck Krogman (05:53):
Yeah, so I think from a, you know, from a Playvox perspective, maybe start with who we are. And we’ve while workforce management is really, that’s what we lead with and a really a core piece of what we call our Greater Workforce Engagement Management or WEM solution, and which previously got, went by a different acronym with a little bit different field to it be some folks might refer to as workforce optimization or W F O. But within our, our Playvox suite, it’s really a, a good I think a strategic advantage to be able to offer not only taking all the advantages of workforce management, but being able to bring quality management, learning performance and gamification into the entire suite. Do so completely or do it all la carte. So I think, you know, having that is important.
Chuck Krogman (06:45):
But to address your initial question, workforce management, I think I, I’m a firm believer, again just keeping it simple, because that’s what radiates with myself, partners, and actually the end users of maybe haven’t been even subjected to anything other than a, a spreadsheet or maybe a basic tool, is it’s really about getting the right resource and the right place at the right time for that interaction. And the more that you can streamline that and, and leverage historical data, it means that you’re doing more with less resources and actually doing a better job. And that in and of itself, I mean, you can apply a lot of different kind of things about call handling times visibility into the queues and a lot of other things that might complicate it. But I think it, it just boils down to getting the right resource in the right place at the right time will, will equate into operational efficiency.
Josh Lupresto (07:44):
Good. Easy to understand. Love it. Walk me through, you know, we, towards the end of this here, a few questions later. I want to get to the, the, the more recent deal. But before we get to that, I want to talk about maybe just one of the first ones that you were ever involved in. So walk me through what that looked like, how it came about and really what it transpired into,
Chuck Krogman (08:04):
Yeah. Is that you you always tend to remember that first that first opportunity, the first home run or, you know, whatever you might be looking at in terms of when, you know, when things occurred. And for me, it was in Louisville, Kentucky of all places. I was out working on a, with a, a customer. We had already sold a UCaaS solution to back in my ShoreTel days. And they were kind of talking through contact center, and we started to have a, a bit of a, just some normal discovery questions. And some of it, you know, as one of the higher level executives in the conversation, he, he echoed some frustration in terms of continually adding, you know, additional agents. And I said, is it just that your demand is grown or what, you know, know, why are we adding? He said, good question.
Chuck Krogman (08:57):
And he said, when I look at the call volumes, he goes, I’m, I’m not sure we’ve even figured out kind of where that is. I said, how exactly are you, how are you scheduling back to my, my power question, if you will? And there were two or three folks on the staff that had spreadsheets, and they, you know, they had a certain block of time that they had for coverage hours, and they kind of just spread those across and then crossed their fingers. And in doing so, I just said, well, I said, you know, one thing you might want to consider, there are tools and we can take historical data and we can actually map that to get your degree of variance, which essentially spreading people out at the time of need and doing a more efficient job. And I said, as a result, we may end up, you know, needing fewer staff or getting it in, you know, as a result, you’ll probably see improvements from csat, your call handling time, the wait times, et cetera.
Chuck Krogman (09:53):
Needless to say, that was my kind of bell ringer, if you will, is that the moment of excitement and possibility. He said, now that’s something I’d like to hear more about. And at the time, I hadn’t sold a lot of WFM, all I knew was a couple of quick questions. So we did, you know, follow up after that, they ended up deploying a workforce management solution, saw some very, very good results. And the amount of hiring was significantly less than they were planning, which meant the ROI was, it was less than 90 days when you look at the, the salary saved. So for me, it made me certainly made me a believer in the technology.
Josh Lupresto (10:36):
Good, great story. Let’s talk about, you know, this idea of does it need to be integrated? Do I need to buy it with my seats? Should I, you know, should I have this fully integrated WEM suite? What’s, what’s your perspective on maybe how do you, how would you encourage people to look at that process of should I add it, should I get it in the beginning? You know how do I look at that?
Chuck Krogman (10:57):
Yeah. I’m you know, having sold a, a really good amount of, of contact center and c a solutions, you know, my personal recommendation is, you know, you’re gonna get the most benefit if you, you know, if you can allow yourself the opportunity to deploy that full workforce engagement suite, right? You know, right out of the gate. Now, sometimes there’s limiting factors to that. Some is, is my staff just doesn’t have the cycles because, you know, we have other competing projects. But in the end you know, the summary in terms of where I feel a full integrated suite in terms of the value of workforce engagement management is it allows you to really, you know, enhance the agent experience. It allows the, the value of those one-on-ones that an agent has with their supervisor. So if you look at it holistically, like one of the examples I might share is, you know, if I’ve, if I’m an agent and I get a chance with my, you know, with my supervisor, I look at maybe a scorecard and see where, you know, my strengths have been on my calls, and they say, Hey, Chuck, you’ve done great, but your, your empathy hasn’t been so great with some of the, you know, with some of our customers.
Chuck Krogman (12:11):
And so what the, the recommendation is, of course, is why don’t we assign you into a learning track to take a couple of our courses on empathy. So what a, what that can do with a fully integrated suite is it allows you to one, you know, enroll me into an empathy class, when do I get assigned into that empathy class on the workforce management tool that says, call Peak volumes are down from two to four on Thursday afternoon, Chuck, you’ll be taking your empathy courses from two to four on Thursday afternoon, and it b brings it full cycle. And because I learned so much in my empathy class, I could actually then on my next meeting with my, you know, with my supervisor, I can see if I’ve improved and if I’ve improved, my supervisor can send me off to, you know, the, what we call a karma store here in Playvox land. And I can get a reward in terms of earning points and in using our gamification piece. So it brings it full cycle when you have all the tools at your disposal with one, you know, with one solution. But it also, you know, with that, you know like I said, there’s, there’s sometimes competing projects, resources, et cetera. So you also offer the flexibility of doing that in an a la carte fashion as well.
Josh Lupresto (13:31):
Woo. That’s awesome. If that doesn’t get you excited about technology, I don’t know what will, because that that, that leads us in maybe to the next question here. You know, in, in, when you’re in that sales cycle, I mean, sitting here listening to you, it’s, it’s clear as day how somebody should be able to understand how they need this. But, you know, what do you walk into for maybe a challenge perspective? What are you finding that, I have to imagine a big chunk of this is that people don’t know what they need. But I, I would love to get from your perspective, what are the hardest parts about this? Or maybe just some of the objections to overcome. What do people think they need or think they don’t need, or what do they think they already know? Just give us some insight into that.
Chuck Krogman (14:13):
Yeah, but I think there’s, you know, from our, you know, day-to-day world is, you know, we were born in the last decade as a, you know, cloud native digital first solution. So one of the things, even before we get into, hey, what’s under the, under the hood is just who is Playvox. So, you know, we have a, an opportunity to, to share that really, I think in power, powerful story in that being able to have the unfair advantage of starting with a clean sheet of paper and being able to bring forward a, a very mod, you know, modern, scalable architecture that allows you to take advantage of your complete technology stack. And so as we’re having these, you know, discovery questions with, with a customer, it’s very much about, Hey, you know, today I, I’m using Zendesk, or, you know, I’m using this CCaaS solution, and I have BambooHR.
Chuck Krogman (15:07):
And you know, there, there’s just, we’re pretty complex. And you know, right now, I think we just focus on, you know, getting agents in the seats. And, and that’s our main concern, the place where we, you know, where we like to educate and really, you know, show that there’s a lot of value is being that aggregator that allows you to, you know, get the data and the tickets and everything out of a Zendesk and allows you to bring these voice conversations. It allows you to be able to do all of this in a single journey. And it, and from a supervisory perspective, see where each of your agents are and where, you know, where they’re spending their time during the day and completely enhancing that agent experience. Because at the end of the day that’s one thing that our founder, you know, really created when he, when he put Playvox front and center, is, how can I, how can I enhance the agent experience?
Chuck Krogman (16:05):
How can I make it better? And so, when you put these tools, we all know the most outside of any, any of the software you might purchase, the agents and your, you know, people sitting in those seats are an extent, not only the most expensive resource, but the most value driven resource. And so a lot of what we will talk about in this, in, in working with customers is, you know, what is the agent experience look like? How are they looking at their schedule? How do they feel about improving in their day-to-day work? And how are you measuring that? And how are you, you know, how are you making these, you know, these stati the statistical data available, and then how does it roll up into your company goals, like csat, net promoter scores, et cetera.
Josh Lupresto (16:51):
Do you find that, when, when you’re asking some of those questions, do you find that they have answers right away? Or is there a lot of Yeah, I don’t know. We’re not really doing that
Chuck Krogman (17:01):
It’s, it’s almost a hundred percent is, I don’t know, because, you know, I I, everybody gets really comfortable in the way that they do things. And so they, they kind of get themselves into this rhythm. And so when you start to ask these discover, because as we talked about earlier, you know, we’re not policemen or lawyers and kind of, you know mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (18:03):
Good points. Yeah. okay. So, so we’re gonna get to a, a recent detailed example, but maybe before we do that, let’s say in the market, there’s Playvox and there’s competitor A and competitor B. How do you feel that, or, or, or, or what do you feel that some of the biggest strengths or the best fits are for, for Playvox, right? Where do you win, where do you want partners to be thinking about? Is it a customer size, is it a vertical, is it a need? Is it a, you know, whatever. I’ll, I’ll kind of leave that up to you to paint the picture.
Chuck Krogman (18:35):
Yeah. So when we look at, and this is really what excited me about coming to work here at Playvox, is it, you know, as we went, we were just kind of moving through this period of Covid and it moved, you know, when you look at kind of, everybody used to work in a centralized place, people came into the call center, now they’re all working from home. And even in today’s world, it’s hybrid. And it, it started to, it really started to emphasize the need for better tools when you can’t just simply look out over the floor and see who’s in their seat and who’s doing what. And so my time as far as coming to Playvox, I think was, you know, I think the, the exciting part of that, and where I feel like we have a decided advantage over competitor A or competitor B is one, you have to start with the just, you know, the, as I mentioned earlier, we were born in the last decade.
Chuck Krogman (19:32):
And when we use terms like, you know, cloud native, digital first, cloud native important, we never had a legacy solution. We never stood up hardware anywhere. It’s, it’s been cloud native from the get-go. But digital first now we, you know, we embrace, we always, you know, we see voices still king in the primary channel in most contact centers today, but digital first, there’s, you know, competitor A and competitor B typically are challenged with that because a lot of our main competitors were born in the nineties. And getting things up to speed in terms of omnichannel and being able to really see what that full journey looks like in terms of, you know, real-time data and, and also being what I call AI by design. So we were, as the solution was built, AI was definitely, you know, a technology microservices in terms of architecturally the platform was all, you know, a tool that was in our toolbox.
Chuck Krogman (20:29):
So it allows us to be extremely a API friendly. So, hey, you, you know, do you have this api? Yes, we can connect it much different than the old kind of c t I middleware games of, of having to have really complicated integration work. So you see that, how is that reflected? We typically have a much less pro-services cost because we’re leveraging just open APIs. And like I said, just that ability, I, I, I, I come back to is, you know, we had the unfair advantage of just starting with a clean sheet of paper with, with this you know, leveraging these types of tools. The other thing that we put a high port importance on, as I mentioned, people might say, well, who is Playvox? It also means we have to, we gotta shine on every single opportunity. So we, our customer success team is just white glove treatment.
Chuck Krogman (21:27):
We assign a customer success manager to every single, every single deployment. And our, our, IT shows in the, again, the underlying architecture, how it was built, ease of use, modular, but that translates into our time to value. You know, we had a thousand plus seat contact center that, or workforce management solution that we sold signed in the month of October. And they were, you know, presenting at, at one of our you know, sales kickoff type forums in January already talking about the noted improvements they were seeing and how the executives were rallying around, which just translates into unmatched time to value sign the deal in October, a thousand plus agents talking about the results in January, some of our competitors wouldn’t even have a project manager assigned by that time
Josh Lupresto (22:22):
Chuck Krogman (22:23):
Love it.
Josh Lupresto (22:28):
Yeah. So no, look, you just, it comes back to you. You gotta just do some of the basics really good, and Oh, oh yeah, you have a cool technology. Oh, great. Yeah. You know, like we talked about this earlier, it’s, you gotta get, if you get the basics right, the rest is easy.
Chuck Krogman (22:43):
Yeah. And we’re, you know, we’re also excited as, you know, as we’ve grown over the last couple of years. I mean, the relationship that I might add is, you know, we’ve put a high premium on aligning with those that really know this business very well, and this relationship with Telarus, it is extremely meaningful for us in that you mentioned J-Lowe, Mike Baillargeon, yourself, I mean, Samantha, there’s so many good people that really understand the contact center space. So for us to be able to forge a relationship of, yeah, we’re performing out in the market, we’re signing great customers, but you know, this was also a very strategic pillar, is align yourself with the right partners. And we feel really strong about our relationship with Telarus.
Josh Lupresto (23:27):
Appreciate it. Appreciate it. All right. Example time. So walk us through a, a deal that you got brought into and you know, it, it, it’s okay if it’s, Hey, this deal looked absolutely nothing like it was when somebody brought it to us or we found it and our thing, our product fit Exactly. Perfect. Or, you know, I’m just kind of curious cuz what we see a lot in this part of the this part of the podcast is the deals don’t always end like they start. And so I would love for you to walk us through, did you have one that ended, like it started or looked nothing like when it got done and really what were you told the problem was? What kind of solution did you put in place and, you know, what, what did it solve? How was it different after?
Chuck Krogman (24:12):
Yeah, so I think, you know, one that would come to mind, and this is a, an online pharmacy type solution. And it was initially raised to us as an opportunity where they have an existing CCaaS solution in place. And as we know, a lot of the CCaaS providers have moved in and say we also do WFM, however, the, as a, as a move from spreadsheets into this first time WFM that was being provided by their CCaaS provider. It was, it was a bit, they were a finding a, a bit cumbersome and b, that in some ways it wasn’t even matching up or, you know, providing, and it could be degree of comfort with their spreadsheets cuz they used them for a long time, but it was falling short. And so as far as an opportunity that was coming to us, it was, it was uncovered and just said, Hey, I don’t, from a partner perspective said, I don’t know a lot about the dynamics of this, but what I do know is they’re not satisfied with this current solution.
Chuck Krogman (25:20):
And I, I’d love to help ’em out. And the partner knew absolutely nothing about Playvox. They said, been hearing a lot of good stuff about you guys. And so the approach that we took is, you know, one, why don’t we collectively just get on a call with your customer? Let’s, let’s see if we can find out. And so we did the discovery call and you know, interestingly enough is that they did not have a savvy team of workforce management folks. So as we asked, you know, more about the, the deeper dive questions, they were, you know, one, they were very pleased. They were like, yeah, this seems like now we understand why we’re not kind of able to do what we thought we were going to be able to do. And so we, I think you know, we proved to be a very strategic advisor during the sales process, but we also opened up and said, we’ve talked a lot about scheduling, how, what do you do from just the everyday agent experience?
Chuck Krogman (26:17):
Do you monitor 25% of your calls, like, you know, once a month or what’s the approach there? And the initial feedback on that was, well, that’s another group, but I also know they’re not real pleased with how things are going. It’s very manual and we have a hard time kind of tracking or making things come full circle. And, and so they introduced us to across the aisle and we set up a separate, separate conversation to talk through the quality management components. Meanwhile, you know, as that first discovery call ended, we, we did a one-off with the partner himself and just said, Hey, what’d you think of the discovery? We end up doing a one-to-one demo with him, so he knew what we were gonna be taking his customer through next. He said, this is great. And I, he goes, he goes, I’ve dealt with a lot of solutions in the marketplace, glad I was introduced to you guys.
Chuck Krogman (27:11):
And he said I’ll sit in on the demo, but you guys, you guys have got this, I’ll just kind of sit more in the back and learn just like, just like my customer will go through the journey I’m gonna go through in their shoes. And so ultimately we ended up selling a full workforce engagement management solution to what started is just simply, I need a tool that’s easier to use and can help me manage my workforce a little bit better. And you know, through the process it was you know, pretty sizable opportunity what, you know, might’ve looked like. It was I think for just under 300 agents, you know, I think the deal that we ended up doing with them was, you know, just under $200,000. Woo.
Josh Lupresto (27:58):
Nice. Good stuff. Yeah. Love a story that ends with that number. Good one. Yeah.
Chuck Krogman (28:03):
And a multi-year deal to boot.
Josh Lupresto (28:05):
Yeah. No, no, no. And, and, and it’s likely not gonna shrink either. That’s the beauty about these things.
Chuck Krogman (28:10):
Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (28:11):
Okay. So I, I think you, you brought this home in the beginning, but maybe just, let’s put a bow in this I, I, I’m about all right. Partners understand it, they’ve listened to this point. What do you want to tell a partner that’s listening? Maybe they’re not comfortable, maybe they’ve not, maybe they were like this last partner where they go, I don’t know a lot about this. Maybe I know a little bit about contact center, but what do you tell ’em? What are the questions that you give ’em? Maybe let’s put a bow on that.
Chuck Krogman (28:36):
Yeah, that’s a great question, Josh. And I’m a firm believer in when I’m speaking with partners and just keep it simple, is that I recognize in, because I’ve worked with partners for many, many years, and I know that, you know, if you’re gonna try to understand security solutions, UCaaS solutions, CCaaS solutions, bots, there’s, there’s a ton of technology out there. And at the end of the day, the, the thing that I like to, to share with workforce management and why it’s a, a value add component, and it doesn’t require, you know, we don’t need to have you be an expert, but just by asking a couple of simple questions, but before even getting to the question itself is it’s, I like to always say, you know, if you’re presenting and you’re working on an opportunity as acast solution, for instance, I always have always referenced this, even back to previous companies.
Chuck Krogman (29:34):
Do you want to get $1 out of the sale or do you want to get $4? Because if you’re selling a pretty large CCaaS solution, there’s a contact center somewhere in there. Now they might call it a help desk. They could, they could call it a support desk, they could call it inside sales, but there’s a contact center. And within that contact center is a very meaningful part of the business. It’s about customer retention, it’s about customer satisfaction. It, there’s all sorts of metrics that just show the health of the company. And that those contact center folks will have a loud voice as to who gets selected. And if you found the contact center, and you start to go through that, that piece, now you’ve just collected dollars, two and three. And you can also say, Hey, we’ve talked a lot about the contact center, your routing, you know, what kind of, you know, are you on, are you using digital channels voice?
Chuck Krogman (30:33):
What are your, what’s your reporting look like? How many sites do you have? Do you use BPOs? And now let me ask one more question. How do you, how do you schedule, how do you keep the agents in the right place at the right time? And by asking that single question, you’ve just added another dollar or two into that $4 equation. But so yeah, I encourage you know, from a partner perspective, it’s just, you know, ask, you could really just ask a couple of questions because we’re all surrounded by experts that if, if my main goal is to walk, because this is where I see the fear factor, is I’ve sold a lot of
Chuck Krogman (31:19):
And if they say, yeah, most of the, the, the UCaaS decision makers will say, separate group, but I’d love to introduce you to Amy mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (32:17):
Good. Great stuff. All right. Final thoughts here. As Chuck looks into his crystal ball and says, I’m looking out the next one to two years, do we just double down on everything that you just mentioned? Do you want the partners to pay attention for anything that you see in the market changing customer needs, tech stack, take this anywhere you want it in, in, in Chuck’s opinion, what do you think?
Chuck Krogman (32:42):
Well, there’s, there’s so many things that and I know you, you said I couldn’t go for three and a half hours, so I’m just gonna give you the three and a half minute version. But there’s, there’s a couple of things, Josh, that I think are important is one in today, in this kind of short-term window that we talk about in the next couple of years, is that there’s a strong desire from customers to do more with a single vendor. And so as you’re out speaking and you have the ability to be able to have a wider portfolio, so rather than just go with a single standalone solution, offer somebody that full suite, you have that much more that you get to sell that customer over a period of time. I do see that there’s also plenty, plenty, plenty of runway of people moving from, believe it or not, legacy solutions to cloud.
Chuck Krogman (33:33):
You know, we just saw an announcement the other day about the condition of Avaya, and Avaya has a ton of legacy on-premise solutions. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (34:50):
Good stuff. Okay. You’re right. We could go on and talk for everybody, AI, and it’ll be all robots next time we get on and talk. Maybe, maybe I’m not even real right now. Maybe I just, I’m here from Lensa, you know, who knows
Chuck Krogman (35:06):
All right, well thanks Joshua. It was truly my pleasure. I appreciate the time. Spend some time with you and look forward to celebrating a lot of success this year.
Josh Lupresto (35:14):
Okay, everybody that wraps us up, I’m your host Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering. Chuck Krogman, SVP of Global Sales of Playvox. Until next time.
Don’t miss today’s episode featuring Jason Lowe, Telarus Solution Architect for Contact Center. Join in as he discusses a key contact center product some companies just can not do without, which is Work Force Management (WFM). He talks about why they need it, how to overcome objections, and most importantly, how to help your contact center customers see the ROI on it!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We are here to talk about contact center workforce management, and we’re gonna talk about why that is so important. But before we get to breaking that down, what it is, why it matters, why you care, I’d like to welcome in Mr. Jason Lowe also goes by the name of J Lo into the studio today.
Jason Lowe (00:33):
Thank you for having me, Josh. Happy to be here.
Josh Lupresto (00:36):
So J lo I want to talk about your background. Part of my favorite you know, thing of doing this is really learning where everybody came from, right? Did you used to cut grass and then you decided you want to get into tech? You know, where, where did you start? What’s your background? How did you get here? And give us the story,
Jason Lowe (00:53):
Man. So I, I, I’ve always been into technology. My parents got an Atari, which I loved, and then we got an Apple to see computer, and they sent me to a computer camp and did all of these things. But when I, quite frankly, when I got to high school and I didn’t want to go to my other classes, I would go and hang out in the computer lab. And the person that ran the computer lab was very nice and knew that if I wasn’t there helping her with the computer lab, that I would probably be at, you know, the 7-Eleven on the corner or something like that. So she let me go ahead and, and spend as much time there. And so I got to spend time networking computers together and setting up software. And then I got a job right outta high school doing the same stuff, and it eventually led to writing code and doing some of the really super cool, crazy techy things. But then I was tired of not having a degree. So I went back to school, got my bachelor’s, and ironically right after I got my bachelor’s, I’m looking around for a job, any job whatsoever. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (02:07):
Yes.
Jason Lowe (02:07):
Yes. And he is now at Verint, by the way. But he he and I bonded and he tried to shoehorn me into like three or four other different positions. And I finally got in as a technical trainer at U cn. And so that’s how my technology, at least in the software as a service space career kind of got started. But yeah, previously everything from, you know, writing code to networking and computer maintenance to software installations.
Josh Lupresto (02:34):
I love it. I, I love it too, because it all translates, right? I mean, you know, I, I never thought when I was going to school that I would need to know what the OSI model was and understanding all these different layers, but, you know, you have these core things that you have that you’re taught that it always kind of comes back to, regardless of if, if you, you know, we, we talk about this of the things that we went to school for, are we doing those now? Right. That’s a whole nother podcast on its own. But I think that core you know, that troubleshooting, plugging it together, right? You just, you’re starting to learn what you like, right? So it, it’s been awesome to kind of see that progression and then, you know, turned into inContact and then there, I believe there’s some product experience in there. So I think you’ve gotten a cool rounded out experience in my mind of the background. Now, obviously specializing in the contact center side here as an architect.
Jason Lowe (03:18):
Yeah. It’s, it’s really funny how things turn out. Everything’s so iterative, right? You build on top of things. And when I got to UC, I was a technical trainer, and then I go walking into Scott Welch’s office. Scott is now COO of Europe for five nine, and I said, I need a mentor. And he said, okay, here, take a test. And so he gave me an LMS personality profile that said it was a 96% match for sales engineering, which I had never heard of before in my life. And so a year and a half later, I’m in the SE team, and, and I also played se roles at, you know, talkdesk and, and things like that. But really the, the fun and interesting thing where things went a little crazy for me was I met the SKO with NICE in Vegas, outside by a campfire, having a drink with Kristen Emer, who is the, now the, you know, chief product officer, I believe mm-hmm.
Jason Lowe (04:09):
For Play box. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (04:47):
So, so you got to see a lot of progression there. I mean, UCN has turning to Incontact and you got to see the variant partnership, product side, engineering side architecture, all of that. And, and, you know, seeing Incontact grow over the years a as you saw that I want to talk a little bit about and, and weave this into the workforce management side, right? Because, you know, we always talk about, from a discovery call perspective, we’re looking to understand where the customer is, where, what do they need? Do they need the full suite of everything? Do they need just this little segment of tools that we’re trying to augment because maybe the customer already bought that and the agents trying to wedge in with some product or service. So first off, help us understand, for anybody that doesn’t know WFM and, and what this whole workforce management thing is, break that down for us.
Jason Lowe (05:30):
So WFM is one of a set of tools that are collectively referred to as workforce experience management these days. He used to also previously be called workforce optimization. And WFM in a nutshell, the Cliff Notes version is a tool that in one side you feed in a bunch of variables, and on the other side it spits out a schedule for your agents. That’s basically what it is. Now, the variables that you feed in are everything from how many calls we’ve taken, what service levels we want for these calls you know, what shifts do they wanna work, what kind of calls can they handle? Are we expecting increases or decreases based on seasonality or on advertising spends or these different things? It takes a new count, all of these different factors before it spits out to schedule that allows you to answer the number of calls that you’re going to get in the service level window that you want.
Jason Lowe (06:23):
Service level being answering within a certain interval. Like, we want to get 80 to 85% of our calls answered within 30 seconds or something like that. And so it takes all that in consideration, and then it just makes sure that you’re optimizing the number of people that you need to have on the floor answering phone calls at any given time. So really it’s the thing that optimizes things in both directions. One, let’s optimize the customer’s experience by making sure that an agent’s there to answer the phone call, but let’s also optimize the spend for the company by making sure that we’re accomplishing this with the lowest number of actual agents or employees necessary to meet those levels.
Josh Lupresto (07:00):
Awesome. I wanna, I wanna go back to maybe one of the first examples that you, you, you did with this. But maybe let’s, let’s kick back even further of how do we know who needs this, right? I mean, do most customers know that they need, it is a certain size that you would always see of when it gets to the size, eh, it’s kind of when the spreadsheets thing doesn’t work anymore or steer us around that?
Jason Lowe (07:22):
Great question. So I would say in most cases, when you’re looking at somewhere north of 40 to 50 agents, you’re probably going to benefit from something like this. Now, there are other variabilities that kind of play into things like you know, do we have a follow the sun model? Do we have just one shift, eight to five Monday through Friday, and that’s it. Do we have long calls? Do we have short calls? Are we doing outbound? Also, what other types of media channels are we handling, like chat, sms, email, et cetera with our agents? Lots of different factors, but generally rule of thumb, if you have more than 40 to 50 agents, if you will, whatever you call those agents mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (08:05):
Thumb. Okay. So let’s, let’s look back at I wanna show a progression here as we, as we build on this at the end of, you know, then versus now kind of thing. If you flash back to one of the first opportunities that you ever worked in as an engineer where you went, Hey, I need wfm, or we need to add WFM in here. Walk, walk us through what was that like and what was the product set then, and how much value did it add?
Jason Lowe (08:26):
At that time, it really was just the scheduling component, but then there were also some affiliated products that also further justified it on, on the scheduling side of things. That was enough of a financial justification to make it happen. This was an instance where I think they were dealing with 75 agents. They were doing spreadsheets. They did have a day shift and a swing shift, and they wanted to be really particular about their schedule, and they wanted to really make sure that they were hitting those service level goals. And so they were less concerned with providing, you know, the agent with a consistent eight to five Monday through Friday schedule, but let’s make sure that we have the right staff scheduled wherever needed. And so, you know, you have two different extremes in using the tools. One is going to be flexibility in the agent schedule, the other is going to be let’s be consistent for the agent and, and just provide them a day job type thing.
Jason Lowe (09:15):
So the more flexible you can be with a schedule for an agent and start and finish at a specific time, take breaks at specific time, then you’re going to be able to customize things a little better to hit those service levels. And in this particular case, it really made sense because they were using Excel spreadsheets and they were just kind of going off of what they felt. But when we dove into things and really took a look at their call volume, imported it into a WFM tool, they could really see the flows, the ebbs and flows during the day and see that sometimes people were taking breaks or were scheduled to take breaks or lunches during some of these peak periods. That’s why their service levels were going down. And they weren’t, they probably knew it was happening, but they weren’t recognizing it cuz they didn’t really have it right in front of their face in the form of a good
Josh Lupresto (09:57):
Report. So how do you how do you pull that in to help the customer see that it’s not just an added cost? What, how do you quantify that into roi? What’s the easiest top couple things to, to drill that down?
Jason Lowe (10:10):
I would say just taking a look at the fact that, that the people in a contact center are the number one cost. There’s no que I mean, no matter what technology you’re going to buy, you’re still the biggest expense is going to be who you’re paying and how much, and anything you can do to optimize that level of personnel or staffing, or dare I say, minimize it to what is just necessary to hit the goals, you’re going to save yourself money. How is that gonna be? Well, you’re always going to be overstaffing if you’re not really analyzing and taking a look at what’s going on with all of these different variables and making sure that you have people staffed at the right time, but also not there at the times when you don’t need them. Yeah. And so it, it really boils down to, okay, how many agents do you have? What’s your labor expenditure? Why don’t we take some of your call volumes, run a couple of simulated schedules and see what your labor costs would be. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (11:06):
It. Love it. That’s good. How, how do you think, let’s talk about pros and cons. You know, our, our job, right as engineers and architects is to help the partner solve the customer’s business problems. And, you know, surely we would love it if we can come in and we can sell ’em contact center and, and you know, the workforce suite and uc and security and all these things, but it, it, we’re only able to do a, what the budget allows. And then, you know, b what they really need that they can identify that solves their problems at the current time. So where I’m going with this is we talk about a fully integrated suite or just these a la carte products that help somebody wedge in. How do you, you know, how do you look at pros and cons there? You know, what’s my pro or con either way of saying, Mr Customer, you should leave this older technology that you have because by the time we bolt on, you know, it’s gonna be X, y, and z, or no, you know, what, wedge it in here. How do you go through that thought process?
Jason Lowe (12:00):
Well, it’s, it’s interesting, right? You have to take into consideration a lot of different things like the philosophy and the environment in the customer. And what I mean by that is are they cutting edge technology adapters or are they someone that likes to hang onto their legacy stuff? How open are they to that, to that conversation? There’s always that burden of teaching people what this new technology can do. And I’ve given you this analogy, but I think it’s a very pertinent one. I I’m giving it up. I’m, I’m not turning in my man card, not gonna do it. But I like this show called Downton Abbey. I just like it. Okay,
Jason Lowe (12:52):
That’s because she didn’t understand that electricity could drive mixers and refrigerators and all these different things. She had to be educated as to why this tool was going to make her life better and easier and more efficient. And sometimes in the sales process with a lot of these products, you go through that. So ROI is really important on wfm, it’s a little bit more tangible on QM and some of these other ancillary products. It can be a little bit harder to prove, but it is provable. You just have to do the analysis. You just have to get into the numbers and figure it out. Now as it pertains to, do we do it as a add-on? Do we do it as a suite of products? Again, that’s kind of the philosophy of the customer. Do they want to write one check? Do they want to have one hand to shake, one throat to choke? Whatever your favorite analogy is. Or are they okay with trying to go with different pieces and, and bringing together a suite of best of breed products? And there’s really no right or wrong answer for everybody because everybody has a different use case that is going to be met by different product mixes. Oftentimes people just kind of go with their gut or they go with what their company philosophy is.
Josh Lupresto (14:00):
Fair, good point. Do you find though, that with a product like this, are you getting them to consider things that they haven’t thought of yet? You know, what, what, what percentage of customers do you think are considering these things, right? Are, are thinking about the agent and how long they’re on and how much their costs are and all those things? Or are you finding that you’re having to bring up in these discovery discussions, Hey, have you thought about this? Have you thought about the software to be able to do these things?
Jason Lowe (14:27):
There’s a lot of factors there. Sometimes it’s, they’re familiar with the technology, but it hasn’t been the right time yet to try and implement it. Sometimes it’s complete discovery and education because they’ve been so stuck on older technology that they haven’t even considered doing this yet. It really is fun to go through that process with customers from both perspectives, right? We now have employees that have used this in previous lives. We want to adopt this technology. We haven’t been big enough to do it yet, now we’re big enough to do it. Or our, our executive team is really emphasizing the trend of now, which is the customer experience. Let’s make sure we’re differentiating ourselves by how well we’re treating our customers. We have to do the better job of that. Let’s make sure that we are incorporating these different tools that can make that better.
Jason Lowe (15:13):
And therefore, therefore, by extension make the customer experience better. And so it, it, wow, it’s, it’s a fascinating time to be in this space. Let’s just put it that way because technology is always changing as you know, Mr. Podcaster in all of these different areas and all of these different and exciting innovations are really bearing fruit at a lot of different levels. And there’s always that bell curve, right, of early adoption versus late adoption, et cetera. Contact centers run the gamut just like everybody else. They all run the gamut. And so it, it’s fun to go in and see what levers you can pull or push to educate them as to what can actually make things better for them. How, why, how it’s gonna save them money, how it’s going to improve their customer experience and make their lives better.
Josh Lupresto (16:03):
So if we get so, so that’s perfect scenario that that’s when it goes good. When we’re able to discover and we can pull out everything that they need. So if, if, let’s say a partner’s listening up to this point, they’re ready to hang up off this podcast and go try what you said and put into play. I wanna talk about the bad things, right? Not to be a Debbie Downer, but what are the problems that you’re gonna run into in a conversation that you see, you know, what, what is it that, that customers struggle with if they don’t wanna adopt WFM or they don’t wanna move in that direction, or just wanna some of the challenges. If a partner goes down and has this discovery and asks some of these questions on their own, what are they gonna run into that? A customer might say, eh, I don’t know.
Jason Lowe (16:40):
Well, the, the number one thing that you’re facing when you’re in a situation like that is, you know, it’s not necessarily the competitor, which is another provider. It’s, you know, no change or not make any change at all. They, they just want to go with the status quo. That’s a tough one to fight. And really, it comes down to education. And sometimes partners may they, how can I put this the right way? They, they want to make sure that they’re coming across the right way when they’re talking to their customers about new technologies, they may not feel armed or educated. And that’s where myself and my solution architect teammates really come into play here. We can be that person in your hip pocket or side by side with you on these phone calls to have those conversations, to do that education, to make sure that the customer realizes the benefit that these technologies could bring to them. It’s, it’s the role we play here at Telarus. We, we make everybody better, including our partners, by giving them greater resources to accomplish those very things.
Josh Lupresto (17:40):
Love it. All right. Let’s get through, you know, we talked about an early example. Let’s talk about a more recent example. We can leave customer name out of, of this. But, but what I’d love to hear about this is that, you know, we always talk a lot about w what the deal ends up closing at really wasn’t always what it started as. Whether that’s because we ask a lot of questions naturally, and we gotta understand what fits where and APIs and integrations and all that good stuff. But maybe walk me through an example where you helped a partner, you got brought into this situation, they said, Jason, here’s, here’s what it is. And by the time you got through your, your, your discovery process and all of that, it ended up being that they needed this. And let, let’s hear kind of what that is, and then really what did it solve?
Jason Lowe (18:22):
Great question. So I, I think doing discovery the right way leads to discussions about these newer technologies. And it can be something as simple as just asking a question about something that maybe they hadn’t considered on purpose, or if they didn’t have experience with it and, and listening to them and go, what’s that? How does that work? How is that gonna provide me a benefit? And then you get into a greater conversation of, of what it is that those tools can do. Really the discovery process is key. I I think it’s very, very, very key in, in making sure that you’re leading the conversation the right way. Plus, if you’re doing it right, you could find opportunity a little bit later down the road to introduce some of those newer things. A recent use case would be actually one that I’m thinking right now was they just were interested in updating their phone systems.
Jason Lowe (19:12):
They didn’t have much of an ivr, but they had heard, and this, this was the term they, they they used with me. They had heard of some of these newer technologies that maybe they wanted to figure out to use down the road. And so that led to a conversation of, okay, well let’s talk about those newer technologies and these are what they can do and, and these are the ways that they can improve that customer experience. And it led to a lot of aha moments for the customer. It led to a lot of, oh, and well, you can do that now. Oh, I’d heard that that might be possible, but I didn’t think that that was technology that we would be able to afford, let alone justify. And then when you get into the details of that and they realize that there are coste effective ways to incorporate a lot of these newer technologies into their practice, it, it really made an impact. And what started out as just a, let’s replace just our phone system and we’re gonna do all of these things as futures. And later on it progressed into, okay, guess what? We’re gonna add this piece and this piece and this piece with these two pieces being phase two, this piece being phase three ended up probably being about twice as big of a deal as it was
Josh Lupresto (20:16):
Originally. Love it. Message here. Bring in the team. We can help.
Jason Lowe (20:20):
We do those things for
Josh Lupresto (20:21):
You,
Jason Lowe (20:47):
Just ask the questions and ask the questions around how people are communicating. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. How are your customers talking to you? How are you talking to your customers? Who are your customers? What is their experience like? Is is there anything you want to do to improve that? What systems are you using now to facilitate those things that you’re doing? Then you can ask, you know, questions that are a little bit standard. Like, you know, what is your sla, what is your service level? What is your CSAT score? You know, what is all of these different things that maybe you dropped some acronyms or you mentioned some things that they hadn’t quite considered. Your job really is not to dive into and ask all of the, at least maybe your job could be this if you wanted it to be, but you don’t necessarily need to dive in and ask all the super technical questions.
Jason Lowe (21:38):
You just need to progress it to, let’s have another conversation. Let’s get to a point where we’re talking to somebody that we can discuss these things in greater detail. And oh, by the way, I’m gonna call Jason and have Jason on the phone with me to go ahead and, and have that conversation. So it, it’s just ask questions. Try and learn a little bit more about what they like, what they don’t like, what’s keeping ’em up at night, what types of technologies have they heard about and they want to consider and, and go from there.
Josh Lupresto (22:06):
Love it. Okay. Final thoughts here. So in honor, miss Cleo, if anybody knows what that is, you know, those, those late night infomercials where she promises to tell your future, we’ve seen a lot of evolution to your point, right? We talk about that all the time on this podcast of technology. The rate of change is faster than anything that we’ve ever seen. If you look out, I don’t know, it’s hard to look out even past 12 months right now. But if you look out 12 plus months, anything that you see changing dramatically in this space that you want partners to kind of be aware of and pay attention to,
Jason Lowe (22:37):
Customer experience is going to be influenced by a lot more technology than just an ability to answer the phone. There are intelligent agents, there are, there’s AI everywhere, doing all sorts of things in all the different places at once. Sam Nelson, one of the great people we work with here at Telarus just today kicked off one of her minutes, or her, I can’t remember the exact name, Sam Snippets. Sam Snippets, where she was talking about AI and the role that it plays in the contact center and in customer service and customer experience. That is very, very true. And it seems like every time we turn a corner and we’re talking to a provider, they’re taking AI and applying it to a different place in the contact center and in the customer experience that we hadn’t thought of or considered before. And so that’s all leading to the point where you just need to be comfortable with the fact that technology is going to continue to evolve, technology is going to continue to make things better.
Jason Lowe (23:30):
But the bottom line is, is that there will always be someone that wants to talk to a live person and that doesn’t necessarily want to talk to a machine or doesn’t want to try and serve themselves in certain ways. And so there will always be people that you can talk to that are contact center or customer experience centric. Another thing, if I may mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (24:18):
Love it. Okay, Mr. Jason Lowe, thanks for coming into the studio with me today, man.
Jason Lowe (24:22):
Thank you for having me.
Josh Lupresto (24:24):
Okay, that wraps us up. All right, everybody, we’re outta here for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering. This is Workforce Management with Mr. Jason Lowe, solution architect at Telarus.
Did you know you can help your customers purchase, install, and monetize EV Charging stations on their property? You can do that and a whole lot more! Don’t miss this episode where Stephanie Turzanski of Vinvu talks about how to unlock the sales process, and approach a technology segment that’s projected to massively grow over the next 5-10 years.
https://youtu.be/m6HTzAjZgYI Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We are wrapping up our track on how to make huge profits from building ev charging stations. And I know if you’ve listened to other tracks, this is dramatically different than how we talk about cloud and containers and security. But it’s new and exciting and, and there’s a lot of stuff coming with this. So excited today to have on Stephanie Turzanski of VinVu. Stephanie, welcome on.
Stephanie Turzanski (00:39):
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Josh Lupresto (00:43):
So Steph, we always like to kick these off with your background. You know, it seems like in this industry, in our world, some people were set out to do this. Some people got sucked into this world, and I always just love hearing everybody’s kind of windy story. How did you get in? How did you get to where you’re at and, and who was VinVu?
Stephanie Turzanski (01:00):
So it was, it’s a very interesting story. I actually owned a marketing firm for 12 years, and I met my business partner who owned a telecom firm. And through him I got to know the ins and outs of telecom and how it went, how it worked but there are a few things about it that I didn’t really like. So we decided to create a model that was going to be way more transparent, letting our clients know who our master agent was, how to interact with them, and, you know, just kind of go through that process. During Covid, you know, we, we originally were just selling phones, internet, some cloud covid hits, and we wound up selling thermal scanners, and that led us into the whole IOT world. At the same time, the building in Miami collapsed. So it really made us look more into, okay, so what caused the building to collapse?
Stephanie Turzanski (02:01):
What kind of technologies could have been put into place? And through the help with Telarus, we were able to see this whole other world that wasn’t just a phone system or internet or cloud. We were able to look into a world that had so many other facets that we were able to put into a building. So from there, we created this model that now does internet wi manage wifi throughout the entire building, having ubiquitous wifi security cameras and access control smart censoring through the IoT sensors through the different partners of Telarus, where we actually will go back to property and casualty insurance and see if we can either get discounts or rebates or lowering of the PNC because of mitigative risk. And then EV charging stations. So from that standpoint, we’ve created this model where we now can go to a developer, whether it’s ground up or already existing and say, here’s what we can do for your building.
Stephanie Turzanski (03:01):
Here’s the money you can save, here’s the money you can make from it. We’re all leveraging technology. So I never knew anything about technology. I wasn’t a a tech person, I was a marketing person. My job was to find out, well, how can I make this work and make it appealing? So I think that served me when we started our company and just creating this whole real estate model with the EV charging and the smart censoring and, and all those components have really been great for us. It’s actually really exciting because, you know, we’re not having to deal with the IT guy for anything, and it’s a little outside of their scope of what happens. And we get to really educate, especially in the northeast, all of these developers who have no idea what technology is. And it’s been really, really fun.
Josh Lupresto (03:53):
I love it. It’s such a different approach, right? And it’s gotta be so just eyes wide open that there’s so much possibility out there, right? So, so you went from looking at some of the traditional tech stack that a lot of people focus on, and then you, you, you tackling this kind of EV and everything else model. How do you, how do you look at kind of the land grab on that, right? Because there’s not a lot of people doing what you’re doing, and I don’t think a lot of people fully understand it. So what’s the, what do you feel the potential is there? Right.
Stephanie Turzanski (04:20):
So we have over 25 active projects right now across the country. It’s myself and my business partner, and again, this is where Telarus is so vital to us because we will leverage their project managers and the engineering staff that’s there, and then just through the suppliers of, of TA’s portfolio to help manage all of these things. But what’s really been interesting is that we keep coming up with other components,
Josh Lupresto (05:50):
Yeah, I think it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s just nice. I think we’ve always sat back and we’ve waited for, oh, one day we’ll get all these cool technologies that we’ll finally be able to sell, right? We’ve, we’ve all had success selling certain things, but we’ve seen these other things in the market and just haven’t been able to monetize ’em. So we’re, we’re super excited to finally have the right provider portfolio set that that gives you the block of Legos that you need. And so how do you you know, that, that thought in mind, right? With the pace of innovation in this and, and you, you’re finding all these new things. Is it through customer need? Are you guys kind of just designing what you think would be adjacent? Because it seems to me like you’re grabbing things that are make perfectly logical sense that just nobody’s thought of.
Stephanie Turzanski (06:30):
Yeah, we we actually don’t always ask, so what do you want? We will say, so have you thought about this instead? It’s a different approach in that it gets the customer thinking, it gets them going, I don’t know what the hell that is, but sure, I’m open to it. What, what is it? And you know, in the world that we work in, we really have to find ways to leverage the technology. Not every builder and developer are going to wanna cash out money. They’re, they’re not gonna wanna put that money out. They don’t want to spend anything, but they need the solutions. So how do we offset that? So that’s why we’ve tried to pair it with either insurance or do you have the managed wifi solutions that give you money, the EV stations that give you money, you know, something to help offset the cost that allows them to have this technology into place.
Stephanie Turzanski (07:22):
So we’re trying to create a need for each of our customers versus just saying, being an order taker. Yeah. And saying, all right, so what do you want? What do you need? And, and kind of move forward. So we’re trying to be very innovative. We’re trying to make customers think and then make them also realize there’s a ton of stuff out there. You don’t have to be that subject matter expert. You don’t have to be the one in the know that’s our job, but let me be that person and let us come in and help you find what’s going to make your building attractive, especially if you’re trying to gain tenants. But 80% of our portfolio is multi-family. So, you know, that’s a, that’s a big draw that you have to make, to have tenants come in and see what amenities they want. And so if you have the things like the EV and other components, it does make it better selling for that particular building owner. And that’s what we try to position, try to position how can we make this sellable and sexier versus what you had before.
Josh Lupresto (08:26):
That’s good, good stuff. All right. So, so the topic for this is getting back to the core of e the EV side, right? I, i, I remember the first time that Jason Kaufman brought us to us and said, Hey just so you guys know, we can sell ev charging systems. We went, what is it? You know, you’re kidding, right? So, so you, you’ve tackled this, right? You’re, you’re down the road with this. I would love for you to kind of walk us through, you know, this is a new space, it’s greenfield. What are the deals like, what are the gotchas? What have, have you seen, what’s your experience been with with going after helping people build out ev charging systems?
Stephanie Turzanski (09:01):
So Jason also came to us and said, Hey, we’ve got a partner that does ev I know that you’re dealing a lot with buildings. Would you be interested? And we said, yes, absolutely. We know that EV is a new thing coming out. We know that buildings have to be future-proofed. So when we looked into it I mean, every project that we have has EV attached to it. And again, that’s us saying, do you want this? What we have seen is that the minimum purchasing of EV stations are two stations because you get the tax credits from it. So when you get the tax credits, when you get the rebates, it helps offset the cost. Again, leveraging other ways to pay for a technology. But we’re seeing a lot of developers wanting to go towards the owner operator model. So they don’t wanna have to pay for the infrastructure.
Stephanie Turzanski (09:57):
They rather just get mailbox money. But because they have this amenity in there we have a few that may want to do financing, but we’re finding majority of them wanting to, if if it’s one or two, they’ll pay for it up front. You’re maybe looking at 30 grand all in, and they’ll just keep that money. For the most part, we’re getting orders of 35, 10, 15, you know, some bulk deals that a lot of these developers say, I don’t wanna pay for it, but I need it. So what do you have to offer? And that’s actually another thing that led us into saying, well, I think we wanna also be owner operators. So we’re now actually funding our own deals and pulling all that together. So when we do have a developer that says, I need 15 charging stations, but I don’t wanna pay for it, we can say, no problem.
Stephanie Turzanski (10:47):
We have investors, they’ll take it. Here’s, you know, 10% of your net that you’re gonna be getting. And you know, qualifying them too. I think that’s the other thing that if you’re going to be an owner operator, and what we’re finding, especially working through it with Modas, is that you have to qualify a lot of these deals because you have to look at the return on investment on it. So when you have an investor involved is a whole other ballgame versus just selling selling that. So I think being open about the different payment methods, whether you’re upfronting it, you’re financing it, or you’re doing owner operator is always good to position in front of the customer because it gives them some options versus I’m pigeonholed into, I need to buy all this equipment and I really don’t wanna have to manage it. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (11:34):
Interesting. Fun stuff. All right. Let’s talk about, I think you let out in the beginning, you’ve done a great job of positioning adjacent technology solutions. So as you’re going in now to EVs or, you know, whether we’re talking about digital signage or we’re talking about just a, a adjacent things, I would love to hear, maybe walk us through just an overall example, ev digital signage, any of that where you know, a a customer that you worked on who, you know, who’s the point of contact, what’s that process like? What kind of thing did they end up picking and then, you know, any hurdles that you had to overcome there?
Stephanie Turzanski (12:10):
Yeah, the, you know, when we work on our projects, there are a few people that are involved. It’s always we’re talking to a gc. So, you know, getting in on the scheduling of the project, finding out, cause remember we we’re working a lot with ground up construction, so I’ll use that as the example working with the GC to find any of the project managers to find out, okay, when is the garage going up? When can we schedule this in? And then also working with our electrical contractors to do the site surveys to get the final pricing. Because the, the process that happens is we get an address, we get an idea of how many units are going to be needed, what type of unit is it gonna be level two, is it gonna be flex, is it going to be rapid charger? And then from there we get preliminary pricing.
Stephanie Turzanski (12:56):
The developer usually signs off on it to say, yeah, I like the cash flow from this, from the 10 year projection that you have. And then we do a site survey. And from that site survey, sometimes the GC already has the electrical done which then will help alleviate some of the cause on Aaron from our electrical contractor going out, taking a look at the site. So from there we’ll get the final pricing sign off on it, and then they decide, do we wanna own or operate? Do we wanna own it? Do we wanna finance it? What do we wanna do? Some of the obstacles I think we initially had was actually finding the electrical contractor at first. I recommend kind of finding somebody that you trust, making sure you know that they’re gonna do the work because you have to stay on a schedule.
Stephanie Turzanski (13:46):
And the other obstacle we always run into on any construction project is, does the project manager kind of get it? And they’re inundated with a whole bunch of things. We need to get answers done, we need to get on the install list. You know, how how do you manage that and what’s the relationship you have with the developer to kind of help leverage them to get the project done? So a lot of the, I would say troubleshooting has been more of just coordination and scheduling to make sure everything’s on track. The product itself, we haven’t had issues with. It’s, it’s been great. Loop’s been really good. They answer the questions that we need. So, you know, they’re, they’re kind of set apart from the other ev charging companies out there. I think the only other issue is there’s so many EV charging companies out there. Yeah. It’s like when solar first came out, everybody was a solar salesperson. Now everybody’s an EV charging salesperson. Yeah. So how do you differentiate yourself from everybody out there? And I think having those payment options, having an easy process, knowing that, you know, you’re the person to go to really helps sell the deal and kind of gets it moving faster. And that, that’s been our success with all of this.
Josh Lupresto (14:59):
Love it. All right. Let’s, let’s talk about, maybe I’m a, I’m a partner listening to this. I’m excited cuz I had no idea that I could do this and now this is a, you know, obviously I’ve know I’ve got relationships, I’ve got customers, I’ve got prospects and I wanna go tackle this. Maybe I’ve sold CX before, maybe I’ve sold security before, whatever, something, something different. Mm-Hmm.
Stephanie Turzanski (15:31):
So we’re of the philosophy you have to A.S.K. to G.E.T. So you have to ask that whomever your contact is, you know, it’s always having that conversation. So if it is the head of it, of a building and you know that the building is leased from, you know, that, that the client is leasing that space, you’re probably gonna have to talk off, find out who the property manager is of that building in order to get that done. Because the, the client itself, the tenant itself won’t really have much say in what goes on to the property unless they kind of get involved of some sort. So it’s always dealing with whoever owns that building is who you’re gonna want to talk to. And then just providing, I believe numbers, math is the thing that sells it. The stuff doesn’t sell it.
Stephanie Turzanski (16:23):
So in every proposal we do, we put math up front first. The stuff is the stuff because the sensors are gonna change. The EV station’s going to change. All the technology is going to change at some point, but the math is what sells it. Everybody wants to know what’s my cost, how does it work, how long is it gonna last me? And what’s the money I’m gonna make off of it? So if you can answer those questions and you have that up there, I think just selling a level two charger isn’t going to do it. I think you really have to pitch the math to say, this is how this works. Here’s the money you’re potentially going to make, and I think that it’s worth it and here are the rebates, here’s, here’s everything. So having that math down pat is really what’s gonna help sell that deal and that, and the, again, that’s what’s worked for us.
Josh Lupresto (17:06):
Love it. Good stuff. All right. Final question here. Let’s look into your crystal ball in, I mean we’re, this is about the most maybe about the fastest evolving technology space that we’ve got in the portfolio. So it’s hard to say, let’s look out too far. But if we look out 12 months, maybe, let’s just say do we, do we still take all the advice in the talk track so far as that’s what it’s gonna look like in 12 months? Do you see other things evolving coming into this? Whether that be tech changing, economic changing, just in your humble opinion what do you think the future looks like for the first little while?
Stephanie Turzanski (17:44):
Well, you don’t know what the government’s going to do. They’re gonna be the first one I believe that dictates everything between the rebates, the tax credits, and then how you actually can charge the user. And by that, you know, there’s an at cost for, if you’re the one owning the equipment, you have your electrical cost that you then pass on to the user and you’re inflating it so you’re making a profit off of it. I can’t see the government not wanting to regulate that at some point because of just the way that everything is. And I can’t see the tax credits lasting as long as they are. So with that, the government’s throwing a lot of money out on this. So I think the one concern I have is not that the technology’s going to change and you know, is this gonna be a success?
Stephanie Turzanski (18:37):
It is. Technology will change, it’s gonna be, well, how are you gonna pay for it and how are you’re gonna take that on? And I think knowing where the tax credits are and those rebates are gonna make a difference not only for the building owner itself, if, if they decide to take that on and take the pricing on themselves and pay for everything, but also the owner operators, you know, we want those tax credits. We wanna make sure that we’re getting that to help offset the cost. So as soon as that starts to disappear I, my hope is that the government comes up with other programs to keep this going because we’re hearing come 2035, majority of the manufacturer car manufacturers are gonna start going electric. So they do that. We still need the infrastructure set up. And I do think, and I hope that how figuring out how to recycle these batteries is going to be the next thing and the next wave of what we can do on the agent side to kind of help our customers as well.
Stephanie Turzanski (19:44):
I would love to find out a way to set up a, you know, a place in every state that goes and finds a way to recycle these batteries because I don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of interesting how these batteries last and I know there are a 15 to 20 year lifespan, but something goes wrong with ’em. You can’t put them out with just water
Josh Lupresto (20:36):
Yeah. Good stuff. You bring up a lot of great points. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen a lot too. I’m big car guy, right? So y you know, I’ve seen a lot of that 2035 kind of deadline it seems like everybody’s moving to. And so whether it’s, it’s pushed as aggressively as we’d like it to be or not from from a government side, it’s, they’re the ones pushing and asking for a lot of that 2035. So I have to imagine to your point, yeah, let’s maximize while the tax credits are there. But I would love to see that they continue pushing and enabling that cuz we can’t make ’em all, all electric if the infrastructure’s not there. So grab on and let’s ride the wave.
Stephanie Turzanski (21:12):
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.
Josh Lupresto (21:14):
Cool. Good stuff. Well, Stephanie, that wraps us up. I appreciate you coming on, dropping some, some gold nuggets for us here today. It’s been a blast.
Stephanie Turzanski (21:21):
Sure, no, thank you very much for having me. I hope it I hope it helps everybody. I hope it lets agents know that this is a really cool way to go. Honest, quite honestly, if you’re getting tired of the telecom side nothing against that world, but you know, we’ve found that this is a lot more exhilarating. There’s a lot to do with it. There’s a lot that you can be creative with and it’s not so transactional. I think the more creative you can be leveraging technology, the more you’re gonna love what you do. And we, we really love what we do. So we’re really happy that we’ve ventured into this area of telecom.
Josh Lupresto (21:59):
Cool. Love it. Good stuff. Okay. Stephanie Turzanski of VinVu. We’ve talked about getting huge profits when EV charging. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. This is Next Level BizTech. Till next time.
Listen in today as we talk to Joel Urano, CEO of Modas Systems. Joel talks about an area you might not be thinking of at all, but you could be sitting on a gold mine. We talk about how to sell, build and manage EV Chargers for businesses! There’s ROI, Modas manages the whole process and revenue share even back to the business. It’s a no-brainer. Learn how to take advantage of this land grab before it’s too late!
https://youtu.be/iIrftRZjvaM Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode, one that you have not heard before. Today we are talking about how to grab huge profits from building EV charging systems. And I know you’re probably thinking what? That’s not CCaaS, that’s not mobility, you know, that, that’s none of these other things that we’ve talked about before. So exciting to break into this topic here. You know, as we kicked it off of the previous segment with Jason Kaufman, but today we’ve got Joel Urano, CEO of Modas Systems. Joel, welcome on, man.
Joel Urano (00:46):
Thanks. Appreciate Josh. Thanks for having me on.
Josh Lupresto (00:49):
So, Joel for anybody that’s not familiar with Modas, we’re gonna get to that in a second, but I think the most important part of this show is hearing how the heck people got to where they are. So I want to hear your personal background. Did you start out selling beach towels and then stumbled into technology? What, what’s the path for you? How did you get here?
Joel Urano (01:08):
Yeah, I I started my first company back in 2005 and actually I started the phone buyback, not the industry, but, you know, I started a phone buyback business back in 2005. And, you know, within 90 days we were moving about 30,000 handsets a month. It was just you couldn’t get enough like the, the, the buyers wanted more than, you know, we could even find, you know, so there was no enterprises out there turned over that much. So, you know, kind of grew that business. And what got me to Modas was something that really is not that exciting, but it’s a part of every business and it’s Supreme Court rule that guess what? Now you gotta charge sales tax, ah, on stuff, right? And, and not just, I’m outta state. You don’t have to do it. So you know, now if you’re outta state seller, you gotta collect sales tax.
Joel Urano (01:48):
So, you know, we put together a platform that could assess sales tax on different types of products and solutions. And you know, we found that in the reseller side of the channel. They didn’t know how to do that, right? And even a lot of technology buyers don’t. So but what really got exciting is that we realized there were technology providers out there that wanted to get an agent channel but didn’t wanna do direct billing cuz they didn’t wanna deal with sales tax. So we kind of bridged that gap and looking forward to bringing new technologies to the Telarus family.
Josh Lupresto (02:14):
I love it. And, and, and let’s, let’s talk about Modas. I mean, I know the, the, the title of this track. We’re gonna get into some nuts and bolts here about EV charging and building that out and profiting from that as a partner and all of that good stuff. But, but maybe before we, we branch off into that piece of what you do, give us a little bit of an overview for somebody who’s never heard of Modas. What are, you know, overall vision of the company, A couple of the key things that you do and what are big focuses for you? Product or vision-wise?
Joel Urano (02:43):
Yeah, no, sure. So, you know, for us, you know, product-wise is, you know, we want to be the, the kind of catchall for, you know, the Telarus sales partner. You know, if it’s there’s a, a solution or product that’s not in the portfolio today and we want to be able to ones, we want to go grab it and make it available to your, your partners, you know, on the quick. So, you know, maybe could take a week and right. We’ll add it to our catalog and right now they can sell it and, you know, just goes through our regular commission scale with, with Telarus. You know how we got here, as I said, you know, we kind of deal with that sales tax thing, which is kinda that foundation, right? It’s that non pretty thing that every house has to be built on, but everything’s got, everybody’s gotta have it. Well, we found the EV charters and, you know, in the resale side, this was just a great fit and introduced it to the market and it’s pretty exciting with the the land grab that’s going on and the revenue and the, the commissions that are out there for this. So we’re really excited.
Josh Lupresto (03:32):
So, so break that down for me for a second. I, I don’t think people will realize and understand how exciting this is, right? When, when, when Kaufman first told us about this of let you know, Hey, by the way, I mean, as nuts and bolts as we know, the i t and this whole space to be, these guys can be a vehicle for us if we can find great products that we need. Right? Which is, which is awesome for us because that saves us from having to go explore and find new suppliers and go through all that process, right? That’s not something that we, we, we want to necessarily do. We wanna lean into the suppliers that we have. Mm-Hmm.
Joel Urano (04:27):
Sure, yeah. You know, it, it’s interesting cause a lot of it actually comes from your team and say, Hey, can you guys get us this kind of solution? Right? There’s that, you know, it’s kind of both sides. So it’s your team and then it’s also a suppliers that, you know, never had access to the agent channel or agent portion of the channel. And, and, you know, now they realize that we’re a, we’re a gateway tech cuz they don’t want to build direct. So, you know, Samsung has got a great program with their digital signage. It’s a great model because it’s recurring revenue to the sales partners for the life of that display. And they could be up there 10 years. You know, that’s a pretty exciting one. Excuse me. You know, we’ve got a, a new relationship with Fujitsu for their network operations center and out, out outside, or I’m sorry, outsourced you know, network management for, you know, larger businesses. So guess what? Partners can sell that too, right? The Fujitsu team comes in, does their assessment and puts everything together. And so, you know, so we’re, we’re getting new suppliers that we’re talking to pretty regularly. But we’re really excited about the Samsung digital signage you know, and, and whether that’s on its own or, you know, pairing with the EV charging stations.
Josh Lupresto (05:29):
I love it. And, and, and, and if you’re a partner and, and you’re used to looking at your itemized list of things that you can sell on the Telarus back office on a per supplier basis I, I would say look at it today, what it looks like with Modas, and you’ll have itemized line items there. And depending on when you watch this today, tomorrow, six months, nine months from now, there may be more items in there that you can get through this. Right? So I think that’s cool to see that you guys are such a great vehicle for this, that, that fits inside your wheelhouse. It just saves us you know, ultimately helps us bring more value and saves us a ton of work of trying to figure this out on our own. So we love that.
Joel Urano (06:01):
Well, you know, and I would say, look what’s there in six months and if it’s not there, give us a call. You know, because it’s not that, you know, it’s not that we wouldn’t add it, it’s just maybe we hadn’t got to that one yet or thought about it. So
Josh Lupresto (06:11):
Yeah, I, I suppose that really means when we say built for you
Joel Urano (06:24):
Right. Right.
Josh Lupresto (06:26):
All right. So we’re talking about ev for for the next couple of questions here. I, I want to get an understanding from you. I, I’ve always been an EV fan. I, I, I always try to look as far out as we can and kind of see where this thing is going and help us get ready for, for what’s next. And, you know, always been a car guy, right? So, naturally, I, I love to pay attention to this space, but talk to me about, you know, what have you learned most valuable in this? I mean, how, how did you come across this whole EVpartnership and, and, and, you know, being able to build and profit from this?
Joel Urano (07:00):
So, you know, with EVyou know, what’s most exciting is that, you know, it’s out there in the press, right? We’re not having to go publicize it. It is out there in the media every single day. You know, the government’s behind it, the government’s putting money out there to fund projects. There’s just, you know, there are grants at the federal level. There’s tax credits not right off, but credits, you know, there’s accelerated depreciation stuff out. I mean, so there’s all sorts of benefits to the business owner. What we found is that, you know, some guys are really excited about that and really kinda depends on the business, but then others like, well, you know, I’m a, I’m a restaurateur, right? I don’t know anything about being EVcharging, but I still need one at my restaurant. So, you know, so we’ve got two models where the, the, the customer can say, I’ll buy it, right?
Joel Urano (07:41):
And then we’ll get, we’ll take care of all the construction you know, get it in the ground and, you know, then the customer gets all the revenue. But we’ve also got another model where the customers are saying, you know, again, I don’t really want to own and maintain it cuz I, you know, I wanna focus on my business. So we’ve got another model with some owner operator partners. They’ll come in, finance the whole project, pay for the equipment, pay for the install, run ’em, maintain them, and they just do a revshare back to the to the, the business owner right, or, or at least the business. And what’s really exciting about that is there’s no upfront out-of-pocket expense to, you know, the customer, but there is a check coming in the mail every month back to the customer. So, you know, so it’s a, it’s just a solution where the customers actually will make money, mailbox money, you know, without having to do too much. You know, if they go the owner operator path, if they, if they choose to buy themselves, there’s not really a whole lot to it. But, you know, some of these projects could get quite expensive. So, you know, we work through each project with, you know, your partners and say, okay, you know, here’s what makes sense at this location. And you know, I mean, if the customer wants to buy more, okay, but, you know, we wanna make sure that, you know, they’re getting what makes sense for their location and performs as expected.
Josh Lupresto (08:50):
I love it. And, and so if I’m a, if I’m a partner and I’m listening and I’m at this, this point, I’m thinking, all right, who, who, who’s my prospect here? And, and I think outside of, you know, Tesla has built out their supercharger network and, and those exist. And then outside of that, everybody else that I have is a business that wants to attract customers and be friendly and have ev chargers in whatever their business is, residential, commercial, whatever, is an opportunity, right?
Joel Urano (09:16):
Mm-Hmm.
Joel Urano (10:05):
And some of the hotel brands, you know, the big brands that we all know one of ’em is actually looking at taking their you know, their elite level frequent guest program. And, you know, once you get to a certain tier, your charging’s free, which means they’re gonna need, you know, they’re, they’re still gonna need to put ’em in. And, and these are all done at the franchise level. You know, most hotels are not owned by corporate, so hotels are a great one. You know, truck stops anywhere, you’re kind of an in-transit destination. Those ones are great too. You know, gas stations, those are, those ones take a little bit more work, but, you know shopping malls you know, but but you really wanna look at, you know, where, where do you think the traffic’s gonna be and you know, best for your customer. You know, like where there’s people, right? Not the, not the town where there’s 2000 folks in there and, you know, there may not be an electric car there for two years. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (10:50):
I love that. We don’t have to think of, you know, what kind of tech stack does this customer have? Is it a MySQL database? Is it, it’s, do they have people that stay there for a while? That’s an opportunity. So I think the partners wheels are spinning, so that’s awesome. I love that. I think there’s huge opportunity there. Let’s talk about innovation for a second. I mean, this, you wanna talk about an innovating space? I mean, how do you, it’s innovating as you’re touching it. It’s innovating, innovating as you’re getting into it. What, what, is there anything key that you’re paying attention to in this space from an innovation perspective? Is it, is it grant money flowing in? Is it tax credit? You know, how do you think of, you know, how does Modas pay attention to innovation of, to be ready for what’s next in an industry like this?
Joel Urano (11:36):
Well, I’ll, I’ll give you a great example. So with the EV charging, you know, let, let’s say we’re five years down the road and you’ve got a charger at your office that you can plug into during the day. You may not even need it, but it’s there. You’ve got charger at your home. So why do you stop at the gas station in town anymore? You know, I mean, cup of coffee, bottle of water, maybe you know, the snack, but, you know, why do you stop there? So, you know, like the gas stations, they’re, you know, they’re looking how to innovate. What can we do to make stopping at my gas station? You know, not just a, a necessity, right? Well, they want it to be a necessity. So, you know, I’m really excited about what new technology can we work with the gas stations to say, I need to put this new technology in to keep my business going.
Joel Urano (12:19):
So, you know, there’s some, there’s a gas station chain that I wouldn’t say they’re out of Dallas, but there’s, you know, certainly they’ve got a lot of stores here and they’re starting to put some tables and a frozen yogurt bar in there where you, you know, you may sit for 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, just have your, you know, a lot of ’em starting to have these deli’s in there. So, you know, it’s not just go ahead and get gas and, you know, grab something off the shelf and pay the cashier. You can sit down and, you know, I mean, it’s not like a full-fledged restaurant, but you know, the expected time that you’re gonna be there is a little bit longer. So we’re starting to see a lot of that. You know, we’ve got one, one of your partners is working on a really exciting deal with with the gas station chain, and they’re doing some really innovating stuff.
Joel Urano (12:55):
So, you know, it, it’s, that part’s really, really, really cool. You know, looking at other types of businesses, you know, like just a, let’s say a a a commercial office complex, you know, where you’ve got a property management firm, this is a draw for you know, for possible tenants. You know, I mean, you with Modas growing, oh, looking at new space. Well, guess what? You know, if they don’t have EV charters, cuz you know, I’m going to an EV vehicle in the next year, probably not gonna look at, although we may just use that and negotiate that, we’re gonna put some in and take some rent off, but
Joel Urano (13:39):
You know, we’ve got a great, great solution with company called LiveView Technologies, and they’ve got subscription-based security cameras. So we’re all right. We need to put the cameras there for security purposes, for insurance purposes, you know, make people safe or feel safe when they’re there charging, you know, you don’t wanna be in some dark, you know, dark parking garage or dark parking lot and, you know, maybe there’s somebody by themselves. Well, you know, we’re gonna put some lights and, and, you know, other things around it, but what other technology can take from the supplier catalog can put it out there.
Josh Lupresto (14:07):
Love it. Yeah, I mean, it’s a, I I think it’s important. I mean, if you think about what, what people look at nowadays with, if I’m, if I’m getting my first apartment and I’ve grown and, and and experienced nothing but tech, and I expect tech everywhere, I’m gonna think, you know, does this apartment complex just have an embedded smart doorbell? Does it have, you know, all these other things include, I’m gonna look for some of these things and, and at some point I’m gonna expect them to your point, and it is gonna change where I go, who I, you know, who I socially align with, or who I like from what tech they have, and it’s gonna influence my decision, and I’m gonna be okay if some of that gets subsidized into my rent or, or, or whatever, because I, I think it’s an amenity or it’s gonna be
Joel Urano (14:53):
You know, I mean, really, you know, with, with getting placement of EV chargers at a business, you know, at, at your partner’s customers is are they gonna be the blockbuster or are they gonna be the Netflix
Josh Lupresto (15:42):
Yeah, good points. All right. Let’s, let’s get into a deployment. So, all right, I understand this. I think, can people listening at this point understand what the opportunity is, who to go after, how to go after, but let’s say I’m ready to do an employment. Now, I’m not saying let’s pull up an SOW and go through line item by light item, but, but help me understand, how do you price this out? What are, what are the things that, that, that create the costs in this, you know, how, how long does it take? What are the roadblocks? Walk me through a deal, something like that. Sure.
Joel Urano (16:14):
Yeah, no, that, that’s a great question. I’m glad you asked that. You know, so, you know, one thing that, you know, the partners need to keep in mind, and we make sure we tell them this, is that this is not technology rollout, but probably more importantly, this is also a construction build. And, you know, you don’t build a house in a week or two weeks or a month. You know, this is a construction build where, you know, it could take six months just to get the, the permitting done, right? It’s gonna take a while you know, but you can get started. I mean, six months is a long time for permitting. But, you know, just as an example. So the cost, cost come with, there’s the, the equipment itself, there’s the cost of the construction and really that’s it.
Joel Urano (16:54):
You know, there’s, there’s a little bit of maintenance, but, you know, depending on the warranty that the customers are buying, you know, the maintenance is mostly covered for, you know, five to seven years. So you know, the one actually there, one of the big piece of value I want to touch on. So for those business owners that buy these EV charters right, or, or, you know, just put ’em in through our owner operator program, that actually will increase the value of that property. So, you know, it’ll increase the value through a cap rate calculation of the, that property. So we had a customer buy million, two worth of charters, and it increased the value of his property by $3 million when he sold it. So property owners a good one. But back to the cost side, you know, the, just, we wanna make sure the partners understand that, you know, as a construction rollout, you know, there’s, contractors have to get involved, city permitting, you know, there’s work to be done.
Joel Urano (17:42):
But you know, again, we’re not talking a hundred thousand dollars sometimes. I mean, in some cases, you know, we’re talking million. We’ve got one quote, we’re working with one of your partners right now, that’s a 17 million quote. Well, you guys can go look at the commission tables on that, and, you know, I think everybody would be really happy. So so really it comes down to the cost and the, and the construction. The, the big driving factor on the construction side is placement of the chargers, and, you know, how far are we from the transformer of the power panel, you know, and we, so we did one with a customer and they said, well, we want it on the south side of the parking lot, but the power is on the north side. And the difference for one charger, right? It was just one charger, but it was a $50,000 construction difference based on where they wanted it based, you know, versus where we suggested. And once we show ’em the difference, like, oh, no, no, we’ll go with where you guys sync
Josh Lupresto (18:31):
Unnecessary $50,000 extension.
Joel Urano (18:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So,
Josh Lupresto (18:35):
Got it. Good. I love it. In that process, right? If I’m, if I’m thinking about this, I’m going, okay, there’s this piece, there’s this piece, there’s that. Does Modas really act as kind of the GC does supervise, or the PM does supervise this whole thing, or what’s that?
Joel Urano (18:49):
Absolutely. Yep. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah, we take care of all of that, you know, you know, we really need, we need the partners to inter make the introduction, you know, kind of help us quarterback the you know, get the calls, get the customer buy-in, and then, you know, we get the paperwork started. And at that point, you know, we’ll just keep the partner in the loop and you know, we get everything closed up. You know, we work with a contractor to get that done you know, and get all the construction done. Once, once the, once the installation works done, we get the Chargers commissioned, and those things are live and, you know, project closed and commission’s paid.
Josh Lupresto (19:21):
And, and so who, who are my who are my stakeholders and my decision makers in this? Is it owners? Is it facilities people? Where do I start and who do I want to be in this conversation if I’m prospecting out here?
Joel Urano (19:35):
You know, if you’re, if you’re looking at the smaller, you know, the smaller business is certainly gonna be the owners. You know, you get to the larger ones where, you know, you’re on a, let’s say you’re on a large commercial property, you know, it gets a little bit more complicated there, where, you know, maybe the tenant, you know, they’re a tenant, so, you know, they, they may not own the gas or may not have rights to the parking lot. So, you know, there’s a little bit of little bit of working through that with, you know, let’s say the, the, the management firm or the, you know, the building owner. But again, typically the building owners are the ones say, absolutely, go ahead and do it. So but, you know, in the hotels is really interesting. You know, the, depending on the contracts for management of hotels, sometimes the management firm takes responsibility, and sometimes it’s the investors that own the building. So, you know, it’s not, it’s not a lot of digging. It’s just a, a couple simple questions to ask.
Josh Lupresto (20:20):
Hmm. So, so walk me through, and we, we can keep names out of this, but I mean, walk me through an example. I would love to hear about how one of these started, right? Did, did, did people hear about that you knew this or that, that you knew how to do this? Did, did you walk in, you know, what was that right? And how did you, how did you scope one of these things out? And and what was the solution that they ultimately went with? Just walk us through a real example.
Joel Urano (20:44):
Sure. So really the first, you know, first one that was, you know, sizable, actually, this was the first one. You know, what we did is, you know, we have, we had a couple of your partners that we had a great relationship with, just we, we talked to regularly. And, you know, we said, Hey, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re gonna roll out ev charters, what do you think? And, you know, it’s like, ding, the light came on and Right, I got a customer for this, and this turned into a 41 acre truck stop Travel Plaza with I don’t know, probably close to 60 chargers on this property. Whoa. And you know, and so, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s in the works, you know, the construction’s going on, but you know, it’s, it’s a big one. It’s a big one. And, you know the partners and, you know, I didn’t know anything about this, but, you know, this wasn’t a hard sell. It was just, you know, I just needed to get the part, the people together, and you guys took the risk. You know, we’re not asking if there to be electrical engineers or contractors. It’s just, you know, get us together with the you know, the business owner or the, the property owner and
Josh Lupresto (21:44):
Love it makes it sound so easy. It’s just different. I, I, I think it’s, it’s so much easier to understand, not to, that you need to get into the nuts and bolts and be a general contractor yourself, but I think fundamentally you just, you understand the value prop right away. You don’t have to cut underneath and go, well, wait, does it really do this? Does it actually go this way? It’s, it’s just so easy to understand.
Joel Urano (22:04):
Well, on that, that travel plaza. So this Travel Plaza owner, over the 10 years, they’re making 15 million on the Chargers. That’s the revenue coming back into them. And of course, we said to, you know, your partner, we said, Hey you know, they’re gonna make 15 million with revenue from these EV chargers. Go sell ’em something else. I mean, obviously we’d love for you to sell ’em something we’re providing, but, you know, hey, we know that we don’t provide everything. So, you know, if they need VoIP, if they need, you know, or zk, I mean, anything that, you know, you can get through the Telarus portfolio, go sell it to ’em, because I can’t say it’s not in the budget because we made the budget
Josh Lupresto (22:40):
For, you made the budget. Yeah.
Joel Urano (23:51):
You know, so, so they want to go talk to the partners and you, do you guys have any interest in putting, you know, ev charging stations here at the, at your location? You know, again, those objections may get, well, we don’t own the building, or, you know, it’s that’s higher up. Maybe you have to talk to our facilities guy. So, you know, who you talk to is gonna vary business to business. But, you know, it’s really, it’s that, it’s that simpler question. You know, because like I said, you know, you could use it for the example of hotels where, you know, guests might not stay there. Well, guess what? If you got employees, you know, it’s, it’s becoming an amenity, right? It’s not becoming a, you know, it’s not becoming, it’s a draw to bring people to your business, you know, but it’s not just customers.
Joel Urano (24:27):
It could be employees, right? As you’re trying to hire new folks. So, you know, ask ask those questions of, you know, where, you know, how many businesses do you have or how many locations do you have? You know, is there any interest? You know, you likely you’re gonna get that pushback of well, you know, it’s not really something, you know, we can pay for. It’s not our focus. Great. Well, you know, I’ve got a partner Modas that’s also got an owner-operator program that, you know, they’ll come and take care of everything. It’s just outsourced and, you know, they’re basically paying you to put these charters into your, in your parking lot, and there’s really nothing for you to do, Mr. Customer, right? And, and by the way, now it created that budget for that other project you said you know, wasn’t, wasn’t on the book for this year.
Josh Lupresto (25:07):
Love it. Simple. All right, final thoughts here. So look into your crystal ball, Joel, and, you know, maybe in six months we’re at flying cars, maybe not yet, but who knows, AI’s progressing and tech is progressing great, but if you look out six, 12 months, 18 months, anything you want us to be ready for, pay attention to additionally, or should be just focused on this and saturate the heck out of this because there is so much runway here.
Joel Urano (25:36):
There’s a ton of runway here, Josh. I mean, this thing is, you know, it, it’s, it’s a land grab right now, right? It’s not gonna be there forever. You know, I mean, once there’s charges in the parking lot, you kind of don’t need more. So, you know, it’s gonna be a land grab. You know, the other thing we didn’t touch on, but I’ll just mention briefly is the digital signage, which is also recurring revenue generator, you know, just like you might see in the airport, but we’re putting these signs outside, you know, and they’re generating revenue for customers you know, in some cases 5, 6, 700 a month. So we’ve got one that’s, you know, they’re almost that deal and it’s gonna generate $2,000 a month ad revenue back to this customer. So it promotes products in his store, and it’s gonna pay for the, the equipment and then it’s all gravy for the guy. So you know, there’s that, the other thing that, you know, we’re, we’re evaluating and you know, would love, if you’ve got a couple partners that have any thoughts, love to hear from them on, you know, are there solar projects out there? So, you know, solar is something that, you know, we’re, we’re looking at trying to make sure we find the right supplier, right partner to bring into the ecosystem you know, to, to push out to the wall.
Josh Lupresto (26:40):
Yeah, it’s good. I mean, it just seems like such a natural half step over from what you’re doing, right? At least as it relates to this to, to the ev charging, we’re talking ev charging, we’re talking profitability, we’re talking ROI and signage. Why not stack solar on top of it at all? Right? And whether that’s that’s revenue generating, that’s power, pays for power, whatever it is. I think, yeah, I think that’s, if that’s not I mean, we did just get a request for that yesterday, but if that’s not gonna become more frequent occurrence I I I don’t know what is if we look out, so, no, I love it. Absolutely. Right? If, if, and we don’t say this a lot, but partners, if you’ve got ideas and there are things that you want Modas to look at that you’ve got customers that are going to need and, and we just maybe haven’t found a great way to market for that, bring it to us. Loop us in loop, Joel in and, and, and let’s talk through it. I think there’s a lot of great opportunity there, so, well good. Joel, we covered a lot of good stuff. I’m excited. I wanna go help somebody sell this stuff. I think this is great
Joel Urano (27:43):
Yeah, thanks for that. I really appreciate that. Look forward to working with everybody.
Josh Lupresto (27:48):
All right, everybody, it wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh, Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Joel Urano, Modas Systems CEO. Till next time, thank to everybody.
Did you ever think we’d go from selling long-distance to building out nationwide EV Chargers for businesses? Well, now we are. If you love technology and want to hear about some unique and huge projects up for a land grab, now is the time to tune in to hear Telarus’ own Jason Kaufman, Mobility & IoT Specialists talk about some of the custom solutions we’re designing and implementing to pave the way for the future of road travel, not to mention, they could put big $$$ back in your customer’s pockets.
https://youtu.be/MMA_r9IZatM Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Everybody. Welcome back. We are on a new track here talking about something unique that you have not heard us talk about before. Title of today’s track is how to grab huge profits from building EV charging stations. And I know you’re thinking, wait a minute, I was expecting cloud or security or some of that. We’re gonna hit you with all that stuff, of course. But this is a hot topic and so we wanted to bring it in. We’ve got some great data for you here. And today what we’d like to welcome in here is returning guest Jason Kaufman, our southeast sales engineer, but also our mobility and IoT specialist. Kaufman. Welcome on, man.
Jason Kaufman (00:50):
Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. You know, third time’s a charm, hoping to, you know, make this one worthwhile.
Josh Lupresto (00:55):
Jason Kaufman (01:21):
Yeah. so my previous role at the, the end of my tenure there, I ran the operations for a desktop as a service micro organization where we ran UCaaS and c a, so the, the whole communication suite within a VDI environment yeah, Citrix and Azure. So I had a well-rounded cloud background. And then when I came over to Telarus, I kind of expanded on that, you know, talking about, you know, all the different types of infrastructure, past SaaS you know, serverless computing. And then one thing that came big was the, the data analytics and management, you know, data lake storage and all that stuff with BI tools. And I really liked how much insights you could get from multiple different areas of data. And that was always a problem previously was, you know, what, what actually business drivers can I get from this?
Jason Kaufman (02:05):
I have data here, data here, and, but I don’t know how to consolidate it and actually get something out of it. So when IoT came up, you know, that was one thing that fit a, a need in the data space was how do I get data from something that’s not necessarily smart? You know, we also have all those like smart devices, you know, the internet of things. How do we get, you know, something that’s not natively software based to provide data to us that, that’s actually insightful. So I really liked the IoT industry and, you know, started looking at the, the network design components of it, what data analytics you could get. And then my cousin actually talked me into getting a couple helium nodes to put at my house and my, my dad’s house. So started messing with that, you know, registering sensors to it through app keys and, and device keys and all that stuff. And it was just a cool overarching thing that I really got interested in and started to you know, talking about it more. And then when I talked to Bob and, you know, he was like, you know what? You sound like you know a little bit about this stuff. How about you you know, tell more people about it. I was like, okay, perfect. So then I spent, you know, a lot of my moonlight time now googling about IoT and love every minute of it.
Josh Lupresto (03:12):
Jason Kaufman (03:52):
Yeah, it’s taking an agnostic perspective and coming in and thinking what’s possible and what business drivers are out there and not trying to fit a square through a peg hole. Cause we, we have multiple providers that have all these great solutions, but some may fall short in one area while others, you know, thrive in that area. And it’s really delineating between who is really great for that specific scenario, or do we need to pull in multiple providers to hit the use case and integrate them together? So where, where I sit in the equation is, you know, either be on the, the customer calls with, you know, our partners or be in the background and say, you know what? These, this provider or these providers be really good in this space. Not only yes, they are, but here’s why. And really it’s just taking a look at it from, from the top level down and what strategic initiatives they’re looking for.
Jason Kaufman (04:36):
Do we need to pull in, you know, a cloud provider with an IoT provider and look at it that way? Or is it just, hey, this is all pre-baked into a simple solution with the, you know, use case. That’s, it might not be the exact defined use case. Like for instance you know, one thing we were talking about earlier on the Tuesday, you know, Telarus podcast was, you know, there’s, you know, many use cases for a temperature sensor. What can you monitor a temperature refrigeration unit, a room you know, even a agriculture, you know, needs to be defined temperature. So water, you know, there’s many different things that you could do with one single sensor where it defines multiple use cases. So when you’re defining all these one, all these use cases, trying to see, Hey, where’s this specific swim length fit? There really isn’t one, we’re still defining what all those are. And one of the key points that I got from most of the, you know presentations that Chris Whitaker does is there’s still about 13 trillion Yes. That’s what the t for Telarus trillion dollars left in the IoT market until 2025 or 2035, sorry to, for actually growth and expansion there. So there’s a lot of room that, that our partners have to get in with these customers and provide that true value.
Josh Lupresto (05:45):
All right. So, so let’s talk about, you know, this, this is a, this is a pace of innovation, right? I mean, we talk about mobility, we talk about IoT, and we’re gonna get into the ev charging specifically, but what are you finding valuable, valuable that has helped you learn this, this segment, and how have you applied it right? To really help you keep tabs on everything that’s out there with this big, you know, this, this big box of Legos?
Jason Kaufman (06:08):
Yeah. so one is constant communication with the providers, you know, cause they do the best. So being in the know and having, you know, constant interactions with them. Hey, what’s the latest and greatest? What are you seeing out there? What use cases are you guys currently selling into? How are you doing it? What talk tracks got you to the finish line to overcome any objections that the customer had? You know, that’s really where the, the latest and greatest fits is, you know, how do we actually make this an impactful conversation for a customer rather than saying, Hey, do you need IoT? And one thing that I always do as well is, you know, in the morning when I’m setting records in the gym, you know, I’m also, I’m listening to podcasts about you know, all the latest and greatest tech out there from, you know, the, the cloud.
Jason Kaufman (06:48):
Because cloud’s very important in this scenario because AWS and Azure are consistently upgrading their native support for IoTt and what they’re doing from an internal you know, AI and development phase. I mean, everybody has that event hub where everything can send to, and then you have the integrations with, you know, the, the specific sensors, but what pre-baked scenarios do you have once you’re in there? And then, you know, GCP pulling their stuff out out of, you know, completely, you know, getting rid of their IoT platform this year. So it’s good to be in the know there as well is not only from the cloud side of the house, but IoT with our specific providers.
Josh Lupresto (07:21):
Love it. It’s good. Yeah, I mean, you’re, you’re probably in the most emerging segment here, so there’s definitely a lot, a lot of stuff to pay attention to. All right, let’s, let’s talk about ev charging. You know, we, we, a lot of people grew up in this space where we had just a couple products to sell. And, and, and it seems like every Telarus event we get together, we’re talking about new things, new things on the checklist that we have that we can help customers with. And, and one of those things that you brought to light and I, I said, are, are you serious? The first time you brought this up is, Hey, by the way, we could do this now. You know, ev charging right? Where we’re going with electric and, and, and that whole movement. We can do this, we can build it, we can, we can profit on it, we can help. And there’s just, there’s so much to unpack here. So I would love to hear it from your perspective, how do you see partners tackling this? I mean, this is a, this is a new thing for our space. So walk me through gotchas, how we tackle it, how you’re seeing people approach it and, and what’s working.
Jason Kaufman (08:18):
Yeah, so just like you’re saying, there’s a lot of mandates that are coming down on EV chargers and where they need to be placed. Like car dealerships are one, you, they need to get on board. You need to get out Ford to actually make that very public that you need to have ev charging stations on premises or else you know, they’re not gonna support you anymore and probably get you new, new cars. I haven’t really seen anybody not do that. So I don’t know really what the ramifications are, but I mean, those are real threatening words that are coming down. And we’re also seeing ev charging stations being put in municipalities, hospitals, hotels MDU spaces for apartment buildings. I mean, there’s many different applications for it. The only qualifying question is, do you own the land and do you have a lot of, you know, really any need for EV charging?
Jason Kaufman (09:00):
One of the big talking points is, hey, you know, not only can you provide this service to somebody, you know, be able to charge your vehicle there, but you can actually charge them for the electricity that they’re using. So it’s not just a cost center for you. You can dictate how much you’re charging them. And then all the payment processing goes through the ev charging platform itself. So there are immediate economical benefits of doing this on premise. The only thing you have to really worry about is how much power are you able to push to that EV charging station. Some of the gotchas ran up front where, you know, between the tier one, two or three charging station, you know, everybody wants to tier three, they wanna be able to charge their, their car in 20 minutes or less. Mm-Hmm.
Jason Kaufman (09:46):
So that’s really where the, you know, the only gotchas really that happened, having a site survey and somebody going through that, but charging for the electricity. And then the new cool hotness is, Hey, you know, that’s great and mall, I can make some money when somebody charges my station, but what else can you do to provide me revenue? And that’s where that ad revenue comes in. So that’s a different conversation track, because now we’re less focused on how much money we can save somebody. I mean, that’s been the talking track of value for us, providing more features, said, you know, saving money on the bottom line. But now what if I can get you revenue without lifting a finger? Hey, you install this ev charging station, it has a sign on it that you can dictate how aggressive you want to be from the ads that come on it that are already defined.
Jason Kaufman (10:26):
I mean, you don’t need to go out and, and, you know, make agreement in these companies or anything. This is all one big solution. So, and none of it’s competitive. So if you put it at your restaurant or something, it’s not gonna show other restaurants on the ads. It’s gonna show things that are non-competitive to you. And we’re actually seeing customers make close to, you know, a hundred k a year, a 100K a year per ev charging station with a lot of foot traffic. So all of it’s defined by how many pings a cell phone gets as it walks by a specific area. That’s how they judge the foot traffic. But the more you have, the more money the customer’s gonna get, which also the partners get commissioned on quarterly on that revenue. So now you’re actually talking about opening up those budgets. What other initiatives do you have? Is it something that that expands across cloud, cybersecurity, mobility or even further IoT initiatives? Now you’re opening that budget with revenue, we’re actually then saving money. That’s ROI over time.
Josh Lupresto (11:17):
Yeah, man, there’s, there’s a lot of good stuff to unpack in there. There’s some golden nuggets. I, I want to go back to one of those talk tracks that you mentioned where when you think about, you know, people go and put these deployments in, it sounds like a complicated thing, and the reality is a, it’s not complicated. You know, I’m not gonna say it’s, it’s simple, but there’s a process and the, and you know, suppliers like motis are, are built to be able to go and deploy and survey, and we’re gonna know exactly what we’re jumping into and they’re gonna manage it all. But I mean, as you think about that though what have you, you found that helping partners, right ways to kind of revolutionize what their customers are going through. I, I guess from a perspective of I’m thinking about moving into this rental place, but this rental doesn’t have ev chargers, right? Are you seeing how, how are you thinking about kind of the environmental dynamics and the social dynamics of something like this besides the fact that this stuff that you brought up, that by the way, this makes you money?
Jason Kaufman (12:16):
Yeah, so the first thing that I can definitely say, and, and it’s better than a golden nugget, it’s more like a Dino nugget,
Josh Lupresto (13:20):
Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s just such a different conversation. I just, if you look at all the things that we can go to market with, with a customer you know, via a partner, how many of them are there that we say, by the way, this improves your property value, by the way, this makes you money, by the way, this makes more people want to come to your facility. It’s just, it seems like such a no-brainer, such a land grab.
Jason Kaufman (13:40):
Yeah. We can also, you know, tax incentives. I mean, we’re having a ton of those right now to where, I mean, if it doesn’t pay for itself, I mean, you’re, you know, as long as you’re putting that tax revenue back into the ev charging station, you know, just a, you know, business decision to do that or keep it for yourself. I mean, generally the nominal fee for this stuff is, you know, it makes, makes total sense once you start getting down to the numbers area, overcoming that first objection on why is this physically needed.
Josh Lupresto (14:04):
Right. Makes sense. You you wanna walk us through maybe just a, an example, right? How, how does one of these opportunities start? Or, or, you know, just give us some kind of generic information. If you walked into, we, we, we knew what they needed, we knew what they had and maybe just what are some of the things that, that you encountered in that?
Jason Kaufman (14:22):
Yeah, so most of the ev charging station you know, opportunities don’t even start ev charging. They’re talking about, Hey, how do we get our residents, you know, TV or internet and build them correctly to where we’re not just getting a, you know, a lump at the beginning and we have to figure out how to make it work in the end. And then how do we monetize some of the, the assets that we do have? You know, one of the first things was putting Crown Castle to come in and, you know, do the lease rights up top and, you know, lease the, you know, the, the rooftop to, you know, Verizon, at and t-Mobile or some other carrier that can come in, some private network and, you know, get some value to the customer there. It all starts with, hey, how do we, how do we either make this more efficient or how do we make money here?
Jason Kaufman (15:02):
Cause we’re struggling on getting the revenues that we had last year. So the apartment building complex, that’s kind of where we start there. From a a restaurant perspective, a lot of it is, Hey, what do we do to keep people in the restaurant longer? So we actually have a, I you know, I live in Venice, Florida you know, we actually have a restaurant down here, a burger joint that right off the interstate who installed Tesla chargers because they want people to come charge. It takes, you know, on average 30 to 40 minutes to charge up a Tesla. So you come in, plug in, and then you go in and get a burger and they’re seeing sales skyrocket through the roof. So there’s also business impacts to where, hey, you’re actually ha, you’re forcing somebody to stay there. You’re providing them value. Are they gonna sit in their car and watch Netflix the whole time? No, they’re gonna come in and get a burger and some fries. So it’s kind of thinking other methods of getting revenue rather than just the normal day-to-day operations that they’re solely used to. That’s kind of where, Hey, have you thought about getting revenue this way? Okay, well, how much, how much effort is that gonna be involved with us doing it? It’s like, oh no, you just signed on dotted line. We’ll do it from there.
Josh Lupresto (16:02):
Yeah, it’s interesting. Yeah, so, so many different ways to generate. I, I think opportunities have conversations, add value, lots of great stuff there. All right. You know, as we, as we wrap up kind of the back half of this track, so let’s say I’m a partner, right? I’m, I, I, I understand this, maybe I haven’t pivoted into this space yet, but I’m realizing, okay, it sounds like my prospects are multi-dwelling restaurant gas stations, that kind of thing. Correct me if I’m wrong on that. But then maybe also button us up with how do I start this conversation? What, what do I do to decide, oh yeah, this is a great fit, I need to bring you in.
Jason Kaufman (16:41):
So, you know, getting the, the upfront information is probably the most important part. So you can go back to the customer with a compelling story on, Hey, if you look into this, you know, there’s some estimations that, you know, you could potentially get this much revenue. Cause that’s where the driving is. How much money can you make the customer? So getting that address and, you know, getting with Motus, you know, who is our partner of choice here for the ev charging stations and letting them know, Hey, this is the customer I’m working on that, you know, this is their nameless register, but also here’s their, their address. How much foot traffic do you guys see there within the, the fancy tool that they have? And how much ad revenue do you think that we could get them? Cause I wanna go back to this customer and say, Hey, based on your parameters that we have here, we went through all this due diligence to find out what, you know, how much we can provide value here based on this information.
Jason Kaufman (17:25):
We think we can make you this amount of money, and this is what’s gonna take from you. And defining that type of process that we talked about, you know, we’ll, we’ll come out and do a site survey, you know, we’ll make sure you have the power requirements of what you’re looking to do there and give you the options. You know, we’ll, we’ll look into, you know, how much, what tax incentives you have in your area. You may already know them. But then ultimately, you know, this is gonna be a full managed service. We’re not gonna ship you an ev charging station. You gotta go out out and lift it on a forklift and get it put in yourself, you know, a couple Phillips screw heads and call it a day
Josh Lupresto (18:17):
Yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, it reminds me of some of the great, one of my favorite strategies that partners used to use when, when UCaaS was just kind of flying off the shelf in that very beginning was walk into a customer’s environment or, you know, look at the phones that they have or call them, try to see what the experience is like, try to get through to sales, try to get through to customer service, and then try to do it with their competitor and help them paint a picture of where are you at, where are you at in the market, and where do you wanna be relative to where your competition is? And does that matter to you? Right? Do you wanna be number one, do you wanna be number two? And so I think this is just more technology to further that agenda and help differentiate these customers and, and generate them profit.
Josh Lupresto (18:51):
I think this is awesome. Great stuff. Okay, final question here is, is as Kaufman looks into his Magic eight ball you know, look, I, look, we’re, we’re, we’re in a, a pace of change, especially an industry like yours that is rapidly, rapidly changing. So we can’t look out too far, but if we look out a little bit, let’s call it 12 months, let’s call it whatever I, I, is the best advice to, to take that conversation in that track that, that we’ve just mentioned. Is there anything else that you want partners to be aware of, of, hey, keep an eye out for this over the next 12 plus months, or what are your kind of final thoughts there?
Jason Kaufman (19:25):
So ev charging stations, I see more options coming out. You know, multiple different OEMs under the hood, you know, multiple ways to, to drive revenue for, for customers and partners. So from that one, I think we’re gonna just gonna scale out and, you know, get, get more options there. From an IoT perspective, I, you know, just like the last podcast we had on IoT, I think really the biggest improvement we’re gonna see is from the AI and ML analytics. I mean, with, with all the new AI technology coming out and the mainstream media hitting it, you know, chat GPT for example. I mean, everybody’s big push for AI and what it could do to simplify everyday living, you know, not just from a business perspective, but from a traditional user space, residential or, or commercial. What can it do to make our lives a lot easier, more efficient?
Jason Kaufman (20:09):
I think we’re gonna see a lot of that from the IoT space because it gives us insights to where we didn’t have them before and how much you can automate by seeing something from a sensor or a video camera, and then have it do something specific after that. And then also I think we’re gonna see a bigger you know, more baseline analytics from video ai. So not only establishing a baseline on either who someone is, you know, what something is the color of something, you know, behavioral analytics, but then driving, you know, something on that. Some, some form of automation remediation task based on that. Whether that’s tracking, you know, not notification or just for business insights to sell to a marketing company. So I think there’s a a lot there that we can do too.
Josh Lupresto (20:54):
Love it. Good stuff. Lots to unpack, lots of great stuff here. Lots of I call ’em golden nuggets. I guess we’re calling ’em Dino Nuggets now. I’m gonna have to go stop at Costco this weekend and probably get some of those. But Kaufman, hey man, that lots of great stuff. Appreciate you coming on, buddy.
Jason Kaufman (21:08):
Yeah, thanks for having me. And I do wanna clarify one of my statements earlier about setting records in the gym. Obviously if you’ve met me before, you know, it’s not, you know, lifting many weights, it’s more just taking a nap
Josh Lupresto (21:28):
Awesome. Love it. Okay, everybody that wraps us up for today, EV Chargers, profits, more mobility, lots of good stuff. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering. Jason Kaufman Mobility and IoT, Telarus Sales Engineer.
Join us today as we talk Security, Managed Detection & Response, and most importantly, the Response! Nick Enger tells his story as he goes from working at the golf course, to internships, to starting out early with ATC when it got launched in the basement! Nick, now CTO, Evangelist, and Thought Leader drive home the importance of MDR, how it’s sold, and how we can better add value to the customers.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech,
Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Everybody. Welcome back. We are back talking about the good, the fun, the dark world, potentially of security. But today what we’re talking about is, is managed detection and response. So the critical thing, we talk a lot about it as MDR. And so today I wanna talk about the r I wanna talk about the response and why that’s so important on with us today, we’ve got the wonderful, the amazing Nick Enger of ATC. Nick is a cto, he’s an evangelist, he’s a thought leader. But most importantly, he’s a fantastic partner of ours. So Nick, want to welcome you on, man.
Nick Enger (00:50):
Hey, thanks for having me. This is exciting. Hey, you get a different voice when you do the podcast. I love it.
Josh Lupresto (00:55):
I know, man, I just turns it on.
Nick Enger (00:59):
Josh Lupresto (01:07):
So let’s jump in. I wanna start off with hearing about where you came from. You know that some people have linear paths where they, they start out doing what they wanna be doing, and, and they, they just continue on that path. Some of this, it, this world sucks us in. And, and people start out completely unrelated to this at all, and then you can just never get out. But I would love to hear and, and have everybody else here. Where did you start? How did you get here?
Nick Enger (01:30):
Yeah, I, I have a rather unique story on how I landed where I am. So growing up, I, I, well, I reside outside of Cincinnati on the north side of Cincinnati, in the suburbs. Grew up a place called Westchester, Ohio. And I had worked at a country club growing up, and I worked there like 12 years old, 11 years old as a caddy, and kind of worked my way up through the, the heritage club life and, and kind of worked my way into doing the cart barn to bartending and working private parties. And I actually I ended up working there all the way through college. I, I decided to stay in Cincinnati and went to the University of Cincinnati and paid my way through school of working at this country club Heritage Club in Mason, Ohio. Well, one of the members of the country club happened to be David Goodwin with a company by the name of Advanced Technology Consulting.
Nick Enger (02:28):
And this is going back 18 years now. So 18 years ago they were working out of the basement of their house. And it was Dave and a guy that was supporting Dave’s efforts. Again, working out of Dave’s basement Clayton Connor, and I, I was I was 20 years old. I was going into my junior summer, actually, I was going into my, the summer before my senior year. And Dave approached me as I was working at the club, and I, one thing led to another, and I said, yeah, I’m looking for an internship if, you know anybody, just kind of, kind of threw it out there. Didn’t know anything about what Dave did, but just seeing if he kind of expanding the network. Well, next thing I know, I’m, I’m interning in the basement of Dave’s house,
Nick Enger (03:21):
And at the time, I mean, we were 18 years ago, right? So we, we were talking more, and admittedly we were more of a, a brokerage. We were, we were really saying like, what are you spending on your long distance today? And let me get you two to three other options, or What are you spending on that internet circuit today? And lemme get you two to three other options. And that’s really where the business was at that time. And I was always growing up I was tech savvy. I was, I was into technology. I always had the latest and greatest cell phone. I, I wanted to have the, the latest and greatest technologies. I was always intrigued by, by the networking and the, the next generation of whatever was coming next. So when I got involved with atc, I got to, I got to hear about all the new technologies and voiced over IP and how cool it could be, right?
Nick Enger (04:13):
Mm-Hmm. And how it’s gonna change the world. And I was very green. I didn’t know anything that we were really selling. We were talking about PRIs and all these legacy services. But at, it was 2007, and I was, I was knee-deep into voiceover ip and I, I learned everything I possibly could about voiceover IP at that time. So I worked there for the summer internship, ended up staying and paying my senior year working at ATC part-time and, and going to school part-time or full-time, I guess you would say. And at the end of it, I was, I was getting approached. I graduated college and I, I, for whatever reason, you know, the universities’ kind of pitch you to going to the big companies mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (05:21):
It’s a good idea. It’s a good idea, I promise.
Nick Enger (05:23):
Yeah. And my parents, you know, they, they grew up with the they worked at the, the fifth, third banks and the large machine tooling companies, and they, they were the big companies. And working for ATC with three employees was like just off the grid for ’em. Like, they, they were like, what are you doing? But they let me do it. And I, I haven’t looked back since, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.
Josh Lupresto (05:45):
Love it. I love that. Any, any great business, any great start. I, I love when there’s a garage, when there’s a basement, right? Because it just, it’s, it’s boots strappy, it’s hungry, it’s aggressive you just, you figure it out and, and you make it work. So kudos to you for, for taking the leap. And, and it’s, it’s I can validate it’s been a great decision for you,
Nick Enger (06:05):
Nick Enger (07:01):
And I found that incredibly rewarding. So with that, I mean, from the voiceover IP days, and then we started expanding into, to larger voice networks and larger contact centers and data networks became hot topic with the MPLS environments and later SD WAN and sassi. So we started adding a couple employees. We added a director of marketing to kind of help tell the ATC story because we were good at what we did, but we didn’t have anybody really telling our story for us. Right? So our director of marketing came on board then, and he’s been on with us for going on 10 years in July this year. So it started off as, you know, the three amigos, and it was the four amigos working in a basement. And now it’s like we have 16, 17 IT ninjas out there that are, are helping. And we’ve, it, we’ve had to modernize the operation, the, the organization as a whole to, to effectively scale. But it’s been so exciting, it’s so fun. And the technology’s ever changing. You have to, as you, you can attest, you have to be thirsty for knowledge in this industry. You have to be learning to learn on the bleeding edge and implement on the leading edge. Yeah. And I, I can’t emphasize that enough. As soon as you stop learning, you, you stop growing.
Josh Lupresto (08:19):
I, I agree a hundred percent. And, and I want to, I want to get into a little bit on you know, early on security exposure. Before I do that, I wanna call out something though. Cause I think you guys do such a bang up job. We, we’ve been able to be in the trenches together on some pretty cool deals. Yeah. And you guys have you know, you’ve obviously expanded far beyond the original days of, of what you do, right? Expanding this into other advanced services now. But can you talk to me a little bit about, for anybody that’s not familiar, who ATC is now, you have a really methodical, very granular, very polished, the way that you work with customers and present the value prop. Maybe you can just talk about that for a second and then we’ll jump into some of your early exposures into security.
Nick Enger (08:59):
Perfect. Yeah. Happy to tell the story. So we are what we consider a next generation IT consulting agency and professional services firm. We specialize in four core areas, voice, network, cloud, and security. We go very, very deep in each of those categories. We have a 23 year proven process that we follow for every single engagement. We call it the delta process. And it, it walks the client and us through a methodical, like you mentioned, very methodical process of making sure that we’re scoping services correctly, evaluating the current environment accurately, making sure that we clearly delineate the business requirements for every single engagement before we engage a vendor. So we have a team of consultants on our, our staff here that walk these clients through the process for every engagement. And it, it’s proven time and time again that if we follow that process, that it’s not only successful for the client, which is number one always, but it’s successful for the vendors that are at play.
Nick Enger (10:09):
Because at the end of the day, if we, if we aren’t doing right by the client and we aren’t doing right by the vendors, it’s not successful for us. Because at the end of the day, we’re, we’re the ones having to support that. And we’re the ones they call upon saying, why did you recommend this solution that didn’t make sense for us? And I think that the, that that’s the three-legged stool, right? Like all three parties have to be whole in that. And we’ve been pr it’s been proven through that process that all three are successful in, in being satisfied if we follow the process. And it’s been proven time and time again, as soon as we step out of that process and don’t do it that way, it falls apart. Right? So we, we’ve we’ve really hammered down on that that process and making sure that we follow it for every engagement.
Josh Lupresto (10:53):
Awesome. Love it. Let’s, let’s talk about your early on exposure to security. I, I would love to hear first on, you know, you, because we’re gonna transition this right to, to something more recent. And, and as you mentioned, right, the technology’s gotten crazy complicated and it’s evolved and, and, and it’s fun. And, and we’ve had to learn all that along the way. Take me back, walk me through one of the first opportunities that, that you worked on, or one of the first chances you had to really learn about this idea, the, the broader security landscape. Where was it? What did it look like? What, what was the technology like, and really what were the problems that you were trying to solve?
Nick Enger (11:27):
Well, I’ll give you a little, a little story of how I’ve evolved within a T c on that, that aspect. Very early on in my career, I had the ability the opportunity, I should say, of working with a very large hospital network. And it was a, an opportunity that was a, a UCaaS opportunity back in 2009 that it was more UCaaS related. They wanted, wanted to revolutionize their 110 locations in a big hospital footprint, about 5,000 users at the time. And it ended up growing through acquisitions. But through that process, we were also dealing with a, a network modification. It was a, a rejuvenation of legacy point to point into a traditional multipoint multipoint solution. It was more of a, a layer two type solution, but it was any, to any with that, that transformation, if you will. They were talking about security.
Nick Enger (12:26):
And this was, at the time I was in over my head on the security conversation. I was just a, a fly on the wall trying to learn as much as I could during that endeavor. I learned so much about networking so much about the network stack, how all of it fits together, how all of the routing works, even how BGP and the, the disaster recovery plans based on BGP routing, all of that, how all of that worked. And it gave me a different lens where I was just talking to them about ucas and maybe a little bit of contact center back then. Now I was having a conversation about like, real deliverables in the security framework. So, fast forward a couple years, we were very lucky. There is a vendor in our backyard in Cincinnati that is one of the early on MDR, before MDR was MDR.
Nick Enger (13:21):
Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (14:50):
It. When you, if if we pause at that, that spot in the learning for just a second, and, and let’s say I’m a partner and I’m listening to this, and maybe I feel like I’m that way now where I’ve, I’ve gotten up to speed on what’s happened in the last, you know, few years, but maybe these last 24 months, I haven’t, I haven’t paid attention to how aggressively the technology has grown and innovated. What, when you’re opening up that conversation with a customer and you’re having a talk track like that with kind of what you picked up on and what you learned from Vigilant about having a little different, how do you feel that that, how does that help your relationship with the customer evolve? Does it, you know, does it solidify the Delta process? Does it just show that, wow, I, I gotta think of you guys for everything. Like what, what does that, what does that lead to?
Nick Enger (15:38):
Yeah, I would say we, we are very good at having business discussions. Like we, we talk high level about business impact, what’s in, what’s hindering their growth? What are they worried about? What if something like X, Y, Z were to happen to your business, how would you respond? What type of, like a lot of folks nowadays are having compliance, does having a business discussion about compliance and regulation and are, do you have anything that you need to adhere to? I mean, it could be, you could be working with a jewelry store and they now all of a sudden have a PCI compliance. They don’t have any idea how to comply with, they have no idea. And just helping them through that process. It’s more about gaining the trust that you really care about their business. And that, I couldn’t emphasize that enough. I mean, you have to build the trust that you care about their wellbeing, the business’s wellbeing and the business growing for you to gain the trust to even ad advise that client.
Nick Enger (16:44):
And I, I would say, like, we’re a fairly technical group. Our group is an, has enough of the technical aptitude to go pretty deep on the, on the security questions on their own. But the, the person just starting out, they don’t need to be, just gain the trust of the, the client and bring in the, the great folks that Josh and, and the team have, and really the, they can have the, the, the tough questions, the technical questions and, and not get exposed. Like not knowing something. Yeah. There’s no one out there. I I, that would be another thing. There’s no one out there that knows everything about security, including your customer.
Josh Lupresto (17:24):
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I love it. Gain the trust. I, I, I, Michelle that you care. I think that’s huge. That’s a good, great way to put it. Let’s talk about the evolution of this product set. So, you know, we, we grew up, we saw Norton and McAfee and, and, and some of these consumer grade endpoints, and we called it antivirus. And then it seems like it evolved and there was anti spyware, there was ad where there was all these things and the names kept changing. And then, you know, then it sort of combined a little bit and AI got embedded in the backend. And then, but we didn’t really know how AI was helping us or how we could quantify it. And now here we are at MDR you know, we, we, we passed over EDR endpoint detection because we realized it’s really hard to do on your own. But now we’re at MDR managed detection and response. What, what’s your opinion on it? It feels like, you know, maybe we do this again in 12 months and XDR takes over the world, and it’s another acronym. But what do you think about that journey? Why has this over the last five years really solidified to be an MDR journey? And what are you seeing out there when you’re talking to customers? Why does MDR peak interest now?
Nick Enger (18:36):
Oh, man, I could go a bunch of different angles on this. I mean, really the, what is MDR, right? Like, it, it’s changing so much, so quickly on a daily basis. I think I could ask two or three or four different vendors to give four different answers of what the actual MDR product set is. I think it’s evolving and changing with the times, because I feel like one, there’s, there’s different buyers out there, there’s different ways of consuming this product. And I would, I would expand on that. Like the, the enterprise, the large enterprise, they have a team of security architects that know the tools that they want to buy. They know exactly the, the, the gap that they have within their enterprise that they’re trying to fill for, and they know the vendors. So they’re looking for you to help procure that.
Nick Enger (19:26):
And they’re wanting to make sure that they’re procuring it in the right way for the mid to large size business, or maybe even small enterprise. They don’t have 25 security architects on staff. They don’t have a SOC internally. They’re looking for solutions. They’re looking for advisement. And I think that that’s where the MDR piece comes into play. Now, I, I can make the argument, MDR has a couple different components. I think the MDR has the endpoint component. And I think that that next generation antivirus that’s evolved into the endpoint component of this, it has to have the visibility, it has to have the, the defense mechanisms to stop a threat on the endpoint. I would also make the argument that the new MDR products have to have a network component. So I think that that the same reasons, they have to have the visibility and this, the ability to stop a threat when it happens.
Nick Enger (20:21):
And I would think that the, the MDRs of today must communicate between the two and have a central repository of all security events that are occurring on those, those two pieces. That would be what a SIM would be providing to you. And then I think you need some type of group that’s going to respond to those events. So when things happen and we shut something down, they need to respond accordingly. And that is what your SOC is going to do. And that SOC could be internal, or it could be out external, it could be outsourced as a service. And those four components, there’s others, don’t get me wrong, but those four components are the bare minimum in my mind, to set up the framework of an MDR solution. And I think that, I know there’s vendors out there that do that as a complete comprehensive solution to a customer that can be productized and consumed as a whole. In addition to that, you could take it a step further and take in the start consuming the AWS and the Azure and the Google suite. You could also take it into ingesting other logs such as your firewall logs and things like that. I think that that’s taking it to the Next Level. I think at the bare minimum it, it’s endpoint, its network, it’s SIM and its SOC. That’s how I would define it. I don’t know if, if that resonates with the, with you.
Josh Lupresto (21:50):
I agree. You painted a good journey, I think, to, to help, to help underscore what these components are, because I think that’s part of the, the, the partner discussion is how do I understand where they are, what they need? And so I love the, the vision that you painted about what an enterprise, you know, where their mindset is versus kind of the mid-market and, and those, and I think you’re right. I I, I do agree with those components. And I think part of the time, if we understand at least what those components are or some sort of framework, then we can figure out, Hey, do you have these components now? And we can ask, yeah, which of these are on your roadmap or on your journey, right? Or have you thought of this? And then we can certainly stop and say, okay, I would love to have a deeper discussion with you about that, to figure out where, you know, where we can augment.
Josh Lupresto (22:32):
And, and so I, I, I think that, I think that’s important. The one thing I want to go back to that you brought up a great point on I would love to hear your, your opinion on this is, is if we flashback to kind of what traditional antivirus was, where it was signature based, meaning, okay, I know the thousand or a hundred thousand or whatever viruses are out there, they all look exactly like this. I’m gonna look for one of those, and then if I see them, I’m going to quarantine it and tell you I did something great for you. Thank you, Norton. Thank you. Mcafee, right? Yeah. For bogging down all of our computers forever. Yep. But now if I look at, to your point of what that’s evolved to, and we talk about layering in ai, it’s, it’s not, you know, having the network connection, like you mentioned, enables a lot of that, well, what do I do when it doesn’t match?
Josh Lupresto (23:15):
It’s more about find out what’s normal and tell me when something’s not normal. And so, you know, we as, as, as tech nerds get to see this stuff every day and, and, and look at these products, see what’s real, really dig into it. I’m curious, from your perspective, when you’re in a conversation with a customer, I wanna talk about the hard part of this conversation. How do you help them understand that they need help? What have you found really the most successful part of that? Because we talk a lot about, you know, staffing shortages, and you brought up a great point that people don’t have all the people and they don’t, nobody knows everything. How do you drive that point home that, you know, here, I understand the evolution, I understand the product sets. Is it going over the four things you just mentioned? Or, or what’s that talk track?
Nick Enger (23:59):
Well, it’s a couple things. One, I would, I would always walk ’em down the path of you don’t have the in-house resources to be able to manage SOC 24/7. If you did, I would, I would walk ’em down a mathematical formula of saying, here’s the average salary. Here’s how many hours you would need these people. How much is this gonna actively cost you to do this? And I inevitably would get the argument, well, they’ll just wake me up out of bed
Nick Enger (24:50):
They’re ingesting a whole bunch of signature sets behind the scenes that are getting released. So they’re getting fed in all the time and getting pushed out to the endpoint in the path as we were doing passes and things like that. We, we, everything’s happening faster. So like waiting for a patch to go out, that doesn’t do us any good, because it’s already been exposed to, to whatever bad’s coming down the pike. So it’s, it’s all about that ai, the machine learning, but at the same time, getting the signatures out to the endpoint as quickly as humanly possible going into the AI and machine learning, like it needs it, it starts to learn the progressions of the organization as a whole. Is it normal for me to have users all of a sudden in Europe? Is it normal for users to all of a sudden show up in Japan? Is it normal for Nick to log into X, y, Z server at 3:00 AM while he is traveling in California? All of those go into that AI and machine learning, giving responses back to the organization. Is this a, a yellow thread, an orange thread, or a red threat in how fast we need to respond to these things? Because as we mentioned earlier, it’s like it’s happening faster and faster in the re ordinary business out there. Cannot keep up with it.
Josh Lupresto (26:12):
Yeah. Great points. So as we’re, as we’re into the weeds, I want to talk about maybe a more recent opportunity. So the, the, the thing that we always joke about in here is that, man, these, these customer environments never end up looking exactly like what we were told. They might, you know, what the problem might be. And I love that because that this helps us underscore like, did you think of this? Did you think of this? And so can you walk us through an example of somebody that you’ve come into, what you were told the problem was, what you found out they really had, and what you, you know, how you ended, ended up helping them. What, what kind of technology did you put in place?
Nick Enger (26:46):
Oh, man, there’s so many. I, I’ll leave, I’ll, I’ll wax a little more philosophical in case they hear this. But I, I will give you a couple different examples here. So we walked into an opportunity that it was, they, they had it figured out. I don’t think he, I bet every agent out there has, has been in these types of meetings, right? Like, I got it covered. We don’t need to talk about security. Yeah. And then after we go through our, our Delta process, and part of our Delta process, and I encourage everybody to do this, is we do it an audit and assessment of their entire environment. And they might say, no, no, no, you don’t need to audit what our endpoint is. You don’t need to audit what firewall versions we are on, or how old our firewalls are. Yeah, we do.
Nick Enger (27:34):
Yeah, we do. And just keep pushing, like, yeah, we need to get a full capture of everything holistically that’s going on within your environment so we can advise you holistically of the best solutions to go forward with in uncovering all of those. And then we do this across the board, whether we’re talking about voice, whether we’re talking about network, whether we’re talking about cloud, or we’re talking about security. We’re gonna get really, really granular on getting an understanding of their current environment. Well, after they said we, we got security cover, we don’t need to do anything. The CIO kind of comes over the top and says, yeah, why don’t we take a look at that? We want, we wanna make sure that we’re buttoned up the best we can. And we came across it, and again, I’m not gonna throw too much out the firewalls, were end of life, end of support.
Nick Enger (28:20):
We uncovered an entire network opportunity by talking about the security conversation. Then we talked about from a compliance standpoint, what do you need to comply with? What type of regulations are coming down on you guys? Oh, by the way, you need to do MDR. Like, we haven’t even touched on the cybersecurity insurance aspect of this. During this conversation, the CFO happened to be in the room. He says, I just got our cybersecurity insurance and it’s gonna double next year. And I have four pages of questions that I need to respond to. Can you guys help us fill that out? This is all in the same meeting.
Josh Lupresto (28:58):
Nick Enger (28:59):
The CFO goes, okay, we need to do this. This is this, this MDR was one. Multifactor was one. Yeah. Like all of these things that the cybersecurity insurance is saying you’re gonna get dinged on and double for the following year, are things that you can take advantage of by just making yourself more resilient and more buttoned up from the cybersecurity posture. So after we went through the laundry list from the cybersecurity insurance audit, as well as our own internal audit, we uncovered that this is a perfect fit for an MDR SOC as a service. And they ended up going down this path with us deploying all of this, got their, their assessment done by the cybersecurity insurance company, and it didn’t raise a penny. Yeah. And they spent less money on the MDR platform that we deployed for them than the, the cost for the cybersecurity insurance was ever going to be love By deploying technology, they reduced their cybersecurity insurance.
Josh Lupresto (30:01):
Love it. Love it. Great stuff. Okay.
Nick Enger (30:05):
The CFO is ecstatic. Same with the the CIO.
Josh Lupresto (30:08):
Yeah. When you can, when you can come in with something that appears on the surface, you know, as a knee jerk reaction to be a net new cost, and it ends up, you know, besides the brand building and, and protection and all of that happens to save money yeah. You’re a hero. You’re, you’re in that deal forever. Absolutely.
Nick Enger (30:23):
I just, I actually just talked to that CIO yesterday. I had dinner a group of folks at dinner, and I asked, how’s it going? How’s, how’s the SOC as a service and a SIM and all of that? How’s it all working? Phenomenal. Is what he said. Phenomenal for a guy that’s he has thousands and thousands of users. Phenomenal.
Josh Lupresto (30:44):
Awesome. Love that. Good stuff. All right, as we, as we wrap this thing up, let’s look forward. You know, I, at the rate that technology changes, we can’t look forward too far. But advice, curious from your perspective, if you look out 12 months-ish what do you think changes, right? Anything else? Trends for us to pay attention to different areas you wanna focus on? Kind of curious where you think this thing goes. Take that anywhere you want.
Nick Enger (31:14):
Oh, man. It could go a lot of different ways.
Josh Lupresto (32:36):
Couldn’t agree more good stuff. Fun to pay attention to. I’m certainly excited to see what comes next. So Nick, hey man. I appreciate you coming on doing this with me, buddy.
Nick Enger (32:46):
This was awesome. Let’s do it again.
Josh Lupresto (32:47):
All right. Deal. K all take us out. All right everybody, I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering. This is Next Level BizTech podcast. Wanna thank Nick Enger of ATC, thanks so much for coming on. Till next time, everybody.
Listen in today as one of the top experts in the security industry, Elia Cohen, Cybersecurity Director at AT&T, weighs in. Elia discusses where he got his start and how he got an early interest in security. Also, Elia opens up about the amazing toolset AT&T Security has to offer with everything from MDR & Security Framework build-outs to prem and web application firewalls along with Compliance checks throughout. Prepare for a wealth of knowledge!
https://youtu.be/oID575Keu0c Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We are on the security track, and today we’re talking about the r and that R is the R in managed detection and response, or you might know of it as MDR. And today we got on a special guest, dear friend a, a peer in the space that’s helped us be extremely successful in the security space. Mr. Elia Cohen, director over cybersecurity at AT&T. Elia, welcome on, man.
Elia Cohen (00:44):
Hey, thanks for having me, Josh. Really excited to be here and talk about this really popular solution out in the industry today.
Josh Lupresto (00:52):
I’m excited you know, for the sake of time, we could go on forever with all the great stuff that you guys have over there that I don’t think a lot of people know about. But we’ll dive into a little bit of that here as we get going. I, I wanna kick us off though first about you. You know, personally, we know right now you were the cybersecurity director at AT&T and we can talk about what that means in a second. But where did you start? What, what’s your path? Has it always been tech? Has it always been security? Has it been something completely unrelated? Where did it begin and how did you get here?
Elia Cohen (01:21):
Yeah, I mean, so in terms of where, where I’ve come from and where I am now I think I kind of fell into this for the lack of a better term.
Josh Lupresto (02:24):
Family show, family show haha.
Elia Cohen (02:26):
Exactly. That, that that’ll keep, keep PG. Yeah. But ultimately education is really where it, it helped people get to a better spot. And so as I did that, I started to move into I got my first job outta college for security company more on the engineering side, and eventually started to move back towards sales probably four or five years into that. And then I’ve been doing technical sales and cybersecurity sales ever since. And it’s been probably a good 15 plus years now.
Josh Lupresto (02:59):
Love it. Love the journey. Talk to me about, you know, at t’s a big name. You know, I, I, I don’t think, and, and, you know, when we learned early on, I, I don’t think we knew the depth of the practice as it has with security. And then it’s certainly even expanded since we started. But we’re gonna get into products here, some more depth in products in a little bit, but maybe gimme a little you know, your segment of AT&T and your security side. What is that all about? What does that practice entail?
Elia Cohen (03:28):
Sure thing. So, yeah, I mean, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll echo your sentiment that yes, AT&T does have a cybersecurity practice.
Josh Lupresto (04:55):
Love it. Let’s talk about, let’s paint a picture of what it was like before maybe one of the early on deals that, that you sold. Walk me through, you know, whenever this was. I, I don’t care how long it, how old it is, how much it dates you, it doesn’t matter. Let’s make it more entertaining. But tell me about one of the first deals that you sold in this, and when, when did that really open your eyes to the idea of, of what we could do in security?
Elia Cohen (05:20):
Yes. I’ve been in the security space for quite a while now, and I, I’ve sold EDR before it even existed and sold kind of the traditional antivirus or endpoint protection solutions, and was with an endpoint company when EDR was becoming a thing. And so it was pretty interesting to see the evolution of the technology going from pretty static types of detections, very signature based detections to the evolution of moving towards machine learning and, and advanced algorithms for detection. And so, as you can imagine, back then, it wasn’t a perfect science probably still isn’t today
Elia Cohen (06:16):
So at the time I was working with a, a fairly large insurance company, and they needed to advance their, their, their, their game when it came to protecting their endpoints. And they had stuff all over the place and data centers that they own in the cloud and then all of their end user compute devices that they needed protected. And so pretty common, they had a ra rather small team of individuals that was mostly focused on it and then a couple of named security persons. And so clearly wasn’t enough when it came to being able to manage a solution and look at all the different detections that were taking place 24 by seven. But that was the model back then. The, the M part of MDR didn’t really exist then. So we were really selling the point solution.
Elia Cohen (07:06):
And just like the evolution of the endpoint in its technology to edr the market kind of realized that there’s a big gap when it comes to the overall 24 by seven monitoring and response capabilities. And so this MDR space started to come in. So at the time, we didn’t have an MDR solution with that company, so we really just focused on selling, selling them the end product. But over time they started to build up more staff and they had a hard time doing that. And fortunately, within a couple years, they ended up having a service to add the management on top of that.
Josh Lupresto (07:42):
Love it. You, you bring up a good a good point, which is one of my next questions, which is the evolution of this. And so, you know, I I, I think I would love to hear maybe from you a little bit about how this helps the customers see an roi. But, you know, maybe weave in, you mentioned, you know, this has evolved. It used to be called antivirus, and then it was edr, and now it’s MDR, and there’s these other ideas of XDR and, and kind of what’s, what’s coming up next around. But talk to me about a, how and why has some of this evolved from your perspective in the trenches, and how do you still, no matter what, help a customer see ROI around that?
Elia Cohen (08:21):
Well, I would say, when it comes to cybersecurity, ROI is a dirty term these days.
Josh Lupresto (09:16):
Do you see, I mean, to to your point where it did used to be all about roi, do you see, though, when people come to you for a security need, is it about the ROI at all, or is it, I have this problem and it’s so important? Cost is the fourth thing on my list of priorities right now. What’s your trend?
Elia Cohen (09:36):
So there’s different types of customers out there, and it, and you really have to go back to the drivers that are leading this conversation. So anybody that’s had a reach will tell you outright that they will, that, that it’s probably the most awful experience that they’ve ever had, and they don’t ever want to have that again. And they’re ready to pay
Elia Cohen (10:27):
And by the way, you also need that to be managed. So now the customer doesn’t really have a choice. If they want to have cybersecurity insurance, they have to go buy a managed EDR service somewhere, somehow
Josh Lupresto (11:24):
You know, you bring up a good point. I mean, sometimes I think when we get in, we uncover the situation of what they really need. We just ask that we just want ’em to do something. I, I think that’s the overall idea with part of a security strategy is that, yeah, you can’t, you know, you, you could spend 80 of your 80% of your time covering 20%, or you’re gonna spend 20% covering 80%, right? E e either way. And I think when you have to look at it, we just want them to walk away and do something and make some progress to that point. So, yeah, I, I, I think we’re just happy now that their hands are forced to some extent, but it really just, it requires them to take a long look at it. And I think we’ve found the same thing, you know, 70% of the it’s responsibility has been it, and then they’ve maybe done, you know, security 30% of the time, and they still just need help even before all this craziness. You know, there was, there was a massive shortage in security when, when employment and all those things were normalized. So, good points.
Elia Cohen (12:19):
Yep.
Josh Lupresto (12:20):
So, all right, let, let’s spend a little bit of time here unpacking the AT&T product set. If, if this podcast for a three hour podcast, we could probably do it cuz you guys have so much good stuff in there. But if, if, if I, if we try to make a decision here for the sake of time we could talk framework building. We, to your point, more services, cmmc compliance readiness, you know, the MDR products that you guys have, pen test, there’s security awareness training. Maybe boil this down for me. Let’s, let’s start with the top three, maybe the top four. What’s the first product that you want to talk about so that we can make sure that everybody understands it from your side?
Elia Cohen (13:01):
Yeah, so as I mentioned before, the there’s really two focuses in the portfolio. One is managed security services, the second is security consulting. And and, and we, we have a number of solutions in both of those areas. So when it comes to protecting assets whether it’s your users, your endpoint or your applications and data, we have solutions that span across all of that. When you start to look at consulting, it’s kind of a weaving fabric for the managed services. So even though we might be providing a, a managed firewall or a managed endpoint solution there’s usually some thought that has to go through in how to do that effectively. And is that enough? Do we need more? Are there other things that we should be doing or could be doing? And what are the pros and cons of doing thAT&The risk that we’re managing with that? And that’s really where consulting comes into play. Getting a good sense of kind of the assessment, the framework that you mentioned of what we could do should do, and how does this align to industry best practices. And when you start to look at the different regulations that are out there this could be just a self initiative that the, a business could have, or it could be a regulated and mandated like PCI or CMMC or any one of the other regulations out there.
Josh Lupresto (14:24):
So, so if we, if we go over what you just mentioned again, and we do a little bit of kind of vendor soup, OEM soup I think that’s where sometimes the, the asks come from the customer side. So if we think about, I’m just going to, we’ll speed date this for a second, but if we talk about obviously frameworks, if we talk about what frameworks we’re building out, I mean, it, it doesn’t matter if it’s NIST, it doesn’t matter if it’s CIS. You guys have expertise to build out any of those and any others that I missed in there that you wanna cover?
Elia Cohen (14:54):
Yeah. HIPAA, I trust, pretty much the, the ISO, SOC2, pretty much all of the different types of initiatives for security that you can think of, we can support and provide the assessment services as well as some of the remediation and fill in some of the gaps, whether it’s with more consulting services or with with the managed security services.
Josh Lupresto (15:17):
Okay. How about from an awareness training? Is there a specific software specific manufacturer that you guys have had a lot of success with? Or ones that, that you tout?
Elia Cohen (15:27):
Yeah, so we have a couple of tools that we have in place. One from health systems, one from Orion. So those are kind of our two leading solutions. Yeah, I, I’d say that there’s a lot of folks out there that that already have security awareness training but what they’re doing with it, how that weaves into maybe some of the other services that they could be or should be doing. So typically if you have training, that’s great, but you should also be doing some phishing simulations. If you have phishing simulation, you should sometimes start thinking about getting social engineering and getting an actual human to your locations. So thinking about AT&, then starting to then test the environment with penetration testing to then test the defenses that are in place, which could also potentially indirectly test in the users. All of that kind of in concert is how we can start to look at solutioning for a customer versus just give them that one widget of say the, the security awareness training.
Josh Lupresto (16:27):
And from a, from a pen testing perspective, let, let’s, let’s lump in here pin testing and vulnerability assessments for a second. Is it safe to say that whether we need external ips just scanned to see if we have any open vulnerabilities versus even inside application level we, we could carve out a program for you to come in and, and, and scope out all of those, right. Internal, external, everything, everything adjacent.
Elia Cohen (16:53):
Absolutely. And I can’t stress this enough that our partners here don’t have to understand all this stuff,
Josh Lupresto (17:22):
Okay. One of the last couple here, maybe talk about MDR and then you know, firewalls both web app and, and prem and, and cloud, things like that. So from an MDR perspective, that, that important, you know, that that important technology to isolate whatever happens at the edge, at the endpoint server device. What, what are some of the MDR tool sets that you guys like that you’ve seen good results out of?
Elia Cohen (17:48):
Yeah, so there’s only one that we really lead with here within our portfolio, and that’s with Sentinel One. And so we have a very large partnership with Sentinel One. They’re a leading EDR solution in the industry. And so, so that’s what we focus on for edr on the network side. Again, alphabet soup, like you mentioned mm-hmm.
Elia Cohen (18:38):
The edge is kind of the internet
Josh Lupresto (19:53):
Great stuff. All right. Speed dating round over. And I know we just, we, we, we probably skipped over a whole bunch of good stuff, but I, I think it, it shows people the depth of what you have. It’s not just about, to your point, the, the point solution. It’s about what you do with those results, what you take action on, what best practices we recommend after. Cuz anybody can sell a point solution. So this isn’t about that. And I think that’s why you guys have had such good success, cuz you see that it’s in the services, it’s in the results, it’s in the, it’s in the skills and the people. So, great stuff. Okay. Let’s, let’s talk about you know, rather than roses and rainbows, let’s talk about the difficult parts. Let’s talk about the sales process. Help me walk through, if you have a hurdle.
Josh Lupresto (20:34):
I mean, we’ve all been in those conversations with customers where they just don’t think that they need help. How do you, I guess what’s, what’s your strategy in the conversation or what do you recommend for the partners listening to this that, you know, I, I, I know we’re telling them they don’t need to be experts. We’ve got a, a plethora of amazing engineers and architects, our team, your team that can help them with this, that are there every single step of the way. But when you’re in a discussion and, and you’re, you’re being asked to come on this call, how do you help get through that, that customer that just doesn’t quite see that they need help? What’s your, what’s your go-to talk track there?
Elia Cohen (21:11):
So I would say that everybody needs help. Everybody out there needs help when it comes to cybersecurity. There’s not there, there’s no, no, there isn’t one single thing that you could be doing. And I, I’ve yet to find a customer that tells me that they have adequate tools and personnel 24 by seven to go solve all their needs. So that being said typically when I hear customers indicating that they don’t need help, that they have things under control or that they they, they don’t need a particular solution typically it’s, it’s more indicative of maturity. And so oftentimes, instead of maybe trying to push or, or recommend say MDR or, or a Simmons SOC solution that might just be too advanced for the customer, they haven’t done some of their table stake guidance. Like, no, what’s in their environment?
Elia Cohen (22:08):
Do you have an asset management solution? Do you know what all the devices are that are communicating on your network? Do you know where they are
Josh Lupresto (22:56):
Love it. All right. I want to get into the last couple points here as we wrap this up. An example. So we talked about in the beginning, one of the examples that you saw, one of the deals that you worked, how you helped them through that. Give me through a, a situation here where, you know, maybe you got brought in, Hey, Elia, this situation and the environment looks like this. And you get in and find out it’s something completely different. Maybe you got in and, and it’s exactly what you said, but maybe just walk us through a situation that you were in where you guys were able to add a lot of value, but really what was the tech that you pulled out or what was the business problem and, and what kind of solutions did you end up putting in?
Elia Cohen (23:32):
Sure. So I’ll cover a a healthcare customer. They were doing and still are they’re doing clinical research using big data in the cloud. And they’re using multiple, multiple cloud platforms. Yes, they’re a startup, so
Elia Cohen (24:48):
And so so he decided to start working with us on that. And then meanwhile, because of all their different environments, they started to realize they needed some help to get a better sense of what’s out there. And so we started to look at both the, some vulnerability management capabilities as well as more of the Simmons SOC as a service. And since we were talking about that, we started to ask them what would happen if an incident takes place? Who would actually be responsible for caring forward, not the response, but the remediation, the eradication of, of the malware that’s in place, and also making sure that things are forensically sound if, if a law enforcement type of agent investigation needs to take place. And of course, they didn’t really have anything like that in place. So the, what the solution turned into was an MDR with Sentinal one, Simmons, the service with alien Vault managed vulnerability with qualis.
Elia Cohen (25:50):
And then also our incident response and forensics retainer. And before we even got a chance to stand up any of these services, we got, I got a phone call, personally,
Elia Cohen (26:51):
And then, of course, in parallel, we started to, to work on getting the, the endpoints deployed, the SIMs deployed, and it wasn’t probably more than another couple months before they had another attack that we detected this time. Ooh, using our MDR services, targeting their oh 365 environment, all their users, it’s mostly their executive staff. But ultimately the investigations that we did came and surfaced that their office 365 policies were fairly lenient in allowing adversaries to just communicate with their employees a little bit too directly mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (27:55):
Love it. Boom. if I had a mic drop sound effect, I would play it right now. It’s a great example, but, but it’s really typical. I mean, that’s exactly why we do this. That’s exactly why we need the solutions that we have out there from our vendors like yourself, because without that, we would not be able to solve these problems. So, nice work excited to keep, keep doing more of those great stuff. All right. So as we get to the end of this here, I think we’ve established the point of what the title of this is, is, you know, why is the R so important, right? The remediation, the response, because it’s not, things are gonna happen, bad things are gonna happen. We’re not defined by the quantity of things that happen, just like in life. We’re defined by how we respond to those things and what we learn and how we get better.
Josh Lupresto (28:38):
And so definitely, I think we’ve, we’ve called out the fact that people still need help. There are gaps all over the place, no matter how mature the organization is. So we have to work to find those. So awesome stuff. I think you really put a bow on that. Final thoughts here. So if we, and this is a hard space to look out more than 12 months, more than 24 months, but if we grab our crystal ball and in, in Eli’s humble opinion, as we look out, I don’t know, let’s call it twelve, twenty four months, what do we think changes? Does, does the, does the agenda change? Do the strategies change as to how we help customers with this? What, what do the products change? What do you see happening or, you know, what do you want to caution partners or give advice to partners for over the next next little while?
Elia Cohen (29:25):
Yeah, I would say that in the next 12 to 24 months security’s still gonna be a focus. There’s still gonna be a lot of of folks that are going to be increasing their level of maturity. So understanding where your customers are, are where some of their gaps are understanding what drives their business is gonna be really important. So if, if there’s some, some final words that I can share around what partners could be doing with their customers, doing what they do best, have a business conversation. Talk to them about what their business is, what their core competencies are what makes them viable as a business how they’re utilizing technology to drive their business and start to uncover some of the risks of what if your technology went down, what if your data was compromised? What if your operations weren’t able to continue forward, and have you thought through how to mitigate some of those risks? So really the focus, I think, should be around risk management. And what you’ll uncover is that some customers have a risk management practice in place, some don’t. Some have varying levels of it. And talking to them in that type of a tone, we’ll start to get them to be more open-ended around the responses that you’re gonna get, which then will open you up to a lot more opportunities s versus just widget selling
Josh Lupresto (30:55):
Love. Okay. Good stuff. All right. Well, man, hey, kudos to you. What you’re doing, what you’re building on the security practice, we appreciate everything over there. You know, big kudos for for Kelly Owoseni, you know, making sure that we really got a good understanding of everything that AT&T has to offer. You know, we got a lot of big advocates of your guys internally. So I, I appreciate you coming on and doing this with me, man.
Elia Cohen (31:17):
Hey, thanks for having me. Great conversation and looking forward to some of the, the momentum that we get after this.
Josh Lupresto (31:23):
All right, good stuff. Okay, everybody that wraps us up for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering. Elia Cohen, cybersecurity director at AT&T. This is Next Level BizTech. Until next time.
Listen today with JW Stanley of the Telarus Sales Engineering team as he kicks off our track around Security and MDR. He talks about why the Response portion of Managed Detection and Response is so crucial now, more than in the past. He drives home great discussions around alert fatigue, and how to draw out these types of projects so you can help customers solve known and unknown problems.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:14):
Everybody, welcome back to another episode. We are talking about a topic that is not new, but we’re talking about an important area within security. So today we are talking about managed detection and response, but more importantly, the title is Why is the R in Managed Detection and Response. So, more importantly, the r why does that matter so much? So we’re not gonna answer that now, but we’re gonna get into that as we go. And hopefully answer that. For you throughout with us on today, we have a good man named JW Stanley, who is a C I S S P. We’ll talk about what that is. Telarus Engineering extraordinaire Barbecue Pro. I dare you to challenge him all. Lots of good stuff. I could go on and on about you. JW. Thanks for coming on, man.
JW Stanley (00:54):
Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it.
Josh Lupresto (00:56):
Hey I like to hear people’s paths in life. Sometimes this world of, of telecom and cloud and, and all these things suck you in and you just go, how did I get here? And others set out to do this. And so I would love to hear, how did you get here? What, what, what was your path?
JW Stanley (01:14):
Yeah, no. So that’s an interesting story. So my undergrad studies is actually in marketing, the special events. I wanted to be an event organizer for something like the Olympics or like a music festival, something like that. However, as I was given my internship speech, the planes hit nine 11. I graduated that December. Struggled finding the job as industry was pretty much as a standstill, as you can imagine. And you know, I had I had a bunch of buddies that was going to law school, and I had a little bit of arrogance. I’m like, you know what, I’ll do that too. And so,
JW Stanley (02:03):
Such so, got on there, started working in IT department, because technology was always a hobby. As I fast forward from that you know, as I saw the, you know, the way that the attorneys worked and all that stuff, I’m like, I have absolutely no interest in law, you know, being an attorney at all. And I really enjoyed the technology aspect of it. So my boss at the time, he’s the one that taught me networking encouraged me to go back to school. So went back to school, got my master’s in telecom engineering with a minor network security, and you know, did that well, story doesn’t stop there. You know, again, my focus was security. And so I had an interest in, you know, BEC going to law enforcement, you know, after graduate school and had applied and done all like the physical tests and everything I needed to do to become a a, a Tulsa police officer in the cyber crime unit. That was kind of like my goal. However, the mayor ended up cutting the budget mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (03:17):
Love it. Good stuff. I love a good non-linear path. That’s awesome. I think life is like that. You know, when we, when we’re growing up and we start out, we just, I don’t know, at least I did, we think that life has to look this certain way and this is how you get here. And I mean, I think there’s been, more often than not it just doesn’t look that way. And so I love it. I love hearing, it’s a good story
JW Stanley (03:38):
When I think, you know, whenever you truly find your passion and you kind of go that direction, it makes a world of a difference.
Josh Lupresto (03:44):
Yeah, I think so. I learned that taken nine years to get my four year degree. My passion was not to stay in school any longer. I’m with you there. Okay. So l let’s get a, a role for anybody that’s not familiar, right? Your role is part of this team from an engineering perspective. Break that down, right? I mean, because I think maybe people listening to this, maybe they haven’t worked with you, maybe they don’t know how engineering can help them. Walk us through just at a high level, what that role is and how it helps.
JW Stanley (04:11):
Yeah, absolutely. So I am one of the regional sales engineers at Telarus. I cover the the central Midwest region, and I really help partners with things like supplier education discovery calls as well as aligning the right suppliers to an opportunity. So, you know, from that, I’m kinda like your main, you know, point of contact. Folks will bring me in at the very beginning. And then, you know, based upon discussions that we have either, you know, the partner and I or the partner customer, and I based upon those conversations, I look at, you know, whether or not, you know, we need to bring in additional resources. So like, maybe one of our solution architects or maybe one of our inside engineers. I’m really kinda like that, you know, team approach. You know, we’ll do such as needed.
Josh Lupresto (04:55):
Good. I’m, I’m gonna come back a little bit about how, how you’ve been able to help some of these partners evolve and learn new things and do different deals and get into their customers. But I wanna, I wanna back up for maybe just a second. So, if, if we flash back, you know, you, you talked about some of these IT jobs, some of these things that you had, if we talk about, you know, defining what this security and managed detection and response is, I mean, w walk us through how you define that. And it’s certainly, it’s evolved over time and we’ll, we’ll talk evolution in a second, but, but how do you look at that, you know, coming fresh off of that security cert, but you know, just in what you do in your day-to-day, how do you define that broader space?
JW Stanley (05:32):
Yeah, so so I gotta give a shout. So Jeff Hathcote, I get all of my network security knowledge from him.
Josh Lupresto (06:10):
So where, if, if we look back, maybe the first time you interacted with this, this could be whenever, right? I mean, walk me through maybe what your first experience, cuz we’re gonna, we’re gonna show the opposite end of this as we kind of build about the advancement of this technology in something more recent. But maybe just walk me through what was it like going through that first deal, right? Were, were you a seller? Were you an IT manager? Were you on the fence, you know, help me out understand that.
JW Stanley (06:35):
Yeah. So this one’s gonna take us back probably not as far as the radio Radio shack discussion that, you know, you and Hathcote had on you guys podcast. What Radio Shack? I mean, if folks, you know, if they haven’t checked it out, they definitely should. It was great. But but no, this one it was pretty soon after joining Telarus, you know, so it’s probably one of the very first ones that I had worked on. And the the customer, it was like, it was a three person, it, you know, person it shop, you know, they were supporting a handful of locations. They had some decent standalone, you know, hardware, but they really struggled, you know, supporting all of it as well as their other day-to-day, you know, job task and such. So, you know, from that they needed a solution that they can, you know, take the monitoring and response responsibilities, take that off their shoulders, and really, you know, kind of outsource that, have somebody else, you know, help them from that.
Josh Lupresto (07:25):
That’s good. Now let’s, let’s look at the evolution of the partner’s relationship in, in a segment of this, right? I mean, when I started in this, we were just, we were a little bit limited on the products that I think we had to sell. So certainly there was a lot of networking and things like that and, and, and some of the LD and, and, and voice services. But as, as you’ve been able to wrap your arms around this and, you know, like you talked about, you’re very deal facing, very discovery call, helping partners. How do you feel that having a technology like this or being able to sell something like this, how does that help the partners and, and really their relationships evolve or, or see roi? You know, walk me through that.
JW Stanley (08:03):
Yeah. This technology really, you know, it helps partners provide like the extra layer of service to their customers. You know, in the past, the focus, you know, has been just on networking or on the voice. However, you know, as we see more security events, you know, impacting those networks and voice, you know, customers, they’re looking for someone that can holistically, you know, help them. And so, you know, time and time again, those partners, you know, that can provide that type of help they’re the ones that are not only seeing growth, but they’re also the ones that are maintaining their customer base. And unfortunately, those partners that struggle, you know, with that pivot find our customer base, you know, starting to shrink because there’s others out there that are helping ’em with this technology
Josh Lupresto (08:44):
Fair. Right? If, if, if they’re not asking the question, somebody is for sure, go. If we think about the journey, if we think about where, where we’re at at mdr, right? We’re talking about mdr. Maybe the next thing to come when we add an AI is xdr, right? We’re helping AI make us smarter and detect things on the endpoints. We just back this journey up before it was MDR was endpoint detection, response, edr, maybe customers manage it themselves. And before that it was just antivirus, you know, the Norton and the MacAfee that just bury your computer and CPU resources. And we all complained about how heavy they were and all that good stuff. I would love your opinion on how and kind of why that technology’s evolved, what’s created that to get us where we’re at now.
JW Stanley (09:27):
Yeah, so let’s kind of look at like, you know, antivirus, you know, antivirus, it’s a program. It was designed to stop, define and remove viruses or malware. It scanned the workstation and, oh, look, you know, we found something and it would remove the the bad application. Well, what happened is, after that, you know, bad actors, they started writing viruses that can mutate or change or, you know, to try and hide from the the antivirus. So this led to companies, you know, towards like an EDR type of solution edr the you know, endpoint you know, detection and response. And that was the next level of replacement for such. Instead of focusing on preventing, you know, threats by using a set of, you know, known malware definitions or scanning the the workstation, an EDR solution was also using technology to analyze the behaviors of the workstations.
JW Stanley (10:17):
So let’s say like there’s a workstation that normally is only used between eight to five, well, suddenly it has a lot of activity after hours as well. The EDR would actually detect that and alert to administrators. Now, EDR, it’s great. But what about your entire network over time? EDR, you know, the offerings have become, you know, more complicated incorporating technology such as machine learning behavioral analysis, as well as the ability to integrate into other complex tools. And so this has created a need for more resources, more time to fully utilize the the company’s EDR solution. And that’s where MDR has come into play. As mentioned earlier, MDR to end-to-end solution protecting your network, and not only just by one product or tool, but you know, MDR is looking at the entire network and it’s introducing, you know, that human expertise, you know, that mature processes and in threat intelligence. Yeah. Let, as well,
Josh Lupresto (11:13):
Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about that, what you bring up, right? That, that human expertise, I mean the, the, the talk track that we’re in, we’re we’re talking about why the R is so important and, and so, you know, you’ve laid out a good vision of why we’ve had to evolve, why the software providers have had to do this to now we’re not, we’re not talking about Northern and McAfee on the endpoints anymore. We’re talking about Carbon Black, and, you know, these Sentinel Ones and CrowdStrike and Defender, all, all of this stuff. But if we look at the r in, in, in, and I think obviously you went through this going and getting your C I S S P, but what, what is it about, now that we have all this great tech, why do you think that we still need the r What, what have you seen? I mean, your, I think your opinion is really important here because you get to see customers all day, every day. So what is it about now that you think we need the R and why is that so important?
JW Stanley (12:04):
Yeah, so the RS changed, the RS changed from just response of alerting an administrator to, you know, going towards that remediation. So it’s one of those where, you know, do I you know, do a response where, you know, it’s telling me that that I have something I need to look at or do I, you know, get a response that says, Hey, this is what we found, but this is how we also fixed it. So, you know, the RS definitely come into play and you know, helped out, you know, companies quite a bit as far as, you know, making that proactive approach.
Josh Lupresto (12:35):
So if I think about, maybe this is a little bit of a religious conversation, right? The, obviously we have a lot of providers that can help around the r the remediation side, and, and on, I think one of those previous Hathcote when Hathcote was on, we talked about the, should you build your own SOC? Should you not build your own SOC, right? I mean, you could argue that part of that SOC is to do remediation. I mean, if a customer, just because they can do remediation, just quick thoughts, do you think they should?
JW Stanley (13:04):
So it really depends on the customer. You know, personally, I, I do think they should however, really it goes into like the discovery call. And so, you know, one of the things that that I help out with our partners is those discovery calls. And one of the analogies I really like to use whenever we’re talking to customers is kind of using, you know, just discussion in my house, kind of puts it in more of like a layman’s term. And so, you know, one of the things that I always mention is like, so I have teenagers so we get a lot of packages at our house, you know, being delivered by Amazon. So much so that like my ring door security is constantly alerting me. So, you know eight to five, and I’m gonna give my, my address here on, on the podcast, but from eight to five, you know, typically my my, you know, I’m not paying attention to those security announces on my phone.
JW Stanley (13:52):
So you know, from that though, like, what if it wasn’t the delivery driver that, you know, was there, how, you know, what if it was like a porch pirate that’s hovering all, you know, hovering all over those those goodies that my family had just purchased and had shipped us? And so I think that’s where we talk about the differences between EDR and NDR that’s where the response really makes the difference. Do I see the anomalies, you know, and letting me know that I have an issue. So like, there’s somebody that’s, you know, hovering over my porch for an extended period of time, or do I see, you know do I see the anomalies and then also let me know, but then also the steps that it took, you know, on my behalf. And so every time I use this analogy, I just, I just imagine my next door neighbor, like the my neighbor kid, you know, coming out of nowhere with like a super soaker and just like, just letting loose on a porch pirate or, you know, AKA a bad actor from that ran over your packages. I went ahead and took care of that for you.
Josh Lupresto (14:49):
Love it. Love it. Great example. No I, I, I, I want to, you know, you called out kind of the discovery call side. I wanna talk about the difficult parts of this. I, I think, you know, maybe early on in security, the idea of people outsourcing and doing some of the management was, was foreign. It was, no, I can do this. And then over the last few years, we’ve gone through the whole shortage of security, the shortage of qualified people you know, all of that good stuff. So when you’re talking to a customer and, and, you know, you’re, you’re trying to help a partner do these discovery calls to help them understand the need. What, what do you do when they don’t know that they need help? Or, you know, what are some of these challenges that you’ve run into, and how do you get over ’em?
JW Stanley (15:28):
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. A lot of times, you know, whenever I see, you know, some, some IT administrators, they still have that mentality of, you know, if I let somebody else do this and I don’t have a job. And so really just kind of walking them through explaining to them, you know, why, what the solution is, how I can be an extension of their team, you know, how I can free them up for more proactive, you know day-to-day operations to really show their value. That’s really where it comes into play. And oftentimes, once you can kind of, you know, do that, you’ll start seeing kind of light bulb, you know, click inside their head and like, Hey, you know what I mean, this really is, this is a great solution for me.
Josh Lupresto (16:08):
Good point. All right. I wanna get into an example. So I think the funny thing that we always talk about here internally is the deals, sometimes the way they start is not how they end. And really what happens is we walk into, we can help in a lot of different areas that maybe we’re not brought up in the beginning. And that’s just, I think, part of our discovery process. We gotta understand how this integrates with data. It ties into this server, where is that server? Oh, it’s on prem, you know, so the UCaaS becomes a cloud and secure. It all kind of blurs. So what I would love to hear from your perspective is, and, and we can certainly keep a, you know, customer name out of this, but if we can say, walk us through an example of one that you got pulled into and, and, and what were you told that the problems were and what did you ultimately discover and find and, and what, what was the end solution that they needed?
JW Stanley (16:58):
Yeah, so this one’s actually gonna probably scare you just a little bit. So I was actually working with a, a partner and a a university. They had decent hardware, you know, and they wanted to create their own SOC. Which, you know, that’s fine, you know, that’s a, that’s a great ambition. However, one of the things that they were wanting to do was they were wanting to have the SOC led by their students. So, you know, they had students within
JW Stanley (17:43):
This is kind of what you’re, you’re looking at from that standpoint. And, you know, you’re looking at the SOC, but really like, who’s doing the remediation? Because these folks, these students, I mean, you know, depending on what year it is, they don’t necessarily have that knowledge or skillset to to apply to that. And so that’s really where the MDR came into play. We we got them aligned with, you know, some really good suppliers had the conversations. And once, you know, we kind of, you know, show them, you know, it, it got to the point where we show, talked to ’em about it, and they were kinda like, okay. But whenever we showed them the demo and kind of, you know, like, here’s how MDR can assist you, that right there was a game changer for them. They could, they quickly decided that maybe that the students were not necessarily the best, you know, to run it to have that kind of a piece of it. And then, you know, with the MDR type of solution, the students were able to see the remediation part too. So they kind of gave them, you know, a little bit of what they were looking for from an educational institute, but also gave them the protection that they needed as well.
Josh Lupresto (18:46):
Love it. Yeah. That’s terrifying. Glad you’re there to help. Let’s let’s get to final thoughts here. So, you know, I i, if we’ve got partners listening to this, maybe haven’t ventured this deep into security yet, or maybe they’re just in an adjacent area, maybe they’re doing SD-WAN, maybe they’re doing contact center, maybe they’re doing something like that. What, you know, with what we’ve talked about here in, in underscoring this importance, and this is a difficult conversation to have with customers sometimes. And, and obviously the, the premise here is ask to a certain point and then leverage you and, and, and the team members to come in and help. But what do you, what do you tell partners they’re, if they’re not comfortable selling this what, what’s your advice there? Is it, is it a couple questions to ask and pause? What’s J W’s perspective?
JW Stanley (19:34):
Yeah, so there’s a couple of different options that we have. Telarus, we have what’s called our security, QSA. And so this allows folks that aren’t comfortable necessarily within the scope, they can have that customer discussion and kind of that journey along security just very, just basic, you know, questions to be able to ask and kind of, you know, engage their customers to gain, you know, more insight. I also recommend, you know, partners, you know, quite often are not comfortable with this technology is engage your, engage your Telarus engineer. You know, we have a great number of engineers on the team. All of us are, you know, we have years of experience and we’re all glad to help you with those customer calls. And then, you know, at also there’s Polaris training education opportunities. So, you know, if there’s one in your area, we have those throughout the year. If there’s a training opportunity within your market, you know, definitely go to one of those, attend that because you know, that’s gonna help you understand it, that’s gonna help you, you know, be able to position it as well as sell the the technology as well as other technologies a as well.
Josh Lupresto (20:37):
Yeah, great point. You know, I think, I think the QSA is critical in that, because this we, we’ve had great feedback on this from the partners where, you know, they can put their branding on on it, they can walk through the customer with it. They don’t have to be the expert, but it really is like having somebody right there at your side to just pull out all this information that you can then, you know, give back. You can give to the suppliers, we can have us have further conversations. But great, great advice on there. Love the events too. We get a lot of people learn. We do a lot of good content out there. Team put some great stuff out.
JW Stanley (21:05):
Yeah. you know, oftentimes, like the QSAs for example, I’ve had several partners say, you know, whenever they have had those conversation with their customers, you know, they, they position as, Hey, this is gonna be an, an area where we’re gonna walk through this. We’re gonna ask some questions, and then based upon this, I’m gonna engage my engineer and bring him back, you know, him or her back, and be able to have further discussions with you. And oftentimes it gives it a more qualified discovery call, you know, for that second call whenever you’re, you’re talking to them. And it really just kind of puts them at ease too, because there’s not that, you know, I’m kind of guarded and I don’t necessarily wanna share anything. It’s just a very much a a conversational type of approach, which is a great job.
Josh Lupresto (21:45):
Great point. All right, last question. Your prediction on the future and if you get this right I’m gonna put some, some money on some of the upcoming football games, but look, this, this technology evolves at a crazy pace more than anything I’ve seen in the last five to 10 years. Now it’s, it’s even more accelerated. So if you look at security and we look at how it’s evolved from antivirus to EDR, to, to, to MDR and whatever comes next, xdr, what’s your opinion? If we look 12 months, it’s hard to look past that. But if we look 12 months plus, what’s your opinion? Do we change strategy? Do we do anything different? Do we do the same? Your thoughts?
JW Stanley (22:24):
I think, you know, this is a good strategy to have in place today, and then we can evolve as the technology evolves. You know, I definitely see more ai, you know, coming into play more geofencing, so, you know, making it to where you’re kind of, you kind of set perimeters as far as your traffic, where it’s going, things like that. As well as, you know, that anomaly piece, you know, I think, you know, definitely there’s gonna be this, this field. I mean, it’s constantly evolving. You know, just I forgot what I read. I think it was earlier today, the predictions of, you know, from like today’s, you know, numbers of, you know, costs and stuff as far as like a, a breach, things like that. We’re talking like trillions you know, like we’re not talking like small numbers here, but just the, you know, the expansion of that how much it was gonna cost, you know, in years to come. It’s, it’s astronomical. And so you’re gonna have those things that can help, you know, remediate things very quickly. And so, you know, the conversations that we’re having today are gonna be the conversations we’re having tomorrow. But just with a more focus, you know, as far as, you know, here’s why we need this kind of approach.
Josh Lupresto (23:32):
Great stuff. Maybe by then future amazing tools. It’ll just be implanted in our brain and all will be well, and it’ll be, it’ll be great, but we’ll still need the remediation. Good, good stuff. All right, J Dub man, that that wraps us up, buddy. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for doing this with me, man.
JW Stanley (23:47):
Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.
Josh Lupresto (23:51):
Okay, everybody that wraps us up, I’m your host Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. JW Stanley. If you haven’t engaged him, please do. This is Next Level BizTech.
Listen in as we wrap up an important talk track with Microsoft Teams and more. Today you’ll hear from our veteran partner in the space, Andrew Bond of Trinity Networks, as he talks Teams, UC & how he’s helped customers in distinguishing what they need in the changing tech landscape. He might even talk about a job offer he once got on a fax machine!
https://youtu.be/9INTmVVWJiI Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next level BizTech. All right, everybody, welcome back. We are wrapping up the Microsoft Teams track. So, so this track is titled, is Microsoft Teams Always the Right Fit. So a as we get through this, we’re gonna answer that. And you know, who we’re gonna hear from today is we’ve got on one of our longtime fantastic partners, good old Mr. Andrew Bond from Trinity Network. Andrew, how you doing, man?
Andrew Bond (00:38):
Good, man. Thanks for having me on.
Josh Lupresto (00:41):
Appreciate you coming on. I know you got a lot of expertise. You’ve been doing this, so you’ve seen a lot of cool evolutions. And so before we get into the weeds and teams and all that good stuff, I want to hear about your background. You know, where, how did this space suck you in? Did you always know you wanted to do this? How did you get here?
Andrew Bond (00:59):
I had no idea I wanted to be here. I went to a college in Ellensburg, Washington called Central Washington University. Thought I wanted to be in banking and finance. And that just happened to be around the time that banks were starting to go out of business. One of them in particular are Washington Mutual, three rescinded offers later because the departments were being literally shut down before they announced the the mortgage crisis. I went to a fundraiser with a friend of mine and she sat me down on the table with a gentleman named Rick, and he said, man, you’re pretty cool. You should be in, you should be in the telecommunication space. And I was like, what is that? He goes, I was like, he’s like cell phones or something. He’s like, oh, no, that’s, that’s, don’t do that. That’s terrible. He’s like, no, you still like pots lines and t1 s I was like, I have no idea what that is, but tell you what, I’m working at a restaurant and a bank as a teller and another restaurant, and I’m lost.
Andrew Bond (02:01):
I was like, but I got a degree, and well, I’ll take a, you know, I’ll take an interview with somebody. So I went down to this office that he told me to go cold call, which was Integra Telecom sales office in Bellevue,
Andrew Bond (02:50):
My dad called me. He’s like, there’s this guy named Craig called the house like five times. He’s looking for you. He said, he wants to hire you. I was like, Hmm, all right. So I gave him this phone number. He is like, that’s in Destin, Florida. What are you, what are you down there for? So anyways, got my offer letter, got in my car a couple weeks later, drove from Destin, Florida back to Seattle, started training, see that was in like November. Started training in December and had a quota in January, and God, the rest was history. And then, and then I got a wild hair started here in the, actually it was my neighboring office partner at the Integra office was the channel manager for Integra. Hmm. And I kept, you know, hearing about their models. I inquired, got a little interested in it, and at month 10 of employment after getting my first President’s Club award, I quit my job and became an agent and had waited out for a few months due to some threats by HR for non-competes and Nons solicits, but mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (04:28):
Andrew Bond (04:55):
Hooked. God, I can remember my first product training with my sales engineer back then. I was so, like, oh, this is so interesting why I didn’t even, I wasn’t even drawn it. I took my tech some, like, high level technology classes in college. I was like, why weren’t they this interesting? But I guess it’s just you’re hustling to do stuff, so you wanna learn.
Josh Lupresto (05:19):
Yeah, no, it keeps, it keeps us, keeps us moving on learning, learning new things. I think that’s the, that’s the goodness in it. Yeah, for sure. So talk to me about, you know I, I wanna really start out with, you know, we’re, we’re talking again teams and, and we’ll get into some differentiators around that. But walk me through maybe just your first iteration of really where you started to see, you see uc, proliferate, and first time you heard about Teams. Right? Let’s start at the beginning. What, what was that exposure like?
Andrew Bond (05:49):
My first uc experience was terrible.
Andrew Bond (06:40):
And, and even then, I didn’t sell it a ton. It was just, it was always there. I would do it for my own customer base, but it’s such a lead generation referral business built up with phone vendors and IT vendors. I kind of just tread, you know, tread it real carefully. But yeah. And then, you know, my first iteration of seeing what is now teams is skyper business vendors. So I started getting into selling SIP trunks for skyper business vendors and figuring out, you know, what trunks they needed that, you know, what SIP trunk providers worked with, what SBC providers partnering with them, just, you know, trying to use CPE vendor, you know, telephony vendor to, to make, you know, more MRC, right? Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (07:36):
So what I, I is that, I guess, you know, that that first deal or that first engagement, right? Where, where you learned about teams and, and kind of in, in the uc side, were there any aha moments for you in there? Did, was it, you know, what, I guess, what was the shining moment in that or anything that made you think differently about a thing you thought before once you got to go through it?
Andrew Bond (07:57):
I guess us as a company were going, I was going through this moment where I was like, God, I have so many tools that I use. I really just wanna like, condense it into this like one place. And teams hadn’t come about yet. And, and Slack was there and I, I think it’s when Slack, when I started using Slack with other enterprise organizations, like they would bring me into their org mm-hmm.
Andrew Bond (08:46):
Like, it might even kill you see as we see it, it’s just gonna be collaboration and then we’re gonna see consolidation amongst all this over time. And we’re kind of seeing that now, right? Yeah. And now I see probably, cuz I’m in the Pacific Northwest is Zoom and Teams, and it’s an easy grab, not an easy, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a nice transitional pickup for the agent. And that agent can go into an account or the consultant or whatever, and I go, Hey, you’ve got Zoom users over here, you’ve got team users over here. There’s a way to make it all in one and let’s just make it easy for your org. Provide a, a user experience and an administrator experience. That’s great. And doesn’t waste our time like managing so many vendors and, right. I think that’s what’s great about Teams. I use it, I have their, you know, team’s phone turned on. Every client that I speak with, I have, I talk about Teams phone, if they have Zoom, I try to turn into a Zoom phone user. Like that’s the aha. Aha is like, Hey, I can grab these licenses and, you know, do good by your customer and then honestly make your money along the way.
Josh Lupresto (09:56):
So, so as you get into those conversations though, what, let’s talk about the hard things. What, what are the, some of the difficulties you face, right? If you, if you go into these conversations, is it people that just don’t totally understand the capabilities, people that have old tech, that they just, it’s work, they don’t see the need for it? What are some of the hard parts about those conversations when you’re talking to prospects
Andrew Bond (10:18):
Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (11:39):
Kind of curious is, you know, as you’ve been in this space so long and the success that you’ve had, has there been any vertical that you’ve had more success in? Or maybe a vertical that you’ve not focused in because it’s just, it hasn’t, they haven’t understood it as well or, you know, curious in that? Or is it, is it everybody at this point?
Andrew Bond (11:58):
Everybody has a Microsoft license, three ,five, they should have teams in some capacity. Well, they will have teams, they should have teams phone in that capacity, especially for the simple of the uc user. I’ve had a lot of success with healthcare construction companies in the last couple years just because that’s been my biggest like, growth area. And that’s, I have a lot of accounts in that, in, in that vertical. But anybody has a license, it’s like, Hey, might as well use it. If not, you’re just not, you’re not maximizing what you’re already paying for. So kind of throwing it away for people with double licenses, right? Yeah. So you can bring Zoom into team and teams into Zoom and, you know, try to simplify that experience. So
Josh Lupresto (12:44):
That’s a good point. I, I want to, I wanna get in here in a second to, you know, where it was direct routing and operator connect and all of that good stuff. But, but let’s start real quick with you. Bring up a great point of, of a lot of these people already have some sort of elic. What, what percentage of them maybe ballpark it here, do you find as you get in the trenches with them, understand how to do teams for voice on their own?
Andrew Bond (13:09):
I think they’re like 20%. They know, like they have the license, but they just don’t, what do they need to activate? What type of license does the user have to have or it’s technical conversation. It’s no different than, Hey, I sipped trunks for this phone system. What SBC do I need? You know, it’s just like, what, what kind of dots do I need to connect to make this work? And, you know, and it’s way easier now than it was back then.
Josh Lupresto (13:34):
Oh yeah, no doubt.
Andrew Bond (13:35):
I mean, operator connect, just check the provider you want, right?
Josh Lupresto (13:41):
Yeah. well, let’s, let’s dive into that. So I remember, you know, when, when all the crazy stuff happened in 2020, Shane and I, and we all in our internal engineering and Andrew Bowser, everybody, we sat down and we said, okay, this direct routing thing is all coming out and there’s Microsoft Teams and it wasn’t a thing. Now it’s a thing. And, and, and all of our providers popped up and said, we have direct routing. And we said, okay, cool. Everybody’s got direct routing. Great. And then as we went and we quantified that, we said, tell us how you’re architecting it. Tell us how you’re built. And some would come in and say, well, I mean we can, we can connect you to Microsoft Teams. Well no, it can’t, you can’t make a native call out of the team’s client. We have to bring up our third party app.
Josh Lupresto (14:24):
And then others would come to us and they would say, well, we’ve actually got the Azure, our SBCs that are Microsoft approved the Ribbon SBCs, or whatever they are. They’re in our virtual Azure cluster adjacent to the Microsoft network. You know, so there were clear differentiators but it, you had to get to the architecture to kind of see through the marketing side of it so that, you know, that being said, now that we’ve evolved a little bit from teams with voice to direct routing and then operator Connect now comes out onto the scene what are you finding that that talk track is like, are you, are you getting asked, oh, do I need direct routing or operator connect? Are you just going in with Operator Connect? What, what’s that conversation like?
Andrew Bond (15:07):
I try to go in with an open mind to what experience the customer wants and and respect how much they want to manage and technically manage and what they want the experience to be. Cuz they’re gonna be with that experience in management for the next 2, 3, 5 years. I haven’t done a ton of operator connect deals because most of my customers, they just like the phone system managed by their external or internal IT guy. They just like, they don’t wanna do it anymore. They just wanna like outsource that task to somebody else and ends up being Bridge or with a, with a vendor that actually builds the Microsoft phone system and then they procure the operator connect themselves. But it’s like a hosted phone provider, right? Right. And they just charge per seat. So I try to respect that and I, I try to just make sure that that decision that they make, if they don’t like it, they can pivot another direction without like causing anything catastrophic in the form of an ETF
Josh Lupresto (16:10):
Fair.
Andrew Bond (16:11):
But I, I’ve, you can go what, three pathways now, right? You can do Bridge into their phone system with an sbc, you can do Operator Connect by building a Microsoft phone system, or you can do I guess the other version of Teams Bridge, which is their, you know, hosted phone provider connected to Microsoft. And then the user net sees who the, that uc provider is. And I guess there’s the ones that put their app inside of teams as well, which not a huge fan of, but I, it’s cool, like if you have that, those providers today, I won’t mention their names, but if they’re, if they’re with those providers today, they can easily transition to that teams experience. Yeah. Again, customer, customer wants, right? They want, they want to take their X, y, Z VoIP company and put it in there, capable of it, and then do it.
Josh Lupresto (16:56):
Yeah. I, I think the, the important thing that helped us, at least from an engineering perspective was when you know, we, we were going down the road for just a traditional uc pre-sales discovery, you know, conversation to understand what they needed. We found ourselves from never having to say, you know, anything about teams to just a pre-qual of, Hey, do you have Microsoft teams? How do you want to use it? How do you plan on using it? Because those seem to pop up at the very end of like, oh yeah, by the way, we have teams. And now that’s such a more meaningful interaction of we just, we have to ask half of our questions in a discovery have to be around that or their expectations to use it or limits. Cuz you know, some of the, I think some of the uc, others have, have conditioned them to think that, yeah, I can do anything that I need in here. So it’s interesting in that
Andrew Bond (17:41):
You, you know what I think teams has done a good job of cuz of their, their collaboration tool is like, so it’s, so, it’s, it’s widespread and out there so quick. You don’t have to do as much discovery because you’re just, in most cases, I mean not maybe not large global enterprises, but large business and below, you’re just turning on teams phone, showing people how to use the phone system. You could run ’em in parallel with other systems until the user education catches up to it. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty,
Josh Lupresto (18:12):
It’s easy. Not
Andrew Bond (18:13):
Like cut the cord of the PBX and swap your phone numbers tomorrow and everybody’s running around the office like a chicken with its head cut off, like a funny dysfunction, you know?
Josh Lupresto (18:21):
Yeah, yeah. You can easily run in parallel, no doubt.
Andrew Bond (18:24):
Nice. A nice transition.
Josh Lupresto (18:25):
Yeah, it’s good point. Let’s, let’s get into, you know, let, let, let’s pick a more recent example of something that you’ve worked on. And we can leave customer names out of this or, you know, one that you’re working on or have worked on recently. Would love to, to kind of hear from, I I think part of the message on this podcast is, you know, the deals don’t always, the way that they finish doesn’t always end up being the same as what we thought it was when we started it. So I would love to hear a good example of something that you walked into and maybe here’s what they said it was versus here’s the tech stack they actually had. Here’s the tech stack. They actually ended up here are the problems that they had. Right? And how did, how did we solve all this?
Andrew Bond (19:05):
You’re speaking specifically in like uc contact center? Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (19:09):
Uc, contact center teams that will lump it in there anyway that you see fit.
Andrew Bond (19:15):
Yeah, I think the most recent one during Covid, I, I was, I’ve never been through a recession in this, you know, being an independent agent, you know, I, I started in the recession and then came out of it. So I was never really, really impacted. I think it was a benefit to me to start and the way it was, cause it kind of made you grind a little bit. But, you know, covid happened. I kind of sat in my office and was very quiet for a little while. I was like, well, here it is. It comes to big recession. I don’t, I don’t know what to do with this. And then the phone started ringing and email started going and was when people started scrambling to get their users remote. And I just happened to have three really big customers that had issues with their on-prem or hybrid on-prem systems you know, like virtualize, you know, virtualize a via Mitel or whatever mm-hmm.
Andrew Bond (20:12):
Or hybrid, hybrid hybrid setup. And as we dug into it, that barrier was moved once they had that problem activating new users, having good quality with those users. So that, that triggered with one of my larger customers today, a pretty large cloud contact center deal, which then transitioned to a very large UCAST deal. So over 2,700 users. And in the midst of that is when teams was kind of growing on the telephony side and becoming to be a lot easier to use with the eight by eight bondages and like G 12 s in the world, right? Mm-Hmm.
Andrew Bond (21:05):
And it was so, it was so easy. Maybe call it the vendor and the technology, or both the customers really complicated. You know, high touch high action customer calls every single day for months on end. But the amount of involvement, once the, the solution was put in place in their activating it, now it’s just, it was easy from my side and the customer side. And even like the, the, that customer still has their internal people that rolled that out and they’re like, that was so much easier. Like, why couldn’t have been that way with the other vendor? I’m like, oh, it’s just two different types of technologies, right? Yeah. other ones, you know, on the, I’m really starting to get into Estie WAN cloud security, and I’m, I am pleasantly surprised that my managed service provider, IT consulting community that I’ve serviced for over a decade plus, they’re starting to jump in and, and want to talk with, you know, the Catos and the halos and the, you know, the aggregators and the actual owners of the, of the technology stacks and try to make that a part of their solution offering.
Andrew Bond (22:13):
And even the customers, like, you bring it up and you’re like, Hey, I want to see what your, you know, what your direction is with your network is, is this year and your security, I have these list of vendors. Would you like any, want me to host any appointments? And you don’t have to be the subject matter expert of this stuff, right? You have to be the procurement expert, not the subject matter expert. And that’s something I’ve done a good job of, of refining in the last four years and, and showing them how I’m gonna be that procurement specialist. I always say like, I’m, I’m a subject matter generalist of all of this stuff, and here’s my, and be awesome. Like, here’s your expertise. Here’s my, here’s my generalist stuff, here’s my, and also that expertise is the procurement side of this. And, you know, vetting these vendors out and looking at price and making sure you follow that that price timeline and that technology timeline. So yeah. That’s
Josh Lupresto (23:05):
Good. That’s good. I love it. I I love that it just starts with an inquisitive mindset of what are you doing for this? I mean, that’s all, that’s all we’ve ever talked about, right? And, and I think early on in, in the security world, if we, if we tried to push some of the security initiatives that we’re pushing now to customers 5, 6, 7, 10 years ago I remember when we did some of that and they would say, wait a minute, you wanna put this fully managed box in my environment that I don’t get to touch and have visibility onto what it does
Andrew Bond (23:42):
Like a cup of that
Josh Lupresto (23:43):
Yeah. You you got this shortage shortage and they’re, they’re, they’re the either a, they can’t get the tech from supply chain, so they need it managed as a service or they don’t have the right people, or they didn’t, you know, even pre employee shortage, they didn’t have the right security people anyway. And now over the last couple years, I think the, the bad guys have gotten a couple steps ahead. And so people are all trying to play catch up. And so we’re just trying to help ’em fill those gaps. And so I I, I love your, your questioning mindset because it does, it just opens down those doors because they’re gonna do these things. They’re gonna tackle 30, 40% of their security initiatives, whether they like it or not. And all you’ve gotta do is just ask. And that question before that was a no, we’re not, is to, yeah, to your point, we’ll, we’ll take seven of those, or whatever it might be.
Andrew Bond (24:25):
I la like last year and the year before I did, I even did a managed Meraki deal for a customer. I had, I was like, really? You guys wanna manage this with Meraki? And it came to a staffing issue, like a pure, we can’t find employees to staff tier one and Meraki specialists. Like we just, we can’t find ’em and we can’t staff ’em. But yeah, all the things I remember going to like, your, your guys’ and various other distributor, you know, boot camps and five years ago I was like, I would I ever sell that? I’m not a contact center expert. I’m just gonna
Josh Lupresto (25:30):
I just, I, I, I think we just have to appreciate the kind words. And I, I think we, there’s just the, the rate of change over the last couple years has been unlike anything that I’ve even ever seen in the last 10 to 15 years. And so we have to just do our best to help everybody keep up. It used to be easy to do it at event after event, and there’s just, there’s so much and there’s so different, so much different technology, and now it’s just different and it’s harder. And so yeah, we’ve, we’ve gotta be able to put that stuff out in front of their, and you know, obviously as well as all the resources and things like that. But no, it’s, it’s a good, it’s a good time to be in it. And yeah, there is no shortage of what, can I grab off the menu anymore? For sure.
Andrew Bond (26:06):
Yeah. I mean, you guys bring on a new employee, it makes it so much easier with the various universities. I’m like, oh my gosh, I couldn’t even, with everything else going on, like begin to, like, where would I start? I’m like, oh, you start here and you start here. It’s great. So what I gotta ask you, like, what’s, what’s the new sexy acronym or product coming down the pipe?
Josh Lupresto (26:29):
Oh, man. It’s, it’s hard to say. I, I, I don’t, I mean, I, I don’t think there’s anything incredibly new and revolutionary per se. I, I do think that all of the technologies that are out there are just gonna get iterated on a little bit, and we’re gonna have to be ready for all of those iterations, right? So our job, I think from an engineering perspective is to pay attention to all those and see is the next thing that comes out, the next greatest thing in a major paradigm shift, or is a little bell and whistle that got a great marketing logo and, and things like that behind it, right? I mean, think about to specifically to, to the contact center you know, we have to pay attention a lot to, to chatbots and the AI and the artificial agent and, and all of those things because you’re gonna walk into a deal tomorrow and you’re gonna have to make a determination, can I lift and, and unseat this entire platform?
Josh Lupresto (27:22):
Or do they already have an investment, but that invest them investment doesn’t allow them to put a chatbot on the website and then transfer that call to a live agent. So now they’re gonna need that chatbot, and maybe that’s your wedge product to get in and help them and help them modernize. So, so for us it’s just about, you know, staying on top of each discipline like that, you know, security as well. Similar story, but really just staying in front of all of those because I think there’s, there’s been so much money you know, in the last 10 years thrown at the tech stack and the tech space and Silicon Valley and startups and blah, blah, blah, that now we’re just reaping I think the growth of all that and the productization of all that. And so it’s a matter of just sorting through as this growth slows down, hopefully from the products wise of going, okay, these are the 75 things we need to be aware of, not 75 new ones every month.
Andrew Bond (28:15):
Yeah. Cool.
Josh Lupresto (28:16):
It’s fun though. It’s fun.
Andrew Bond (28:18):
It is.
Josh Lupresto (28:20):
I, I would love a, as we wrap this up, I would love to kick it back to you, speaking of kind of the future here of, you know, you’ve, you’ve seen some great evolutions in this. You’ve seen, you know Skype and all, all these things come from nothing to now be this massive, hundreds of millions of users a month. So curious from your perspective, you know, this could be advice for partners that aren’t maybe aren’t yet stepping into this space. What do you think Protips, and really, where do you think this space all goes?
Andrew Bond (28:51):
Well, I think we’re, we are at is where it went, right? I don’t know where it’s really going in the future, but all this stuff that has happened in the last like five years, you’ve been consuming this education and, and products that are out there. Like, you’re gonna grow your, your tiber, your, your net new customers, everything’s gonna grow. I don’t, I don’t know technology wise, like I’m gonna stay in the stuff that I know and I have, and I can take a, a Telarus University education track or a breakout session with you guys or conversations like this and, and turn into a customer conversation and engagement into new MRC. But yeah, I think, I guess in conclusion, I, I think in the uc side, I think teams and Zoom are the future, and it’s gonna get consolidated to just that and our space and watch it in your base, and it’ll lead to more landing and expanding. Like I’ve told people, I get into accounts on dedicated internet or coming on a teams discussion or maybe Estee Wan, and then you just expand out from there. So these, these new conversations may not convert to MRC by product, but it’ll expand you into other stuff really quick.
Josh Lupresto (30:10):
Great point. It’s good stuff. Golden nuggets. Okay. That wraps us up, man. Mr. Bond, I appreciate you coming on with me today, buddy.
Andrew Bond (30:18):
Yeah, thanks for your time. We look forward to speaking with you. And we need to get Mr. Speakman some newly labeled golf balls with some jokes on him.
Josh Lupresto (30:27):
Do you want to dive deeper into the Microsoft Teams roadmap and understand Teams at a deeper level? Tune in to hear Shams Khan of SCB Global as he discusses their unique and rare partnership with Microsoft that helps them (and you) architect high-level Microsoft Teams and voice solutions on a global scale!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. All right, everybody, welcome back. We are talking about unified comms, Microsoft teams, everything in between. And so today I would like to welcome in one of the world’s most well-traveled men, Shams Khan, VP at SCB Global Shams. Welcome onto the show, man. Excited to have you.
Shams Kahn (00:35):
Hey, Josh. Thank you for having me here. And I’m just trying to meet the levels of, you know, how much you would travel
Josh Lupresto (00:48):
Not, not there, but you, you have touched pieces of the world that I think give you so much cool experience, and we’ll get into that here in a minute, and Sure. Maybe that, maybe it kicks us off with that. I, I, I wanna, I want everybody to learn a little bit about you. You know, we’ll get to SCB in just a second, but, but talk to me about your personal background. You know, how did you get into this space? Where did you start? And, and let’s kick it off there.
Shams Kahn (01:11):
Sure. So there will probably many things that will be you know, uncovered, as I say, and probably your audience or people who are listening to this will learn a lot more about me on the personal front. So I started in this space when it comes to this space, meaning communications at a very tender age of 10. And people will not know this I’m 34 now, but I started at, at the age of 10 because of our family business. I think I’ve mentioned some of this in our personal conversations with you, Josh, but it was more so internet was booming and communication was one of the things that we are an ISP in Mumbai. I got interested by it computers and, you know, my father or the computer trainer. So I was always around computers, and I think I’m of the generation that I used computers and I played games on computers, which were pixelated versus, you know, team games, right?
Shams Kahn (02:06):
Or consults. So computer was really the center of my universe in terms of how I grew up. And communication was really exciting. And I was 16 when I started to really take the reins of the business our networking, internet communications within the s p world. And that too was a life event where somebody said, Hey, you, you know, you guys are just delivering this service because you got Monopoly in this area. And that kind of kicked me off you know, as a trigger moment, as, as I would say to try and say, no, it’s not really true. And I decided to learn that in the first of two years, and then decided to study that that led me to come to United Kingdom study at Chapel Hallam University doing computer and network engineering as a degree which is where I came here and I said, I wanna study now that I’ve kind of got a background in understanding.
Shams Kahn (03:02):
And the idea was to always go into something that will help me in my career path, right? And that is how it started. Now, what got me into cloud is another life event. It was 2009 ish, I would say. I was coming back from my you know, like normal class in, in my college or university, as we call it, here in the UK. And somebody had broken into our house. I was renting a house with my friends and, and they stole my laptop. And this was really like, you know, college fees and everything my parents were sponsoring and funding before. I’m like, how do I now retrieve my assignments? You know, they’ve just taken in the space of the 10 minutes that we had that me and my friend were out and coming back from our you know class.
Shams Kahn (03:52):
So I was like, there must be a way to find something that I can, you know, store somewhere as opposed to carrying u sb. And that led me into cloud computing. I decided to do dissertation on cloud which was my research paper that got published. And I really took on that path to say there is a way of solving the problem that I experienced or others. And that’s how I graduated. I got my paper published, and I was looking for a break in, in this space. And I did not get it until f e b global come in 2013 in December. I still remember that time I was speaking to my, who’s a math CEO now of the company that it’s coming up to almost 10 years that you met me. And I had to find a br, you know, an opportunity where I can showcase my skills. But I started as an intern for the company where I’m the VP in the space of nine years or so. So that’s the background. My real life story life events brought me into the space. And also that knack that I have of solving problems for of the world was something that I faced. And I, and I believed truly that that is what technology in this space where I’m in should be able to offer for the earth to come. So that’s the little bit of a background for your listeners.
Josh Lupresto (05:22):
Love it. I, I think you’re the first person on this podcast that has written a dissertation on clouds. So you’ve definitely moved up a qualification level. And like I say, we always learn, learned things about people that we knew, that we thought we knew. No, that’s awesome. And, but I think it does solidify all the great, great inventions or great movements or great ways to go in a different direction were created outta necessity. So, cool story. Awesome background.
Shams Kahn (05:48):
Thank you.
Josh Lupresto (05:50):
So let’s talk about the now. Who is SCB Global and what is your current role?
Shams Kahn (05:56):
Sure. So as SCB Global came out with a heritage of voice communication. So like you and ACT talking right now was available, but not really easily possible where SCB had that wealth and knowledge whereby you had I L D N or, you know, traditional base of communication. And SEV was really in the inception of saying, Hey, look at this. You know, this is IP based communication. And they kept doing that until I came into the picture which was IP based on-premise communication, being a licensed operator like your you know, our, a licensed operator like Verizons or B VPs of the world who are in different space. But SCB was very much a boutique as the name is global, where we can be that single hand to shake to provide you the voice communication. The springboard moment came in 2015, and that’s where my dissertation story and my experience in India was put together as a business plan.
Shams Kahn (06:54):
And we discussed this in the board meeting today. SCB really needs to be the springboard to take things in the cloud and really power these platforms. So we started from empowering global business to enabling global business now to optimizing global businesses using the wealth of voice licenses that we carry to provide voice communication in exotic locations to easy locations, but also giving the customer a springboard to move into the cloud pretty much in the Microsoft space that we are championed now. And there is history there as well. What happened, and we will probably go into that too. My role in the business is really as a VP go-to market, working with tactical and strategic partners to build a UK and fecal story for their customers. How we can help them augment, optimize, and unlock the existing investment that they ha carry quite often than not breaking those silos that generally tax start to occur. And that will naturally, at the end, drive efficiency and cost.
Josh Lupresto (07:59):
Yeah. You know, you guys are, I think, a good example of the evolution of our channel where five to 10 years ago, maybe partners were just traditionally selling, all they had to sell was connectivity and voice, right? You talked about prs, tdm, things like that. And, and, and that was all it looked like we had access to. But in the meantime, over here, you know, we’ve got, in this parallel universe, we’ve got Microsoft developing you know, their licensing products, their office products, but over here is link over here is Skype, over here is teams and direct routing and operator connect. And so there are, you know, that for the longest time, there was no way to monetize any of that in our channel. So we just stood by and, and hoped it didn’t have too much success, right?
Josh Lupresto (08:57):
And now, thankfully regardless of what direction the customers want to go, whether they say, oh, I’m, I want to go this route with a, a more traditional uc provider that, that we know, or I’m going Microsoft, we don’t have to any longer say oh, well, sorry, you know, we, we can’t help you with that. So yeah, you guys, we will get into some of the products that’s here in a second and, and some of maybe what’s new and what’s coming. But you guys, to me, are a really great example of how, how the channel has molded, how the channel has shifted. And quite honestly, we’re thankful to have somebody like you with your level of expertise in the portfolio, because it gives our partners that confidence to go in and say whatever you want to cover from a voice perspective, anything, Microsoft, anywhere that, that falls under that under that funnel, we got you covered.
Shams Kahn (09:44):
Yep. And I think there’s another interesting anecdote I wish to share here for the listeners as well. If you see that Microsoft has tried to enter this space time and time again with acquisitions that were billions of dollars and it’s never clicked, but it’s always been there, you know, somewhere in that space. And so is the other collaboration companies that are out there as well, have tried. What happened here is that when Microsoft Teams came, and I remember this really well, saying to our board members here, that 2018, you know, teams is something that is new, it’s different, it was more heavily around collaboration. It was a framework, and that’s what we recognized. So the enabling global business, like ethos I mentioned was to enable people who are using these platforms. And I remember in 2019, we had a event here in London, international Partners came over a room of 200 people, and I remember so well that it was pretty much everybody said in that room, teams are the distraction teams is a red herring, you know, and it pretty much put to the side.
Shams Kahn (10:47):
And from there, it was only three, four months later, you know, the world experienced the pandemic and everybody was like throwing hook line and nnc, as I say, on Microsoft and other forms of, you know, solutions. So naturally there was a wave that came through. We had confusion as well to a lot of companies, a lot of partners in your, in, in the space as well that needed that clarification and unlearn what they were told. There has been that side of effort the s St P has been putting in, because as I say, they couldn’t join the wave sorry, they couldn’t fight the wave, they had to join the wave, right? Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (11:43):
Yeah, great point. I mean, we, we, we, we knew that Microsoft would get it, right? They might not get it perfect, but we knew that they would get it right or more, right? They would, would iterate and they wouldn’t waste all of that money. Yeah, certainly seeing what you’re seeing on the sidelines, we’re just waiting for them to kind of get it right, but also wanna be prepared when they get it right. And, and everything that happens in between, so. Yep. Good point. So let’s talk about, you know, what you’ve seen, you mentioned you’re coming up kind of on this 10 year mark, right? I, I’m, I’m kind of interested, you’ve talked about, you know, I know your personality, you’ve always been hey, let me figure out a way to fix it. Let me figure out a way to help you sell it. What, what have you seen that has been, or what have you learned that has been the most valuable in, in these evolutions over the last five plus years?
Shams Kahn (12:31):
I feel quite often as ses or even as, you know, people who are selling technology, it’s always I have noticed in my experience that it focuses on the new flashy product or, you know, features and functionality and not so much on the adoption. So everybody talks about, yeah, we’ve got a better product, we do this in the cloud, it’s easy, it’s simple, but the factor is that the world comes with different people with different levels of, you know, knowledge and experience. Adoption has been an area that I often get missed. And another area would be because you are working in the space of software as a service now or everything, there’s an app for it, right? You wanna order something, there’s an app for it. If you want a cleaner, there’s an app for it. You know, you wanna wash your clothes, there’s an app for it.
Shams Kahn (13:23):
So that, that’s the problem. So there’s so many application hopping that does, and that obviously leads to a problem that is efficiency enablers, where the reason why these apps came about, they became efficiency blockers growth. That is another area which I will see the adoption and the efficiency, which kind of leads, because of silos that gets created was sometimes even now, it gets missed when people talk hybrid. I was at an event in London last week, and a lot of people were talking hybrid, but then the whole objective of not having hybrid is you don’t want to have people causing, you know, two applications or platforms that they wish to run. And if they are, they need to be immensely integrated or be, have an immersive experience versus, you know, a purely an integration that looks integrated, but it’s not really integrated. But that’s the, those are the three areas of vertical that I feel despite what’s gonna happen, if we relieve that in the background, then that will cause a problem for you know, all of us pretty much, right? Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (14:31):
I wanna get into evolution. I feel like this is a really big topic, evolution and differentiators. So what, I mean, what I mean by that is I, you guys have been able to see and, and be witness to all the different evolutions that Microsoft has had, but let, let’s talk about evolutions in the sense of how you’ve matured your products, how you guys have invested, how you guys see the world in r and d. And then, then we’ll get to the differentiators the the heavy hitter speed dating stuff. But, but, but talk to me, you know, you, you and I talked a lot about where you’re traveling, where you’re going, the different countries, the different, you’re connected at a different level. Let me just put it that way. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna prime the pump with that, and then maybe you can tell us about how you guys look at evolving in the future and being ready for what’s next.
Shams Kahn (15:18):
Sure. So I think you mentioned, right, Microsoft has evolved and I have this thing that I learned, again, going back in my personal space when I was in my placement here with a pharmaceutical company called Eli Lilly, they were going to lose a patent on schizophrenia. And what I found is my land managers were changing. And one thing I experienced after that, you know, my laptop getting stolen, if you don’t roll with a change, you become part of the change, right? And that is exactly what you are seeing right now with some businesses. They didn’t wanna roll with the change and they were replaced by someone else. You know companies have been replaced as well. So evolution absolutely is there. You gotta be with time. Absolutely. For us as a SCB we have this analogy that we really stick by.
Shams Kahn (16:05):
We are on that racetrack, you know, of going 200 miles an hour with us, you know, cannot take our foot of the gas even on the bends one, the front one other back, or we cannot lose control and we cannot slow down. And that is how we see us as a business where, where we are going with, with this story of communication, right? So all these different islands of communication, collaboration, customer experience that are siloed, we see that the customer is not gonna buy telephone system that they used to the way used to buy before. They’re gonna buy a framework or a platform that is gonna give them the ability to do much more than just picking up the phone and making a call, or have somebody in the receptionist take a call on a console because that person or that technology can and should be available from anywhere, which is the workplace transformation.
Shams Kahn (17:01):
So that is the, the, the pa you know, area that we feel evolution would be, would be and will be is the work and place, both are being transformed. Everyone’s talking about it, the future world to work, but it’s more so what do you enable that future worker world with? Is it plethora of applications or is there a framework that allows you to meet the demands and needs of all your persona types of user type? And that’s where we are going to be really focusing on as a business, using the analogy that I gave. But now to answer your second part of the question is what is SCB doing? SCB has really seen these big platforms, you know, I mean, you look at Gartner Magic Cord, right? Right now Microsoft is at the forefront, SCB really making Microsoft teams fully capable with all the features, functionalities, and capabilities because of the framework that Microsoft is facilitated as a gateway or the customer adoption to occur with all the points that I mentioned, or the persona types or communication, collaboration, whatever that may be. And that is where SCB really laser the focus in because we don’t see communication as it was before. We call it comms4.org, Which is the generation after ipbs communication. And that is what we feel will be the next era for businesses. And SCB’s focus is gonna be really connecting people to people and people to applications in that era.
Josh Lupresto (18:31):
Love it. Alright. I want to talk now about some of the kind of technical differentiators, the way that you guys go to market. You know, I think early on when we first learned how critical Microsoft was gonna be, we were able to find some partners that gave us an angle to direct routing that was outside of pure play, full-priced uc seat. And, and that was eyeopening for us. You know, I remember being back in the teams admin center trying to configure some of the call flows, the direct routing, the admin, all that good stuff, and realizing that, you know, hey, I’m, I’m a technical guy. I’ve been a, I’ve been a Linux, I’ve been an AWS guy a majority of my life, and this is not that easy for the end user to do. And so the other thing I think when we came across you guys, and maybe this is where we kick this off of differentiators, is I think one of the first times when we talked and, and heard your comms 4.0 pitch and saw the, you know, 20, 30 plus slides that you have put together of the different ways that you can architect the solution, where the call path goes, where the audio goes, where the data stream goes, it was very eye-opening for us how you guys looked at architecting and the kind of expertise that you had on the backend to build some of these solutions.
Josh Lupresto (19:40):
So if I’m a Telarus partner listening to this, and I, I find out about SCB global and maybe there’s a couple other options in the portfolio that maybe I don’t understand all the differences, what would you say that, what are a couple of those differences from, from you to some of your competitors out there?
Shams Kahn (19:58):
Sure. I think it’s, it’s important and I, I think I would like to ask the viewers or listeners right now to, you know, visualize this. It’s like a pyramid, right? So I really, at the base when you look at any use of your offering there is always going to be a need for you to have a, a tip trunking a provider or partner that powers that platform. The key point, point for SCB is that that baseline that you see, which is gen general tip, which is, as I use an example there, is like everybody, majority of the world at least speaks English or understands English, right? So let’s use that as a terminology for th trunks or th language. That’s the general language. Any IP based systems will understand, be it intercom, be it d or paging system.
Shams Kahn (20:45):
They all will understand that language. So for you to enable the language, you need that layer or that tier SCB, he is the licensed operator in that tier to begin with, to power these UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS platforms. That’s the first win globally, which a lot of these UCaaS/CCaaS or other vendors when you see they did not carry, I mean, we carry that even in the ob secure locations as well. The next layer of the pyramid is Mike, when you look at Microsoft most of the folks will, again, I’ll use an analogy, will bring you to the room, or if it was in, in a building, say this is a Microsoft space, you go and figure out where the life switches are, where you can sit, where you can’t sit, is there a, you know, a bomb underneath somewhere where you can call the problem to yourself.
Shams Kahn (21:30):
They don’t show you that. Whereas for us, we are really the champion. We know exactly how to navigate through this challenge and help the customer go through those hoops and hurdles, but more so also simplify it. So we carry that Microsoft tier. So we are top tier partner for Microsoft top, less than 1% of Microsoft partners in the world. We also manage Microsoft partner, which means we can bring a Microsoft rep on the table if there’s an opportunity where we feel that Microsoft can help us bring the deal or help the customer recognize the value we bring. In addition to that, we are also an EIF program partner, which is End Customer Investment Fund, where Microsoft will sign as a check to help build a customer from any state to Microsoft teams. Wow. And that is, again, a very select or handful of players in this space.
Shams Kahn (22:24):
If you’re thinking of following me on the pyramid, you’ll see the license operator status, the system integration and Microsoft expertise status is there. And now it adding more layers on top where you know, our SDwan
Shams Kahn (23:12):
Cause Microsoft’s not everything for everywhere. It’s a gateway. It allows you to build, but quite often people, you know, like a typical salesman actor will be, oh, look, it doesn’t, they don’t have this and that. But more so a reason Microsoft doesn’t have is because Microsoft wants a partner like us to go and build that story, right? You know, in that pyramid. But that’s what we are really going out. And when you look at it from our competitors, they wouldn’t do those things. That what they’re gonna do is they will, and I use an example here is like, you have an Android platform. So imagine that’s your Microsoft platform and you have an iOS platform and that’s the provider’s platform. They’ll create a bridge between the two. So quite often with a third party connector, and now you’ve got a solution. So it looks and feels that is Microsoft, but it’s not really Microsoft. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (24:01):
Great, great examples. Very good visuals too. Love the analogies in there. Thank you. All right, let’s let’s, let’s get here. As we get towards the latter half of this, let’s talk about examples. So I, I think the interesting thing is we, you know, we don’t always see that the customer environment is not exactly what it was described, right? The, the, the problem, but we don’t really know what the problem is, right? We might hear, we need unified comms, and the reality is they’ve got a beat up ribbon SBC that they can’t control, and they’re trying to tie it to a teams environment, right? Some of that stuff just doesn’t come out. So I, I would love to hear just an example that, that you got brought into. What was the problem statement? What did you uncover? How did you uncover? And then really, what, what, what did you rip out or replace or, or augment or, you know, whatever the story is and, and what did the end solution look like? And, and, and how did it all come to come to fruition?
Shams Kahn (24:54):
Sure. So I’ve got a few, but, so I’m just gonna try and think which one it’s beneficial. Would you want me to just talk about the teams play or talk about bright teams, then we help them move into teams and then contact center? Which one would
Josh Lupresto (25:08):
You, yeah, maybe, maybe just a little bit about what really related around teams and then what, what did it look like and kind of, you know, what were their struggles? I mean, frame it in the thought of, if I’m a partner listening to this, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be gaining confidence in you guys and your abilities, and I’m gonna look for environments that you paint a picture for me where you’re a fit. So maybe something like that.
Shams Kahn (25:29):
Sure. So we had a couple of instances recently where both of these customers went with a team solution that was a uc. You know, the example I gave of Android and iOS and teams. And it just failed. So there were multiple problems. The customer said, it doesn’t work, obviously, what doesn’t work, we don’t know, right? When we go in and we found out that I gave an example of, you know, somebody taking you to the Microsoft room or the area and the space, and then not showing you inside. When we logged on, we found there were a series of issues that the customer experiences because of the dial plan, the calling policy, the voice policy of the user insight teams. And that’s one of the reasons why that partner could not execute a successful cutover and migration from an on-prem PBX moving into cloud with the PBX provider or a UC provider.
Shams Kahn (26:30):
So when we go, when we logged on immediately, it took us like, what few minutes to go in and find out the problem. The reason it took us few minutes is our approach is very consultative. We like to go in and say to the customer, let us either work with you in the team, Adam admin center, or give us the rights to work on those. And sometimes customers will say, we can’t give you full rights. So we have like a process around that. So anyway, we went in, we found the problem straight away. We fixed them, we rerouted the whole policy and, and everything else within that. And the customer was brought live with an aggressive deadline of like, what, 40 days including number port, including the entire delivery and contact center as well. So that is what we did for this customer.
Shams Kahn (27:20):
And in their own words, they never experienced such fast delivery. Number one, efficiency and clarity. That’s what they mentioned to us. And in fact, the other customer had a similar situation, but with different UC provider where they went ahead and had to roll it back whereby, you know, we came in and we found a problem. Again on the Microsoft side. That’s why, you know, when you asked about our differentiation, a lot of the times people claim they’re Microsoft experts, but they’re not
Josh Lupresto (28:01):
Good, good stuff. Final final couple thoughts here. Walk me through if, I’m a partner, I’m super excited about this, I’ve got a lot of confidence in you guys, I know customers that are gonna be a good fit and that are struggling with this what do you, what kind of talk track, or I’m a big questions guy, what kind of questions do you recommend giving that partner? What, what can they walk away with and take to their customers and go ask X and y and Z to help flush this out a little bit?
Shams Kahn (28:31):
Sure. Well, I mean, we do have a qualification document that we’ve built based on the persona type. So like, for example, regulated countries like China, India have a separate in need and demand that we have created that. And just as a point as well, important to note, we just, just don’t, don’t go and say teams day one, you can start with just pure sip trunking on an existing platform and then crawl, walk, and run, you know, or even coexist with one of you sites going to teams and the other not. So we’ve got qualification questions there, whether the most important and the key point that we always ask, which is a low-hanging fruit to our customers is are they using Microsoft teams today? And obviously, most of often than not, they will say, oh, yes, we are. And if you call a recent numbers from Microsoft as well, of 80 million bond users, but only 12 million using pstn, that’s like roughly 68 million or four have the license, but they don’t use it, you know, and there are 350 million office seats out there that don’t use the whole PSN aspect as well.
Shams Kahn (29:35):
So asking that question absolutely, help us, number one. Number two is what is it their, what is their strategy around you know, workplace transformation? Like with people working, are they using, like, for example, zoom and Microsoft? Are they using different platforms? Are they looking to consolidate? And that, that is an important point as well for us. The third one is where are they, where are they based, you know, and the use account. Cause our strength and pedigree being a full stack provider in 90 plus countries where we can be the licensed operator and, and voice provider you know, depending in different countries, et cetera, we absolutely can start the journey and get into the account or that partner even on sip, for example, those three variables or angles if you want, you know in that time that we have helps us really and our sales team to help the partner obviously, and more important the customer to navigate through that in our consultative approach.
Josh Lupresto (30:35):
Love it. Good stuff. All right final thoughts here. So I was watching a couple of these videos, you know, that, that you get down a rabbit hole of watching this video. And, you know, it was a TikTok that had came over to a YouTube short, and it, it was, I think at the bull market, the height of the crypto run, and it, it somehow this, this kid had been able to surround himself that there was nothing but millionaires walking outta the buildings that he was asking questions at. I don’t know, however that works out, but
Josh Lupresto (31:19):
What? And, and the guy said, listen, kid, it’s, it’s not about that coin. It’s, it’s not about, you know, whether this one’s gonna take off or that one’s gonna take off. You gotta have a zoom out mindset, and you gotta think and, and ask yourself, is the world going more digital or less digital over time? And I think we know the answer to that. And so setting the stage in that context, I’m kind of curious if, if, if Shams looks out and SUV Global looks out where do you see this world going? Right? Do you see it going more complex, more detailed, more need? You know, what’s, what’s your, your forethought here, just looking out 12 months, 24 months, right? What should partners be aware of and, and, and things to look for as they walk in to talk to customers?
Shams Kahn (32:06):
Well, I think my take, and, you know, personally what I see, as I said, you know, if you don’t roll with a change, you become part of the change. The, this is not the end of the cycle, you know, where this market is mature, there will be some more things coming. And this is where I, I, I would say to partners that the way people are communicating and collaborating is going to change even more. So bracing yourself with someone who has been on that journey, or at least was at the beginning of the journey to try and say, yes, this is our plan, but is trying to just sell in a reactive way, then that’s, that’s something you gotta be watching out for you know, who you partner with. And the second part is that you see that in, in this space of people where we talked about, you know, collaboration and communication, again, the generation of how accustomed they are you know, of using some tools and application that is also gonna evolve.
Shams Kahn (33:06):
So in the pandemic, even the people who never really used a mobile phone to order online, they were forced to order online. So again, that behavior is gonna stay there is going to be that divide or which allow work from one place or multiple that is gonna happen. But working with a, you know, a company that sees that, that is going to be very, very critical for any of your partners. I feel there is a lot more to happen in this space that is gonna ha evolve and show us direction. And it is only going to be more complex for the one who doesn’t wanna change, but it will be more simple for the one who understands that this is the next wave that we are gonna be hit by. So it is important to, from those people who, who feel that, you know, this is it it’s not, it’s a lot more to evolve.
Josh Lupresto (34:00):
Beautiful. Well, my friend, that brings us up to the end here, Shams, I appreciate you coming on and doing this with me, man. It’s been fun.
Shams Kahn (34:07):
Thank you so much, Josh, for having me, and thank you for this opportunity, Telarus.
Josh Lupresto (34:13):
All right, everybody. That wraps us up for this week, VP of SCB, global Shams Kahn. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this has been the Next Level Biztech podcast.
https://youtu.be/6jgflqngj2M Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. All right, everybody. Today we’re back here as you can see with the special guest, Mr. Shane Speakman, VP of the UC practice at Telarus. Shane, thanks so much for agreeing to come back to the podcast.
Shane Speakman (00:28):
Yes, thank you.
Josh Lupresto (00:30):
Shane was guest number one on the podcast, so when we had no plan, no goals, no whatever, and we just kind of winged it, here we are back coming up on 50 episodes. So appreciate you, and we’re back here in the studio, studio 19 in Utah. So excited to jump in, man.
Shane Speakman (00:46):
Yeah, thanks. Congrats on the success. It’s been really fun to hear about your different guests.
Josh Lupresto (00:51):
Yeah, thanks. It’s fun. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s been so cool to just learn so much about people that, you know, we, we thought we knew a lot about your illustrious scrapbooking career.
Josh Lupresto (01:03):
It’s where it all started. That’s right. But today we’re not talking scrapbooking. If people wanna know about your career back in the scrapbooking days and, and where your, your awesome path has gotten you to, they can go back and listen to episode number one on that. But you know, let’s, let’s remind everybody though of, is this the path that you set out to, right. When, when did it really click for you? When did you know this technology area, this space was the path for you? Yeah, maybe let’s start it off there.
Shane Speakman (01:30):
So, a actually, let’s go, let’s go back to scrapbooking, which is, I, I sold my company in my late twenties and, and moved into a little nicer neighborhood. And it’s just so happened that my neighbor owned a telecom company, and as we became friends and worked out and vacationed, he said, Hey, why don’t you come lead my sales organization and I’ll give you a piece of the company? And I said, I don’t know anything about telecom. He said, that’s alright. It’s easy. And, and I’ll tell you, my thought process was I saw that the industry that I had invested in was starting to die. It was, it was turning digital. And as I looked forward towards telecommunications and the cloud services that were coming, I thought, oh, here, here’s, here’s a, a long term play. And so as we look at the ebb and flow, whether it’s through the macroeconomics or microeconomics here locally, it’s been a, a fantastic industry. And so for me, it was really about longevity, which is obviously proven to be that the internet and communicating is not exactly a fad
Josh Lupresto (02:28):
See, I think it’s gonna stay. And, and speaking of fads, not, not a fad. Who knows? The topic of today that we’re talking about is Microsoft Teams easy at the right fit. I mean, there was a period where, where we went through where that was just every other word that we said was Microsoft teams. And so, so that’s the point that I wanna lay out of this podcast is we’re gonna dial in as we go through this talk track of the fact of is Microsoft Teams always the right fit, rhetorical, but we’re gonna end it and we’re gonna answer it and, and solve that as we kind of go through this. So talking about that I wanna see what, what are you seeing, right? Yeah. It’s been a while since you’ve been on. What have you seen with customers that are moving to teams? Is it working? What are they struggling with? We’re coming out of obviously all the pandemic stuff, and, and that has settled down, but, but what, you know, what’s your thoughts there?
Shane Speakman (03:16):
You know, a lot’s actually changed since last time we talked about Microsoft Teams and the series that we did early on. I think it was filled with some ambiguity as to what teams ultimately would become, how much of the industry it would take over. What what’s really interesting is Gartner just released its magic Quadrant for UC suppliers, Microsoft Teams was, was noted as the leader. And so not only has it proven to be a a good stable platform, it’s, it’s also becoming more feature rich with better integration. So certainly, especially as we talk with suppliers in our portfolio we are more cognizant of the fact that this is, this is certainly a, an important player. As I spoke with one of the Gartner analysts last year, he indicated that he thought that this would be 25% of the market.
Shane Speakman (04:05):
And we’re seeing, if you look at those monthly active users in 2020, of course there was a huge bump, right? I think we saw an increase of about 20 million users as people went to work from home. But that was really only from about 44 million up to roughly 75 million. And now we’re approaching that 300 million month monthly active user mark mark. So with that increase of adoption, clearly we’re seeing more innovation not just with Microsoft teams, but with third party suppliers integrating into that. And we, we’ve seen the advent of operator connect, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, but certainly it’s, it’s growing and it’s changing, becoming more robust.
Josh Lupresto (04:41):
So, so we’ve established that it’s, it is really kind of what we talked about and what we set out that it would, it would proliferate and it would just kind of expand into the broader marketplace and people using it, whether we thought it was a good fit or not. But what do you see from a struggles perspective? What, let’s, let’s talk about the bad people that maybe have moved or thinking about, you know, have moved part of their things into it. Is it working? And, and if it’s not, what are they struggling with?
Shane Speakman (05:09):
Sure. Right. Of course, with anything, the answer is, it depends. What we have found, of course, is that an IT department or an a strategy would be let’s, let’s put everything Microsoft on in our stack. And so we’re finding that with that natural integration, especially into office 365, it becomes a matter of even if this tool that has potentially pstn connectivity through licensing is available readily in this platform, does it have the features? Does it have the ai, does it have the really the integrations to make the most efficient workspace? And the answer is not all the time. And so if a company has deployed Teams is using teams, it may be sufficient for a lot of users, but it’s not necessarily changing the game. And when we look at innovation in the industry, it’s somewhat lagging, which is, which is natural and to be expected.
Shane Speakman (06:10):
So where is it not working? Well, it’s, it’s certainly not working. If a company is looking to change customer experience through technology with a communications platform the other, the other areas that’s not working would be in that look, it, it can get really expensive, really fast. I, I was actually talking with a customer who had slowly bolted on the different oli carte options from teams, and then as they audited their, their bill, they thought, oh my gosh, we are spending so much money on teams. When in reality, if they had gone with a direct routing partner, or even with a third party PBX vendor, they could have bifurcated some of those licenses to say, we need some basic, basic subscriptions here, and we need some maybe more advanced features over here, and ultimately could have saved money.
Josh Lupresto (06:57):
You know, you, you you bring up a good point with, with, it seems like I, I care more about what the Fed chair does and what the economic headwinds are that, that face the broader markets than I ever did ever before earlier in my life, probably more than I even like to care about now. But I think it’s important because we, we look at those things and we have to determine how are they gonna affect business? How are our partners gonna be able to approach, or how are they gonna have to approach their customers differently? Is it gonna promote a, a sea of digital transformation where people are a little more willing to spend money, or is it gonna promote a time where people need to examine their costs and figure out where they’re spending, how they’re spending? And I think that’s what’s great about this is that, you know, for our partners that are listening to this, they’ve always been such incredible entrepreneurs and just figuring out a way to be successful.
Josh Lupresto (07:48):
And during the periods of the bull run, it’s, let’s do digital transformation. Let’s modernize, let’s accelerate. And now maybe it’s a little more of, to your point, let’s look at where we’ve spent money in the last couple years. Is it making us profitable? Is it too high of a cost? Is there a better way, a more efficient way for us to kind of do things? And so you, I think you bring up a great point that our partners have to be aware of is, you know, if you frame that into a question, what’s that? What’s that question that the partners that know their customers have moved a little bit into, teams are not sure about it? And if they need a reason to re-approach them, what’s a question that you give them to ask related to kind of what you just mentioned?
Shane Speakman (08:27):
So, I, I, I would say there are a few different considerations. When we talk about, lemme take a step back. When we talk about UCaaS we’re really talking about collaboration suite. And I think inherently we go to voice as kind of the default. And when we talk about Microsoft Teams, we’re also talking about different types of communications. And so ultimately what, what we’re really struggling with, I would say with Teams, would be those integrations into the disparate systems. And so that’s one of the first questions which would, would surround what are, what are the other technologies that you’re, you are utilizing? Which, which of these systems would you ultimately want to integrate into a communications platform? We find that a lot of, a lot of users are buying a bolt-on messaging platform or they’re, they don’t have, again, that AI embedded into teams, and so they’re using a third party AI platform for transcription service, or they, they aren’t integrating with their inventory management system, which you wouldn’t think would be a necessarily an integration into communications.
Shane Speakman (09:36):
But as you look at the ability to receive a message, have it dip into that inventory management system, and then respond with some really good output, it will increase that customer experience. And unfortunately, our partners, I think at at least a, a large subset of them have come from that clac world just like I did, where it’s all right, we’re gonna do key emulation, we’re gonna just move this exact PBX into a cloud environment. And as we’ve moved or progressed forward, I, I think we’ve had to really change the mindset to we’re going to be a consultant and now show you what the art of the possible is. And so those questions will vary based on the customer’s needs or their appetite for innovation as well.
Josh Lupresto (10:19):
Fair, fair. Good stuff. Okay. we’re gonna get into trends on deals here in just a second. Maybe we’ll, we’ll talk a little bit about Operator Connect. We’ll talk about direct routing. What, what are you seeing before we, before we kind of jump into that, right? It, it, some of these folks are being faced with modernization. They’re, they’re trying to evolve their business, and I think we talked about that just a minute ago, whether they’re transforming or they’re trying to save costs, right? The track is gonna be a little different, but what are you seeing a lot of the asks and the trends from partners, right? Is it, is it, do I need to care about operator connect? Is it, what are the differences between this and direct routing? And, and, and before we answer that, if we back up to when we talked about this last time, we were just trying to decipher through what truly being a Microsoft partner was. And we thought everybody said they could do Direct Connect, and then we found out, oh, direct Connect really meant if you have the Azure Certified Session Border Controllers and the Microsoft ones that are on their approved list, and where those are, and the adjacent in in ad, you know, all of that good stuff versus now Operator Connect changes at, so a lot of kinda loading that question up, but what, what are you seeing out of that trends and, and differences around those two Microsoft offerings?
Shane Speakman (11:32):
So, I would say most immediately, the last time we talked, I think there were still some ambiguity around the architecture of going through call to teams. And we, we saw that a lot of third party PBX vendors were kind of masking the fact that they were using this, this third party to actually connect to one of those approved SBCs within Microsoft. Call to Teams was acquired by qfi, which is now Destiny which is a Brussels based company. I don’t think there’s any real concern around their partnership, but ultimately what that has done is that it, it has led to more innovation. And we look at operator Connect, for example, where now third party suppliers are embedding their technology into the Azure ecosystem. And so it’s it’s now an app that you can self consume through their marketplace.
Shane Speakman (12:20):
And so when you, when you look at the experience, we’re finding that, whether it’s direct routing or through call to teams even operator connect there’s some minute differences. And the, the innovation is really in how easy is it to now provision, and that’s part of Operator Connect. What, what does the redundancy look like? And clearly we’ve had, we’ve had some Microsoft team outages. And so I think ultimately the real goal here, if I’m a partner looking at an environment that has teams, which is probable, it’s do we wanna rip and replace or do we wanna find a solution that hits all of their needs and then incorporates the core technology that they’ve already invested in?
Josh Lupresto (13:06):
Yeah. Great. Great point. And just from what it seems like, at least from an engineering mindset, I don’t see a lot of revolutionary things out of Operator Connect that they couldn’t do before. Right? Yeah. To your point, maybe it makes it a little more intuitive for people to turn up. Maybe it brings some more part you know, supplier, vendor partners into the ecosystem. But again, it’s just, it, it does follow into the talk track of what you and I always used to talk about was that Microsoft will continue to iterate, they will continue to be partner friendly, but we just don’t know what that next product is gonna be. But it seems that Operator Connect has just been an iterative product and iterative development that makes it a little more easy to, or a little easier to, to, to integrate with Microsoft in that as they go forward.
Shane Speakman (13:52):
Yeah. there was a, there was some concern around the management or the provisioning through Microsoft PowerShell. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (14:24):
Yeah, good point. All right. Let’s talk about successful partners. We, you know, we, we talked about some of the pain point, and remember, the, the, the goal of this track and the title of this track is, is Teams always a Fit? Right? And, and I think we’re addressing things that allude to help you decide one way or the other, if, if it is, and when it is successful partners that are out there that are, that are navigating this talk track, what are they doing? What are they developing expertise wise? What are you teaching and training? What, what do you want people to gleam from that to continue to be more successful in this area as it evolves?
Shane Speakman (15:01):
I have two thoughts on this. Number one, if, if there’s an environment with teams where they have set that standard, I, I think it is unwise to try and uproot that it is, okay, embrace the core of the technology and let’s add to it, let’s enhance what they have. Secondly, I would say if you are not taking the consultative approach and showing the art of the possible, or using maybe use cases or examples from our solutions architects and opportunities that we’ve been involved in to create new workflows, customer experience communication possibilities, then you’re not doing your job. And those successful, those really successful partners have looked at how those different either interactions take place with different different servers or technologies, even softwares such as Marketo or Eloqua. What they’re doing is looking at that saying, okay, there’s an opportunity here and I’m going to show you how to make for a better customer experience, and this is the ROI that you can expect.
Josh Lupresto (16:08):
Good. let’s, let’s go into examples. So what I think is always interesting when we talk about this is that sometimes when the deals come to us or the opportunities come to us, it, what we end up selling doesn’t always look like what it came to us originally. Like, certainly, you know, I hope when, when our team gets involved and when you get involved, we, we help a partner multiply that opportunity or improve the close ratio, or, you know, any of those kind of metrics, right? We uncover more things. Would love to hear about kind of an example where, you know, an opportunity that you saw, what it looked like, what the problems were, what were some of the pieces that, that you, you realized that we could help with and uncover and, you know, what was the end result in that?
Shane Speakman (16:53):
Sure. You and I have kind of joked about that. Most, most conversations start with Microsoft teams and it’s amazing how the percentage of Microsoft teams deployment when we’re done with that consultative approach is really kind of low. And so you know, I think at the beginning we, we kind of wondered, is this going to be every conversation? Well, it certainly starts with every conversation. One in particular that I would say was impactful and maybe it’s very typical for a partner would be that, look, I’ve, I’ve got Microsoft teams in a, in a few different deployments here. I’ve got a PBX as well. And so I’ve, I have some tools that I’m using outside of Microsoft Teams. We’re still seeing that there are a lot of Zoom licenses being utilized for, for video. They may even have Slack for, for a messaging platform.
Shane Speakman (17:46):
And so a typical opportunity would be one in this is one that I think that we saw a lot of success, especially with that horizontal or, or looking in the different technology stacks to be able to incorporate different practices. But it’s one where you say, okay, look, do you wanna stay in teams? And then this is a situation? They said, look, yeah, we’ve invested in teams and, and we don’t wanna deviate from that. And so what we did is looked at the other technologies that they had deployed and said, all right, if we’re gonna do this, let’s first of all, let’s incorporate new technology from a PBX vendor, throw that into teams. And there are ways now to circumvent that $8 PBX charge by throwing a dialer natively into the into the app, which, which is fantastic, right?
Shane Speakman (18:28):
Saves you money there, it gives you additional features. It starts to introduce the AI and change the workflow. Not only that, but it then it also brings in the messaging. We find that just like just like some video platforms, we, we, there’s a propensity to stick with whichever chat feature that that your organization uses a changing that can be somewhat difficult. So when we integrate that into teams, we find that now you don’t have to consume quite as much of that a la carte stack. And then in this example, what happened is we ended up actually saving them money through that integration, but then also giving them the additional feature sets.
Josh Lupresto (19:06):
Love it. Yeah, I think we just, you know, we have to make that determination of, you know, is this a fit? We talk a lot about some of our UC providers, like a dial pad, right? That have incredible artificial intelligence, and I’m, I’m not gonna steal your thunder room. We talk about kind of the future, but it, it, it either seems like it goes that route, or it goes the route of somebody like you know, that’s on the forefront of the cutting edge of what being adjacent to what Microsoft is doing, like an s SCB global, where they’re in the Azure pops, they’re, they’re embracing and, and, and training and teaching and managing operator connect and anywhere 365 and all of these things. And so, good example I think it, it just builds on what we’ve talked about of we’ve gotta understand where they’re at. Are we ripping? Are we integrating, are we growing? Do we need help managing, do they lack the people to do it? All that good stuff. Okay. Great stuff, great examples. Last couple thoughts here as we wrap this up. When you look at the future, and maybe this is 12 months out, maybe this is a little bit further, what are some of the trends that you want our partners to be aware of? And, and really maybe what is that talk track? What are some of those questions that you wanna leave them with?
Shane Speakman (20:16):
So I think that when you look at the, based on my experience, when you look at the innovation that’s occurred in this industry over the last even five years, it’s sexy, right? Dial tone, ah, maybe not so sexy. We, we expect that it’s good when you look at Microsoft calling plans, whether it’s their, you know, this, their domestic, international or pays you get, all right, we’re, we’re, we’re not, nobody’s doing high fives over, over anything like this
Shane Speakman (21:18):
It becomes really transformative. And so, yeah, you’re right. When, when you, when you talk about AI in general I, I think there are a lot of companies innovating really cool new technology that really changes the way that that we even think about how we operate. If I were to give you an example, if, if I were able to and let me back up and say, the CPAs community, which is growing rapidly, is really starting to innovate and bolt on different features into UC platforms that allow for really cool messaging and geolocating in these short codes. And you start talking about what we have seen on the periphery as being this almost rogue platform that was de developer driven. And you start to incorporate that into a teams environment. Now, now, if you really got something so when, when, when I see the ability for my son to be able to text his his favorite shoe store and have that come back with, yep, here’s a link and here’s the shoe that’s available, and here’s the price and would you like to put this on hold?
Shane Speakman (22:26):
But because he has the app when he walks through the mall, that’s able to geolocate him to shoot him out a message that says, Hey, I, we can give you 10% off if you shop within the next hour. Now, now that’s transformative. And that all goes back to and revolves around this communications platform, which you can use teams as a, as a, as a basic platform that everything is enhanced on. Well, also when you start looking at natural language processing the transcription service transcription service in itself is cool. It’s becoming really good, and it will be, it will become better, but it’s how you use that data, right? How an organization is able to start to cash all of it and then make really good assumptions about that data looking at the the algorithms that say, Hey, we’re predicting that this conversation is going south, and so here’s a suggestion based on success that was indicated in, in an aggregate of a thousand different calls or a million different calls over here.
Shane Speakman (23:29):
It’s just a very different way of looking at communication. And I think that we will see more of that. The expectation will be that as a workflow and as an employee experience, if I wanna message one of my colleagues and say, Hey, what’s going on with this deal over here? And the AI can pick it up and say, Hey, I, I noticed that you asked about this deal. Here’s a suggested link to your sales force. Or here, here’s a, here’s a link that shows that this actually hit your BI tool because of a inquiry into your, your data system over here, and it’s already sold. Now we’ve really become more efficient. And it’s yeah, it makes for a cool experience. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (24:07):
Great. There’s like 16 great golden nuggets in there. I think what I hope the partners walk away with is, you know, on the surface you might feel like, yeah, but everybody has a collaboration tool, or they, I think my car, my, my customer just bought something. But if you don’t ask yourself those types of experiences and put yourself in the role of a consumer that is buying a like product at, at a competitor, you have to take that stuff back, I think, and, and, and ask yourself is, is my business, is my customer able to do these things? And able to innovate in a way that, you know, to your point when dial tone was just not the sexiest thing, it was a necessary commodity and it was a cost. Now the technology space and the collaboration space has to be looked at as a way for these businesses to modernize and capture revenue that they just haven’t thought of. So I think our, as our partners are not just thinking at this as a, well, have I sold them this? Have I not sold them this yet? It’s how can I help my customers and my prospects modernize the way that they’re generating revenue, the way that they’re building their own brand, to your point, right? Now they can communicate with a demographic that they just couldn’t communicate before. And if they’re not able to do that, to your point, they’re just missing the mark and somebody else is gonna do it,
Shane Speakman (25:22):
Right? And the innovation is certainly changing the way that that we operate. I’m a truck guy, and when I, when I think about my old diesel truck, look, it, it does the same thing that my new truck does. It, it hauls my trailer, but now my, my new truck is a, it’s, it’s a beacon of technology, right? When you, when you look at the Bluetooth thing, you look at the, the navigation, and you look at the, the internet that I connect to in my own, in my own truck. I never had that expectation before. I just needed something to tow my trailer. And I think it’s the same here where we, we should expect, and as partners, we ought to be expecting that we, we bring that new technology and that that advice so that we’re seen as that long-term consultant.
Josh Lupresto (26:07):
Great stuff. Okay. I think we wrapped it up. I, I hope people listen to this and, and gives them a little bit of a gleam of when and if Microsoft Teams is really a fit. I think you did a great job of providing us some examples of how to talk through that. So Shane Speakman, appreciate you coming on, man. Good to have you on again.
Shane Speakman (26:22):
Thanks, bro.
Josh Lupresto (26:24):
Ok everybody that wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering here at Telarus. Wrapping up with Shane Speakman, VP of the UCaaS practice. Until next time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODltsvZDsv0 Listen in today with our incredible partner, Ryan Urbanski of Martin Advisory, as we talk trends, tech stacks, customer interactions, and more. Martin Advisory has been consulting for over 10 years, so pay close attention as Ryan shares what he’s seen, dissects some customer environments he has been through, and also lays out where he thinks we’re headed next!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Hey everybody, welcome back. We are on wrapping up the exciting track of contact center, kind of contact center, CC CX, customer experience, all kinds of good names. This is about specifically the interactions of the future. And, and what you’re gonna hear throughout this is you’ve seen with the contact center practices that it evolves. We have to communicate with our customers, and you have to communicate with your customers in the way that they wanna be communicated with. So I’m excited today to, to hear this from a partner’s perspective. So, Ryan Urbanski of Martin Advisory is on with us today. Ryan, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Ryan Urbanski (00:52):
Hey, thanks Josh. Thanks for having me.
Josh Lupresto (00:55):
So you know, we, we, we launched this talk track, Ryan, with first hearing from, from Sam Nelson, our fearless leader of the contact center side of the business, the CX practice. We’ll get some perspective after that from one of our suppliers and then now on on with you. So before we get in, you know, get into these weeds of, of, of talking about deals and technology and evolution, I just wanna hear about you. Tell us about how did you get started in this? You know, have you always been in tech? Did you start out doing something else, polishing boats? Like what’s the story?
Ryan Urbanski (01:30):
Josh Lupresto (02:30):
Love it. And, and evolved you have, right? Obviously huge partner, fantastic partner. Love the the energy and the effort that you guys have. So, so certainly appreciate the partnership. I wanna talk about, you know, you, you started in oh five, right? That the cx we weren’t even calling it CX then. And, you know, we weren’t contact center, I think met some, met in something different back then. Tell me about where did this, where did the cx, where did contact Center first start, you know, and how did you really learn about that broader contact center landscape?
Ryan Urbanski (03:06):
Well, the, on the contact center side, I mean, back in the day, right, there really wasn’t a lot of cloud solutions or anything for us. So when we heard of a contact center solution, immediately the, the, the flag that went up was, how many minutes can I, you know, can we propose and, and look at solutions for our clients? Right? So you wanted them to have a pretty substantial contact center. You can charge them the, the five to six per minute rate that was going through, and that was a great deal for ’em. Yeah, so I mean, back in the day, those, the, the contact center in our view was just looked at as a a service type solution for them. So then as it evolved a little bit, I would say we got, got into the contact center space probably about seven years ago on the cloud base.
Ryan Urbanski (03:50):
And so once we started getting some solutions that we can give to the clients, that’s when we kind of dipped our toes in the water and, and felt a little bit more confident going up against the Avaya solutions and Cisco solutions, the on-prem solutions the customers had in their shop today. And kind of got into that space. And so it’s been funny. I mean, it hasn’t been that long, but just to see how not only the, the technology invo has evolved, the business decisions the procurement process even this year I was talking to another partner about how this has changed so differently for us this year than it has on years past. I think it’s just a model that we continue to see as a, a large opportunity for us. I mean, as far as contact center business for, for Martin Advisory, when we started, you know, back in oh five, and I gotta reel that in a little bit, that was way too long ago.
Ryan Urbanski (04:44):
But, you know, we were network infrastructure heavy and, and services heavy. And I’d say the part of our business we make today, the infrastructure probably accounts from maybe 10 to 15% of our business contact center makes up you know, the 50% of that, the UCaaS maybe 20. And then so the other miscellaneous is on the security and stuff like that. So it’s taken up a, a large portion of our portfolio as far as what we’re doing today for our clients. And I think, and there’s different ways to get into it now, which is kind of cool. Yeah. Which we didn’t have before.
Josh Lupresto (05:15):
Exact point, right? I, I think the cool thing about this is that we’ve been able to see the channel evolve, right? You mm-hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (06:21):
So, the first CX deal, they were a medical, they’re in the medical field mental health, and they went from a on-prem ShoreTel solution to going to the cloud. And then, so we got them out there. Yeah, no, it was different. I mean, they’re, they’re still, they were one of our first ones still a client today. It’s evolved a couple iterations since that initial sale. And, but you asked me the question, I was kind of smirking cause it made me think about the, the process we went through and, and how I want, I don’t wanna say clumpy, but our, it was our first one. Yeah. We didn’t have any experience on it whatsoever. So just a, a lot of the times that decision was made by the IT organization. There was no other business units involved. They kind of made the decisions and they really, because they didn’t understand it, we really went from a, like, to like, solution.
Ryan Urbanski (07:18):
So there was really no upgrades and stuff like that. And so it was, it was challenging to to take all of that because once you go from, from the on-prem to the cloud on a, like, for like, the business processes got muddled up, the technology and how they leveraged it got it muddled up. So since that time, we’ve gone through several different iterations of kind of tweaking and changing it. And I think we’re on like version 3.0 or 4.0 from that first time. So yeah, that was, that was kind of our, our, our first engagement into it. So we, and I think they had about 150 seats. So it wa it wasn’t a, a small project by any means, but it was definitely, we learned a lot by going through there as we learned from everyone that we go through. So it was interesting though. It’s funny you asked
Josh Lupresto (08:07):
I I I’m gonna come back to you brought up a good point that I think is, is critical to bring up is, is how the, how the pre-sales process has changed Uhhuh.
Ryan Urbanski (08:52):
Yeah. Well, the, the, the whole process has been great on all accounts because, I mean, obviously me, I’m not an expert in it, right? I mean, I know enough to, to get my foot in the door, but we’ve really leveraged a lot of resources with our Telarus team, you know, so like Sam Nelson Jason Lowe, Meagan Thai. They’ve all been kind of our, our, our backbone or, or the, our experts in the field when it comes to getting these engagements. But what’s been nice about it is because what we’ve been able to do is, obviously we touched other business units within the organization that we didn’t have relationships with before. So while we were kind of maybe singular threaded in the IT organization, now we’re working with marketing, now we’re working with analytics, now we’re working with bi. So we kind of, we’ve been able to distribute our relationships to other parts of the organization to kind of make us more of a valuable partner for our clients. So it is only strengthened our relationship and made us less single threaded, which has been great cuz it’s led to other opportunities that we never would’ve known were available that don’t necessarily come through it all the time. So that’s been great.
Josh Lupresto (10:00):
Good, good points. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s always the end goal is that you know, we wanna do this delicately in a way that, that in, you know, helps us uncover other things. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (10:47):
Mm-Hmm. If we can mm-hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (11:12):
Yep. No, it’s been great. And just streamlining and, and again, not only just the multiple relationships, but as you just talked about, you know, opening up the, their eyes to the existing infrastructure and being able to kind of make them more efficient. You know, they, they see the value of working with us. Well, wait a second, this is great. You know, an outside pair of eyes is helping us with this. Gives ’em some ideas they didn’t have internally before.
Josh Lupresto (11:34):
So I wanna ask you about, I’m gonna go back to that question that, that we, we put a pin in of the procurement process,
Josh Lupresto (12:24):
We need to factor in what they need. And third, what we have to factor in is the procurement person, because they have a job and they have a different job and they have a different agenda. Mm-Hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (13:05):
No, it’s, and that, this is the conversation I was having with another partner, is that this is completely changed even in, in, in 2022 has really been our main focus. Cause traditionally we’ve gone through these engagements starting with the IT organization, you know, and, and so kind of how we evolved is that we, we went from there, we took their requirements, kind of looked at those through the different service providers and came back with some solutions. That was step 1.0. What happened is that we just missed a lot of things. So then what we did is step two, okay, IT organization, you had your own requirements that great version two was, okay, you’ve got your requirements, but you know what, and this was what Megan Ty was great with helping me with. There’s other there’s other requirements that you may need to address.
Ryan Urbanski (13:54):
You know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So we would go through and kind of help them compile a complete requirement list, right? Stuff that they knew, stuff that we knew from what the industry was. And that was kind of version 2.0, kind of went through the process that way. And so now what we’re experiencing is, okay, that’s great, but you know, what, we’re really missing, as I had mentioned before, the different business units that are going through. And you know, what, on top of that, marketing has these requirements that it has nothing, knows nothing about analytics has requirements and knows nothing about. So, whereas we used to start with the IT organization, I wouldn’t say that we put them last, but they’re definitely not first anymore. I mean, all these organizations have director of customer experience, director of patient needs and stuff like that.
Ryan Urbanski (14:41):
And so th there’s actually unique positions that are responsible for organizing their omni experience and their digital patient experience for, you know, on the healthcare side throughout the whole course of it. And so what we’re, what we’ve kind of migrated to here internally is, okay, let’s, let’s start the conversation with these groups, right? I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re different to talk to. You know, we’ve been talking to IT people for the last 15 years. It’s kind of cool to, to talk to someone in marketing or start the conversations that way, but their requirements kind of, they take priority over what it needed. So it was kind of driving the ship. They’ve kind of stepped aside and most organizations are saying, Hey, whatever marketing and they need, they’re gonna drive the ship. It, you need to figure out how to make it happen. So we’re starting our conversations with those units and then trickling down and kind of looping in it as we go on.
Ryan Urbanski (15:33):
That’s been the biggest, biggest change and, and biggest kind of shift that we’ve made in our business this year and going into the future. And it’s actually, the great thing about it is that, cuz as you mentioned, a lot of those gotchas, when we were going through the old way, we’d get to implementation only to find out that everything we were activating and turning on wasn’t necessarily what the business wanted. So then we had to go back and there was a lot of situations where we would stand this up based on what it was saying, only to have to do a professional services engagement to realign it. And so now that we’re kind of getting on the ground with these other business units, we’re hitting the ground running a little bit smoother on these implementations than may of where we had in the past. So that’s, that’s a long-winded answer to your question there, but no good. It’s,
Josh Lupresto (16:22):
It’s good. That’s, that’s what I wanna make sure that people understand is that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter when you jump into doing this mm-hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (17:05):
Yeah. Perfect.
Josh Lupresto (17:07):
I wanna talk for a second. I, I wanna get into kind of a detailed, more recent example of what, what you experienced and what you went through. But before I do that, I, I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, the interaction side of this. So if I flash back to, you know, what our vendor portfolio looked like 10, you know, five years ago, even the idea of an interaction meant, well, it’s gonna be, you know, through a contact center seat, and the agent is gonna have the ability to maybe, maybe take some email into that, maybe a voice channel only, and we’re gonna voice route, but then we’re gonna give you analytics around it and reporting, and that’s great and that’s all you need. But then if we look at, now, the last five plus years have, have opened up both from products coming to market, but probably more importantly of what the changing demographic of the customer base was.
Josh Lupresto (18:00):
I think everybody realized that, and everybody in product that these vendors realized, we have to be able to communicate with the customers in the way that they want to communicate with us. So if they wanna voice call us, great. If they want to text us because they don’t wanna pick up a phone, great. If they want to email, if they wanna use WhatsApp, whatever, we’ve gotta be able to appeal to all these things. And so I think what it created, it, it, those that were opportunistic created the ability as vendors to come in and say, you know, somebody like ADA comes into our portfolio. We’re just, we’re a chatbot company. We wanna enable you. And maybe for you, maybe that’s a wedges product, maybe you can’t come in and rip out the full seat, right? And so I think what, what behind the scenes, what we’re trying to do is obviously we want our, we want our providers to continue to evolve and say, yes, not only are we a leader in voice, we’re a leader in sms, we’re a leader in chat.
Josh Lupresto (18:49):
We have all those that’s bundled, but maybe if you come into a deal, maybe ripping out the whole thing isn’t up for grabs. Maybe they’ve sunk cost into something else. And so we need to enable you to go in with whatever tools you need from a vendor perspective. So, long-winded way to load up this question, but I, I, I, I just, I wanna understand maybe from your perspective out there, what you’re seeing in trends in the asks from customers around the interactions. And where do you think that, where have you seen that kind of go, right? Have you, how, how important, I guess, have you seen the omnichannel component be over the last few years as these practices have evolved?
Ryan Urbanski (19:28):
I mean, it’s the, it’s, it’s the number one aspect. I mean, just as you talked about the, whether it’s the customer base, whether it’s efficiencies that the organization wants, maybe they, they don’t want to have the staff to, to be able to do this, and they want a little bit more automation to, to offset some of these common interactions. I mean, you, you hit it right on the head. And so, I mean, I don’t, and there’s a fine line, right? I mean, I’m not throwing anyone under the bus, but Frontier Airlines decision to, to stop taking calls all of a sudden. Yes. You know? Yes. Oh my God. So funny. Cause I was talking to my daughters about that. I was like, let’s test it. So I called the, called the number to actually see if there was some way to, to backdoor and get it through to someone.
Ryan Urbanski (20:05):
And there really wasn’t. And so, I mean, you, you can get a lot of stuff done with the Omni, but you, you, there has to be a balance. And so the, I mean, our, our business, we focus on the healthcare side, on the financial side. So there’s some unique compliance things that has to happen on the omni side with both of those. But, but what we’re finding, and then we do some work on the non-profit side. And so what, what we’re finding is whether it’s, you know, a click to dial, you know, whether there’s a, there’s a someone that’s interested in getting some mental health, but they’re, they don’t wanna make the step of scheduling appointment, but they do want to talk to someone. And, and so I’ve got customers that are, that are trying to make it easier to start, start engaging, you know, these people and you talk about a different base, maybe they just want to chat.
Ryan Urbanski (20:51):
Maybe they’re not comfortable talking about it at first, but they’d like to chat with a, a clinician. You know what I mean? Mm-Hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (21:50):
And so we’re really trying to work on whether it’s streamlining the subject line of the emails that come in or, or doing some things on the texting side, trying to get a little bit more automation into there so that the agents they have are only needed to do unique requests instead of the, so that’s, that’s kind of where we’re seeing our business kind of migrating through. So when, when we talk about what’s happening on the voice side, the, it’s almost like the voice side’s kind of a, a third place type conversation, right? The contact center used to be completely voice first, everything else. Second Voice is really kind of an afterthought at this point of what we’re trying to get done.
Josh Lupresto (22:28):
Agree. Yeah. Great, great example. It’s funny you bring up the frontier thing. I was just talking to somebody about that, about that news mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (23:17):
It’s in travel, right? When travel goes bad, you want to, you wanna solve it and get over it quickly. And one of the things that Delta’s done is they figured out an easy way to communicate however you wanna communicate with them. You wanna text, you wanna call, you wanna, whatever your status matters, all of that good stuff. The reality is you’re gonna pay more for Delta than you’re gonna pay for Frontier. And this study was about 87% of people came out right at the time as frontier says, we’re cutting voice
Ryan Urbanski (24:05):
What, and, and there’s times where you need to talk to someone, right? I mean, Southwest, they have a great online experience and you could do a lot of stuff through their app, but there’s a couple of times where you just, you need to talk to someone, you know, Hey, I, I need to take this person off my register or whatever, that you can do through the tool and you need to talk to someone. So it’s nice to have that lifeline there, but they cut it off completely. Was it’s crazy. So we’ll see if that gets reversed or whatnot.
Josh Lupresto (24:27):
Crazy. It kind of reminds me of the old days where you know, when, when uc first started, partners would, would ask, how do I jump into this? Maybe I’ve, maybe I’ve done network, I haven’t jumped into uc, and that was really one of our first advanced solutions. And we said, go out there, walk in door, knock, see what phones they have on the desk. Mm-Hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (25:12):
Yeah. No, and you’re spot on. I mean, a lot of the times what we’ll do is, you know, when we get a referral or something like that for a, a new opportunity, we’ll go through, we’ll do exactly that, spend some time on their website finding different ways to, whether it’s chat maybe it’s an sms, see what the response time is, we’ll kind of go through that and we’ll also call ’em, see what’s going on. So by the time we get to the first conversation, it’s not, Hey, what are your, you know, what’s going on? We can actually say, Hey, listen, you know, I, I kind of went through the queue. I was in your chat bot, it took me 15 minutes to get someone there. Are you guys using that as a, a real tool or is that just something you pinned up? Cuz you feel you need to have that? And so we kind of are able to kind of go into that first conversation with a lot of ammo and, and knowledge prior to just saying, Hey, you know, you got something going on. So, no, that’s, you bring up a great point. It’s great to get the customer experience prior to getting into those new prospects.
Josh Lupresto (26:01):
Kudos to you though. I mean, that is that if, if, if two people are calling your prospect and the other one is calling them saying, Hey, I I can help you with this. Maybe I could save you some money. And you come in and say, listen, we did this. I pretended like I was an end customer and I did it and here’s what I experienced. Is that okay with you? Did you know that? I mean, that, your angle on that is just so different. Right? Kudos to you for mm-hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (26:25):
Josh Lupresto (26:27):
Okay. as we get to kind of the last couple questions here, I want to hit you with one of a, I wanna talk about a detailed example. You know, we talk about in the beginning how you got into this space, the evolution, the first deal you sold. I would love, love to hear, and, and we certainly don’t have to share customer names and stuff like that, but, you know, walk us through something that you’ve been brought into recently. And, and here’s the things that I would love to kind of have everybody understand. One, you know, did it, did it end up looking like what you thought it was going to be in the beginning? And two, really, what, what were the problems? What were the complaints and what kind of tech stack did they have prior? And what did you end up putting in place? What ended up fixing and and what did it solve?
Ryan Urbanski (27:15):
So let’s use this example. So they are a nonprofit maybe about 200 seats. International. They are business is to sponsor children impoverished children across the different countries of the world. And so they had an on-prem genesis solution, and we went through the process of looking at different service providers that moved into a, a cloud-based provider. And I won’t say which one, I guess the, the for sake of this one, but basically it was their first, it was their first iteration from going on-prem to cloud. And so I, let me go through this a little bit. So what happened is that we didn’t necessarily do a like to, like, we did some improvements and they went through and it was good. But what we found out was that a lot of the business practices that they had established and the way they were doing things from like a workforce management perspective, they were realigning skills on the fly and taking people in and out of things and really doing a manual process because that’s how they had to do it in the old world.
Ryan Urbanski (28:24):
So when they got to the new world, there was a lot of business practices that they had that didn’t translate and it, it just didn’t work out the same and it didn’t give ’em the same information. Cause now all of a sudden what happened is that when they moved to the prem, to the this new solution, they were getting analytics and information that before they never thought mm-hmm. You know, they didn’t know that they had 2000 emails that were unapplied to, and they were just sitting in queue before they, they just couldn’t see how many they had there. So now all of a sudden this was a good solution, but it created kind of question mark in their head. They’re like, well, wait a second. You know, why are all these problems happening? They’re like, well, we didn’t know we had these problems before.
Ryan Urbanski (29:07):
We’re like, well, okay, we do now fix them. So their way to fix them was to to just kind of tweak and, and manage some things. And, and so we, we, we put a stop on that is what happened. And so what happened is that we, we got some other resources involved from an engagement perspective. We got some additional resources within their company to get going. And so what happened is that they were, they were missing their KPIs on their, their call to answer, you know, it was supposed to be I think 30 seconds, and it was like five minutes on the voice side, on the email side, as I said, I mean, their, their largest backlog was about 5,000 emails. And they were supposed to respond to those within 24 hours. And then they had the longest priority was, was five days.
Ryan Urbanski (29:50):
And so what we did was that we kind of went through and said, okay, let’s, let’s restart this whole program and kind of understood what their business practices were. And we actually went and kind of retooled their workforce management organization to, to kind of tweak their mindset a little bit. But what they were able to do then was they took that 5,000 email backlog and all of a sudden their KPIs with the automation and stuff we had talked about earlier, they started getting that backlog down or actually ahead of the account. And then, so they started having, they were using a BPO organization to compliment theirs. So they had their team here and they had another team in Thailand. They were actually able to scale back their team in Thailand by about 15 agents to 20 agents just for some of this automation and stuff that we did. So their bottom line saw big reduction in what they were trying to do. So, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, but Perfect. That’s kinda the latest case on, on how this, this technology and stuff like that kind of helps serve them a little bit better, not only their, their, their, their sponsors, but as well as kind of cut some bottom line internally. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (30:58):
No, that’s perfect. I, I think what, what I imagine in this from a visual perspective is our, our ability to put an x-ray over this deal mm-hmm.
Ryan Urbanski (31:38):
Perfect, perfect. And yeah, you mentioned, I’m not, I am not the hero. I don’t know anything I
Josh Lupresto (32:36):
Appreciate the, it’s kind, it’s it’s hard to call this work when you get to, to come in and, and do what you love every day. Yeah. I’d tell you, you guys do have the hard job. I mean, I don’t want to go back to door knocking selling stuff. Yeah. So if you can knock down the doors, we will, we will ly hold up our end of the bargain of helping you on the tech side. Happily. We love it. Yeah. So good stuff. That’s great. That’s what makes it a good partnership.
Ryan Urbanski (33:01):
Yep.
Josh Lupresto (33:02):
Okay. So as we as we look into our, our, and, and not everybody’s gonna get this reference, but some people are gonna get it as we look into our Miss Cleo eight ball here and our, our our magic, magic crystal ball the, the Ryan Urbanski opinion of, of the future. I mean, you’ve seen a lot of evolutions in this, of, of what the customers need. You’ve seen evolutions in the tech stack. If you just look out a little ways, look out, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s add one, one variable into this. Let’s add in the variable of the fact that a lot of companies right now are being asked to improve efficiency, do more with less, all that good stuff. But, but couple, in everything that you’ve seen up to this point, do we continue down the same trends of, of the same conversations that we’re having because there’s so much area for tech improvement and efficiency improvement, or what are your opinions just, I mean, interactions of the future? Where does it continue to head?
Ryan Urbanski (33:55):
Well, I think just, I mean, kind of complimenting some of the conversations we had earlier, right? I mean, I, I think it’s a completely different customer experience. I think different different business units are driving these conversations internally. And I think some of the, the different interactions that the companies want with their clients has also evolved quite a bit. I mean, we’re, we’re going through the I wouldn’t say an undercurrent, but they, I’ve just noticed, I’ve been in the business for a while. I’m noticing a lot of my clients are, are starting to retire, right? And so we’re coming in with kind of a, as you mentioned, a new generation of individuals and stuff that are coming in there. So, so those individuals are used to having interactions with the company is a little bit different than maybe the outgoing support is doing.
Ryan Urbanski (34:45):
So it’s, it is been kind of, it’s, it’s refreshing and it also kind of rejuvenating to kind of work with this younger subset of, of executives that are coming in that have a different mindset on where things are going. And no, I think it’s just, it’s simply gonna progress that way. I mean, I think when we say the customer experience, I think that’s exactly it. I don’t, I don’t think we’re gonna be calling it a call center anymore, and I don’t even know if we’re still doing that today. So it’s really just that the customer experience and, and everything goes along with with that and how those tie in across all the different business units across the board into that sector. So, no, I think you’re spot on. Good, good spot on stuff,
Josh Lupresto (35:23):
Josh. Good stuff, man. Well, Ryan, that brings us up to the end. I really appreciate you coming on, spending a little bit of time with me this morning. And thanks so much for doing it, man.
Ryan Urbanski (35:32):
No, I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me ramble and stuff like that.
Josh Lupresto (35:43):
Okay. That wraps us up for today, everybody. Thanks for joining. Ryan Urbanski of Martin Advisory. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of engineering at Telarus. This is Next Level BizTech.
Listen in to this special episode where we get an opportunity to speak with a long-time friend and pioneer in the contact center space, Paul Jarman, of Nice CXone. Paul talks business lessons, along with key paradigm shifts that have happened over the years all of which have created incredible opportunities in the contact center space more than ever before.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:00):
Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I’m your host Josh Lupresto here today. A lot of special stuff going on. We’re in the studio, as you can see. We’ve got a special guest. I’d like to welcome in here, Paul Jarman, CEO of Nice CXone. Paul, thanks for coming in.
Paul Jarman (00:29):
Hey, great. How you doing today?
Josh Lupresto (00:31):
I can’t complain. I could, but nobody would listen, so doesn’t matter. Hey, special special note today. This is a big deal. This is actually episode number 50, so appreciate you coming in, being here in the studio. You know, like we were talking earlier, you guys are a stones throwaway, so love that you could break away and get some time to come out here and excited to do this with you.
Paul Jarman (00:51):
Well, that’s great to be here. We’re practically neighbors and you got a great place here and a great studio. So it’s great to do the podcast with. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (01:00):
So let’s talk about where we always like to kick these off. You know, you’ve been at this, you’ve built a, an incredible company, but I want to talk about you personally. You know, where, where was your background, how did you start this, and what was that journey like for you? Right? Did you, did you wake up and go, this is, I know what I wanna build, I know what it needs to look like, or was there a path that you took to get to where you were to start this?
Paul Jarman (01:24):
You know, it’s most good stories. This is over 25 years that we’ve been doing this, and as we began this, it was really, it started in a very different place. So really we started principally in telecommunications. Early on it was a little bit of b2c, and then it became more B2B telecommunications. And then about 2005, we really looked at the market and, and we said, you know, we can’t be that unique or special in telecommunications, but we could do something in software. And it was right about then we started to look at the opportunity for cloud software and in we did a small acquisition in 2006 of a company called My City. And that ended up being the very first piece to this puzzle that we started with that created this idea that we could provide cloud-based basically, you know, great software that people could use as a pay as you go service. And, and that started really combining that with our telecommunications that we had been doing for five or six years. And all that started in about 2006, but the company started back right before 2000. And as we, as we started to combine the software with the telecommunications, we started to really see a new growth pattern for us, which was what then became in contact. And obviously what now is NICE CXone?
Josh Lupresto (02:49):
Yeah, it’s been an interesting growth path. I, you know, I came into this space obviously knowing it as as in contact, but there’s been such a long history here where you guys have been such a great supplier, great partner. So it’s been cool to see it grow cool to see the partners get behind it, the channel get behind it, and it, it, it’s been fun, right? And excited for where the future goes of which we’ll get into here in just a minute. So let’s, let’s give a little bit of an overview for anybody that is not, you know, the whole goal of this podcast is to help partners step into a space either deeper if they’re in it already or if they’re selling something adjacent. So maybe just step back for a second as it stands right now, give us a little bit of an overview on NICE CXone.
Paul Jarman (03:31):
You bet. So when you, I’m gonna talk a little bit about the market first and then about CXone. And as you really think about what’s happening today, you know, the world’s changing. And, and in part of that changing of the world, one of the things that’s really different for companies now is that they’re really what I call entering the reference economy. And what I mean by that is, is that now most goods and services are driven and sold based on third party references. All of us, every day we go to a place, we look and see how many stars that product got, that book got that restaurant got that car got, or that service got. And based on these third party references, we are making most of our new purchasing decisions. So as companies reconcile to that change, they have to now really create a service model.
Paul Jarman (04:22):
And an experience that is, is, is seamless. It’s very customer friendly, it’s very successful and it supports those references. And so as you kind of look at the customer experience market today, the first thing we saw was this, this really reference driven economy. The second thing that’s really happening in our market today is this new drive to digital. And as you look at what’s happening with digital, it used to be we all call the TOLLFREE number. We got an agent, we had a conversation, hopefully it fixed our problem, maybe it didn’t. And all of a sudden that doesn’t really happen that much anymore. What’s really happening is we’re going on Google. We’re looking at a website, we’re searching for solutions. We’re going to apps and, and social media and other places to get answers to our questions or issues or problems that we have with a particular product or our company.
Paul Jarman (05:15):
And so as you look at the service market today, it’s now this cloud, it’s digital and it’s so important and so critical because it’s really what drives the brand. Branding is no longer company driven. It’s driven by the people that buy and reference around it. So as you look at what CXone is, is back, you know, 20 years ago we started in traditional telecommunications and then we started in basic, I’ll call it a ACD or customer service based on phones and tollfree numbers. And really where we’ve gotten to today is CXone is now a platform. It’s a set of multiple solutions that run on that platform, and it basically solves first all of the interactions that a company might have with its consumer, and then it solves the self-service parts to the interactions that might be needed. And then when it is a human that they’re interacting with either digitally or through voice, it solves all the tools that a company would need to help those agents to be successful. And then lastly, it provides really all the analytics that come behind it that help companies understand how they’re doing with their customers, how they’re doing with their business, how much efficiency they’re getting, and what else they can do to be more successful across all of their different touch touchpoints that they can measure success from.
Josh Lupresto (06:39):
It’s a great it’s a great example or a great story and I think we talk a lot about when we go do these academies and the trainings and all these different things for our partners, the one phrase that we always use is, you’ve gotta be able to you gotta be able to communicate with your end customers in the way that they want to communicate with you. And so we, we, we especially always get the partners that say, okay, I, I’ve learned these things. Where do I take this now? What, what questions do I ask? Where do I go? And, and so I think you guys have done a great job of recognizing that. And I want to, I want to jump into that a little bit about how you guys have kind of pioneered some innovation in this. And so, you know, looking at that, what do you kind of, how have you looked at the importance of innovation in this space? Cuz your point, right, you came from the telco space, the a c d to where it is now, all of the, the incredible tools that you guys have to interact. How, how have you viewed that importance of innovation and capturing that?
Paul Jarman (07:32):
You know, innovation has always been huge for us. And innovation can be in lots of things, right? It can be in service models, it can be in products, it can be in how we make and create technologies. And so we’ve always kind of felt like innovation’s a foundation of really everything we did across the business. And as you look at innovation today, it’s a couple of things. So first of all, we, we looked forward into the future and we said, okay, what’s likely gonna happen? You know, where is the customer experience gonna go? What’s it gonna be like? And then as we came backwards, we looked at the companies and we said, what’s keeping a company from doing it successfully? Cuz what we see as we look in the market and look work with so many different companies is most companies do it poorly. And, and the question is why?
Paul Jarman (08:16):
And as we, as we answer that question and we look at where the future is and the gap between those two, that’s a really fertile place to innovate from. And so we, we really looked at it on both sides. And then we’ve got really wonderful research and development teams, product teams, market research groups that have really helped us understand what’s necessary. Now, as you think of the innovations that we’ve done though, there’s a lot of different places. So the first thing is, is that we help to help those companies really have the width of the products and solutions and platform to manage the entire customer experience. We’ve really been been the first company that’s really said, let’s cover the entire width of a customer journey. And the second thing we’ve done is we’ve really said, okay, once we’ve been the first one to do the entire journey, and we can do it for small companies, medium companies, large companies, international companies, really any type of company, we then said, how can we be the first to really make it easy?
Paul Jarman (09:16):
And one of the big challenges in our market has been that it’s really been a market full of point solutions. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (10:03):
That’s good. I wanna talk about progression. So switching gears a little bit here, right, picking Paul Jarman’s brain building a business, what to our partners that are out there building businesses of their own, what, as you’ve built this up, what’s been kind of one or two of the most valuable lessons that, that you’ve learned in in growing a company?
Paul Jarman (10:27):
You know, that’s a great question and there’s lots of possible answers to that. I think, I think the first thing that I have always found is, is you’ve got to go find that real customer need. And, and then you’ve gotta understand that there’s a return for that customer when you solve it. So the first thing I think that a lot of people sometimes struggle with is, is really understanding what does my customer really need and how do I become really good at delivering it? And then doing it long enough that you become good at it. A lot of people fail because they aren’t patient enough or determined enough or have enough grit to keep keep the course even when sometimes it doesn’t seem easy. It might be their other ideas. And in that we, we do, I do agree you should change your ideas as you go, but only as you change what the customer’s looking for.
Paul Jarman (11:17):
And, and then the second thing I would say is, is it’s important to really think through deeply how you make money solving the problem. And so, you know, usually I see a lot of people struggle or fail when they haven’t really gotten the right vision as to what it is I can really help the customer do successfully. And then secondly is, is can I make money doing it? And, and those sound really basic, but it’s amazing. It’s good though, when you really step back and ask people those two key questions that they have really good understanding of those two answers. How many of ’em have just kind of been busy and they work and they work hard and they, they, they just kind of make stuff happen, but it doesn’t really be as strategic as it could. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (11:57):
Great points. I love it. Very basic. There’s no shortage of ideas. There’s shortage of execution and what was it, Wiseman once said, don’t confuse activity with productivity
Paul Jarman (12:07):
Josh Lupresto (12:09):
Yeah, exactly. Okay, let’s, let’s talk about your platform as it competes in the broader marketplace. What, what do you feel that are some of the, either the, the innovations or some of the differentiators, right? If the, if someone comes up to you and says, well, what do you guys differ against X and Y and z competitor w you know, we, what do you say as or if if you need x, you know, this, this piece of it where do you feel that in, you know, the nice InContact, NICE CXones really stands out?
Paul Jarman (12:41):
You know, it’s a great question. So, and, and, and to answer that question, you gotta ask, say what the platform is solving, right? And so cuz we have, we have different people in our market, we have CRMs we have competitors in what I call the ACD or the self-service or interaction management. And we have other people to the side of us that also do things like collaboration or pbx. So inside of kind of collaboration of PBX PBX on one side and on the other side, this idea of the CRM or the customer relationship management, in the middle, there’s the management of the interaction. So the first thing I would say is our first differentiation is, is that we can handle the entire interaction, the digital part, the website part, the Google part, the self-service part, the agent part, the digital part, the voice part, the proactive part, the reactive part.
Paul Jarman (13:32):
So the fact that they can come to one place and get all of that under a single brand on a single platform that works seamlessly together is huge. The second thing is, is that we’ve made it so that it can work for 50 seats, 20 seats or 10,000 seats. And so the ability for us to manage all types of enterprises from the small to the huge. The third thing is, is that it can work across the world. So we’ve made it so that the multinationals and so many different organizations all across the world can have 30, 40, 50 offices or contact centers all over the place. And it all works together. And so, so the first thing I would say is really the breadth, the depth, the international nature. And then when you really dive into each piece, and I could spend an hour or two with you here doing it and I won’t
Paul Jarman (14:35):
And so you start to get to all these pieces, we’ve really created tremendous differentiation in, in innovation there. And then lastly I would say is, you know, our heritage from in contact now nice and the nice companies and the different piece pieces that NICE has had all along, we all of a sudden have this great power in data and the analytics and the machine learning and the AI that comes with that really is setting apart as us, apart as really the smartest platform in the market. And so it’s not just deep and and wide, it’s intelligent and that in intelligence is really a key step to the future of how you successfully do customer experience.
Josh Lupresto (15:16):
Great stuff. I want to, I wanna play on that a little bit of where you talked about the data that you have. I think that’s what’s part of how you’ve been successful is that you’ve been able to innovate and improve and see and hear what the customers are asking, what the sales folks are seeing, right? Firsthand what the trends are. I like to ask this question because when we get brought in, right from an engineering perspective, when we get brought in, generally it’s the customer has this problem or this one thing, or they’ve asked for this, this tool set, and I need to provide that tool set. Can you help me do it? And so that what we find that that journey generally then once we actually talk to the end customers, it doesn’t always look like what, what it looked like initially either they, they needed something totally different or they needed three or four different things because of how they needed it tied together. To your point, they had a lot of different solutions. So I’d love to hear it from your perspective, either anecdotally or just broad-based. You know, is there any trends that you’ve seen where they thought the outcome was this, that we, the customer thought their problem was this and we solved and in the end it actually looked like, you know, this solution that we put in place?
Paul Jarman (16:22):
You bet. So there’s, there’s a lot of answers to that. Sometimes they’re just coming to us saying, I need to save money, or they come to us and say, you know I just want this one thing. And, and really what we find is we dig in many times is what they initially thought was important was only kind of important. And as they kind of get to know what’s the power of a platform or the platform, they start to find additional solutions or they didn’t consider were possible or they start to hit new KPIs. They didn’t know it could be affected by something that they weren’t purchasing or they thought they didn’t quite understand. So I guess examples I would say sometimes we found people who wanted just a digital channel and then they’ve learned that their customers really want six or seven of ’em.
Paul Jarman (17:12):
And so they, they really widen out the digital channels. Other times we found people who thought, wow, I just am gonna schedule like this, but they realize with really good scheduling, they can transform the use of agents. Or I found people who, who thought they wanted this bot for self-service, but when they started to realize that it’s so much more than a bot, it can be proactive, you can do it on the website, you can create things through Google, they found a much more holistic self-service plan. That self-service could be a far more powerful tool than just, hey, there’s this little bot that does a couple of things on the side. And so usually that’s cuz they didn’t even know to ask the right questions as they were coming in to purchase the products. But as we started to get into their situation and we can give them more advice than they’d ask for in the purchasing process, we found a lot of richness in helping them succeed in a lot of ways they didn’t even think of when they started.
Josh Lupresto (18:08):
That’s good. Alright, so pro tips, sales tips. One of my favorite books out there that I read I is called Power Questions. And I, I think what, what that book taught me was, rather than going in with an agenda of what I think the customer needs or what anybody needs, I just, I ask questions, right? I either restate and these are, these are techniques that we always talk about, but really understand, I think you want to talk about this and I think there’s vested interest here in this, this issue or this problem. But is that what’s important to you is that what’s on your roadmap? Is that what’s immediate right now? So your advice for, let’s say partners that are in an adjacent technology, maybe I’m an MSP selling security and I’ve been contemplating going more into this. What’s your advice there or that partner’s talk track or just some of the questions that you’d recommend to get them to get their customers to think of them in that light, but now be able to do this?
Paul Jarman (19:00):
You bet. So, so first of all, I think a couple of questions that I have found, and I I do agree that questions are a key to the process. And, and so a couple things I would say is the first thing is, is don’t be so busy selling that you’re not solving. I continuously ask our sales organizations go solve don’t sell. Because in our world, solving is selling and and to solve, you first of all have to get into the questions and often they’re asking for something that isn’t really the answer. So the question really first is, I know you want this thing, tell me what it’s gonna solve and tell me what KPI you hope it moves when you solve it. And as you get a little deeper into those questions, you start to get a better idea of what it is you can actually solve it with versus what they might even be asking for.
Paul Jarman (19:53):
The second thing I have found in this market is customers might be looking for a product, but they really need, as a partner, they need someone that can hold their hand, stand with them and provide the expertise of, of the market and say, look, come with me and I’ll help you through this journey. And so it’s not just about buying another point solution, but let me help you really go through a journey that’s that’s iterative that gets you to the customer success that you’re hoping to achieve. And, and then I would just say lastly, I think a lot of people buy from people they like and people they trust and people that they think understand them. And so when you can be conversational, you can tell the good with the bad, you can ask great questions and you really become an expert in an industry, they will by far trust you more than if you just come in and say, here’s the features, here’s what I got, here’s what the price is, you’re gonna love it and good luck.
Josh Lupresto (20:54):
I love it. Great nuggets in there. Okay, we’re at the end. As we wrap this up, I would like to, if, if we had a crystal ball here, I’d say please look into your crystal ball and I, I think you’ve done a great job. We talked a lot about innovation of, of forecasting kind of where this thing goes. And you know, when we were recently out as a team to kind of look at the way that, that you view interactions of the future and all these different channels and all these things, it’s cool to see how far out you guys are looking, but I’m, I’m, I’m curious, we can use this broadly. As you look back out maybe let’s call it a year, two years, three years, where do you see the customer experience segment changing? Right? What, what do you see differently or, or do the products change or the customer needs change? Just, you know, any way you wanna take that curious what you think the next couple years look like.
Paul Jarman (21:43):
So, so first of all, the factors are really changing us will be digital, it’ll be self-service, it’ll be people looking for a much more personal experience and then really more than just an experience, a journey frankly. And so what I think is gonna happen is, is is is the industry and the consumer. The consumer first of all is gonna expect a very fast, personable and efficient way of solving problems. And they’re gonna want that in any form of interaction. They like all the way from digital to websites to search engines, to calling to all these different forms. So I think at the end of the day, what will happen is, is the consumer’s gonna demand this multi-channel, multi experience, optional way of solving problems. And then the company’s gonna say, I need to do all that, but I need to stay compliant. I needed to be efficient, I need it to be cost effective.
Paul Jarman (22:42):
And in the mixture of those two is where what we’re seeing is, is that companies will really have to change to make that possible. To get to what that consumer wants in this new world with the cost structure they have to do it in, with the security they have to do it in will be really tough. And so I actually think that in go a couple more years, you’ll see self-service become more popular. You’ll see digital be more popular and you’ll see customers expecting a more personal and seamless journey to solve their problems. And they want the company to feel interconnected and seamless to their experience. And companies are gonna all of a sudden start to say that’s possible. I can do that effectively as long as I use the right insights, machine learning, AI tools that can happen more so than it is happening today. So I don’t think the future changes a lot. I think that’s just speeding up to where it’s going and then the suppliers like us are getting much better at making that possible.
Josh Lupresto (23:44):
Awesome. Good stuff. Okay. That wraps us up. Paul, again, I appreciate you for coming in. Thanks so much for coming in to the studio here. And again, thanks for all the years of the partnership as well. Awesome. All right, everybody that wraps us up for today. I’m your host Josh, Lupresto SVP of sales engineering. We’re covering CX, the interactions of the future. Thank Paul Jarman for coming in so much today. Till next time.
Listen in as we dive in with Sam Nelson, leader for the Telarus CX Practice. We chat about current trends how the customer expectations are changing, what we are seeing in actual deals, and what to watch out for in the next 12-18 months as new technology enters the space. If you stay till the end and hear a discovery call role play!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is the Next Level BizTech podcast. Today I’m joined with the wonderful Sam Nelson, leader of the Contact Center Practice at Telarus. Sam, thanks for joining today.
Sam Nelson (00:30):
Thanks for having me, Josh
Josh Lupresto (00:31):
In studio. So the title of this track is Interactions and Contact Center and, and really what the future that looks like. So we’re gonna go through some good stuff today, but before we jump into that journey, what your role is, the experience, all this good stuff. How did you get here? Have, has this been a linear path for you,
Sam Nelson (00:53):
Yeah, When I was two years old, three years old, my first words were, I wanna sell contact center
Josh Lupresto (01:49):
The important thing here to share is that you and I share the fact that we’re never gonna bump into any ceiling fans. So Absolutely. With you on the height chain as well.
Sam Nelson (01:57):
Absolutely.
Josh Lupresto (01:58):
Sam Nelson (02:18):
Well, what’s interesting is the pandemic did a lot of things including the way that we as consumers like to do business with companies, right? We now expect things to show up on our doorstep, not even tomorrow or two days from now, but the same day right. And we’re even willing to pay more for better experiences and just for the least path of least resistance, I should say. Right? So the technology leading up to that has changed quite a bit with the way people have set up their roadmaps. Now, from a supplier standpoint, it’s leading more toward giving people different options depending on how they prefer to interact, right? Because, you know, like I said, our consumer expectations are so high and we want to reach out to companies the way that we prefer to do so, right? We don’t always want to pick up the phone and call somebody we want to text, right? We want to send an email if we don’t have time, Right? There’s so many different ways. And so what you’re seeing now is a shift from, hey, here’s my physical doorstep to more of a digital doorstep, right? And so to your point, we’re making more progress in the digital interactions realm.
Josh Lupresto (03:29):
So, you know, we, we joke about this, but when my kids wanna use their chore money to buy something online, they get, they get distraught when they realize it’s gonna be three days before it gets here. Right?
Sam Nelson (04:18):
Josh Lupresto (05:00):
Sam Nelson (05:13):
Yeah, there’s a lot of different components that go into this, right? And approach is definitely not linear. It’s definitely multifaceted. In that one, we have to make sure that partners have access to emerging technology, right? And just because something’s not on the magic quad doesn’t mean that it’s not good, right? A lot of these disruptive technologies are changing the way that companies are doing business and changing the way that they’re thinking of growing in the future. And so, you know, emerging technologies and making those available for partners is really key and it’s really, you know, a big responsibility with all the folks involved in this practice. But in addition to that, we need to make sure that we’re keeping our partners up to speed on sort of what the latest trends are, what’s happening when I’m telling you, if you go into the AI space, I mean, we can go into, into the depths of ai to the point at which, you know, we can have you, you know, sitting on the floor in knees to chest rocking back and forth, right? It really is the case, but it’s just really important to make sure that we keep our partner community really informed of what’s most important right now. And that’s a real challenge cuz something new is coming out every single day.
Josh Lupresto (06:23):
No, it’s true. And we have to pay attention to, is it the next greatest thing right? That people need to revolutionize their business? Or is this just some really good marketing?
Sam Nelson (06:30):
Exactly. Exactly. And it’s our job to make sure that they’ve also got the model in place that best supports our partner community, right? Because of course, you know, great partner experiences ultimately lead to really great customer experiences, and we have to make sure that they all are treated with a priority at that
Josh Lupresto (06:46):
Level. So if I’m a partner, let’s say I’m a partner that’s tuning into this. Maybe I’ve sold cloud, I’ve sold network, SD wan, whatever mm-hmm.
Sam Nelson (07:01):
Yeah, definitely. Well, the first thing to do is embrace this concept of getting comfortable with being really uncomfortable. And that’s something that regardless of practice that you’re involved in, if you’re looking to get into something new you have to get really uncomfortable. And that first step is actually 50% of the way there. And I’ve been in that situation, and so, you know, when you think of, Oh, I need to build a a contact center or even a CX practice you have to start somewhere. Don’t try to boil the ocean, as they say, right? Or if you think of like a sand dune, focus on a grain of that sand, right? And what you can focus on and what you’re really gonna go after. You know, pick maybe a few, you know, folks you want to go into the race with and go from there.
Sam Nelson (07:49):
But more importantly if you don’t know where to start, which is typically where a lot of partners are right now, come to us and we will help you start where you’re at today. I think that’s the biggest challenge in trying to educate an entire partner community on a, on a new practice, is that they really just don’t know where to start. Because there are so many things you could start with. They’re like, I have people who come to me saying, Sam, let’s talk ai, let’s talk workforce management. You know, employee gamification experience, right? And they really don’t know where to start. You know, let’s get back to the basics. And if you know that, great, maybe we talk about an ancillary product like AI or what have you, right? So come to us, we can help you. And just to add in, you know, a big differentiation for us is we’ve got by far the biggest technical team out there, right? I mean, we’ve got, you know, solution architects, we’ve got sales engineers you know, one of our guys literally wrote code for an existing product out there, right? We’ve got the tools that you guys need, so don’t be afraid. And we’ll help help you get started.
Josh Lupresto (08:51):
Love it. We, we gotta give JLo some love for sure. Yeah,
Sam Nelson (09:17):
Yeah. Let me paint the picture because a few years ago, pre pandemic, I would say that unified communications and contact center were treated pretty separately, right? And so what we’re seeing now is that uc and CC or contact center are blending together. Because what we’re witnessing now is that companies are realizing their internal employees all, for the most part, play a CX related role, right? And it doesn’t matter if they’re communicating with the customer directly, but if the end result ends up in front of a customer, even if it’s a billing inquiry or something like that that person’s in a customer experience related role. And so that’s why you’re seeing these two coming together. The conversation of, hey, you know, is you see just for internal employees, is CC just for a contact center? That’s absolutely not the case. And so, you know, many suppliers out there will kind of muddy the waters but there’s a reason for that. It’s because there’s so much gray area in that entire environment. So that’s why, you know, even more importantly, to lean in on us to kind of help figure out what goes where.
Josh Lupresto (10:28):
Let’s, let’s dive into that one a little bit. Let’s talk about you know, I like to hear what you think partners that are out there that are successful, that have cracked into this. You brought up a couple things, right? You brought up gamification, you brought up workforce management. We’re talking ai, you know, rpa, all these things. Mm-Hmm.
Sam Nelson (10:58):
Yeah, that’s a really great question. And there are really two types of customers out there when you look at the CX world. One is you have those customers who are literally looking to rip and replace what they have. They’re like, This stuff is old. We want something new. Help us with this entire project. However, those customers are very rare, right? Especially post pandemic. It’s hard to keep even staff, right? So they’re looking for ways to actually optimize what they currently have. So that’s a second kind of customer where, you know, you have to be able to have the discussion around, Hey, you wanna keep what you have, and that’s great, but let’s talk about how you can optimize some of the, you know, processes that you have going on in that unit. And so that’s why then you have the ancillary products that will sit on top of whatever they’re using to help optimize what they have and make the most of what they have currently.
Josh Lupresto (11:50):
So, I mean, do, do you find that, we were talking about modernization this morning with Koby, we were talking about the cloud practice. Do you find that the, the CX side of the house, those customers, do they know where they need to go from a modernization perspective? Do they have their head wrapped around it and they’re just coming to us going, Do we have somebody that can do a workforce management tool? Like what maybe what percentage of that, or what, what portion of that do you feel that they know what they want versus we have to help them transform
Sam Nelson (12:17):
Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (13:12):
Yeah. So, I mean, a good example, right? I need, I need my agents more intelligent. Well, okay, I need ai. Well, let’s talk about what you need. Maybe you need some recording over the top to listen for that. Listen for tone, listen for sentiment, and make a, make a recommendation. Make a a not not sure agent advised on what to do. And I think we see that a lot as well.
Sam Nelson (13:33):
Right? Right. Well, and when people talk about, Hey, I need to, to you know, train my agents to be better. Okay, well, let’s talk about what mechanisms you have in place for that. Do you have coaches? What does the follow up look like? Sometimes it’s not even technology related, right? Sometimes it’s just a simple workflow process that needs to be filled. Now technology can certainly help with that, right? But sometimes it’s, it’s literally just a business practice that we have to talk to them about. And then technology can augment that.
Josh Lupresto (14:00):
Fair. alright, let’s get into the weeds on an example. I, I love to go into this because like you mentioned, sometimes what we get pulled into and say, I need this thing, or the customer says they need this thing, it doesn’t always end up that way either because a business outcome is different or just it, it didn’t do what they thought it needed to do. Mm-Hmm.
Sam Nelson (14:33):
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that’s a loaded one. Because there are so many different, different ways we could approach this. I’ve definitely had experiences like that where, you know, we’ve helped sell the core, but we’ve also helped sell an ancillary. So let me go into example of an ancillary solution because that’s where the majority of customers are today. I’ll use the basic example of, hey, we need artificial intelligence and I wanna go with these chat bots. Okay? So I actually went with the partners to the customer and they said yeah, we want these chat bots and here’s why. Come to find out that they actually wanted self-service, but it’s because their agents weren’t up to par and they wanted like kind of a nesting period to be able to train them up, ease off the chat bot, but then also filter different interactions.
Sam Nelson (15:23):
And it was, they thought maybe chatbot was going to be the ultimate solution, right? And granted it was part of the solution. But when we, we went in, we kind of debunked the different players in the AI space and where they play looking beyond just the conversational AI quadrant, right? Now of course, you know, I went in, but I also brought Jason Lowe in as well with the partner. And we were able to talk to it from a business process standpoint, but also from a technical standpoint. Cuz a lot of these guys are really hesitant to put you know, put new technology into a stack if it’s going to disrupt everything else. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (16:20):
Good point. Yeah. And, and I have to underscore right, what you mentioned earlier, I think we have the deepest team out there in whether we’re giving you new things, new ideas that you didn’t have before, and you’re ready to go rock with those on your own. Great. Or if we’re giving things that you’re getting excited and equally scared about mm-hmm.
Sam Nelson (16:42):
Success for sure. For sure.
Josh Lupresto (16:45):
All right. Before we get to the end, second to last here I wanna look in the future, right? So, so get out your crystal ball. My kids now hit me with the magic eight ball
Sam Nelson (17:26):
Sure. in the CX world it is very clear that companies are using CX or customer experience as a basis of differentiation. That much is absolutely clear. And so as a result, what we’re going to see over the next, even within the next, I would say, you know, nine to to 18 months or so is that you’re going to see a massive acceleration in the world of automation as well as artificial intelligence. And when I talk about automation, I’m talking more so around RPA or robotic process automation where a robot can literally you know, complete specific tasks for an agent, reducing the number of times that they have to go into different systems and what have you, Right? For quicker first call resolution. But you know, automation, artificial intelligence for sure. To give you a sneak peek of that, I actually spoke to someone of a supplier who actually said, Yeah we have the ability to change someone’s accent in real time while they’re speaking to a customer, Right?
Sam Nelson (18:37):
Because we love talking to locals and you can tell Yeah. Like when, when someone’s not from around here, you know, like me, where I’m like, Ah, no rain, I can’t do it, you know, I’m not from here. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so yeah, it’s, it’s pretty amazing what technology is. So really at the end of the day, it’s, it’s automation, it’s artificial intelligence. And, you know, on top of that, it’s how to keep employees, how to keep them, because being an agent is really, really difficult. Working at a contact center is really difficult. I’ve done it in the past, so I can, I can tell from experience,
Josh Lupresto (19:07):
Yes. Dial up msn tech support. So yeah, I, anything that would’ve made my life easier, I would’ve been all in. There
Sam Nelson (19:16):
You go.
Josh Lupresto (19:17):
All right. Let’s maybe wrap this up with a little bit of role play. Okay. I wanna step back. I wanna be the customer. Maybe I’ll be the chief business officer. I’ll be the, you know, VP of Context center, whatever. And I want you to come in and maybe just be that, that right hand of the partner, the Telarus resource, the architect, whatever, the advanced solutions, all of the above mm-hmm.
Sam Nelson (19:54):
Okay. Can you be like, be something relevant, like a, like a chief marketing officer or something? All right. I say that because they have the biggest budget, by the way.
Josh Lupresto (20:01):
I’m, I’m Bob, the chief marketing Officer. Thanks for coming to the meeting. I’m
Sam Nelson (20:08):
No, no, thank you, Bob. Oh,
Josh Lupresto (20:09):
Oh, wow. Okay. Thank you. Wait, I said thank you. Oh, man. Okay. I’m nervous. Wait,
Sam Nelson (20:15):
No, I already made him nervous.
Josh Lupresto (20:17):
Oh, this is great. Listen, I, I’ve been told I’m, I’m, you can come in and help us. We’ve got some issues going on in our contact center. We’ve got some legacy technology, but I mean, it’s working right now. So I I I’ve been told that, you know, you’re on the latest and greatest trends of technology. I don’t exactly know where we need to go with this, but the problem that we have is that we’re just not getting real time decisions. We’re really, we’re reviewing some of the data, some of the analytics, and we’re not able to really coach our people and improve them at all. So what do you, you know, where do we start in this conversation? What do you recommend? What can we do from here?
Sam Nelson (20:51):
Yeah, Most definitely. Well, first, Bob, thanks for taking this meeting. I really appreciate the time. And I appreciate you sharing all that detail. You typically, we have clients who, who have an idea of where they want to go, but it sounds like you actually have experience with what some of the issues are going on in your contact center which is impressive. Now, to that point, before we dive into, you know, real time discussion and kind of getting into the weeds there, talk to me about your top initiatives for the year when it comes to customer experience or, or whatever you have the contact center doing. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (21:25):
So we, you know, part of it is we wanna keep a high NBS score. I think our brand is everything. Mm-Hmm.
Sam Nelson (22:08):
Yeah, and that’s a great question. It’s really going to depend on sort of the outcomes you’re looking for, right? And when you talk about, you know, needing to add technology and, and you know, what you’re looking to accomplish, but you’ve got things like high turnover, you need real time assistance, it sounds like. Right? These are all, these are all you know, capabilities that several of our customers are looking for today. Because at the end of the day, you know, based on the fact that you’re, you know, head of marketing what a lot of other kind of marketing folks I’ve spoken to are really interested in things like, Hey, how can I, you know, make sure that my brand and my CX is literally our differentiator, right? How are you leveraging customer experience as a competitive advantage and things like real time and, you know, all these other capabilities will definitely contribute to that. And there are options. It doesn’t have to be a lifter shift, it doesn’t have to be a simple Bolton to your technology that you have today. But at the end of the day, it’s a really big project that technology can absolutely help solve for. Does that make sense?
Josh Lupresto (23:10):
It does. And that’s where we cut it, and that’s the aha moment. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a glimpse into how we have some of these conversations, and that’s, that’s really where we’re here to help. So appreciate you playing along with the role play stuff there.
Sam Nelson (23:22):
Awesome. No, a hundred percent. And I’m gonna add Josh. Yeah. That, you know, guys, you gotta know when to pivot, right? Everybody knows that pivot, right?
Josh Lupresto (23:53):
Yeah, great point. I mean, and throughout that you’ve got, you’ve got folks that have contributed to contact center code. You’ve got folks that have sold contact center and ancillary products, engineered all of the above. So, so yeah, tout that great point, right? Know when to say, Hey, are you o put the question back on them? Are you okay if I bring them into this conversation to help you? They’re part of my team.
Sam Nelson (24:14):
Yep. Absolutely.
Josh Lupresto (24:14):
Awesome. Fun stuff. All right, Sam, that that wraps us up. I appreciate you coming in, bearing in with our, our fresh snowflakes this year, and
Sam Nelson (24:24):
Delightful surprise
Josh Lupresto (24:25):
To do this with us. Thanks so much for coming on.
Sam Nelson (24:27):
Thanks.
Josh Lupresto (24:28):
All right, everybody, that wraps us up for this week. I am your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, and this is the next Level BizTech podcast. Till next time.
https://youtu.be/YC1DwuCkaGA Listen in today as we talk with our partner, Sean Weisenburger of JIL Communications. Sean has been immersed in Security for 20+ years, originally as an MSP, and also as a seller. His angle of viewing security as a risk is very complimentary to how he helps customers leverage the power and economies of scale when it’s time to add Security Operations. Find out for Sean how it all started with the computer store next door!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I’m here wrapping up the security track. You know, we were on, if you, if you tuned in a couple weeks ago, we started this with Jeff Hathcote, and we got his purview, Telarus solution architect, and then we went and we talked to Ben Bowman of Masergy talked about all the things that, the great things that Masergy’s doing with SOC and, and SEM and MDR and all of that. Now we’re on with Sean Weisenburger of JIL Communications, the Man of the Hour. Sean, thanks for coming on, man.
Sean Weisenburger (00:42):
Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Josh.
Josh Lupresto (00:45):
Sean, I’d like to kick these off with any unique background or any blackmail I can use against you later,
Sean Weisenburger (00:59):
I’m going to contribute this to my father, actually, because he used to work for a bank doing the ATM network, right? Mm-Hmm. And he, and this was like mid eighties, late eighties, right? And he always had the coolest toys to bring home. I mean, these things were suitcases, right? Of these, these computers and everything. And we would sit there and just bang on ’em and, and kind of, you know, kick it around. And before I know it, I had a a Commodore 64, a Tandy T 100, all of the evolution of those and everything. And I can remember from my eighth, my eighth grade, like dissertation final project, right? We, we were writing programming, we were writing programming, basic, right? No big deal, you know, 10 print, go-to 10, you know, that kind of stuff, right? Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (01:56):
Everything. I just hit play, man. And the, and the, the whole class was amazed of what we were doing. So it was, it was kind of cool. So that kind of spun my propeller head right there. You know, you get a little older, you kind of get away from it. You’re 16, you know what happens, you know when, when that happens, right? So there’s stories in there, we won’t go for it. Yeah. Yeah. But, but but really after I was working, you know, I started as a paperboy, went to a lumber yard, was working through there. Kind of got my business knowledge from just that retail sales acumen. Next door there was a a computer shop next door, right? And one of the, with the sales managers would go over there and, and actually on the side build clones, right? Clone computers all day long.
Sean Weisenburger (02:45):
And that just fascinated me. This was 94 or five, like right when Windows 95 was coming out. So, yeah. You know, we were all on dos. And this 95 was like, oh my gosh, gooey, gooey, gooey, right? Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (03:47):
Some, some real smoking bandwidth at that time, right?
Sean Weisenburger (04:42):
Popped off from there to another local integrator who was standing up an MSP, an MSSP. They didn’t even know that word exist back then. Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (05:44):
Bit bit, what’s his name, bit whatever. And he’s at Proofpoint now, so he’s been in security too. Went back to the telecom side. So really got deep into the telecom side cuz I really knew Route switch pretty, pretty well. And that’s perspective. And, and lo and behold, we were standing up VO VoIP networks back in oh 2, 0 3. Ooh. Right there. Yeah. Like, it was, it was painful. Very painful. So again, my tech, my my telecom teeth had been, you know, a couple years there, got acquired by actually it went bankrupt.
Sean Weisenburger (06:42):
And kind of got fed up with, with the Big W no offense. I mean, the great company just, just wanted something different, right. To cut it up. So I went to a Telarus competitor MicroCorp, who is now AppSmart as their first sales engineer. And that’s right when SDWAN was really getting hot, right? That was kind of the buzz term. So I was tasked to go out and figure out SDWAN for them and all that. So kind of cut my teeth on that and had a lot of travel that involved with that. I’m sure you can relate with that. Kids were young and I was like, dude, this kind of, you know, I wanna be at my kid’s basketball game, so. Right. one of my good partners actually lended a handoff Charlie Booth, and he brought me on j i l communications. I’ve known him for 20 years, sold a lot of his book and his business and everything over the past, all the companies I’ve been, been through. But yeah, so I’ve been kind of on the provider, the, the master and the partner side. So I’m very unique in that, that realm. So that’s kind of my technology journey per se. Love it.
Josh Lupresto (07:52):
Love it. And and I love how it starts with a computer store next door.
Sean Weisenburger (07:56):
Yeah, totally. I mean, that’s the way it was. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (07:59):
That’s awesome. Very cool. Great, great story. So thank you. Let’s, let’s start a little bit about a little bit more about G I l. For anybody who’s not familiar mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (08:10):
Traditional telecom agency back in the 1999 is when it was started that since I have been brought on as a sales engineer, engineer, whatever, we have really pivoted towards the more complex offerings, right? That being the cybersecurity, being the contact center, being those high, high dollar, high touch, highly complex services that you really have to kind of understand at, at not only a business level, but somewhat of a technical level. Yeah. To navigate a lot of the noise that we all hear as people and get blasted with all these companies. So yeah, that’s, that’s kind of what we do. So we, we take the complex and make it uncomplex, right? And we partner with our customers. We we’re just not a sell it and leave. We’re more of a white glove relationship. We want to keep you as you know, forever. We’ve realized that the direct sales force, no knock on the direct sales force out there, but they tend to come and go. Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (09:33):
Good. let’s, let’s talk about, I, I think you kind of mentioned it, but, but tell me, you know, I wanna, I want to, I want to start kind of polar, you know, one end and then mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (10:12):
So think about, you know, a hundred clients right out there and having to log to a hundred clients to update firmware software change of configuration, because they ask, but that’s just not, that’s not you know, it’s not, it’s not what of what, or my trying to think. It’s not just, it’s hard. It’s feasible. Yeah. It’s not feasible. It’s not, it’s not streamlined either. Right? It’s a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of things like that. So the company I, I, I worked for fortress Network Security. They were a pretty big sonic Wall partner. And Sonic Wall actually brought out their global management system that we deployed in, in more of, not just so you could sell that to an enterprise, but we were focused on kind of the small medium business mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (11:10):
I mean, applying the patches, the updates, the, you know, all of that stuff. All the love, care and feeding that go along with that security. Because remember back then this was oh two, it was all about hardware, right? Mm-Hmm.
Josh Lupresto (11:52):
You had me at MRR.
Sean Weisenburger (11:54):
Josh Lupresto (11:55):
Sean Weisenburger (11:58):
It was actually, so it was a hundred percent year over year growth. I was only there for three years granted. And that turned into like 10 million in revenue, annual revenue for a, for a, for a small business. A local small business. That’s,
Josh Lupresto (12:12):
That’s huge. Pretty
Sean Weisenburger (12:13):
Good. Pretty
Josh Lupresto (12:13):
Good. That’s kudos to you.
Sean Weisenburger (12:14):
Absolutely.
Josh Lupresto (12:17):
All right. So let’s talk about, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, partners that, that haven’t sold some of these advanced services mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (12:45):
So the way we, we approach everything is a kind of a security first mentality. And here’s the reason why. Every piece of what Telarus offers, what technology offers, is surrounded by security. I don’t care if it’s connectivity, your UCaaS phone system, your any of the other, you know, the contact center, the cloud infrastructure services, all of that stuff. When you start with that security mindset, that opens up the conversation. Cuz they kind of, they gotta tell you everything. Yeah. They kind of do. If they really wanna be honest and, and open with, with that. Now that being said, that also brings in the cfo right? Cuz the CFO has invested interest cuz he’s getting these cybersecurity questionnaires, right? They gotta fill ’em out and put their, their name, CFO CIO, they have to put their name on the line on that. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s really gotten gotten us to partner deeper and wider with every customer. So I wanna say, you know, our, we don’t grow as a company 20, 40, 50% a year. We, we have that steady five to 8% growth, right? But that a lot of that growth is going back into these customers figuring out a problem and, and going deeper and wider with all these product sets we have now available in the channel. It’s, it’s, it’s incredible. The opportunity is limitless.
Josh Lupresto (14:21):
So, yeah. Yeah. You bring up a good point. There’s a, there’s a financial, like I stole this from a financial guy, but second money is easier than first money, right? Absolutely. Not having to go, not having to go cold call, not having to go, you know, door knock, all that good stuff. And, and being able to go back and do that and, and probe, and you’re right. I think one of the things that we focus on is trying to figure out how to maximize uplift and tiber in an account with our partners for for the customers. And I think that’s, to your point, depends on where you start that, right? Because either A, they’re gonna think of you as only that, or B, they’re gonna realize, whoa, if, if he knows this mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (15:08):
And that’s where you get to become a trusted advisor right there. You know, they’re making the phone call to you first because granted, my resources are free, right? I just want to figure out your problem and your pain and apply solution, right? So they’re not calling the, the shop down the street that’s gonna sell ’em some Cisco stack, right? Cuz that’s all they do. So I, I think this evolution of var it consultant, trusted advisor is really getting the lines bl blurred, which I like, cuz I kind of know all, all of the, the, the different pieces of it. Yeah. But it’s very, very very open as far as what we can do on this side of the house. Absolutely.
Josh Lupresto (15:55):
Yeah. Good point. And it is a big you know my next question is gonna be about challenges in these conversations, but I mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (16:40):
You, you are correct. So what are some of the challenges that we have talking about what we do and how we do and everything is that buyer that is used to that oem conversation. I wanna buy product. It’s not about product anymore. All these products are, are stellar and, and pretty good at what they do. It’s, it’s the people and the companies behind that product that, that deploy. I can’t tell you how many companies we have met where they bought a, a stack of, of whatever, you know, whether it be a SEM that sat on the shelf for eight months cuz they couldn’t deploy it. Whether it be, you know, some EDR piece of it that they just couldn’t, it didn’t work in their environment cuz they didn’t do the right pre, you know, kind of install and everything on their applications.
Sean Weisenburger (17:33):
Oh, they forgot about their cloud resources, right? Oh my gosh. Wait, you mean it doesn’t work up there in the cloud? Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (18:11):
Gold golden point. I, I love the risk. Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (19:28):
So number one you know, a lot of these, a lot of this insurance and and state regulated policies are mandating that you have a 24 by seven SOC SEM, right? And, and when you put numbers to having to do that in a company that takes six to eight salaries, employees with benefits and everything, I mean, the managed service completely knocked that conversation outta the ballpark, right? So, and I’m not gonna say that it’s a hundred percent managed service everywhere, right? But that piece of it, and as you said, co-management or at least have some visibility into that SEM SOC so they can react and have a playbook there to, to help them react. That’s, that’s where we see the advantageous benefit. Once you land that product, product that service into an environment, the conversation expands from there. What else can you do for me?
Sean Weisenburger (20:31):
What else can I take off your plate? Because I don’t have SI dedicated cyber security engineers. I’ve got, you know, a team of six, two of ’em are developers, a co couple of ’em are route switch guys, some of ’em are break fix and I don’t, don’t have 24 by seven coverage. So Yeah. That, that is exactly I think where this landscape’s heading especially with, with, oh my gosh, we’ve had so many people jump from company to company to company for 20 grand here, 30 grand here, et cetera. And it’s in, I’ll, I’ll give you an example. Right now we have a company that is looking to deploy a SEM pretty large company, don’t have a SEM yet. But looking to deploy a SEM. They have two engineers that recommended a, a workload, a, a SEM that is one of the leading SEMs.
Sean Weisenburger (21:26):
But it takes a team of engineers to deploy it, care and feed it and everything. And we are sitting back waiting for the phone call going, yeah, you failed. I get it. We’ll help you. We’ll prop you up. We’ll get these guys in there that can manage it the right way. And, and oh, by the way, you know, one of those guys have already left the company. So, so they’re seeing the light, unfortunately, sometimes kind of like I was told when I was younger, you gotta hit the, you gotta hit the brick wall first, right? Yeah. Before going Oh,
Josh Lupresto (22:06):
No, yeah. You bring up a great point. And I think when we started down, I mean from a Telarus perspective, when we started pushing security heavily and helping partners kind of go down that road trying to get more products into the market it it, early on it, it was the customers saying, I’m not a target. I’m not a target, I’m not a target, you know, I’m small, I’m small, you know. And, and thankfully now I think shouldn’t say thankfully, but because of some of the breaches that have happened, a people have realized anybody’s a target. But, but more importantly, I think the insurance companies and things like that are really forcing people to, to look at this and to do things. Even if you do the basics, even if you do the minimum, the minimum is so much better than most people have done.
Josh Lupresto (22:48):
Oh, and, and, and I think the, the other thing that I want to encourage people on, I think we don’t, whenever we bring this up, we have good conversations around it, but I don’t think we talk about it enough as the whole imposter syndrome idea. Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (23:52):
So never again, don’t be shy. I agree. Do not be shy by asking some of these questions that, that, that are pretty basic. Cuz you can’t assume that everybody, you are Exactly right, Josh, that’s, that’s head on. Cause the, the first time you assume, you know what happens there. Yeah. You know,
Josh Lupresto (24:21):
Yeah. but if we don’t ask, we know somebody else.
Sean Weisenburger (24:24):
That’s correct. You got it. Absolutely.
Josh Lupresto (24:27):
Let’s, let’s walk through maybe is there any verticals that you’ve focused on from a security? I mean, we’re, we’re talking about SOC here, right? As the key focus mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (24:51):
Yes. Right now manufacturing, we’re Midwest manufacturing too huge. Right? They’re, they’re still trying to play catch up from the eighties, to be honest with you. Yeah. They really are. And they’ve got pretty sophisticated systems inside their plant, right. That are all now becoming iot aware. They want the analytics off of it. How do you protect, you know, so they, they’re getting more sophisticated, but they’re not, you know, dedicating, A lot of these companies don’t have CIOs, they don’t have CTOs. Right. They have a glorified IT guy. Right. So that’s where I see a lot of home runs being hit right now is, is in that space. The other, the other space I will say is healthcare. Healthcare is getting bombarded. And I don’t mean, you know, healthcare from a a, a hospital perspective, but a pretty large radiologist, right? Or an orthopedic surgeon that is, has a huge practice, right? Those guys are targets all day long and they don’t have the resources cuz they’re outsourcing stuff already for that. So those, those two verticals are pretty, pretty deep, pretty good conversations with the, with the, the cybersecurity discussion.
Josh Lupresto (26:12):
Good. Let’s, let’s go into a detailed example as we kind of get towards the the, the back half of this podcast. I, I wanna mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (26:53):
So yeah, I’ll just take one of these manufacturing examples that I have. In our, in our, in our, in our book of business, they, they hired a new cio, first CIO of this company cuz they were growing and, and actually Covid actually propelled their growth for a lot of instances. It’s packaging company, right? Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (28:01):
And their partner’s partner, right? So when you have a company that’s doing business with one of the big blue chip, big, big, big, like I just mentioned their name earlier, Amazon yeah. They, they kinda, you don’t want to be the guy left holding the stick going we got breached, by the way, we gotta tell Amazon, right? So it, it goes down to the reputation piece of it. The legal liability the insurance, all of it, right? So, funny, funny this, and this is how, I’ll tell you how we got engaged with this customer. They bought a stack from another MSP
Josh Lupresto (28:48):
Oh,
Sean Weisenburger (28:49):
Josh Lupresto (28:59):
That’ll go well.
Sean Weisenburger (29:00):
So yeah, no, we, and we were pitching this company for the last six to nine months, right? Trying to get in. So they, they didn’t choose our solution, they chose somebody else’s. Well, one of our guys got, got the phone call like at nine o’clock at night going, Hey, I need some help. I don’t know where to go. My tech company says, I, I, I just don’t have anybody to do anything. So, lo and behold, we had one of our vendors in their systems within a couple hours mitigating the risk, trying to do the forensics on all of what happened and making sure everything was, was, was kind of good. So that actually that incident changed that company’s entire mindset on security. And now it’s a security first approach within their company as a culture, right? And, and you know, I, it’s like the old backup.
Sean Weisenburger (29:50):
It’s not if it’s, when it it’s gonna happen, guys, it’s gonna happen. And as many layers as we put in place, it, it’s good to have those layers, but it, it’s the people, the processes and the business outcomes that really make a full solution, right? You can’t just have the latest and greatest shiny object and expect it to work, right? You’ve gotta have this shiny object that also takes care of this with the people and the culture inside. So yeah, it’s, it’s a full, it’s a full court press from a security perspective. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (30:27):
Love it. Good example. And I think if you’re the one fielding that call at their absolute worst right, you, you form a trust, I, you know, trust, trust to me and, and relationships are really built down in the trenches. And so how, you know, it’s not, it’s not necessarily what you do sometimes, right? Cause we make mistakes, but it’s about how you respond and how you react and how you grow from those. So obviously your relationship’s defined as how you react in that situation and how resourceful you are. And so, yeah. You’re, you’re the next call on everything else, right? Because you, you can present value, you can present value in a panic. You can, you could have easily said, mm, eh, not gonna answer that call nine o’clock, right? But that’s our brand, that’s what we do. And this is all built on our relationships.
Sean Weisenburger (31:10):
100%. 100%. And that’s why, you know, this isn’t a job to me. It’s my lifestyle. It really is. I’m that passionate about it. I’m, I’m really passionate about this, this trusted advisor role I’m in. So these guys lean on me and, you know, I ask favors from them too. So it’s, it’s what I do. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (31:34):
All right. Final thoughts here. I, I would love to hear, you know, we talked about it a little with the idea of imposter syndrome, not being afraid to ask the questions. Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (32:01):
I’m gonna tell you what, I’m gonna tell you this start small. So I’m gonna, I’ll, I’ll give a props out cuz I was looking for a solution for a small real estate agency here locally. They’re not gonna go out and buy a SEM, they’re not gonna go out and buy this big, you know, $10,000 a month product. But you have a, you have a provider Transmosis right in your portfolio that fits that bill perfectly and kind of offers a very Simple full stack security EDR, xdr, whatever you wanna call it, with liability insurance and everything else included in a package that’s really easy to digest for these, these small business customers. Start there, start there, cut your teeth right? Get to know some of the verbiage and some of the vernacular and, and and buzzwords and out and things out there, and then build upon that.
Sean Weisenburger (33:00):
I, I think that’s, that’s a good, you know, it’s hard cuz I’m an engineer. We have large companies that will never do managed services, but we can still supplement some other things, their tools and, and all that, that mid-market is exactly where we focus, which is huge. But again, yeah, start small, build build your confidence in that arena. And I’m, I’m actually I I kind of came prepared. I don’t know if we’re gonna be on video or not, but I have a book here called the Cyber Defense Matrix. Ooh. It’s a very, very good book and kind of lays out what the CIO is thinking and where they’re going as far as a plan. And it maps, it maps technologies to business problems inside the organization and who’s responsible for that. So it’s a really good, it’s a really good book. I don’t wanna say it’s, it’s, you know, like Cyber Defense for Dummies goes a little more in depth, but it is actually a very good business slash technology platform that I’ve read. And it’s really good. It’s really good. So read the, I mean, just consume that information, right? Consume is what I do. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (34:14):
Love it. Love a good book plug, especially relates to our world and, and this space cuz it’s so unique, I think what we’re doing out there. So appreciate that. That’s a, looks like a good one. All right. Final thoughts then as we wrap this up, you know, your, your opinion, you’ve seen a lot of change in this space. You’ve seen change in the channel, you’ve seen change with security and OEMs mm-hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (34:51):
I think there’s gonna be a lot of consolidation, kind of like what the UCaaS industry has felt right there is, there’s, I swear there’s probably 3000 different cybersecurity companies out there right now. And I think there’s gonna be some consolidation in that arena, especially with the private equity money out there that can take these companies and put ’em together and make something better. That’s, that’s kind of where I see this cybersecurity piece of it. But also, I’m honest opinion that not every workload’s gonna go cloud. So we’re gonna have this hybrid stack, right? Some on-prem, some in the cloud, some in multiple clouds, some in private clouds, right? And how do you defend that attack surface, right? You’ve gotta have your eye, somebody’s gotta gotta have their eyes on the ball, right? And, and typically the customers only have a piece of that, right?
Sean Weisenburger (35:42):
So you can still use the vantage services and things to help augment what they’re doing in their effort. So don’t ever be shy about offering, even though they have maybe a SOC of 10 people or whatever. Perfect example right now is we have a customer that it’s a, it’s a, it’s a healthcare customer and they’ve got their full stack, they’ve got a stock going on. It’s, it’s a hospital change. It’s, it’s huge, right? But their problem is they can’t get projects completed because of the staff shortage. Mm-Hmm. So, you know, you’ve got resolve tech in your, in your portfolio that can place individuals, right? Very profitable. I’m not, I don’t wanna call it head hunting, but it’s, it’s high level engineering placement that, that us as trust advisors can make some money. Or even augment pro, don’t be scared of professional services either. Those engagements. Cause typically those lead to the managed services eventually. Right? so yeah, that, that’s where I see a lot of this going. A lot of, at least where companies like ours are, are, are really hitting home runs out there. But even we’ll take the base hits, you know, we’ll take the doubles all day long. So Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (37:00):
Great point. Great point too. We, we’ve seen that start off with a lot of partners in security. It starts off, we all, we all want the predictable r on a lifetime contract that grows at 30% a year and all that good stuff. Mm-Hmm.
Sean Weisenburger (37:44):
Thanks Josh. I appreciate having you. Thanks.
Josh Lupresto (37:48):
All right, everybody that wraps us up. Sean Weisenburger, JIL Communications. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Listen in as Ben Bohman, Director of Solution Engineering Comcast Masergy talks about the value a customer gets from their Security Operations Center, with everything from endpoint detection to threat hunting and remediation. The price to value in this offering is unparalleled!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering here at t Telarus. Today we are on talking Security, but we’re talking with Ben Bowman, the man with the most well manicured beard in the channel. He’s also the director of Solution Engineering for Comcast and Masergy on the indirect channel. Ben, welcome on my man.
Ben Bohman (00:38):
Hey, thanks Josh. Thanks for having me.
Josh Lupresto (00:41):
So today the track is why should I not run a security operations center on my own, obviously from the customer perspective. So Ben, before we kind of get into a little bit of the why and your product sets and some, some deals and things like that, I wanna hear your story. Uh, talk to me about your personal background, how you got into this world. Is it a linear path and you always wanted to be this, or did you have some crazy jobs along the way?
Ben Bohman (01:08):
Yeah, I’d say this definitely wasn’t linear, and even working in technology was kind of a nod. Like if I go back to like my days in high school and what I was focused on, it definitely nothing in technology and fast. In fact, when I got my first technology job, I had never even own a computer at that point. But anyhow, I was reading a newspaper at a Denny’s, I was working as a waiter at Denny’s when I was 18 years old. And it was back when the MCSE were getting very popular, right? Mm-hmm.
Ben Bohman (01:58):
He was an IT director for an international printing company, uh, out in Utah. And he hired me on just part-time to gimme a little bit of experience. And that just kind of took off from there. He actually quit one year later. I started running the computer department after like one year of total computer experience.
Josh Lupresto (03:02):
So, uh, what I heard from that is that next time we get together, we’re going to Denny’s,
Ben Bohman (03:06):
We’re going
Josh Lupresto (03:07):
Where? To Denny’s?
Ben Bohman (03:08):
Yes. Denny’s,
Josh Lupresto (03:38):
People. A hundred percent. We talk about it, uh, for se we talk about do you want Big S little e or little s Big E Yeah. And I think the, the idea of Big E is gone. Uh, it’s the big s that certainly prevails
Ben Bohman (03:51):
A Absolutely. And, and we’ll talk about more, I mean a little bit more about how companies look at, especially, I know we’re talking about SOC today and everything, but how companies look at that and, and that’s why that, you know, that the Big S is so, is so important.
Josh Lupresto (04:05):
Agree. So let’s talk about, uh, your current role. Uh, you know, really your current role. Then talk to me about the whole Masergy Comcast thing.
Ben Bohman (04:15):
Yeah, so my current role is the director of solution engineering, like you said, for the indirect channel. So my role and my team’s role is a dedicated engineering resource for the channel. We just talked about that soft skill, right? That engineering skill as far as being able to tell a message and, and talk to a community that of sellers that don’t really understand the weeds or get into the weeds of technology, right? And that’s what my team does, is we go out and we talk about the technology, but we more talk about how are you leveraging the technology, how do you speak about the solutions that we offer, and use that to open doors. So we’re having technical sales training almost with the, with the partner community, just helping them again, understand how to open the door. And I think when you’re talking to the partners, the most difficult thing isn’t really having the conversation with the customer. Cuz once you’re doing that, you’ve brought in you, right? You’ve brought in your engineers, you’ve brought in the vendors, engineers, and the experts. The most difficult thing in sales is actually opening the door and having that conversation. And so when you can tie that technology into something that’s relevant to the partner community, it, it just really, it, it really means a lot to, and it resonates. They’re very appreciative.
Josh Lupresto (05:23):
So, so talk then about, uh, I love the approach. I agree. I think you do a phenomenal job at that approach. Uh, and, and we really love the, you know, how how much we can lean on you, uh, and it helps us, it makes our job easier. And so I, you know, there’s a, there’s this convergence with the Comcast Masergy side. Mm-hmm.
Ben Bohman (06:00):
Yeah, I mean, the, if you look at the core of the product set, right? If you, if you wanna call it the pillars or the three pillars, and this is, you could almost say the three pillars of many technology companies, right? Security, voice and collaboration and network, right? I mean, the, and if you just sum it up to that, like that’s really still, nothing’s changed, right? I mean, that, that’s still what those three pillars are. In fact, that’s still what Comcast three pillars are. There’s a couple things that I think both of us have done, and the way I look at it is Comcast has became a better company because of acquiring Masergy. And Masergy has definitely became a better company because of that, that acquisition. So Masergy has always operated on a global scale. That is one thing that Comcast has never really been able to do.
Ben Bohman (06:44):
They’ve never been able to get into that global, the, the global deals, the, those bigger deals that, again, that, that spread across, um, every nation mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (07:48):
So, yeah. No, good point. Uh, talk to me about, I mean this, you, you’ve got a lot of background on the security side. You, you see a lot of things, and I know we just summed it up with security and, and connectivity and voice in that. What do you like most about this? What, you know, of all the things you get to touch of all the parts of your role, what do you like the most?
Ben Bohman (08:07):
Well, I’d say, and this goes with security, but technology. And I always like having that bigger technology conversation because I think, and especially when we’re talking about security, now, security touches every aspect of a technological ecosystem, right? I mean, you have to agree that we can’t talk about voice network cloud applications without talking about security. So when I, when I look at technology and what I’ve always loved about it, and even talking to when I was 22 years old, right? I just became an IT director. I like the business strategy, I solving business problems. And I always talk about that. And when, of course, Josh, when you hear me talk, I’m always talking about we solve business problems, not technology problems. Yeah. And I love that. I love going in and almost reversing what’s done. Like right now, we talk about, a lot of engineers go in and they say, okay, well, we’re go, this is what we’re going to do to solve the problem.
Ben Bohman (09:01):
And so immediately they get on their problem solving this is what and how we’re gonna do it. But they don’t go into the, why are we doing it? Like, why is it needed? And that, that’s what I like, I like looking first at why is that technology needed? Why do, why do you need a maybe a SOCk as a service or an MDR platform? Why do you need sdwan? Why do you need any portion of technology? And it’s interesting, my, my ceo, when I go back to my, or president of the company, owner of the company, to my starting days in it, he sat me down and he is like, look, I don’t really care like how easy your job is. He didn’t mean this rude. He’s like, but what I care about and what your job is to do is to make everybody else’s job easier. Right? And so, right there, from a like young age, 22 years old, I was taught that, look, I’m brought on board from an IT standpoint to solve business problems, to increase productivity, to make the company money. He didn’t want to use it as a cost center. He wanted to, he wanted me to turn it into a profit center. And so again, that’s just kind of given me this passion of, I love looking at things from a strategic business standpoint, not just a technology standpoint.
Josh Lupresto (10:11):
Love it. Um, let’s talk about innovation here. We’re gonna get into SOCk and maybe a little bit of MDR and all that good stuff, and what that is, what it means, what you guys are doing. Yeah. But talk to me for a second before we get into the OEMs and all of that. Talk to me about innovation. Um, you know, you talked about, you know, what your ability was to do previously. Now given what your part of, what’s the approach to, to innovation, right? If we’re, we’re, we’re kind of fast forwarding a little bit, but, but how does the, how does the Comcast side of things and the Masergy side of things now approach, uh, innovation to stay in front of what’s next?
Ben Bohman (10:45):
Yeah, and I, I think this just ties into how the story of Masergy is developed now, the acquisition of Comcast is further developing it. So Masergy at its core is an engineering and innovation company, right? I mean, that’s like from the beginning time where I started at Masergy, that’s, that’s how we talked about it. So when you look at how we have invested the money, let’s say, and I talk about the VC firms coming in, they invest and you don’t get quite the investment. We have a very small sales team. I think overall 24 sellers in the whole company of ma. So going back into the roots, you know, we’d have 24, maybe 30 sellers, and we relied of course on the partner community, right on, on, uh, great partners like Telarus and and such. So they didn’t invest heavily in sales.
Ben Bohman (11:29):
And I think that’s where a lot of companies do, is it is this heavy investment in sales and just trying to get as much, again, sales. I mean, they’re not really looking at the quality of it, just the, the amount of it. Masergy did a different approach where they focused on engineering. So we are very engineering heavy. We are very r and d heavy. If you look at what we did with software defined networking at the beginning, we were doing SD WAN through our core network before SD WAN was even being talked about 20 years ago. Then you get into the security aspect, and we developed our MDR managed detect and response offering, which you can also call right? The SOCk as a service or mss, uh, depending on how you look at that. We invested in our own proprietary seam, our own security analytics engine.
Ben Bohman (12:12):
So of course, we still do use the, that best of, I don’t really like best of breed, but best of platform approach, meaning we have managed Sentinel one, uh, managed Bitglass purchased by Force Point, and we’ve put this all into this security analytics engine through, again, r and d. Now, what’s cool with Comcast coming in is Comcast is coming in with a obviously larger wallet. They’re coming with an e coming in with an eagerness to expand these services and grow these services. And really, their primary focus is what we’re seeing in the industry and that security. So what we’re tracking towards is not so much towards a sassy type of everyone’s chasing sassy, right? But we’re, we’re more approaching that SSE approach, right? That security service edge approach. And, and that’s where all of our r and d right now is going into. And the next year, uh, within the next year, you’re going to see a significant, I mean, improvement in what is already a very strong offering with us, uh, when you’re talking about sought edr, mdr, xdr, and all those.
Josh Lupresto (13:14):
So, let’s, uh, you touched on some really key things there. Let’s dive in further too, as we’re, we’re expanding what is in the security realm for you? We talked edr, mdr, you talked, uh, Sentinel one, we talked, uh, you know, we talked Bitglass layout. Let’s lay out either all those OEMs or OEMs and products, and then let’s dive into how that kind of feeds into your SOC offering.
Ben Bohman (13:37):
Sure. And so, and let’s actually start, I’m gonna even take one step back of something we don’t mention, and I, and I, and I agree why we approach security this way. So obviously that first layer of defense is most often your firewall, right? Mm-hmm.
Ben Bohman (14:23):
When you’re talking about security, it’s not having one layer of defense. It’s having a in depth defenses to block all these vectors of attacks that are coming at us nowadays, right? So that set, so that’s that very first layer. Now the next layer, and let’s just talk about the most simplistic layer, but still key is that east west traffic. So now we’ve got the, our EDR endpoint detect response, and it’s really a managed Sentinel one offering, and what that’s protecting against ransomware. And you could call that next generational virus, next generation virus protection. Because instead of looking at signatures, it’s looking at behaviors, right? So it’s looking a, a ransomware doesn’t go in and have it the same kind of look and feel every single time it goes in. They’re adapting it to the company, to the environment and everything, connecting to different ips, setting up processes within it.
Ben Bohman (15:13):
So now we’re looking at behaviors within that environment that is also managed by our SOC. That to me, honestly, is the biggest bang for your buck in the security industry right now. Just, you know, it starts at $7 a seat. I mean, with, uh, managed sentinel, one with a SOC wrapped around it and remediation capabilities. So I, I just, it shocks me, um, that, that it’s that low and it’s really, uh, it’s a big deal with our, with our customers and with our partners. We’re making a lot of progress with that. Now, we go into casb, which is that cloud access security broker, right? So how are you protect, protecting your Azure environments, how you’re protecting your Office 365 and those cloud environments? Now, I will say that casb, I think that’s gonna be really taking off probably in about a year and a half, two years.
Ben Bohman (16:03):
I mean, we, it’s part of that sassy, you know, the zt and a CASB is part of that, that sassy framework that we talk about. But it’s going to gain momentum. I won’t say it’s there yet. The need is there, but it’s not as big of a need as it will be in two years as we continue this cloud migration, right? This, this edge migration for security. And then the, the last portion of it, uh, of the SKUs that we offer is our MDR managed detect and response. Again, SOC is a service. I try to use different acronyms because there’s, you know, there’s so many right in the street. So SOC as a service, or mss, managed security service is your mss. And that, that really is kind of your ultimate, that’s your bigger offering. That’s, uh, a full-fledged security service. It comes with remediation a SEM, which is actually digesting and looking at the packets.
Ben Bohman (16:53):
It’s looking at the events. It’s monitoring, again, the behaviors within the network. And that, again, that’s a higher, a higher end approach. We also have sensors and, and different points of access that we’re collecting information from on the network. And, and so that’s how you tie that whole I that, that holistically together, right? So you started the firewall. If we’re selling, uh, an SD wan, which is still a lot of SD WAN cells coming in, we’re starting there. And then we’re talking about the endpoints, how we’re protecting the endpoints. We’re talking about their cloud applications, and then we’re talking about that holistic approach to security and how much visibility. And really, when you talk about security, it is all about visibility, right?
Josh Lupresto (17:35):
So speaking of visibility, uh, I appreciate you laying all those things out. I think that helps give, give people, uh, understanding of the, the depth and the breadth of the product set. When we talk a little bit more about specifically visibility, uh, on the, the one right before this, we were on with Jeff Hathcote from Telarus, and talked about kinda the, the math behind why it doesn’t make sense for somebody to go do their own SOCk. Uh, and I know you guys obviously have an opinion on that. You’ve achieved great economies of scale, and you’ve got a great product with that mm-hmm.
Ben Bohman (18:40):
Well, yeah, first there’s a stat I always like to, and it’s an important stat when we’re talking about this. There’s 3.5 million unfulfilled, secure cybersecurity positions out there. So just open, I was listening to something, it was ba it was a podcast back from 2019, and they, they were talking about like that that was going to happen, and sure enough, it, it would happen. The other interesting thing that kind of ties into that story is the number one problem businesses have, again, it’s not technology, it’s not even cybersecurity. In essence, the number one problem they have is like employee retention. Yeah. And number of employees. And we, we see that, right? We feel that if we go to restaurants nowadays, if we go to any kind of retail, like we know that they’re understaffed, it’s just an inherent problem. It’s the same with the, it’s, it’s the same with these companies.
Ben Bohman (19:23):
And you think about retention, right? So yeah, even if you can actually find your security person, and we’ll go into why a security person doesn’t work,
Ben Bohman (20:07):
So that’s really what we’re seeing as far as that, that need and how we’re, we’re helping, uh, customers with it. And I, and I would say the trends are falling within the partner community. If you look at the number one solution right now, it’s always ucas and C cas. I mean, that’s what we always see across the board right now. And that that’s just because of the amount of phone systems and the replacement of old legacy PBX systems is still happening. So that’s natural. But the two things we’re seeing most rapidly catch up to uca c a is security and managed services.
Josh Lupresto (20:38):
Yeah, a hundred percent agree.
Ben Bohman (20:40):
Right? And, and this is exactly why, exactly what we’re talking about now, how we approach it differently, again, as a holistic approach. When we, when Comcast business in ERG looks at a security solution, we’re or a, or we’re doing, we’re deep diving in with a customer, not just looking at security. We’re having to look at it under all the lenses I talked earlier, right? About how you have to look at your voice collaboration, your network. But that’s the approach that I think that we’re taking differently. And I always say, if you, if you have someone who just does security, go in and look at the security environment, that’s all they’re gonna look at in that environment. But usually they’re not gonna expand into these other aspects that they’re not comfortable with. Yeah. Voice collaboration, cloud applications, everything else. Same with, uh, a voice. You bring someone in who just does voice, well then guess what? You’re only gonna talk about voice Technology doesn’t work like that anymore. We can’t have single threaded conversations and the conversations that we’re having with customers, I’d say is a differentiator because our services are related around, and our conversations are around protecting the holistic environment, not just one aspect of it. Does that make sense?
Josh Lupresto (21:47):
It does. It does. And I think you guys have a, having that suite of services is really unique because you can talk about wherever they’re at, at, at the branch at the edge. Mm-hmm.
Ben Bohman (22:23):
Protecting, more, I was gonna throw out there too, that we, like with us, we sell 2.7 solutions per opportunity. Because of that approach, we also are able to uncover more needs. Because if you’re having a security conversation and you don’t know what you’re protecting and who you’re protecting, then you really can’t expand that conversation. But then once you go into every aspect, again, I talk about that technological ecosystem, now you’re talking about voice. What are you doing with voice? Are you happy with voice? You’re talking about network, you’re talking about cloud, you’re talking about applications. And the coolest thing for the partner community in my mind and for your, for the Telarus sellers, is I am limited by the capabilities of my technology with the conversation I can have. But you, you guys are unlimited, meaning that you can overcome. You have unlimited ways to overcome objections, unlimited routes to go, unlimited things you can talk about when it comes to technology, because you do it all. You’re able to provide a solution in the entirety of every need of a company or every need that a customer has.
Josh Lupresto (23:26):
Yeah. Makes it makes our jobs easy. I I always say, setting up the appointment, knocking that down, uh, is, is way harder than us showing up and talking tech for sure. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (23:37):
Uh, alright, let’s, let’s bring this thing home here with an example. I would love to hear, give me a situation that you got brought into. What were you told the need was? Uh, we can keep customer names out of this if need be for sure, but, you know, I’m kind of curious, did you, did you get brought in and say, ah, you know, we just need a firewall. Can you come talk to us about what you guys can do with Fort Net? And then, you know, reality, what did it amount to, right? If it started out weird or if it was exactly like it, it looked, but what did it replace? What did it do? What did it solve?
Ben Bohman (24:08):
Yeah. Well, so if you don’t mind, I, I’ve got one really quick one that’s gonna lean in on this, on the Managed Sentinel one and why that’s such, I mean, it, it’s such a low hanging fruit for the partner community. And then I’ve got one that maybe we can dig in a little bit more. That’s more of that holistic approach that starts somewhere and in somewhere else, right? Mm-hmm.
Ben Bohman (24:50):
And in 2,700 seats, I, I told you again, it starts at $7 a seat. We’re actually able to get this down to $5 and 40 cents, which was really cool. But, um, we, we start, we start there, we go in, we sit down and once we start talking about the SOCk capabilities and what the remediation, what we do with Sentinel One, helping set up the environment, helping them understand the detect and Protective Sentinel one, of course, that’s a bigger conversation going into how we fine tune the environment for best protection and then continue to monitor it, make sure it’s updated, it easily made sense for them to actually be like, okay, we’re just gonna purchase Sentinel one from you guys with your SOC, right? So that managed Sentinel one made sense. And it’s not that we’re competing Sentinel One still wins in that case, right? Because they’re still, they’re still getting that win.
Ben Bohman (25:35):
But when you throw that SOC and that management, the remediation, you always the mdr, what does the R stand for? Really response. But really, what does that remediation? What are you doing? It ended up being a really a no-brainer. And they, they swung that over and then that partner actually brought us in on another 2,500 seed, uh, EDR or managed one deal immediately after that that we’re able to win. And those turnaround times are, like, from the time we talked to the company to when we closed the deal and got signatures was a week and a half. Wow. The install was 30 days. So I mean, that means the partner’s getting paid very fast and there’s not as many problems as your traditional once you start throwing bandwidth and connectivity solution, right? It’s like, who knows? So anyhow, that, that’s kinda a quick one, but the another one that I like to look at is, uh, is a healthcare company, uh, kind of back east.
Ben Bohman (26:23):
And we go in, we start having a conversation with them, and really they were needing some changes on their SD WAN network. Now, we always hear, right, NPLS is dead, but private connectivity within SD WAN isn’t, which is kind of still that same idea with pls, right? We sometimes you need that private layer two connectivity to do some things that you can’t do over public internet. So we start having the conversation about SD wan, and then remember that that transition and that, like that flow that I talked about with security. So of course we start talking about the security aspects and their needs within the router and firewall and come to a need. Okay, well, definitely tmr, right? They have a short, they’re very short staff from an IT standpoint. I think they were running, it was like four total it, uh, people on staff.
Ben Bohman (27:11):
And this is with over 40 locations. So now we’re, now we’re talking about TMR and firewall, okay? And that’s now we, now we start pro probing, right? We start digging deeper into, okay, well what else? Like, what are we protecting? What’s going on in your environment? We always say pe it’s people, processes, and technology. And that’s the way we approach these conversations, right? So now we start talking about people, we start talking about the processes and start finding out that they’re very under, they’re not secured within that e east west traffic that we’re talking about. They had a need for edr. We also found out that they had a lot of work from home users. So they needed ems, they needed the Ford Net client on there to be able to remote into the network was ems, provide some additional like security functions on the endpoint with through for Dnet and the for client.
Ben Bohman (27:59):
And then we also find out that they’re in the middle of a teams integration, right? What are you doing for voice? And now this, now we get into the voice and they need help with the team’s integration. We end up selling 500 seats of teams direct, direct connect. So at the, by then, by the time we’re done, we’re starting at maybe a $35,000 SD WAN conversation, and we start talking about security, voice collaboration, and even some cloud peering that we were doing through our eex data exchange. This had grown into a $77,000 deal. Now, fast forward another year after this is all done and installed, now we’re looking over about a hundred, $2,000 a month spend on the, on this, uh, customer. And again, at start, it starts small. I mean, 40, 30, that’s not small, right? I understand that’s not small, small, but it starts on that smaller end. No, but once we start talking about security and holistically what we do, and you go, you layer on top of that, the customer experience, again, whenever a customer calls into us, they’re getting a engineer, not a take a taker, anyone like that. It just, it just made sense for them. It, it relieved so much pressure from them, from a security standpoint, from a resource standpoint, and not only that, it actually grew their security posture to something formidable and respectable.
Josh Lupresto (29:17):
Love it. Good examples. Uh, okay, so Ben, we’re gonna land this plane. Um, I want you to look into your crystal ball in Ben’s humble opinion. You know, we’ve, we’ve done this 180 from where years ago people would not even let us put a, managed any kind of box in their environment. Now we’re managing whatever gear they have. We’re augmenting that, we’re putting edge software on with, you know, things like Sentinel One, all of these things, and now outsource SOC and everything that comes into that. So if you look out six, 12, even 24 months, where do you see this going? Do you see the CASB things being more prevalent? Do you see us staying down the course? What are your thoughts?
Ben Bohman (29:58):
Yeah, so there’s two things that come to mind when I’m thinking about kind of the future. And there there’s two things that we’re seeing that are very telling. One less than 1% of cyber crimes are prosecuted. And if you think about that, I mean, obviously that’s telling us, look like cyber crimes are not going, it’s not going away. I always ask if less than 1% of bank robberies were prosecuted, how many of us would be out robbing banks? Right? Right. Like it be, obviously bank robberies would be a huge problem, right? And, and I just think that we’re gonna see, obviously see a rise in, in cyber crimes and even uniqueness and complexity, complexity of these crimes. Okay? Now the next thing that I heard this, this was the Forbes thing that I was talking about earlier, is that if we took every single person enrolled in, let’s say technology related college or training or what, even the MCSE stuff, right?
Ben Bohman (30:51):
All that stuff we took everyone enrolled into taking care of technology problems or that that eventual career path, we still wanna be able to fulfill the cybersecurity shortage, right? Even with all of them, and a lot of them aren’t even going into right. Cybersecurity, a lot of ’em are programming or different technology or different areas related to technology. So that problem, the people problem’s not going away. So I think what we’re going to see is actually a continued and even a larger need for managed, again, I talk about that managed services and managed. So, and now we’re, look, we talked about the cas, we right? Things going into the cloud, all the different areas and vectors and new AR vectors of a tab that are, and vulnerabilities that are now available. It’s gonna cause a bigger need again for managed services and experts to be able to go in and truly secure the environment. I mean, that like really, I think it leans back to the managed services and security. It’s just gonna continue to be a problem that we have to address.
Josh Lupresto (31:52):
Good stuff. All right, man, Ben, that wraps us up for today. I really appreciate you coming on and doing this with me, buddy.
Ben Bohman (31:58):
Yeah, thanks for having me. That was, that was fun.
Josh Lupresto (32:01):
All right, everybody that wraps us up. Uh, security. Why I should not run a SOCk on my own. We got Ben Bowman, the director of solution engineering from the Comcast Maer G indirect channel side. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is next level BizTech.
Tune in as we speak with Jeff Hathcote, Telarus Solution Architect for Security, and one of the most advanced security architects around. He talks about Security Operations and how, as a customer, why you should NOT try to build one on your own. Jeff has 20+ years of real-world practice building, managing, and designing under his belt, along with the foremost security certifications in the channel!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto. Today I am joined with the world’s most interesting man, Jeff Hathcote, Telarus Security architect. Jeff, welcome back to the show, my friend.
Jeff Hathcote (00:31):
Thank you, sir. Glad to be here.
Josh Lupresto (00:34):
Today we’re talking about security. We’re talking about a security operations center, a SOC, and making a bold claim as to why it’s a really bad idea to run one on my own. Before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about, for anybody that didn’t tune in to season one, your background, how did you get here? Give us a quick, uh, quick summary on that and then we’ll get started.
Jeff Hathcote (00:59):
I, I was the kid, Josh, there was the geek back before there were such things as geeks. Uh, I actually had an old Radio Shack, TRS 80 Model three, if you’re, you’re still too young to remember those.
Josh Lupresto (01:13):
What’s Radio Shack?
Jeff Hathcote (01:15):
Yeah, exactly. That was a, that was a very cool computer and I even had a dot matrix printer attached to it, so I got very interested in that. Uh, just kinda learned on my own, learned how to, you know, write things in basic, actually did a little, uh, little machine code as well. And it just, it was fascinating to me. And this was about the time that the original, uh, war Games movie came out. So I saw that and I went, oh, yeah, that’s what I wanna do. Uh, never, never ne never went that direction. Uh, but in college, uh, I was always interested in this new technology that was coming around. The only curriculum that my particular university had was called Mathematical computing, which did not interest me in the lease, even though I did take some programming classes. Uh, I just tinkered. I was a tinkerer. I would take things apart, put them back together, figure out how they worked. Uh, and that led me to, you know, this just career of exploration. I worked in law enforcement. I actually worked in the prison system. I worked my way through college in the Louisiana State Department of Corrections, uh, which allowed me to enhance my technical skills. Cause I ran the commissary where inmates bought things.
Josh Lupresto (02:33):
This is gonna be a whole podcast, but go ahead. Yeah,
Jeff Hathcote (02:37):
They bought their cigarettes and their ice cream and things of that nature. But I was one of the few organizations that had a, at a computer. And I found out quickly that I was attached to the entire, uh, department of Public for the state of Louisiana, which allowed to and print driving things of that nature. And I found some I some holes and I was able to report those up and, you know, we’d get them fixed. And that just got me interested in the security aspect. Moved on, went to the, went to work for the federal government in the same capacity with Federal Bureau Prisons, and was actually one of the first, or the, the charter member really, of the group that built at the time was called Computer Services, which is now obviously it, but I was part of that initial group that built the policies and procedures and created a division within a, within a government bureau.
Jeff Hathcote (03:33):
Uh, security was always a big part of that right there. Was it, I was an application developer, software guy. I was a network engineer, but the security piece was always what interested me. When I left government service a few years ago, I just jumped right back into the security aspects of it. I’ve been an IT director. I’ve been, you know, I’ve, I’ve run large organizations, small organizations, uh, in the security realm and the IT realm, you know, multiple industries. But security has always been a strong, strong part of what I do. I just, it interests me, uh, because I don’t like bad guys and I don’t view these cyber criminals any different than the guy that robs the bank or jacks your car or breaks into your house. There’s the same mindset, the criminals, and maybe it’s just been ingrained in me since that early part of my career where I, I, I just have a protective nature and I like to help people protect themselves against these bad guys.
Jeff Hathcote (04:35):
So, um, passion evolved. Uh, I got, I got a phone from, from Telarus once upon a time, and it sounded like an awesome opportunity to be able to share my experience. And whenever I say experience, it’s not, cause I’m the smartest guy in the room. I’ve always said, you’ve heard this, Josh, if I’m, I’m the smartest guy in the room, I’m in the wrong room, right? Uh, but it gives me the opportunity to share my passion and to collaborate with folks that are facing a lot of the same problems that I’ve faced in the past, and use the benefit of the mistakes that I’ve made and the lessons that I’ve learned to keep them from making those same mistakes. Uh, being able to keep up with technology in the, in the realm of cybersecurity. What these bad guys are doing, how they’re doing it, what our countermeasures are, uh, what the new tech that the good guys are coming out with to affect what the bad guys are. And, you know, it’s, I think it helps that I spent so much time around the criminal aspect of the population that it allows me to think like a bad guy. And if you can think like a bad guy, you can, you can, you can stop them. So in a roundabout way, that’s how I wound up on this podcast. I was in prison, now I’m here. So, but
Josh Lupresto (05:49):
Hey, let the record show. While we did go to college at different times, I did go to Radio Shack to buy resistors in college to finish
Jeff Hathcote (05:56):
Radio Shack was the, you know, everybody else was hanging out. Well, everybody was hanging out at the cool places and Jeff was at Radio Shack talking to the guy going, Hey, you getting any new breadboards I can look at?
Josh Lupresto (06:06):
Yes. Spread boards. All right. Uh, that’s good. And, and, and look, I think that’s what’s great too, that, that, to prop you up for a second, I think you’ve done a great job with the partners really saying, Hey, I’ve been here before. I’ve done this. I know what to expect. Pull me into this. Put me in. I don’t really care. Uh, if this customer is brand new to security or if they’re enterprise expert level security, we can help. Cuz you’ve seen a lot of things. So I think that’s, that’s been awesome. Uh, okay. So I want you to, you know, let’s recap of, you know, you were on a number of months ago. We talked about, you know, some slightly different topics, but I want you to give me and, and give the listeners, uh, a really bad example of, of something that you’ve seen. We see a lot of things of what customers do, some that, that they do that are the right thing. Some that we go, eh, I don’t know if I’d do that, but maybe just kick us off with any bad things that you’ve seen recently be as we, as we kind of start this off,
Jeff Hathcote (07:05):
Bad, bad things in terms of attacks or just the way someone approaches their Cybersecurity.
Josh Lupresto (07:10):
Yeah. The way that, that, that somebody’s thought, you know what? I need to go do this. I’m gonna go do this thing.
Jeff Hathcote (07:16):
Yeah. I, I, I see it a lot, right? And it’s not limited to very small customers. It’s lim, you know, it’s, it’s the big enterprises. It’s the small ones. And I think it’s just a case of there’s a lot of apathy right there, because security is not the sexiest thing in the world, right? Uh, security does not make you money. Security is not something that you market, right? That’s not your widget that you’re trying to sell. Uh, and so a lot of customers know that they have a problem, right? They, they, they realize that they’ve got an issue. Uh, it could be a new, uh, or it doesn’t have to be new, but a CIO or a CSO that comes into an organization that inherits a, an organization, an infrastructure where they’re just not sure what’s out there, but they know there’s probably, there’s probably bad stuff.
Jeff Hathcote (08:06):
There’s probably a bad actor, uh, sitting somewhere in their infrastructure. Uh, but a lot of times they get paralyzed and then they have to rely on the team that they’ve inherited as well to tell them what needs to be done. And a lot of times there’s some pet projects that pop out. Cause it’s geeks, and I’m a geek, so I can say that word. I own it. Um, there’s a lot of cool toys that we could get that we weren’t able to get before. The old boss said no, maybe the new boss say yes. And so they’re very focused on product, product, product, new, new software, new tools, uh, and that causes the, the, the new leader to just kinda be paralyzed. And, and you’re getting all this noise from various places and you gotta stop and say, I gotta discover, discover where I am.
Jeff Hathcote (08:56):
Right? And I’ve had so many people tell me that I know we’ve got problems, um, but I’m just not comfortable in this role yet to go to my boss, to go to the CFO or go to the board and ask for money to do this because I’m, I’m new to the role. I had that conversation with someone yesterday that was just, I, I know we’ve gotta do something. I don’t think now’s the time. I think we’re gonna wait probably until first quarter before we really look at it. Well, that’s what the bad, that’s what counting. You’re just, you’re just gonna maintain a status quo and even worth a status quo that you know is not good. You have no, you have no ability to, to identify. You have no iden no, no way to, to protect the things because you know what they are. Obviously you can’t detect and respond and recover because you have no idea what’s going on. And you notice I use those five functions of a framework, right? And those are gonna, those are gonna follow me everywhere I go, every conversation I have with you’s gonna, I those things. So in a roundabout way, it’s just, it’s just, it’s not necessarily apathy, but it’s like paralysis. My gosh, I’ve got so much going on. I where to start. I don’t. So I’m do nothing.
Josh Lupresto (10:15):
I, I think that’s what we’ve realized. To your point, we’ve realized that we get pulled into these situations and we don’t wanna be pushy, right? We don’t wanna be that pushy salesperson. But what, what I’m finding, and I think what we’re all getting more confident in with security is we have to drill or double down and let them, no, you don’t wanna do that. Like, yes, I would love it if you buy some things, that’s great. I’m not that, that, that’s gonna happen no matter what. But if you don’t do anything, you have to realize the repercussions of not doing something right. So yeah. Great, great point.
Jeff Hathcote (10:46):
Well, look, look, look back, you know, at the situation with Uber that happened a few years ago and they were, there was a compromise. The CISO tried to hide that and look what happened to him. Yeah. Went to jail, right? So it’s, it’s not just protecting the reputation of, of you and your team and maybe your company. There’s some personal ramifications that can come into play if you don’t accept that you need to do something and then do something with it. So,
Josh Lupresto (11:18):
All right, so let’s talk SOC. Security Operations center. So we’ve talked about a lot of tools. We’ve talked about, you know, there’s a lot of layers. We’ve talked about framework. But let’s re break down, uh, educate everybody on really, what, what does a SOC, what does it solve? What does it encompass?
Jeff Hathcote (11:39):
So I, and again, and I love it cause I’m starting to have this conversation more and more. I, I, I typically have it at least once a day, but now it’s become more and more cause people are starting to realize that we don’t have the resources. There’s not an organization out there. You, you’re a Fortune 50 or you’re a a three-man shop. We don’t have the resources to staff for specifically security to watch for security events that are in our environment. Those types of events are compromised accounts. You’ve got a guy that logs into his computer at eight o’clock in the morning from the home office in Omaha, and then two minutes later, that same account logs in from somewhere in Thailand, right? Um, if you don’t have somebody watching that, you’re not gonna know that it happened. And then the, the account from Thailand starts traversing your network and wreaking havoc in your infrastructure.
Jeff Hathcote (12:40):
Um, a lot of, a lot of folks will tell me that, well, we have things in place, we have tools, and they’ll alert us. Well, alert fatigue is real and the bad guys typically don’t, and I think you heard me say this before, they’re not gonna operate Monday through Friday, eight five. They’re not gonna wait until you get to your office to start doing things. It’s gonna be the two in the morning on a, you know, Saturday or Sunday morning, uh, where your phone on the charger or whatever. So with that, we really need to have s a team, not just a person or not just an electronic device like a phone or, or whatever, watching that infrastructure. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long. Weekends and holidays, fluided. Um, and that is something that if you try to build on your own, and I’m not telling you not to do it.
Jeff Hathcote (13:41):
If you wanna do it, you knock yourself out and then call me in about six months and I’ll help you unwind it and get a real solution. Not being snarky, just that’s the way its, cause I’ve tried to do it before as well. But you have to figure if you wanna build a round the clock security operations center in order to get qualified and trained people that can, that can understand what a security event is, can, can understand what a log, how to read a log, how to implement a, a security incident and events manager solution, log aggregator, understand what various alerts and alarms mean within various systems. You’re gonna pay about a hundred grand on an average. It’s gonna be some places it’ll be more some’s gonna a hundred thousand dollars per person and you’ve gotta at least 12 of them to man around the clock.
Jeff Hathcote (14:36):
And that’s just your labor cost. Your technology on the other hand, is gonna cost anywhere from 300 grand to over a million. So that’s the, the software, that’s the hardware as well. That’s the implementation. And it’s gonna take anywhere from six to 18 months to implement these things. The problem that we have is we might be able to find those people and we may have that capital budget to buy that equipment. We may be able to buy that software, but guess what? There’s that, there’s that constant, you know, I always use Moore’s Law as an example. Uh, security changes so rapidly and there’s gonna be something new. There’s gonna be another, another, uh, uh, point solution if you will, that that needs to be put in place. So you’re gonna constantly be spending more and more money. You’re gonna be constantly having to not only update your infrastructure, but you gotta update your SOCk.
Jeff Hathcote (15:34):
You’ve gotta update your people. You’ve got people that get sick. You’ve got people that wanna go on vacation. You got, the biggest problem is you got people to quit, right? Uh, there’s, there’s so many jobs out there right now that you can take a young, uh, security analyst, uh, that knows what they’re doing, that has a bit of experience that maybe has a cert or two, put them in that chair and they, they start working and they get that real world experience. Somebody’s gonna come. And then guess what, you’re back into that HR model where you’re constantly, constantly just go to, just go to Indeed or one of those job boards and just do a search for security analysts or security professional cyber security specifically. And you’ll get page after page after page and a of those posts. I just did that yesterday. I’m for a new job, but to prepare. It’s
Josh Lupresto (16:26):
Good. Thanks. Clearing that. Good, good.
Jeff Hathcote (16:30):
Uh, you’ll just, and a lot of those postings have been up for 60, 90 days because they can’t fill em.
Josh Lupresto (16:39):
Well, and, and, and we talked about this, there’s how many job openings right now that require that, that they say they want you to have the big security cert, the cissp How many are you seeing?
Jeff Hathcote (16:51):
Uh, there, I, I’m trying to remember this off the top of my head. So it may not be completely accurate, but there’s like 90, 90,000 people in the United States with the, uh, certified information system security professionals, CS s P certification, which is kind of the gold standard in this world. Uh, 90,000 folks have that certification in the United States. And the glass count I think was back in, you know, it was probably about six, eight months ago, there were 109, 10,000 jobs posted that required the CSS P certification before they would even talk to you, much less hire you. Yeah. So that’s a gap, right? Uh, same thing with all these other certifications and you know, we are a certification heavy industry. And I, I think where I think the best thing about a certification, and I have certifications, I have a, I have a strong belief that they are, they’re useful, they’re good.
Jeff Hathcote (17:53):
I would never say anything bad about cert just cause I’m, I’m a cert certified guy too. But that real world experience is key as well, right? Just because you have a certification doesn’t mean you can do the job. I used to teach back in the old days with Microsoft, I used to teach the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, uh, curriculum, and it was, it was amazing how many people could pass those tests based on the book, but they’d never had any real world, uh, experience. I would come in, I was also a Microsoft certified trainer. I would come into the classroom and throw the book away and bring a real world scenarios, probably something that I was facing in my job. Yeah. And I would help have the class help me s
Josh Lupresto (19:09):
And thats, yeah. And, and to, to bring this, to bring this home, this point, uh, we’re not at a spot economically right now. We’re going to the well for non-revenue producing needs. You’re not seeing that in the tech sector, right? It’s not the time right now. So companies to this point, let’s leverage the, the vendors that have achieved economy of scale, that have the stable expertise, that have the certifications, and to your point, the real world experience. So, absolutely. Right. Bring us some really good
Jeff Hathcote (19:40):
Points. Well, and we, and we have a lot of folks within our portfolio, as you know, that have, um, they have a pipeline to educational facilities. So they’re working with colleges, universities that have cybersecurity programs that are allowing them to be interns. So they’re getting their, their book learning, if you will, the, the formal education. But they’re also getting the real world by serving as interns when they graduate. Uh, a great many of ’em are going to work for these organizations in their SOCks, working up from tier one to tier three to, you know, SOC leads and managers and so forth and, and traversing through the cybersecurity world. And there are so many different avenues you can take in that cybersecurity world. You know, there’s policies and procedures and frameworks and all, and then there’s the technical aspect of penetration testers, you know, that sort of thing.
Josh Lupresto (20:35):
So I wanna skip to, you know, I I, we’ve talked about what Telarus does, right? What, what we do with our resources, what, what you’re out there doing, being very tactical and strategic, but, but tactically in these deals, helping partners doing discoveries, helping the customer figure out what the real problem is and where they really need to spend their time versus where they think they need to spend their time. Uh, I, I thought it was interesting yesterday, I did a webinar yesterday with Microsoft and some of their security engineering team and, you know, it was about stats, about where we’re at and, and sad stats about where we’re at with the state of some of the adoption of the security technology. And I thought it, it, it’s interesting, they have a good glimpse on it where from a Microsoft perspective, roughly 25 to 30% of their users, anybody using Microsoft Tools, office 365 has adopted mfa. And I thought that was fascinating to me, to go right now after one of the easiest things that is out there to adopt. And now they’re, they’re, they’re setting that, but also shifting towards the new tool sets, the Microsoft enter these things that are really getting to the root of it is identity, right? Identity and trust and governance. And I think that’s important. But you know, you, you and I were talking before this go, going back to the basics mfa, right? Multi simple multifactor, why, why are we at 25% adoption?
Jeff Hathcote (22:03):
I, I, I’ve got my theories right? And this is not based in anything scientific, I don’t think, but just again, real world experience and, and, and real world implementation of multifactor authentication, mobile device management, anything where you’re affecting a user experience, there is a, I think it’s a, it’s a fear that it has that, well, I’m going to make you respond to a push message or an SMS message or a phone call in order for you to log in and do your job, right? Uh, and the argument back from the field, or from, you know, from the user community is you’re making it hard for me to do my job. You’re getting in the, in the way of productivity. And so a lot of folks are are backing up saying, yeah, I’m sorry. I’ll, I’ll turn that off for you. And a lot of times it starts with we’re just gonna implement multifactor authentication across the board.
Jeff Hathcote (23:05):
Everybody has to use it, and then they start getting that pushback and they onsie twosie it. And so now, well, you’re the COO of the organization and you’re the boss, so I don’t want you to have to do it. So I’m gonna turn it off for you. Well, then the next C-suite meeting, the cfo, the CEO and cio say the same things, right? Before you know it, you’ve got this mix of, some people have to have it, some people don’t. Um, my argument has always been, and if you don’t have someone looking out for you at the C-suite or the board to, but my response has, security is not a, uh, a hindrance to productivity security is going to help productivity, right? It may be a little painful at first, but implementation of something like multifactor authentication, it’s not necessarily something you have to do all at once.
Jeff Hathcote (24:03):
Phase it in, phase it in. Get people in departments that will be your champion. Let them understand the value of multifactor authentication. And multifactor authentication is not the end. Be all security. Just because you have it implemented doesn’t mean you’re never going get, it’s, it’s kinda like leaving your porch light on at your house. That’s not gonna stop someone from breaking in, but it’s probably gonna make them pause and look at the other house that doesn’t have the porch light on. Right? So I I, I think it’s a fear. Back to your original question, I think it’s just we don’t like people barking at us because we’re making their lives a little harder.
Josh Lupresto (24:45):
Yeah. Yeah. Procrastination is great. Some people are really good at it. So let’s encourage people to get MFA and also tonight, make sure your porch lights are on. Great point. Yep.
Jeff Hathcote (24:55):
Josh Lupresto (24:58):
Yes, yes, absolutely. Uh, I have mine automated on a cycle, so I’m lazy.
Jeff Hathcote (25:03):
I have cameras and porch lights, so you know, it’s, I have I what you call a zero trust house,
Josh Lupresto (25:09):
So Yeah. Yeah. I know you won’t let me in to come over. I’m like, no. Uh, okay. So we talked about what Del Telarus is doing, you know, any other trends you wanna call out real quick of, you know, things that you’re seeing? I mean, we talked about this is about why I shouldn’t run a security op center. We’re seeing customers trying to do it on their own or, or just freeze and paralysis. Any other trends that you need to call out that have changed in the last six months?
Jeff Hathcote (25:34):
Yeah, you know, and it’s, it’s, it’s probably been less than that, unless six to three months I would have the conversation with organizations that you really need that, that full view of your infrastructure, you know, all the time with trained people that can respond, can detect and respond to those anomalies. Uh, and a lot of those conversations really didn’t go anywhere. Cause of, eh, I don’t think we need that. We’re not big enough. We’re not, uh, you know, we’re not a target or we don’t have the money now. It’s, it’s amazing to me because customers are going to the, to our partners, right? Who have that relationship with the customer asking for it. We need a security operation center and we don’t know where to start. That to me, is a great, great trend. And I think the, the rationale behind that is some of the news articles that we see, so and so got com so and so got compromised and so just spent, you know, 8 million, you know, on a, a ransom of that nature.
Jeff Hathcote (26:38):
And one of the nice things that I see, at least from perspective is we’re seeing more and more boards that are being required to have security minded or security professionals sitting on those boards. So it’s raising the awareness of how important this is. And we’re no longer an eight to five world, right? Especially with, with work from home. You know, back in the day we’d get on the train or get in our car, drive to the office, log in at eight, boy, it gets to be five o’clock. We shut everything down and, and move on with work from home and work from anywhere really. We’re 24 hours a day. How many times have you and I been on two o’clock in the morning, right? Mm-hmm.
Jeff Hathcote (28:03):
It’s a lot l it’s a lot more, uh, fiscally responsible than a lot of people think. They think it’s gonna cost millions and millions of dollars and that’s why they wanna do it themselves. But whenever it, when the rubber meets the road, it’s like, that’s about the cost of a full time employee per year.
Josh Lupresto (28:20):
Yeah.
Jeff Hathcote (28:21):
And it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a no brainer, really. Yeah. So,
Josh Lupresto (28:25):
You know, good point. I wanna call out one other trend too. You know, we looked at what was happening three to six months ago and we’re, we’re helping the partners figure out how to crack into these deals with customers, with some of questions that we give them. Now, it seems like, to your point with what you’ve talked about, the security staffing, the great resignation, all of these things that have transpired in the last 12 plus months. The, the other piece of this that we’ve seen come out is before we were teaching people, it’s important to talk to your customers about a SOCk, about sim and log management. Now it seems like we’re seeing, hey, I bought Splunk, or I bought QRadar, or I bought, you know, whatever, but I don’t have the people to manage it anymore, or I’m not comfortable that it’s being managed appropriately. So we’re a definite trend that I want partners to pay attention to. And you, you feel free to comment on this, that, uh, if, if the company is a little more mature and has purchased some of those tools, what are the tools that they have? You know, what, what are the questions that you should ask, right? Is it effectiveness and the tools? How do we draw those opportunities out if that’s what we’re helping partners with?
Jeff Hathcote (29:28):
Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s a, that’s a conversation that happens a lot as well. And I’ve never seen an organization, I could be wrong, but I’ve never been a part of or worked with an organization that had Splunk that didn’t have an entire department wrapped around it, right? It’s kinda like saying, well, you know, we have, we have finance and HR issues, so we’re just gonna go buy PeopleSoft and let PeopleSoft take it. You know, that you can’t run PeopleSoft with, you know, a half person. And it’s the same thing with a lot of these really, really good tools. And one of the things that Telarus does, I think very well with our, with our portfolio of providers is you may be that person that came from a organization that had Splunk, you like Splunk, you understand how it works. So you wanna implement it in your new role, in your new organization, but you don’t have the time patient patients or energy to either sprain people on it, hire people on it, whatever.
Jeff Hathcote (30:27):
Cuz you’re gonna have these, these, these big holes. We can provide people that will manage that for you, that will provide the SOC that will manage the Splunks and the qras and whatever else there is out there. If you have nothing, we have people that will provide a sim, a log aggregator, get telemetry from your firewalls, from your active directory, from your endpoints, actively manage it for you. So it’s not a case of your team or you if you’re the only person that has a security focus, responding to every alert, every alarm that comes along. Because most people, when they try to implement on their own, they turn everything on, right? That’s just the way it’s, we check every box if we wanna know about, well guess what, when you log in successfully to a Windows computer, I think it creates about 15 or or more alerts.
Jeff Hathcote (31:23):
Yeah, Josh Lupresto logged in successfully. Joshua Lupresto access this successfully. Do I care that Josh Lupresto did that? No, not really. So I wanna be able to, to, to get down to the nuts and bolts of that, of that software and kind of filter those things out. And I only wanna know what’s real, what’s an alarm versus all this alert and the alert fatigue won’t set in, but I’ve got a whole team of people that are 24 7 that are watching this for me. So I can actually go to a baseball game. I can actually go out to dinner with my wife and not have to, you know, keep grabbing my phone. So,
Josh Lupresto (32:02):
Good, good point. Yeah. To your point, you know, give me things like conditional access. Don’t tell me when Josh logs in, but get the tool set and configured right. And know the tool enough. Maybe you bought it, but maybe you don’t know it. How to do conditional access of, I don’t care when Jeff logs in, but I care when Jeff logs in after hours in a different city. Or if Jeff logs in somewhere that isn’t this, and then help me manage it and, and help
Jeff Hathcote (32:26):
Or from a foreign device, right? I he’s never used
Josh Lupresto (32:29):
That. He’s not trusted. Exactly. We talk about trust a lot. Good point. So, uh, I, I wanna maybe wrap us up with a five minutes or less roleplay scenario. I wanna be the customer. I want to tell you what I’m going through and I want you to kind of give me some ad advice. Uh, I realize five minutes is much shorter than our traditional discovery call, but the idea is I will be a customer that is going through things and it is a snapshot in time of where we’re at. So you, you tell me kind of what your recommendation and maybe help me understand that. And if anybody understands, this is a little bit of a glimpse into what we do in a discovery conversation. So, Hey Jeff, listen, uh, I appreciate you helping me out with our environment. Uh, I was told you’re kind of the security guy and you’ve got some expertise that I’m excited to hear about.
Josh Lupresto (33:17):
You know, listen, we’ve, you know, we’ve got some financial records, we’ve got some data, we’ve got an Azure environment, um, you know, we’ve made some investment into Palos. Um, we, we we’re, we’re getting ready to get MFA turned on and, and some of those things. But I guess the hard part I’m figuring out is I’m not sure where we should be spending our time next. Um, I know we need to do some things. I know there are some vulnerabilities, but I’ve gotta figure out, do I have the right budget? Where should I be spending my time? And I’m just kind of curious from your perspective with what you’re seeing out there, is that the right thing? Do I focus on mfa? Where do I go from here?
Jeff Hathcote (33:53):
Let me, lemme stop you real quick and just kind of back up a minute, right? Uh, understand first of all that security cybersecurity is not a product, right? It’s not, it’s not something you buy as a package. Here’s security. Um, think of, let’s, let’s put it into an analogy that, that pretty much anybody can understand. Let’s say you’re gonna build a house or a building a shed, whatever. You go to the hardware store, you go to the lumber yard and you look and you say, I know I need some windows, so I’m gonna buy some windows. I need a door. Uh, I need three doors and I need a bunch of shingles and I need some lumber and four or five bags of concrete. Cause I’m pretty sure I’m gonna require concrete in this build. Well, you have all this stuff in the back of a big trailer and it’s delivered to your property and it’s dumped on the yard.
Jeff Hathcote (34:50):
Okay? There’s your security. What are you gonna do with it? What do you start with? You start with the shingles. Cuz you’re building a new, you’re building a new building. You start with the shingles, you just start with the windows. Probably not, right? The first thing you need to do is have a foundation, right? So understand what that foundation’s gonna look like. Are you gonna have a basement? Is it just gonna be a slab? Yet? You have to figure that. How big is it going to be? Is it gonna be rectangular? Is it gonna be square? Is it, don’t know, right? So that foundation is the key piece. And, and just take this analogy into cybersecurity. You have to have a framework. A framework is going to allow you to make those decisions in a timely way. It’s gonna help you with your budgeting, it’s going to help you have the conversation with your organization because this affects the organization.
Jeff Hathcote (35:47):
It’s not just an IT thing, right? So I always talk about, uh, the particular framework that comes out of the National Institute of Standards and Technologies missed, right? Uh, but that is the first thing that I’m gonna recommend to you, Josh, is that let’s talk about a framework. Let’s pick a framework for you. And they’re all gonna have the essential five main functions, right? We want to identify what those assets are. You already mentioned three of them, right? You’ve got stuff in Azure, we’ve got some financials, we’ve got this, okay, let’s identify what they are, where they are, who has access to them, so forth and so on, right? So that’s gonna be one of the, one of the pillars. And then we want to protect those assets. So we want to provide training to users. We wanna put some basic, uh, protections in place, right?
Jeff Hathcote (36:41):
You’re buying Palo Altos great. Um, that’s a certain level. Um, encryption is going to be another way to protect those things of that nature. So we have identified it and we’re protecting it, and then we’re gonna move down the road, down the down the road a little bit. And we want to be able to detect when there’s an anomaly within your infrastructure. Something’s just not right. Well, in order to know that something’s not right, you have to know what right is first, right? So that’s part of this journey, right? We know what normal is. So I’ll use h and r Block as an example, right? H and r Block does taxes, but you only see the h and r block offices opened a few months out of the year, right? So probably May through December, they’re nothing, right? But January, February, March starts kicking in.
Jeff Hathcote (37:35):
Boy, they’re, so, they know that their activity is gonna peak, so that’s normal for them. If you’ve got a standard, you know what your data looks like, you know what your network activity looks like throughout the year, but suddenly it goes crazy and you’re getting, you know, all kinds of weird stuff. Are you gonna be able to identify that? Are you gonna be able to, to detect it? Right? Well, once you do, when it, once it is detected, how do you respond to it? What do you do? Uh, well, unless you can detect it, you’re not gonna do anything and then recover from it, right? So those are the five functions of a framework, multiple frameworks out there, NIST, CIS18, I mean, just there, there’s, there’s tons of ’em. Depending upon your industry, we’ll recommend the direction to go. And we’ve got multiple folks that can help you get on the path to the implementation of that framework.
Jeff Hathcote (38:32):
But don’t go out and just start buying things. Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (39:53):
I love it. Uh, good. I hope that helps everybody. I, I love the role play. I think that gives a, that’s a real situation, that’s a real conversation that we regularly have. Uh, and then really once we started off like that, we just decide where we’re gonna go deeper, who else we gotta pull into the conversation, what the subsequent, you know, how the budget aligns, all that good stuff. So, great stuff. Well, Jeff, that wraps us up today, man. I appreciate you coming back on. We might have you back a third time.
Jeff Hathcote (40:19):
Well, I don’t know. You have to check with my agent. So,
Josh Lupresto (40:22):
Jeff Hathcote (40:38):
You gotta have your, you gotta have your porch light on.
Josh Lupresto (40:40):
That wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Listen in as we talk with Aaron Bock of Opkalla and how he went from an IT Accounting job to starting Opkalla where they solve infrastructure and technology problems. They have a deep focus around Microsoft and an in-depth understanding of the infrastructure provider landscape. We talk roadblocks, deals, and more!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. All right, everybody. Welcome. We are back on another cloud track. Excited to be here today with somebody else that has a cool mic. Also does a podcast and can talk cloud. This is, this might be like a trifecta here. So Aaron, Aaron Bock of Upcall. Thanks for coming on, man.
Aaron Bock (00:33):
Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh. Really excited for this one. That’s a sweet intro that you do.
Josh Lupresto (00:39):
Hey, I, I, I gotta try to keep up with the It Matters podcast, man. So I’m doing the best I can over here.
Aaron Bock (00:45):
We cheat. We we outsource the intro so it’s not my voice.
Josh Lupresto (00:49):
Oh, secrets. People are learning. They’re getting secrets. Fair enough. Right? We’re adding value.
Aaron Bock (00:54):
Well, I think they’d figure it out real quick. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a female’s voice right off the bat, so I’m not that good. Fair,
Josh Lupresto (01:01):
Fair, fair enough. All right, so today we’re talking about Azure. We’re talking about cloud. I, if you tuned into the first episode of this track, we got Kobe Phillips, who leads out the Telarus Cloud practice talking about what we’re doing you know, and, and what our purview on, on this is. And then we heard from one of our providers of, of their play and Azure, their modernization strategy, the different things that they can do. And now we get to the good part here where we get to hear from Aaron and, and his purview on cloud and how he approaches this. And so, Aaron, maybe if you can kick us off a little bit. I always love to hear how everybody got started in this space. Were you always destined to do this? Did you, did you stumble into this? What’s your path?
Aaron Bock (01:42):
Yeah, no, definitely not destined to do this. And it’s, it’s, it’s funny, I love to hear the story of people’s paths, how they got there. But for me personally, I went to college as a finance major. I took a job at a big four accounting for firm thinking I was doing, kind of auditing for financials. And it ended up being, it auditing, they called it risk risk assurance, which there’s no way I would’ve known that was it unless they told me. And I maybe didn’t listen
Aaron Bock (02:32):
And so at that point in my career, I switched into a sales and I was selling for a data center maintenance third party data center, maintenance company. Very small niche in a market that exists in a lot of companies back, you know, before cloud was a thing. So everyone had on-prem data centers, servers would get older, we would support them. And I think along the way, what I realized was typically tech trends, the ones that catch on, they take a little while and you hear about them for a long time. Mm-Hmm.
Aaron Bock (03:25):
And it’s like, really? Like we support on-prem servers. Like I’m, I’m really surprised to hear that, but I mean, in theory, like, yes, there’s more compute out there, but it’s, it’s consolidated at at less places. And so I think their point was the market was growing. But anyways, long story short, I, I knew what, what where I wanted to be was somewhere where the cloud was happening and where we were, we were on the cutting edge or we were on the front side of the curve. And I still think we’re on the very much the front side of cloud. I think there’s going to be a lot that changes over the next 10 years. Not sure what it is, but I still think people, especially in, depending on the part of the country you’re in, like I’m in North Carolina, and I would say we as a state are in generally in general, further behind in the cloud journey. Then like if you take a San Fran or a, a New York or a DC; they’re just much further ahead in the cloud journey in general.
Josh Lupresto (04:25):
So did you know when, when you say you, you went from IT auditing and accounting, and you said, I jumped into sales. Did, did you ever picture yourself in sales, any previous sales experience before? Or did you just go, I think I’d be good at this?
Aaron Bock (04:40):
I, I kind of thought I would be able to do it, but it was really one of those, I, I forget the, the exercise, but it was one of those kind of like assessment exercises they do. We were at training for managers and they split us up. We, we filled out some, you know, this is what your personality’s like, and of like a hundred people in the room. I was the only person standing in this one quadrant. And I asked the trainer, I said, why am I the only person there in the quadrant? And he said, well, most of the other people in your quadrant left go do sales. And I’m like,
Josh Lupresto (05:25):
Awesome. Love that. All right. So tell me about Opkalla. How did it start?
Aaron Bock (05:30):
Yeah, so we started in 2019. We, there’s three founders, myself, Jim Campbell and Bryce Olray. And then Steve Irmish joined us slightly after that. But we started really we, the original idea was, hey, we just want to be a little bit more advisory to customers in the third party maintenance space. And then we kind of stumbled across Doug Crocker, who’s now at Telarus, and he was explaining to us, you know, this is, this is all the things that we do. And it’s like, whoa, this is crazy. So we went from just this niche of third party maintenance into, okay, these are all the providers that we were supporting, we worked with. And so our whole goal is to be a trusted advisor, help customers really understand like, why are they doing things? What are they trying to do? Is there a better way?
Aaron Bock (06:22):
Let’s not just, let’s not just show you Dell or Cisco. And not to say that those OEMs are bad, by the way, because they’re not, they’re great, great technology, and I’m, I’m not a a fan of people who knock technologies or, or, or downplay, but there, what I don’t like is the bias that we would see. And so, you know, we were, we kind of started to say, look, let’s be really good to our customers. Let’s show them the popular option. Let’s show them the non-popular option, and let’s help them make that decision better, and we think we can add value along the way. And then it kind of took off from there. So we’ve had a hundred percent growth every year since 2019. And our team, yeah, our team keeps growing. So it’s, it’s great. We’re, we’re really excited to, to be here. And I mean, we still feel like we’re ground floor. We still feel like there’s a lot of opportunity that we haven’t captured. And we’re not, I won’t sit here and say, we are the best at selling cloud. It’s something we know and we’re, we’re doing more of. But there’s still, every day there’s a new tool that comes out or a new acquisition you have to pay attention to. And that’s what I think we’re gonna get into. But that’s some of the challenge with it.
Josh Lupresto (07:31):
Yeah, so true. So true. The pace right now is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And I, you know, I try to, I try to understand, geez, did I just not pay attention to it as much? And, and I think, no, I mean, it’s been, it’s been our job as technical folks to pay attention to it, the rate of change. And I have a, I have a opinion that maybe it’s the money that flowed into Silicon Valley over the last five to 10 years, a zillion products were made. And now those that are, whether they’re good or they’re bad, all these different things are sprawled into the customer’s environments. And now we have to deal with those, we have to deal with the innovations. And it’s just been, it’s been fascinating and fun to kind of see all those changes. For sure.
Aaron Bock (08:11):
Yeah. And, and you’re right, I think it, there’s not one single place where like, I think the cloud came from. It makes sense in theory. There are times where it doesn’t, but you know, you had all these startups, you had all these people like popping up in the two thousands with websites and they needed to put, you know, their websites somewhere. So they were, were hosting ’em in, what was it? Cloud then? It just wasn’t the hyperscalers we know today. Right.
Josh Lupresto (08:38):
So was your, if we flash back, I, I wanna do a little bit of a a story of where you started with cloud to where we’re at now, and we’ll get into the weeds on a, on a recent deal. But early on in cloud, when you were doing kind of the IT auditing, were, were you understanding cloud then? Was it all prem then, you know, really, where was your first forer into cloud or Azure, any of those things?
Aaron Bock (09:00):
Yeah, so I mean, we were aware of cloud before Opkalla. I mean, it was, we were kind of selling against it or you know, a couple of us were selling to basically help transition people. But I think where we, it’s a tough question because every single customer’s on a different journey. So like, I’ll give you an example. We have some customers that are traditional manufacturers here in North Carolina. They don’t want anything to do with the cloud still today. But when you start getting into that and you say, you know, what are you using for your crm? Oh, Salesforce, okay, what are you using for your payroll? Oh, you know, Paylocity or something like that. You start going through that and you, they, they just listed 10 SAS apps and you’re like, by the way, do you know that those are kind of cloud? Do you know that?
Aaron Bock (09:49):
And they’re like, well, no, not really, but they are. And so I think like as, as we continue to see that, we started to learn more and more about the cloud and then on outside of, of what we do with Telarus, we are a Microsoft CSP in house. And so we, we have the modern work licenses, which are, you know, the popular E one, E three, E five licensing that everyone kind of knows the, you know, a one if you’re an academic and non-profit. And so along the way we were getting cloud certifications as well to learn these things, try to get the PhD in Microsoft licensing as everyone says. And you know, each, each opportunity that we’ve worked, every, every job we had before, it was learning more about, well, what can you do in the cloud? Start with the why, why do people go to the cloud?
Aaron Bock (10:40):
What’s a really good use case? And if you can start to understand that and then what, what’s not a fit, you just kind of start to understand, okay, you know, this is never gonna be a fit for so and so, or this will be a really good fit for so and so, let’s go down that path with them. And I think it’s just each opportunity is wildly different with cloud, which is unique because in some of the other technology areas, you know, I hate to say this, but a phone is a phone with some features. It’s not drastically different from the use case. And so you talk about the cloud, you’re dealing with custom apps, you’re dealing with custom, you know, integrations, you’re dealing with all kinds of things that come into play that make it a little bit more unique to that customer.
Josh Lupresto (11:23):
Fair point. Let’s, let’s dive in then. Let’s say first deal, first cloud deal, right? What, what did that look like? Did it, did it look like a cloud deal right away? Was it what you were told that the problems were, you know, were they actually what they were said? You know, break that down for me.
Aaron Bock (11:40):
So I’ll give you two, I’ll give you the first one we won, and then the first one where we realized why cloud’s hard to sell.
Josh Lupresto (11:46):
Ooo. All right.
Aaron Bock (11:47):
First one that we won, the CFO and the CIO basically came together and said, we need to go to the cloud and we’re gonna go to the cloud by, I think the time was like 2021 or 2022, we need to be in the cloud. And that means we want to be in Azure. Like they knew they wanted to be an Azure. They had already talked to their Microsoft rep and, and they had done all these things. They had buy-in from the top. They knew exactly why. They knew exactly what they didn’t want to have to hire people. They wanted to get rid of their data center and turn it into more office space, pre covid. I haven’t checked in to see if they actually did that now, but they had all these reasons why going to the cloud, even if it’s more expensive, potentially was a good fit for them.
Aaron Bock (12:34):
They were gonna hire people in other states. They were bought into the cloud. They were willing to sign into long term commitments with like instances at the time. And so they were a really good fit and they knew they wanted to go to the cloud, and you don’t get those a lot. So that was kind of an easy layup, like, let’s just help you get there. Let’s do, do you need certain things managed? Do you need, you know, what resources do you need? What resources do you not need? And, and break it down. That was the first one we won. The first one we lost was a, it was a, it came from like a manager, director level in a larger organization saying, you know, I wanna start looking at people to help me get to the cloud. And, and that’s where like, now I cringe when I hear that because there’s so many things you need to qualify before you have that conversation.
Aaron Bock (13:26):
Really. Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (14:42):
Fair. so, so pro tips kind of, you know, my, one of my next questions was gonna be, what are some of the challenges you face? But let’s, let’s pick on that a little bit. I think think it’s important to help dissect it, because I think we found that too, especially as you move from SMB to mid-market and enterprise. It’s not just my one person, to your point, it’s seed level, it’s procurement, it’s technical, it’s business. What what are the pro tips that you would say? Is it, is it get alignment early or how, how do you recommend getting that alignment early? Do we just have to be more aggressive and push the agenda and say, get a yes, get a no fast?
Aaron Bock (15:19):
I, I think getting alignment and getting by in early is definitely helpful. I mean, that’s like the classic, you know, if you read any sales book about like getting, finding a qualified buyer, I don’t wanna say you, you need to just go qualify people because that’s, that’s not what we believe in. But you need to know if the per, if the company you’re talking to has a, has a reason to do this or do they understand the reasons to do it. So for example, I, I mentioned fine use cases early on when you look at the hyperscalers and if, for those that don’t know what the hyperscalers, that’s gcp, that’s Azure, that’s aws, that’s typically the three you here, there’s Oracle, there’s Alibaba, there’s a couple others early on, A really good use case for that was scalability and flexibility of compute. So take a co a customer who had a really, really, really busy peak season.
Aaron Bock (16:15):
So like we’re in the holiday season, a lot of people are shopping for the holidays. That creates a peak for a lot of retailers who needed to scale up on website compute and storage and things like that. That was a great use case for the cloud early on. So you said, well what do you do if you have a retail customer who is struggling with capacity of compute around the holidays and there’s CFOs complaining about the cost, it is to procure all this hardware that we don’t use most of the year. And the IT departments dealing with outages left and right over the holidays, they should be looking at cloud. And that’s a pretty, like, that’s a strong mission for you to say like, have you considered moving some of these applications into the hyperscalers so that you can scale up and scale down? Or now you could do that with private cloud, you could do it with private cloud, then have you considered going to private cloud so you don’t have to procure.
Aaron Bock (17:09):
And if you can get multiple people in the organization to see that value, then that that’s what buy-in is. It’s seeing the value of what you’re going to do, but it’s not, you know, hey, I just wanna look at this to look, you need to have a reason to look at it. You need to have a story and a compelling event to say, yes, we’re gonna go there. So like compelling events might be like a really big hardware refresh. That was kind of the first one. Yeah, we’ve got this big storage array that we’re paying, we paid 5 million for or 10 million for, and now we’re paying a million dollars a year in support. Would it be less to go to an OPEX model and not have the maintenance and not have the, the data center? That was kind of the early compelling event or reason to look at the cloud.
Aaron Bock (17:54):
And then there was the flexibility and the scalability. Now you have native, you know, cloud apps and you have the, the lo the geolocations of the cloud and where your workers are. So there’s a lot more compelling events now than there were. But I think understanding the reason for people to make that shift and consider it initially is, is a really good reason. Sorry, I keep saying, I see, I keep talking. But another thing in 2022, for example, we just got done, we’re almost done with 20 20 22, which is crazy this year. A big topic for CEOs everywhere has been the great resignation. Yes, you had, you had covid, you have all these people who are unhappy with employers, so people are resigning left and right. There’s more jobs open in it than ever. Well what does that cause that causes people to need support because those jobs are turning over fast. So now you’ve got, well, why don’t we look at a managed cloud offering? We never did that before, but I’m gonna look at it because the people that I do have, I want them to work on things for the business, not for running a server like I used to.
Josh Lupresto (19:01):
Yeah, I, you know, you bring up a really good point. We could, we could talk about that one for a while because that’s a hot topic. It seems like if you look at trying to sell this itto IT outsourcing person skill set, whatever as a service, either scope of work based or ongoing, continually opex selling this five, 10 years ago, people would think you’re crazy cuz they could just do it all in house. And why would they ever need an outsource now that that trend just seems to continue to go up and to the right. Whether it be I lost my Fortinet person, I lost my VMware person, I lost whatever. So I, you know, part of that I think to your point is we just have to ask that this is a new part of our discovery process of with what’s cooked in the last 12, 24 months. Have you lost great people have your abilities to do some of these projects, initiatives, application deployments, has it gone down? Can you hit those timeframes? And those are weird new questions I think to ask. You bring up a great point there.
Aaron Bock (20:00):
The o the other interesting thing and the other, you know, if you think about what’s happened, we are, we used to have exchange, which is your mail hosted on prem and Microsoft who’s driving, I think a lot of the cloud push is basically making people go to cloud licensing. So pretty much everyone is either in workspace with a, with Google or they’re in the Microsoft suite of, of licensing with office. So when you think about that at the basic, like just take like a one person business or a two person business, how do they communicate? It’s via email. That’s, that’s still a very popular medium. Where are you emailing? You’re emailing in the cloud. So that’s just a basic concept. Well now let’s start to build on this. So like, I think the struggle is, well how do I sell the cloud? I need to sell this like concept.
Aaron Bock (20:54):
No, start there. You got email in the cloud. What happens if you have an employee who’s off at you, who deletes all their emails the day they leave and you, and then walk away and you need ’em cuz you have to go into to some lawsuit with an employee because of employee law or something happens and you don’t have any of that data. What’s in the cloud? It’s safe. Well, no, it’s, it’s, it’s not being backed up there. It’s the’s things in the cloud that people don’t understand. And so when we talk cloud, I think everyone just thinks Amazon, Azure, gcp, there’s what do you back up in the cloud? How do you back up in the cloud? How should you use the cloud? Oh, you don’t sit, you don’t want to use the cloud, but you’re already using it. And so it’s just like, it kind of builds on it on on themselves.
Aaron Bock (21:46):
So, so like my point is, is that I think cloud is this like, Hey, I’m gonna sell cloud, but you can sell backup for the cloud. You can sell voice in the cloud, you can sell all these things. A funny story is we had a customer, and I’m not knocking them, I think it’s just baby basic naivety. They said to me in the opening, they said, we can’t use the cloud, we contract with the government. I said, okay, you know, it makes sense. I’ve heard of this, you know, there’s definitely things you, you probably don’t know high gcc and we don’t need to go in all those. But so we started going through, I said, you know, tell me like what do you use for email? Oh, we use Microsoft. Okay, do you, you host your on, on OnPrem? No, no, no, no, we have the Microsoft 365.
Aaron Bock (22:31):
I said, oh, okay, you’re, you’re using cloud. And they said, well no, that’s not really cloud, you know, it’s just the
Josh Lupresto (23:44):
A great, great point. I think that’s what gets me excited to wake up and do this every day because there’s moments where you think the world is modernized. IT infrastructure is at the next gen, it’s where it needs to be. And then you have these conversations about, no I don’t have any endpoint security. We’re not a target. I don’t, I don’t have anything on my endpoint. I don’t have anything that protects me and my intellectual property from walking out the door, to your point when a disgruntled employee does. And so I think there’s just, there’s so much value for us to add to help people. And I, I think we take it for granted sometimes, but what, what we have to help people understand is that we get to see so many situations and so many customer environments that bringing to bear and saying, here’s what most other people are struggling with, here’s what most other people are doing. It helps the customers wanna move in that direction. And, and I think they, they don’t wanna be the first to do anything. So the more we can encourage them and get them to see this is what others are doing and, and here’s how you can do it. Here’s how you can do it unsuccessfully, but here’s how we can help you do it successfully. Brings up a great point.
Aaron Bock (24:49):
Yeah. And, and I think like fundamentally the cloud, if you think about what it is, it’s a server that someone else is hosting or it’s compute, storage, et cetera, that someone else is hosting you, you’re not, you, you’re not. So, yes, you know, you start to get deep into AWS and some of these, you know, capabilities they have or they’re laying, layering in services. There are other things now. But at the basic level, you used to buy a server, you could go physically put a, a drive in it. You could, you could go, you know, upgrade it, you could touch it, you could feel it, it’s in a rack and you know, the, the really cold data center behind you that’s loudest can be, that’s what it was, right? If you wanted to add security to it, you would add something like an agent on the server to make it more secure.
Aaron Bock (25:38):
If you want to add, you know, backup or you wanna add storage, you’d connect it you know, to a storage array, you would do all that right back there. The difference is it’s being done by someone else now. It’s in a much bigger data center. It’s much more scaled and you just, you don’t touch it. You’re still consuming the same services. It’s just a different, it’s just a little bit of a mindset shift to say, I’m gonna opex, like I’m gonna like pay for it monthly instead of just it being back there and have to deal with it there.
Josh Lupresto (26:09):
Yeah, great point. We get to make it somebody else’s problem, right? People look at that as a benefit and not a, I want you to, I want you to make more money, be a better manager, be a better director, be a better cio, and actually get some sleep and be able to enjoy life and go through it and have things not go down and break. That’s my goal for you. Yeah,
Aaron Bock (26:28):
It’s,
Josh Lupresto (26:29):
You still have it still vm still got an IP address, all that good stuff. Alright, let’s go as we wrap this up, final couple thoughts here. I wanna walk through an example. So we talked about early on your exposure to cloud and infrastructure, but walk us through an example maybe that you walked in where you really helped somebody modernize and move that needle a little bit. What did you walk into? What did the environment look like? What my favorite part is sometimes these things just don’t look like what the people are saying. I I need this thing and reality. They need something completely different. But I’m, I’m curious from your perspective, what’s a good example that you’ve seen? Just how you’ve helped somebody transform and maybe get into the weeds and what’s the tech that they had and, and you know, how did it end up?
Aaron Bock (27:13):
Yeah, I I I’ll give two. I I like to give two examples cuz these are just so broad. We’re working on one right now. It’s a, it’s a manufacturing very traditional manufacturer. If you haven’t caught it from this episode, we have a lot of manufacturing, North Carolina. So manufacturer, really not on the cloud journey, but about two years ago, I, I really, you know, I knew the, the CIO and the, the director of IT and you know, I mentioned to them, I said, you know, acas, were, were young, we do a lot with the cloud. You know, we’re not your traditional VAR that you’ve worked with in the past. Give us a shot, let us come in, let’s talk about some things. And so we kind of sat down with them and we said, you know, what do you, what is gonna happen as over the next five years?
Aaron Bock (27:57):
And we kind of went from there, this was two years ago and we asked them, you know, SAP’s their core application, what’s gonna happen with sap? Are they, are they talking to you about like going to the cloud cuz they’re gonna start making people do it. Well not yet, but by 20 at the time it was like 20 23, 20 24, they’re gonna potentially want us to go to the cloud. Okay, great. How are you prepared to do that? So like, just that question was like, well I don’t, we’re not really prepared. Like we haven’t really thought of that. So over the last year, two, two years we’ve had, you know, different folks come in and talk to them about like the way they do cloud, right? Someone who’s uber focused on aws, someone who’s more of a hybrid provider, some other tools that are focused on cloud connectivity.
Aaron Bock (28:44):
We’ve just been bringing in different folks to kind of talk about the way they do it. Where I think they’re gonna end up is, I think they’re gonna end up with remaining on prem for the next probably cycle, which is two to three years, but getting closer cuz they’re starting to consume some of those cloud resources, shifting their mindset around like, we need to start moving to the cloud. And so like putting their, their production data center in a colo at the base of a, of a hyperscaler like that concept, I know it might be really technical for some, but it’s basically moving your data center to where an AWS or Azure or GCP data center is and connecting them so there’s lower latency. So I think they’re gonna do that and, and then keep dr. Their, their disaster recovery or, or their backup OnPrem because they still have a data center.
Aaron Bock (29:35):
I think they’re gonna do that initially. And so like while that doesn’t, you said it might not look like cloud, that sure surely doesn’t really sound like cloud. It’s the first step in the cloud journey because they know that at some point they need to be prepared to go to the cloud. So that’s an example where that’s sort of your traditional colo, that’s network and connectivity. And that’s maybe a little bit of like hybrid, like, you know, maybe managed AWS or Azure depending on where your customer sits. Yeah, that’s one. Another, I would say another example and, and I’m just gonna speak generally cause I’ve seen this multiple times. I think another success is when you have people in, we see a lot of Microsoft being a csp. So what a lot of people don’t realize is all of the funding you can get from different cloud providers who know these clouds really well.
Aaron Bock (30:28):
And so understanding like, well if I do this with like Microsoft has Power bi, which is great for data analytics, can I get funding to do things in Power BI that I want to do? Oh wait, I could get $50,000 paid for from Microsoft to do this. How do I do that? Well, you just need a partner that knows that cloud, they need to know what you’re trying to do. So I’ve seen a lot of people kind of like have an Azure skew or kind of start to play around with aws and when they really kind of take it into the next gear with their cloud journey is when they engage someone that’s an expert in that cloud. And, and that doesn’t have to be a public hyperscaler by the way, but there are really good providers that know, like AWS all in Azure, but it could also be like a hybrid cloud.
Aaron Bock (31:22):
Like, hey, let’s take some of this stuff and let’s, let’s, let’s use our resources. We’ve got beefier resources than you will pay for and then we can do this, we can put this in archive and it helps them see like, we don’t need all this equipment that we used to buy that could also be a cloud journey. And so like those two examples are not traditional, like, hey, we just moved everything and lifted and shifted like Capital One said like 10 years ago to the cloud. Those are more like, hey, we, we kind of have other other needs, let’s do it. You know, the the the most classic example is, you know, CFO or CEO comes back from a conference and says, all right, that’s it. We’re going cloud, let’s lift and shift and let’s do it and you gotta be done by the end of next year.
Aaron Bock (32:07):
Go. I mean, we do see that. I see a lot of failures with that because it’s just too forced. But you know, those are all ways people will go to the cloud. And then to me the, like the, the most common use case we’re seeing now for cloud is I don’t have enough resources or I can’t retain resources or the resources are too expensive. Like why, why host something that I could easily give to someone else or put somewhere else where like it’s one less thing that I don’t have to worry about. Yeah, great point.
Josh Lupresto (32:38):
I, and it goes back to our point. I don’t have the people to manage it. Do you want to CapEx this gear and rock it there and hire somebody that is hard to find or is gonna bounce, you know, I mean, or or you’re gonna have to lay off or who knows what the scenario’s gonna be or do you want your business to maintain no matter what. Yeah, great point. Great point. Yeah. alright, let’s, let’s let’s go crystal ball here as we wrap this up and, and kind of look to the future, right? We’re, we’re talking about, you know, 15 20% of the world is modernized into some sort of, of cloud infrastructure at this point, maybe a little more. And, and so, you know, looking at what comes next if we turn up the super nerd knob I’m, I’m reading some of the articles that are coming out of the, you know, the big AWS reinvent conference that’s happening this week.
Josh Lupresto (33:25):
There’s some predictions. There was a, a really good art article that I read out of I wanna say it was Silicon Angle, which is kind of a prediction of what you know now that, that that chassis is as CEO Linsky is, is running aws. They have some different initiatives and I think we have to look at that. I know we’re talking Azure, but we have to look at what people like this set the pace on what’s next. And so there, there seems to be a big push going forward on infrastructure as code, which is gonna change the DevOps and infrastructure management knowledge set to dev and programming and, you know, infrastructure is now JSON code, but I’m, I’m, you know, I’m curious, you know, and Azure has functions and all of these things and serverless, everybody, you know, in containers. But what’s, what’s Aaron’s prediction? What if we look out, let’s call it 12, we look out maybe 24 months. Are we continuing to help modernize because of lack of resources? Are we doing the same things because there’s so much ground left to cover anywhere you wanna take it? What’s what’s your perspective on this to the future as we wrap this?
Aaron Bock (34:29):
Yeah, I guess I’d put a disclaimer that this is just some thoughts in my opinions. This may may have no bearing on what actually happens. Couple things I would say near term are, you know, I think we hear about the cloud and you know, when you’re walking through the airport there, there’s great advertisements that makes it feel like the whole world is on a cloud and, and we’re just being left behind. The reality is what you said, 15% of people are, of companies are, are really truly using the cloud. If that, I don’t even know if that’s the, the true number that actually kind of feels high to me, but I would say from a Microsoft, let’s start from Microsoft. I think from a Microsoft perspective, they have done, whether we like it or not, an amazing job bundling packages for people to purchase.
Josh Lupresto (35:16):
Yeah, what
Aaron Bock (35:16):
Was just email, but they’ve added in security tools, phone data and analytics, governance. They’ve added in all kinds of stuff that we get for free. My prediction would be you’re gonna continue to see people either commit to the Microsoft ecosystem long term and go the Microsoft route, or you’re gonna see people commit to using the least amount possible in Microsoft and, and kind of go the other route. I don’t think either one’s right or wrong. I just think you’re gonna see more people use it. So for example, I think a very common path is if if someone’s a hundred percent OnPrem, like meaning they’re still hosting exchange OnPrem, if they can even do that anymore, move their licensing, start using cloud email, then they start using like SharePoint in one drive, which is in Azure, then they start using Azure for a little bit of storage and blob for some of the archiving.
Aaron Bock (36:16):
And then they use teams and now they’re using teams for collaboration and then they add on Power bi and then they add on Intune for management. And you just see that they start layering in the Microsoft ecosystem near term. You’re gonna see a lot more companies do that because it’s easy, it’s a single, it’s not a single skill set, but it is a Microsoft skill set. So you can hire Microsoft focused engineers, you can hire Microsoft focused people, you can engage service providers who are Microsoft focused. Consolidating into an ecosystem like that does have a lot of benefits. The con is that Microsoft, this past year raised prices hugely like 10, 15% in some cases, 26% on some mm-hmm
Aaron Bock (37:12):
And Google’s come a long way. That’s one prediction. The second prediction I think you’re gonna see is for the folks that have gone cloud and have really heavily invested, you’re gonna see a focus on security again. So security was really a big focus for like, how do I secure work from home? How do I secure this? A lot of the, you know, the breaches, they’re, they’re targeting back to the clouds. So how do I, how do I secure the cloud? That’s been happening. But what I think you’re gonna see is more investment, more investment from the hyperscalers, aws, Azure, Google. They’re gonna be spending more time and money either building or acquiring security companies for the cloud. And you’re gonna be selling add-ons in those to secure cloud environments. I think you’re gonna see more of that. On the same token, I also think you’re gonna see in the next five years a a point of like a tipping point where the whole like, I need to be a hundred percent cloud conversation starts to go away and everyone’s totally comfortable with a hybrid model and not necessarily hybrid.
Aaron Bock (38:20):
Like, I have a data center and I have public cloud. It’s, I have SaaS, I have PaaS, platform as a service, I have like certain services as a service and I have like cloud infrastructure as a service. I think you’ll see a hybrid of those and then, you know, potentially still coming back on prem for some. I just think we’re, it’s too much of a pendulum for it not to come back a little bit. And then I also think there, this is super like a political thing kind of, but like there’s, there’s some element of a monopoly when you look at these clouds Yeah, that like people we really haven’t talked about. But like if you put your entire company in Microsoft and the only way to continue adding is adding through Microsoft with no competition, I don’t know. At some point maybe there’s some type of like concern around like, I have way too much stuff with one company and if they start doing poorly in one service, like I need to pull out. I think something like that could cause a pullback from like a Microsoft or an AWS and create new competition and new like waves of like, no, I don’t wanna be big cloud. Like yeah, cloud’s the rave now, but big cloud one day might be like the, the enemy. So
Aaron Bock (39:39):
I don’t know, those are just some thoughts like long term that could happen.
Josh Lupresto (39:43):
I love it. I love getting in your brain. Good stuff. All right, man. That wraps us up. Aaron. I appreciate you coming on. Thanks for doing this buddy.
Aaron Bock (39:51):
Yeah, thanks for having me. And for those who had to listen to me for this full time,
Josh Lupresto (39:56):
Aaron Bock (40:06):
Yeah, check out the It Matters podcast hosted by Opkalla. It’s on all your favorite podcast stations, Stitcher apple, Spotify, you name it, it’s up there. We, we typically interview, you know, anyone from a CIO or to a cfo to someone focused. We actually have someone an episode coming up on cloud finops management. So check it out. I think you guys will like it.
Josh Lupresto (40:31):
Sweet. Okay, that wraps us up, my friend. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much. Aaron Bock of Opkalla. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Tune in to listen as we chat with Chad Muckenfuss, Director of Channel, from Ancero. Ancero is a leading Managed Service Provider with a core focus on all things Microsoft & Azure. We talk about licenses, infrastructure & modernization, along with how to fully uncover these types of customers. You might even hear about how not only does Chad run the channel for Ancero, but may or may not have a cattle farm…
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode. We are here, we are talking cloud, we’re talking Azure, and I’m on with my good friend Chad Muckenfuss, director of channel from Ancero. Chad, welcome on my man.
Chad Muckenfuss (00:32):
Well, thanks for having me, Josh. I’m, uh, I’m excited to talk Azure with you today.
Josh Lupresto (00:37):
Uh, we got a, we got a lot, uh, to talk about. We could, we could certainly narrow this down. But before we do that, before we get into the, the nuts and bolts, uh, I wanna talk a little bit about you. Uh, we’ll get to Ancero, but my favorite part of this whole thing is hearing everybody’s background story. So, Chad, how did you get here? Did you, did you grow up and say, I’m destined to do Azure and all that fun stuff, or what’s the course? Man?
Chad Muckenfuss (00:59):
No, it’s, it’s a windy path for sure. Um, so, uh, born and raised in the greater Philadelphia area in Southern New Jersey. Um, I, uh, I went to Temple University. My degree is in telecommunications and new technologies. Um, one of the few universities that offered that back in the day. Um, showing my age a little bit with that, but, uh, regardless, I’ve always liked technology, uh, always liked to play in that world. Um, but it, my career post-college did not take me right to that place. Um, I went, uh, and worked for, um, a children’s video company as a national marketer right outta college. Uh, traveled the whole US worked, um, primarily in retail stores and all that type of thing. And then from there, um, I started a, um, a, an auto franchise, uh, when General Motors bought Hummer. Um, I started a Hummer franchise in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and ran that for about six years.
Chad Muckenfuss (01:55):
And then finally transitioned into the technology space, um, back when T1s were still, uh, in use and all that regular fund stuff. And, uh, just have grown. Um, always worked in the channel, either, um, on the partner agent side or on, um, on the channel side for, uh, for the different suppliers and really, really like the channel. Have always liked the channel, um, but have been challenged host, uh, post telecom to really grow in cloud. So for the past, uh, three to five years, been focused on that, really digging into it, um, aligning myself with, with some people that are very knowledgeable, uh, like yourself and the whole team there that really understand the cloud and where it’s going and what it’s doing. Um, and hopefully on that trajectory of, of where it’s gonna go in the next five years and, and how, you know, currently we can help some, uh, some partners and everything learn how to leverage the cloud.
Chad Muckenfuss (02:53):
It’s, it’s a difficult transition for a lot of the partners, and that’s one of the key things I think we’ll touch on today. And as a side note, um, outside of my day job here, I, I own and operate a cattle farm. And, um, so, so something a little bit, uh, different, uh, born and raised, I’m third generation, uh, purchased a family farm about, uh, 16 years ago. And so, uh, we raise currently about between 30 and 40 head of beef cattle. Um, I have, uh, pigs. So we have 10 pigs now and about 150 chickens for eggs. And, um, so I leave work every day and, and go home and, and play farmer for, uh, for my free time. So that’s one of those, uh, fun things that, uh, that everybody likes to chat about, uh, more than technology, a lot of times,
Josh Lupresto (03:41):
Chad Muckenfuss (03:44):
Exactly.
Josh Lupresto (03:45):
I just love it cuz it’s something completely different from this where you probably get to unplug and Yes. Slow it down.
Chad Muckenfuss (03:52):
Yep. Very much so. Very much so. So that’s kind of my life in a nutshell. I have, uh, you know, I’m married, have two, two kids, 14 year old daughter Emma, 12 year old son, Alex. Um, so between soccer and karate and all the fun things that parents do these days, uh, that’s, that’s my world.
Josh Lupresto (04:08):
Love it. Good stuff. Uh, it’s funny you mentioned the, the Hummer. Uh, you know, I grew up in the Midwest. Uh, my dad for about 32 years, uh, worked at a place called AM General. And so their bread, their bread and butter was the military H one contracts.
Chad Muckenfuss (04:25):
I spent so much time in Mishawaka, Indiana and South Bend, Indiana at the plants. Um, so we could, we could chat about all the restaurants and all of that fun stuff. So That’s funny. So AM general was where I started because, uh, general Motors did not have, uh, everything spun up yet. So I flew out and spent months at the factory out there learning, driving off road at the, at the proven grounds and all that kind of stuff. So, yep. Spent a lot of time out there.
Josh Lupresto (04:52):
That’s funny. Now, one, one slightly different life change. I had an opportunity to go work in one of those factories with my dad when I think when the H two was coming out. Yep. And I just went, ah, I just, I think I wanna go a different direction. I didn’t really know what that direction was or where, I didn’t know the whole, you know, Utah thing that wasn’t in the cards yet, but, uh, but no, he was there. Gosh. Yeah. That’s so funny. He was there for a long time. Crazy.
Chad Muckenfuss (05:14):
Yeah. That, that was a great company back in the day. Um, really closeknit group of people. Got to know a lot of them as friends and yeah. Really, really cool company.
Josh Lupresto (05:24):
Crazy. All right, well, we’ll come back to that. Sure. This is, this is all natural right here. Good stuff. Yeah. All right. Uh, let’s, so let’s fast forward now. Let’s talk, and Sarah, let’s talk cloud. For anybody that’s listening to this, that, that doesn’t know who is, and Sarah, what are you guys? Gimme the spiel.
Chad Muckenfuss (05:43):
Sure. So Ancero is a 20 plus year company. Um, we’ve been in business started before MSP and CSP were even words or acronyms or anything like that, was a traditional just IT vendor that would come in, do break, fix, server, spin up, all that type of thing back in the day. And now, uh, we are a true MSP cloud service provider. We are strictly a Microsoft shop. So all we do is Microsoft and Azure Cloud. We bundle, and we’ll get into this I’m sure a little bit later here, but we, we bundle everything together to make it easy for the consumer, um, and the partner to sell and be able to present. But one of the key things that we do is we are intimately involved in the fact finding. So we come alongside the partner, we dig in, we figure out what the customer has, um, what do they need, where are they going, and spend a lot of time up front site surveys, all of that ahead of time to figure out what is the solution that’s gonna work best for this, for this, uh, customer And partners really like that because it takes a lot of the pressure off of them.
Chad Muckenfuss (06:51):
It’s not a spreadsheet that they’ve gotta check a bunch of things off. They, they come to us because they know we can get into those sticky situations, unwind them, and do a great job of getting their customer up and online and billing, which means recurring revenue, which means everybody’s happy at that point.
Josh Lupresto (07:09):
And I, it’s, it’s such a critical weapon too. I mean, the title of this podcast is, so you’re in Azure, you know what now? And I think what, what we’re often coming into from an opportunity perspective is let’s, let’s say not cloud for a second, let’s just say anything. Am I walking into a technology that I’m gonna have to replace? Am I walking into a technology that they’ve already spent a bunch of money in and they just need to make it better? And so I, I think you guys are in such a great spot where you, you make it really easy to understand exactly what you do, exactly, where you focus on and the customers. It, I don’t think you see a lot of people that are, well, we’re thinking about going, they’re already there. And now just based on the timeline of what’s transpired and the economy and all that stuff in the last 36 months, people need help. And I think you guys make it really easy to understand. Great. Stay there. We’ll help you, to your point, I think you said, unwind this, uh, and figure out how to get where you wanna go.
Chad Muckenfuss (08:03):
Yeah, exactly. And, and you’re, you’re right on with that. But a lot of people have begun to make that change, transition to the cloud regardless of what the brand of the cloud is that they’re using, aws, Azure, et cetera. A lot of them have different departments that, that use their company credit cards and spin up all kinds of different servers and forget that they’re there. Uh, it’s, it’s endless what
Josh Lupresto (09:23):
So your, your role there as director of channel, do you, do you find that are, are people, do they know, is this gonna be a one time, so w based engagement, do they know right away it’s gonna be forever recurring, you know, supplementing the workforce? What are you kind of seeing in that trend?
Chad Muckenfuss (09:42):
So I’m seeing a lot of companies that really don’t know what they have, um, whether specific to your initial point in the cloud, Hey, we’ve got Joss on the server up to try something. Not sure if it’s still there or not. We get these bills, here’s a pile of information, don’t know what’s, what’s really going on. Can you help? We’re spending, pick a number, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, $10,000 a month and up. And we really don’t know what we have. Um, we we’re, uh, Telarus partner has us in a university right now. Each one of the, the parts of the university has different cloud services all over the place. They spin stuff up for a specific project for a class one semester, forget it’s there, but it’s still billing and still ongoing years later, they’re still paying for servers. So that type of thing we get brought into, look at it, when’s the last, you know, last time it was used, what was it for?
Chad Muckenfuss (10:38):
Does anybody know? It’s really all fact finding and then scaling it down, and there’s huge savings and huge benefits to figuring that out. A lot of times, again, back to your original point, we get engaged maybe as a, as just a one time. So w go in, look at something, Hey, we need to do X, we go in, we look at X, and that opens the doors to Y and Z and the rest of it. And all of a sudden it becomes, oh, well, can you look at this? Can you look at that? And one of the things that we do really, really well is we don’t want oust the IT staff. We’re not looking to get rid of an IT director. We’re not looking to replace them. We come alongside of them, wrap ourselves around and fill in all the gaps. There’s so many gaps when it comes to these situations that it’s, it’s a necessity to come alongside of them and help them, because everybody, you can’t know everything about this world. The change is too fast.
Josh Lupresto (11:33):
Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of what we’re sort to see is, hey, I’ve got this environment, uh, can you maybe help me build it, modernize it, and then maybe gimme the keys back, but be there if I need you, kind of this pile light type service. Exactly. So I think that’s where, that’s where you guys are nice to be flexible in. Yeah. If you want us to build it and give it back to you, great. If you want us to build it and completely manage it, great. Uh, you need whatever
Chad Muckenfuss (11:55):
Josh Lupresto (12:43):
What would you say, I mean, you’ve, you’ve learned a lot doing this and seeing a lot of different environments, and we’re gonna get into innovation, and we’re gonna get into a specific, you know, deal and things like that. But just backing it up, I mean, partners listening to this, what what would you say that you’ve learned or what’s been the most helpful for you throughout the years with this
Chad Muckenfuss (13:03):
Josh Lupresto (14:01):
Love it. Good advice. Stay curious. Mm-hmm.
Chad Muckenfuss (14:39):
So, um, we have inside, it’s, it’s an interesting company from the top down. So, um, Randy, who heads up is, uh, oversees our engineering team, really fosters that curiosity that you just mentioned in the last question. Uh, with, with the team of engineers. They are a, a group of people that really dig in. They, they learn, but they take the ownership of learning what the new technologies are themselves too. And then they get together and they talk about it. I mean, the biggest thing, and it hasn’t changed regardless of technology, is communication. Hey, I saw this. Send an email out to the group of a quick snapshot. And, you know, I have a couple of notes here too, of things that we’ll talk about in a little bit that wow, you know, growth of the cloud over the next five years. What Gartner’s saying about that, all those things.
Chad Muckenfuss (15:26):
You see it, you take a snapshot of it, you send it off, you have a discussion over it. That’s really how in the most part, people learn and stay on top of it. From a regulatory standpoint, and we didn’t touch on this yet, but, but Ancero is SOC two, type two certified. We have a lot of of customers that, um, are in the regulatory world, and they need that, whether it’s HIPAA compliance, whether it’s other compliance driven, um, industries. So we’re, we’re kind of mandated to stay on top of some of the new technologies to stay ahead of the curve and, and be that, uh, person that can come to the forefront and say, Hey, this is coming down the pike from, from this government entity or this, uh, governing, uh, organization. You need to be aware of it and you need to update or you need to change, or whatever the messaging needs to be at that point.
Josh Lupresto (16:17):
Good. Uh, let’s talk about differentiators, right? If, if a partner looks at you and has a couple other options for Azure, for Microsoft, for msp, what do you want? I mean, how would you describe, here’s how we’re different. Uh, I know you’ve talked about being isolated to Azure. I don’t know if there’s any other OEMs that you wanna mention that you have proficiencies in, or just how do you speak to that, uh, that technology, that subset differentiators, things like that?
Chad Muckenfuss (16:43):
Well, I’ll talk to the Azure piece first. Um, I think one of the, one of the interesting things with Azure and what we’ve done, our, our secret sauce, if you wanna call it that, is, um, our creativity within Azure. Azure provides a uniform platform for everybody. And it’s how you utilize that and how you bring that in to have it have something unique for yourself, build that out, something unique for Ancero. And what we’ve done is, uh, we’ve done just that. So we’ve, we’ve leveraged automation, we’ve leveraged, um, our knowledge base internally, and I’m not gonna get into the specifics, but, um, we’ve leveraged it to a point where we can bring, uh, Azure to even the SMB world if necessary and, and bring it to a cost effective per user model that not only is the Azure portion of a desktop as a service or the infrastructure aspect of things, but it’s also bundling together the msp um, it’s bundling together, um, the AV and EDR and all the rest of it for on a per user basis that really makes it attractive to, to the end customer. And, and there’s, there’s frankly plenty of margin in it too, um, for, for the rest of us here that are, that are selling it and providing the services as well. So it’s, it’s really a unique, um, unique offering that we bring to the table. And again, it’s purely based around the creativity of, Hey, here’s your box, what are you gonna do with it?
Josh Lupresto (18:13):
Got it. All right. Let’s get into the weeds. Let’s nerd out. Let’s get our propeller hats on. Whatever it is. Uh, so let’s, let’s talk about an example. What, what I loved, and you mentioned it, and it seems like this is always the goodness when, when we get to be involved is somebody comes to us and says, Hey, I have this thing, uh, who do you have that does this? And we as engineers go, oh, but I have 84 questions. There’s definitely so much more here that nobody even realizes. So I’m curious of an example that you have, uh, talk to us about something that you walked into, what were you told it would be? And then really what were all the problems and, you know, and ultimately the outcome. What, what, what, how did we get where we needed to go?
Chad Muckenfuss (18:55):
Sure. So, um, one of the examples, it’s a logistics company, um, in the southeastern part of the us They came, they were having all kinds of issues, um, trouble with some of their applications, trouble with some of that partner brought ’em into us. We start talking with them and begin that process of uncovering what’s going on. Come to find out there’s no firewall. They have no firewall on site. They’re using, they’re using the Comcast modem or spectrum modem or whatever it is. And oh, that’s our firewall. They are contracted with an msp. So the MSP doesn’t have anything. Yes, exactly.
Josh Lupresto (19:32):
Schmill. That’s what I
Chad Muckenfuss (19:33):
Say. Exactly. Now you don’t need it. Forget about it.
Chad Muckenfuss (20:21):
So we do all of that work for firewalls. Um, not a problem. So we settled on a firewall for them, got them set up with that, and then begun to move them, transition them out of, it was an AWS cloud instance that was shared and into our Azure. Um, got them spun up, got them, their tenant, moved everything over, and then started to clean up a lot of the software issues that they were having because of Misconfigurations and all of that licensing. We took over all their licensing at that point. Uh, uh, they were using Microsoft Office licensing was all over the place, E one s to E five s, and it was a mess and cleaned all that up for them. What it comes down to a lot of times, and, and it wasn’t a huge company, um, you know, probably 30, 40, maybe 50 users on it, a pretty average company from our standpoint.
Chad Muckenfuss (21:14):
What we found is that between MSP cloud services, maybe some infrastructure, that type of thing, if you add all of that up, the antivirus, um, backup and recovery, all that kind of thing, it usually works out to about 200, $250 a user on average almost every time in that SMB to, to mid-market company, that 500 employees and less, it’s always about that price. We come in between a hundred and 150, depending on what flavor they want per user, includes all of that. And if they want unlimited onsite, then we can roll that at the higher end of things too. And it was a win. They saved a significant amount of money, got it all cleaned up, and are still, you know, two years later, are still a great, great customer of ours with our business to us, which the partner gets tagged on, even though they didn’t even do anything. And, you know, it’s, it’s love it, it’s great. That’s how, that’s how we operate. And one key thing I forgot to mention in there earlier, we’re a hundred percent channel. We have no direct, never had direct, we’ve been a hundred percent channel from day one. So that’s, that’s another unique thing for us in the market
Josh Lupresto (22:22):
Too. Love it. Good answer. Good answer. Partners love to hear that stuff. Um, yeah,
Chad Muckenfuss (22:26):
I’ve got more. I’ve got more. If you wanna hear more, I’ve got other, other examples that, hey,
Josh Lupresto (22:31):
Uh, look, I, that’s what I want. That’s what I wanna get out of this, right? I want, I want partners that are listening to this of different situations, different environments, different things, different problems. Uh, I’m happy if you, if you want to throw maybe something that’s, that’s different, um, out there that people that you stumbled into.
Chad Muckenfuss (22:45):
Here’s a, here’s a good one. Um, it’s a, a larger nonprofit in the northeast here. Um, they deal specifically with homeless issues. Uh, they, they put housing together for homeless, uh, and we were brought in their IT director was, was on his, on his way out, essentially was out the door. Um, and they needed, they knew they needed to clean things up. Their infrastructure was over 12 years old, 26 servers, OnPrem. Nice. Um, they, they were
Chad Muckenfuss (23:40):
We, we were one of three that the partner brought in one of three MSP CSPs that were brought in. We were the only one that talked about cloud to them. The other two wanted to replace the servers with on-prem servers, all that type of thing. We got their attention by talking cloud to the point where the CFO came to us and said, with his financials blacked out in certain sections and said, what is this gonna look like if we do cloud? I need to sit down and have a real conversation. What does this look like for us? We’re not used to this. We’re not used to a monthly recurring, we’re not used to any of that type of thing. We sit down, we outline it for them, we go through a top to bottom and we save them 20, over $20,000 a month in savings, and it’s a great deal.
Chad Muckenfuss (24:29):
And they love us to death. And we took those 26 OnPrem servers to six cloud servers. So again, we talk, we talk about cloud sprawl and what that looks like. It was the same thing with them, except it was OnPrem. It was, it was server sprawl. Again, very common, especially in the nonprofit world. We do a lot with nonprofits all over the country, and we donate a lot to, to those. We donate time, we donate equipment if it’s available. Uh, this, this one specifically, they needed monitors and we updated all the monitors in our knocks. So we donated all the monitors that were, ah, a couple years old. We put all them out, um, in, in their facilities and all that type of thing. So again, we get that giving back to the community is a key part of, of being a good business too, regardless of where that community may be in the country. So,
Josh Lupresto (25:19):
Nice.
Chad Muckenfuss (25:20):
Let’s, that was a great one. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (25:22):
All right. So let’s see. I’m a partner. I’ve listened to this 20, 25 minutes jacked up and ready to sell Azure. Maybe I’ve not sold Azure Cloud infrastructure before. What is my, is it three, four questions? What’s my talk track? Because I don’t know if my customers in my base need this, have this, but if you’re me and you wanna go back to those customers that I’ve sold some things to, what do I say?
Chad Muckenfuss (25:50):
Are you using computers in your day to day business? I mean, that’s, that’s an opener.
Chad Muckenfuss (26:45):
Here’s a spreadsheet. You know, look, here’s three options. I’ll save you X amount. Mm-hmm.
Chad Muckenfuss (27:33):
But again, hey, what, what do you do in day to day? Do you use Microsoft Office? Do you use any cloud based apps? Do you have, um, maybe a server in the cloud or one on premise? What do you do for, for backup and recovery? How are you? Cybersecurity is a great door opener these days too. How are you protecting your network? Do you know? Most cases, I don’t know. I’ve got John and it that handles that. Let me get him on a call with you. Maybe we can talk about it. So again, those, those key factors of what do you do every day and are you protected, are probably the two key ones, I would say to open the door.
Josh Lupresto (28:08):
Good, good stuff. I like those. I love questions. Uh, let’s go final thoughts here. So as you look, we talked about innovation. We talked about, you know, moving people from OnPrem to a little bit of VMs to the next level of, of cloud and infrastructure. What’s your, if we just look out a little bit, look out, 12, 24 months, anything different, you want the partners to be prepared for, you know, what are the trends or what would you advise us on? If you look in your crystal ball,
Chad Muckenfuss (28:35):
Look at that optimization side of things. Um, I’m, I’m gonna read this so I get this right here, but public, this is from Gartner Public Cloud market to hit nearly 600 billion in 2023. That means that, to your point, the cloud’s been adopted. It’s, it’s in regular use every day by almost every company out there. So guess what? It’s bloated. There’s plenty of places to trim it down. Start looking at cloud optimization. Start having that conversation or asking that question of, Hey, what stuff do you use in the cloud? What applications are you using? Are they cloud based still? Are you, you know, are you interacting with customers not only from a computer anymore, but off of your cell phone? What are you doing? How is that look? What are you doing to communicate to your customers? All of that revolves around the cloud. And all of that opens the door for opportunity to talk about, Hey, guess what? We can probably trim that down. When’s the last time somebody looked at it? Oh, nobody’s looked at it. Well, great. Let’s, let’s dig into that a little bit and, and optimize it, make it work better for you.
Josh Lupresto (29:39):
Good stuff. All right, Chad, that wraps us up for today, man. That’s, this is good stuff. We covered a lot of good ground, a lot of good questions. I, I really appreciate you coming on, buddy.
Chad Muckenfuss (29:48):
No, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much,
Josh Lupresto (29:49):
Josh. All right. Chad Muckenfuss, director of channel from Ancero. Chad, thanks so much. Until next time, we’re outta here, everybody. I’m your host, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telrus. Tune in next week as we start talking to partners about how these deals have worked in Azure.
Buckle up as we talk Microsoft Azure and cloud strategy with Koby Phillips, leader for the Telarus Cloud Practice. If you have customer moving or considering a move to Azure, you'll want to listen in. We dissect trends around key business drivers along with when a technical conversation works and when a business outcomes conversation makes more sense!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Today we're here in studio with Koby Phillips, VP of the Cloud Practice. We're back on season two and we're talking about Azure. So we're, we're moving to Azure. We've made the move. Where do we go from there? Koby, welcome. Thanks for agreeing to come on and do this again with me again.
Koby Phillips (00:39):
Yeah, man, I appreciate you having me. It's always great to be your 19th guest of the year,
Josh Lupresto (00:43):
. So more about you. I want to hear a little bit about your background. Refresh us, how did you get here? Your path?
Koby Phillips (00:52):
Yes so VP of cloud now, right? So super, super straightforward path to get here. Started off in Telco worked at Telarus, and then a data center, and then now VP at Cloud. So, totally makes sense, but no, in all reality, what, what's happened is I started off at a little clec Integra left there, went to TW, got gobbled at by level three moved over started as an spdm here at Telarus a few years back. Moved into an RVP role for exiting the company for a bit and went to work at Equinex data center provider. That really opened in my eyes to a lot of things. It set at a lot of the center of a lot of technology. You see a lot of you know, the on ramps to get to Azure, to get to aws, all reside within there.
Koby Phillips (01:41):
And so there's a lot of communication, a lot of ecosystem discussions, and it made a lot of sense to come back knowing the channel community and then knowing, you know, where we wanted to go to come back and really help build out this cloud practice. It was real interesting when we started it, right? 2020 January. So that was a really good time to build something out. Why not? The, the original strategy was really to go out and meet with a bunch of partners, do a bunch of, you know, academies and shows, and we all know how that turned out. Mm-Hmm. . So we, we pivoted, we did a lot of digital education and have we worked through it. What we really started to build is an impressive entire practice, right? It was kind of, you know, utilizing a couple of the engineers at, at the beginning going out and doing a bunch of deals. Then we have architects, we have engineers that are certified across the board. I would, you know, put up that team against anybody in the industry. And what we've been able to focus on is extending out, you know, where we're going, what products are available, and really start to work on the business, not just in the business as much. And we've seen a tremendous growth in partner participation as well as the RC component, which are both, you know, tremendous successes so far.
Josh Lupresto (03:02):
All important for sure. Give us maybe an example. Hit us with something here. I mean, you see a lot of things. We see a lot of deals, we have a lot of conversations. I'd like to hear something from you. I mean, we're talking about Azure people that have already made a little bit of a move, but gimme something that you've seen a mistake that people have made something out there where, you know, whether that was a business decision, a technical decision, just what are you seeing?
Koby Phillips (03:26):
I can give you a combination of both.
Listen to the powerhouse team of Brandon Ivey and Christoph Uhlig from Evok Technologies. They live and breathe cloud & security sales. Being uniquely positioned to understand what a customer is going through, they talk modernization, augmenting teams, and the struggles they help customers overcome.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:16):
Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, and this is the Next Level BizTech podcast. So today we are actually wrapping up the first series in season two, and we're talking about managed services and how we're solving this tech talent issue that we got going on with security and the broader technology landscape. So if you tuned in on the first episode, you heard Jason Stein and he talked about what Telarus is doing overall from the practice and how we go to market and what we're seeing and the trends and things like that. And then we had one of our great suppliers on where, where Thrive came on and talked about all the things from a technical perspective, their products, where they're fitting, how they go to market with those differentiators, all that good stuff. But today we get to hear from what I think is, is really critical. We get to hear from the partner's perspective. So I got some good friends of mine. We've been spending a lot of time together lately. We got Brandon Ivey and Christoph Uhlig from EVOK Technologies, gents. Brandon, welcome.
Brandon Ivey (01:12):
Thanks for having us, Josh. It's really great to be here.
Josh Lupresto (01:17):
All right, so let's kick this off. Brandon, I'm gonna come to you first here. I I, you know, part of my favorite story is how do you, how do you get started? Everybody has a different path. Some people super linear, some people do crazy windy stuff and end up in this world. I'm curious to hear how you guys get started in this.
Brandon Ivey (01:38):
Absolutely. so it's kind of interesting. I think Christoph and I both have similar backgrounds and kind of went through similar trials and tribulations, if you will, through our career path. We both started out in entry level sales jobs coming outta college, worked up the corporate ladder, led sales teams, became, you know, directors or VPs and led led to overall go to market strategies and, and new logo acquisition sales. And you know, interesting enough, neither one of us really wanted to be in management roles any longer. And we found ourselves starting at a cloud company on the same day in the same role. And what was interesting enough for, for, at least from my perspective, is that you know, we kind of hit it off from the get go. I think Christoph may have had a difference of opinion, but he was like, Hey, I want to be aligned with that guy.
Brandon Ivey (02:28):
He seems competitive. And we fed off of that. And so what we did to begin with was we started interviewing all of the top reps at the organization trying to figure out what was the secret sauce to be successful, right? And long story short, most of them didn't have a lot of positive feedback. It was, you know, if you got lucky enough to be tagged to that right account that was growing, et cetera, et cetera then you had some success. So we kind of stumbled and went through some, some different challenges the first few months at that cloud company. And and then we realized we needed a force multiplier. And I had some little exposure to what the channel ecosystem was more from a, more, from a competitive standpoint based on where I was when I was leading a sales team, There was a, a channel.
Brandon Ivey (03:18):
And, and so we introduced that. We started working with some regional players and we started integrating that into our go to market s...
Hear Chris discuss how his winding path went from restaurants and management to Security and Innovation. Join us as Chris Moore, VP of Solutions Architecture for Thrive lays out the key problems facing customers in the midst of this massive tech talent shortage. Thrive has tons of tools, but more importantly, the talent to manage just about any customer environment while modernizing and augmenting whatever technology they might run up against.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hi everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, and today we are joined by a good man, Chris Moore, VP of Solution Architecture for Thrive. Chris, thanks for jumping on with me, man.
Chris Moore (00:28):
Josh, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Josh Lupresto (00:31):
So, title today we're talking about, you know, in this managed services world, but more importantly we're laying a claim. We're saying it's really hard and it's real, the talent shortage in technology, you know, in security in cloud, all of these things, right? So, so we're gonna get to that. I'm excited to kind of hear, obviously you guys have a lot of incredible solutions around that, and we'll get into that as we go. And we're gonna try to answer this. Now, more importantly, though, I wanna hear about your background. You know, if, look, if you've had a, you've had a great linear path and you knew exactly what you wanted to be your entire life, kudos to you. But if you took some weird, windy path and you, you know, you used to train goldfish or whatever, that's okay too. So, first of all, tell me about your background, Chris, let everybody know kind of how you got here.
Chris Moore (01:18):
Absolutely. Thanks Josh. So, as a kid my dad brought home this lovely IBM computer, and I turned on the monitor. I was like, What the heck is this? I'm looking at, And there was a five and a quarter inch floppy sitting next to it, and I plugged it in the 28 discs or whatever it was to get it Lotus 1, 2, 3 loaded up. Then the next evolution came. I was like, Oh, we can put this modem in it and I can get Prodigy loaded up and everything's good. And then as I progressed through my childhood I didn't honestly really play that much for the computers. I got sucked into working at restaurants and washing dishes and helping the bartenders and all that good stuff. And then I realized when I went to college, I wanted to go get my restaurant resort management degree.
Chris Moore (02:07):
So that's what I started off down that path. And then right around that time is right when the the CD writers came out where you could burn your own music onto, yeah, CDs. And they were all running by a parallel port, and you expect hundreds and thousands of dollars on CDs that never burnt correctly, and you threw 'em out. And it was right around that point in time where I decided actually, I want to go do something with computers for a career. So I went down and saw my counselor, said, Hey, I wanna change majors. And she looked at me and she goes, Well, if you wanna be here for three more years, and I had about 18 months left, right? So she goes, If you wanna be here for three more years, then you can change majors. And I looked at her and said, Nope, I'll get my degree, and then I'll go do what I want to do. So I did, and ironically, my first job out of college was working at a national restaurant chain on their help desk.
Josh Lupresto (03:05):
Ah.
Chris Moore (03:06):
So from there, I did help desk support. I went out to restaurants, pulled CAT5 cable, redid their POS systems, and kind of terminated everything you know, at two o'clock in the morning after the restaurant had closed, and then came back in the next morning and trained the...
Tune in as we learn how Jason Stein went from theology to bartending and ultimately landed on Security! Hear him discuss the key issues facing most customers right now in security and what you can do to get in front of them.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto (00:19):
Welcome!Excited to be back. We are here it is season two. It, you know, we're, we're diving in, we've got so much technology to talk about, but today we're kicking it off with managed services and we're talking about something near and dear. The technology landscape has changed and we got a talent shortage out there. This manifests itself everywhere, but today specifically, we're talking about security. So we're back kicking off season two with the man, the myth, the legend. Jason Stein, head of the security practice at Telarus. Jason, thanks for agreeing to come back again.
Jason Stein (00:52):
Thanks for having me. What's going on?
Josh Lupresto (00:55):
Oh, we live the dream. Man, where do we, where do we kick this off? So if anybody goes back and listens to season one, we talked about your background where you thought you were gonna be a practicing theologian and then you maybe were a bartender. So you gotta go back and listen to that story. We're not gonna give it away again. Today we're gonna talk a little bit about what's the problem, How did we get here, Why is this such a big deal?
Jason Stein (01:24):
So when you think about the talent shortage, it's massive in the industry right now. There's just not enough resources that are focused on security. Security's kind of become a hot topic over the last 10 years since I think the target compromise. And so we've tried to escalate and get people accelerated into the security world, but there's just not enough people. So there's 2.7 million jobs available. So by the time he finally finds somebody, that guy's got 10 other job offers. So if he doesn't like the vision, the direction, the budget, he's just gonna leave. Or he is gonna implement all of his security measures and then go to the next organization. So we see a lot of companies not sure what to do. So they're coming to us and we're actually helping them with a virtual chief security officer. We're coming in with a SOC approach, a security operation center, and giving them a team of people that are experts that you don't have to worry about turnover. If you do find one security person, chances are you can't staff at 24 by seven, cuz you need six to nine to even remotely be able to function properly.
Josh Lupresto (02:27):
Well, it seems like if, if we look at, since the last time we've talked, right, it's been a little while and, and it seems like, you know, the security people were hard to find before. I mean, we can't even find people now. Customers can't find people to manage an end device, endpoint security, the soc, the sim, any of that stuff. What has anything changed that has made you more optimistic that this talent shortage is gonna magically fix itself in the next 12 to 18 months? Or what's your perspective there?
Jason Stein (02:55):
Well, if you think about it, the technology just keeps changing as fast as we get, get people ramped up on the current technology, it changes overnight. 75% of CIO CTOs and CISOs say they want new innovative technology to help protect their organization. So how are you gonna get new innovative technology and yet find somebody who's up to speed on that new technology? So it, I'm optimistic that people will get caught up to the technology that we have today, but here in two years, think about all the technology that's changed over the last three years with zero Trust and sassy and protecting on the edge, and then MDR and now XDR.
This week we finish exploring Telecom Expense Management, with special guest Paige Clancy, CEO of Link121.
This week we continue to explore Telecom Expense Management, with special guest Jordan Philip, Sales Engineer at brightfin.
Automated Transcription:
Josh Lupresto (00:02):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, VP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level Biztech. Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP here at Telarus. And this is the Next Level Biztech podcast. So we're getting towards the end of season one here on the podcast, and we're kicking this final session off with telecom expense management. So today we've got on Jordan Philip of Brightfin, who's got a cool engineering and, and partner success background. Jordan, appreciate you being on. Thanks for coming on, man.
Jordan Philip (00:55):
No, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Josh Lupresto (00:57):
So, so Jordan, I I love to hear everybody's background, where they started, how they got into this space. Why don't you just kick us off. Have you always been in tech? Did you know you wanted to do tech? You know, what's your path getting up to this point? And then go into a little bit about your role now.
Jordan Philip (01:11):
Sure, yeah. Okay. so no, I didn't actually always know I wanted to be in tech. I was obsessed with airplanes, honestly, when I grew up and never really saw that as a, as a, a path forward. So, out of high school, I attended a University of Colorado with a concentration on pre-med. This is never my passion, but I couldn't figure out what I, what I wanted to do when I grew up. So I had some doctors in my family, so I figured I'd just go for it. It, it wasn't good and I was miserable. So I kind of moved over to my passion. I got through flight school between Emry Brittle and airs sorry, asu through all that huge expense and realized I didn't wanna fly for a living. So it's still a passion, but it's not really something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Jordan Philip (01:56):
So I still fly general aviation from time to time, like little puddle jumpers just to kind of feed my inner child. So I left there and pursued one of my other passions. Cuz as a kid I was always taking apart computers and trying to figure out what was inside and what kind of made them tick, right? So moved into tech and specifically computer and home theater systems. So I started my own IT consulting business in 2006. I was 23 at the time. Shortly thereafter I moved back to Denver where I'd been since 96. And I kind of got hooked up with Mobile Solutions which you'll find out later, was one of the feeder companies into Brightfin during the three-way merger that's kind of existed over the last three years. So I, I was a sys admin for them from 2008 until 2015 through my consulting business.
Jordan Philip (02:45):
And at that time I never really understood why such a company existed, a telecom expense management company. I was just kind of awestruck at that, like that there's actually a need for that type of service. So in 2014 the CEO kind of took me golfing and attempted to take me off the market and he offered me a job with their sales team. The sales team was growing over there and they wanted to kinda have somebody come in and normalize the sales process. They needed a technically minded person like me to deliver sales demonstration and overall offer presale support. I took the role in early 2015, kind of made 'em sweat a little bit but I still keep a couple of clients on the side even to this day. Then until 2022 or so, I filled roles like sys admin uem, mdm administrator, Director of Logistics solution architects. So there were a lot of hats on my desk, honestly which kept it really interesting cuz to be honest with you, te as a whole is, it's a little dry. It's not the most exciting sales demonst
Josh Lupresto (03:49):
You're ever gonna no
Jordan Philip (03:51):
. It is like, oh,
This week we dive into Telecom Expense Management (TEM), with special guest Jason Kaufman, Sales Engineer, Southeast of Telarus.
Automated Transcript:
Josh Lupresto (00:02):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level Biztech.
Josh Lupresto (00:30):
Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering for Telarus. And this is the Next Level Biztech podcast. So today we are actually wrapping up our first part of the track for the end of season one. We're back, we're talking about telecom, we're talking about expense management, and we have the amazing Jason Kaufman, who is our southeast sales engineer at Telarus, but also part-time moonlighting as mobility, solution architect, IoT, all that good stuff. But before we let him introduce himself again today's a special episode because this is our first time having a return guest. So Kaufman, welcome back my man.
Jason Kaufman (01:10):
Thanks Josh. You know what they say? Fool me once. Shame on you, fool me twice. You get the gist, but I really appreciate you having me back on here. Yeah,
Josh Lupresto (01:17):
Yeah. Truth is like, I forgot you were on. And so, you know, when we realize you were on a second time, we just thought, Oh, let's just go with it. . No kidding. So let's you know, I, I wanna talk backstory again, right? Let, let's refresh everybody. Tell me about, you know, have, have you always had an interest in this? Have you always gotten to the telecom side, expense management, mobility, wireless, you know, where, where did things start for you and kind of how did you get to this spot?
Jason Kaufman (01:43):
Yeah so my previous role, you know, skip, skip a few different you know, positions, but I ended up being, I run the, ran the operations for a desktop as a service little micro organization to where we were the first one to do like UCaaS within a vdi. And so running the operations, my whole goal was trying to save money on the bottom line, you know, make, you know, robotics, process automation, you know, trying to save time, money anywhere we could so we could scale without having to hire, you know, more, more people unless it was absolutely needed. So, you know, the effective turn of running skinny, some I've never done in my life. But but yeah, so when I, when I got here and started with Telarus, you know, one of the things that came up, you know, somebody started asking about expense management.
Jason Kaufman (02:28):
So I started looking into it, you know, prior to my tenure here. But it was something I took a real interest in because it did exactly that. It allows somebody to run way more efficient. It puts everything in a single pan of glass, you know, all your contracts, you know, proactive management. And then when I started digging into it more and started actually getting some high level customers that really needed it, I, you know, thought, you know, I really need to learn this pretty quickly because it's coming down the pipe quite a bit, You know, with the rising gas prices, all the expenses rising, the great resignation causing, you know, salaries to go through the roof. People, companies are trying to find a way to save money anyway they could. So the technology spin was one of it. And one thing that we specialize really well is looking at what you're, what you have now, and trying to find ways to give you, like, for like to save money or give you more features and benefits for the same amount money.
Jason Kaufman (03:15):
But if a custom, if a company is really like, Hey, we need to save money here and need a way to, you know, optimize everything that we have from a contract perspective, that's something I took a heavy interest in because that's streamlining process. So I just took a heavy interest in it.
This week we continue to explore Security and Virtual CISO, with special guest Michael Marlowe, Vice President of Chasetek. Transcript below is auto-generated, some errors may be present. Josh Lupresto:
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Josh Lupresto:
Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is the Next Level BizTech podcast. So we are getting closer to wrapping up the security track, and we are talking today, security and virtual CISO, Chief Info Security Officer. So if you tuned in earlier, you heard from the Telarus side, you heard Jeff Hathcote, our chief security architect, talking about all the things that Telarus is doing with regard to security. And then you heard from one of our suppliers, you heard from IGI and Paul over there. Today though, today we get the fun part. Today we get to be joined by the one, the only Michael Marlowe of Chasetek and talking about his view on security and everything that encompasses that. Michael, thanks so much for being on, my man.
Michael Marlowe:
Thanks for having me.
Josh Lupresto:
Let's let's jump right in. You know, part of my favorite you know, piece of these things is, is hearing about everybody's history. How did we all get here? We've had some people that have known and been destined that this is what they're gonna do. And then some people that have done everything crazy from car mechanics to I've been in door to door vacuum sales and everything in between. So, I would love to hear personally about you. How'd you start? What was your path? And then wanna learn a little bit about Chasetek?
Michael Marlowe:
Great, thanks. Yeah, well, the first thing you should know is it's 5 0 1 on a Friday and a holiday weekend heading into Labor Day. So you gotta know that we have love of career and love for Telarus here at Chasetek, just by that staff. So I'm really started my inspiration to do what I do really started with reading a book one up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch. The guy that created Fidelity Magellan, the kind of original huge mutual fund. And the reason it I go back there is that inspired me to become a, a broker, which I am today. So it was a different track. It was the Merrill Lynch Morgan Stanley track, but that got me into that career. And you know, it started with cold calling at Merrill and that morphed into developing a satellite office in Circleville, Ohio.
Michael Marlowe:
And which the home of the Great Pumpkin Show every year for those who don't know and kind of following around their 401k plan, helping people retire. And that I, we made the move into Morgan Stanley as technology IPOs started happening. This is the late nineties now. And heading into the 2000 you know, kind of tech bubble. And around that time, I did that for eight years combined. And at the end of that tenure you know, helping people who had successful business careers and and lives the one common denominator that I noticed was that the people that were happiest were folks that were in control of what they were doing at work. That they were always themselves. So whether they were, you know, CEOs or doctors or whatever attorneys the big thing was that they were empowered to always be themselves.
Michael Marlowe:
And I felt at the end of that, that it was time for me to be one of them. So I went and started doing my own thing. We had a tech startup and had a few of 'em that I was a part of got involved in the innovation community and had a couple exits along the way. And getting to, I think it was 2014, 15 I did some innovation work for government in central Ohio, did an innovation study for the city of Columbus that they helped use to figure out where the city and should make investments in startups.
This week we continue to explore Security and Virtual CISO, with special guest Paul Robinson, National Sales Director of IGI. Transcript was auto-generated, some errors may be present Josh Lupresto (00:02):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level Biztech. Hey everybody. Welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering here at Telarus, and this is the Next Level Biztech podcast. Today. We are talking security, but more importantly, we are talking about virtual CISO chief information security officer. And today we have the pleasure of being joined by my good friend, Paul Robinson, who is VP of national sales at IGI cyber security. Paul, welcome on my man,
Paul Robinson (00:56):
Josh, thank you so much. Just looking forward to having our normal conversations and sharing it to the masses. Really excited for this man.
Josh Lupresto (01:04):
So I, I want everybody to get to know Paul any, anything cool you have about, you know, your background or weird or normal or whatever? I, I always love hearing how people got into the roles, we're gonna get into who IGI is and what your role is. But, but how about getting here? Were you always security? Did you switch, you know, what's the story?
Paul Robinson (01:25):
Oh man. It, it is a weird story. So I'm gonna shock a lot of people that are listening to this at Nomi. My start actually started with telecom and selling WebEx and conference call services back in the early two thousands. When you call on fortune 100 companies and they'd say, yeah, we're never gonna use WebEx. We're gonna put people on planes for the rest of our duration here. And lo and behold everything had changed. So did that for a while and then went into healthcare. Healthcare management for a couple of years, kind of got bogged down with that. I'm like, nah, I like technology. I like, you know, telecom and things of that nature. So joined a company locally here in Rochester and within a week they said, Hey, we're changing the whole business model to cybersecurity. And this is in October of 2009.
Paul Robinson (02:13):
So I was like yeah, I, I know a little bit about antivirus that's on my computer and TJ max, that was the big reach that had just come out recently. Somebody's, I don't know. They're excited about my story back there, but but so TJ Maxx just came out, so that was kind of mainstream news and, and whatever. So I was like, okay, take a, take a switch. And it's been history ever since. Cybersecurity has allowed me to meet some of the, the world's greatest cybersecurity minds and world's greatest risk minds. And it was a weird path to get here, but I feel, you know, for the last 14 years, I've, I've found what my career calling is and that's to use cybersecurity and risk risk services to help out people
Josh Lupresto (03:00):
Love it. I, I love that very rarely is there just this linear path. And I think that teaches you so much too, right? You just, you learn it the hard way. And you know that you wanna do something in your general area, but you don't really know what always your general area is. So I love to, to hear somebody that landed on something different. That's awesome. Yeah.
Paul Robinson (03:20):
We inherently, we all wanna be great at something like, I think that's inherent in all of us and, and whether it is, you know, being a garbage man or being in cybersecurity or being a doc, like we just have that innate thing of just wanting to be great at something and to latch onto something and have a purpose. And that's how cybersecurity fell for me.
Josh Lupresto (03:38):
So let's jump in then current role VP of national sales at IGI I wanna preface with IGI was one of the very early security providers of Telarus. And it's been awesome to, to work with you as you guys have grown as we've g...
This week we explore Security and Virtual CISO, with special guest Jeff Hathcote, Solution Architect of Telarus.
This week we continue to explore Security Detection and Response, with special guest JP Panzica, Chief Executive Officer of Accelerate Tech Partners.
Peter Roosakos, Foghorn CTO, joins with Koby Phillips, Telarus VP of Cloud, to explain how Telarus partners can now sell DevOps, SRE, and CI/CD solutions to help their customers with FinOps, DevOps, Cloud Security, Cloud Migrations, digital transformation, and application modernization.
Learn how BCM One takes the complexity out of business communications for IT leaders and resellers.
This week we explore Security Detection and Response, with special guest Tia Hopkins, Field CTO & Chief Cyber Risk Strategist at eSentire.
This week we explore Security Detection and Response, with special guest Bob Greenough, Director of Sales Engineering at Telarus.
This week we continue our dive into Security and Security Assessments, with special guest Nick Vanderlinden, Supplier Agnostic Technology Advisor/Creator of ClientOne Global.
This week we continue our dive into Security and Security Assessments, with special guest Duane Shugars, CTO of Foresite.
This week we dive into Security and Security Assessments, with special guest Jason Stein, Vice President of Cybersecurity at Telarus.
In this Telarus Executive Interview, we interview Cathryn Valladares, Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Nextiva.
In this Telarus Executive Interview, we interview Ken Mills, CEO of EPIC iO. Learn more about EPIC iO.
In this Telarus Executive Interview, Adam Edwards interviews Cisco's Head of Global Collaboration Partner Sales - Kristyn Hogan. Learn more about Cisco and Telarus' recent launch.
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud with special guest Mike Jones, CEO & Founder at Trace Advisors.
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud with special guest Bob Buchanan, EVP Sales at Rapidscale.
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud with special guest Anthony Hansen, Cloud Solution Architect at Telarus.
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud Infrastructure with special guest Lorie Burkemper, President and Founder at iSymplify.
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud Infrastructure with special guest Paul Croteau, Channel Field Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace.
Learn the fundamentals of Cloud Infrastructure with special guest Koby Phillips, Vice President of Cloud at Telarus.
Learn the fundamentals of Marketing with special guest Ben Robertson, President at Menadena.
Learn the fundamentals of Marketing with special guest Erin Knese, Sr. Director of Channel Sales at Vivial.
Learn the fundamentals of IoT with special guest Ruben Pina, President and Director at A1 BizCom Inc.
Learn the fundamentals of Marketing with special guest Chad Dixon, VP of Marketing at Telarus.
Learn the fundamentals of IoT with special guest Skyler Stewart, Leader of AIoT Channel Sales, North America at EPIC iO.
In this episode of Hidden Gems featuring Crown Castle, Roger Pascal, VP of Channels for Crown Castle. Learn how a company that does Network has some unique product sets in the industry and how you can use those to engage with your customers.
Learn the fundamentals of Wireless with special guests Brad Hope, GM & Principal Owner at Six Play and Tarence Sang, Director of Mobility at Six Play.
Learn the fundamentals of IoT with special guest Jason Kaufman, Sales Engineer of Mobility/IoT SME at Telarus.
Learn the fundamentals of Wireless with special guest Max Silber, VP of Mobility/IoT at MetTel.
Learn the fundamentals of Wireless with special guest Chris Whitaker, VP of Wireless/IoT at Telarus.
Learn how other technology consultants are transforming their business to sell more CCaaS with special guest, Aarde Cosseboom with Clariti.
Learn what CCaaS products and services are available for you to sell today with special guest Phillip Files SVP, Global Solution Consulting at Five9.
Learn the fundamentals of CCaaS with special guest Brandon Knight, VP of Contact Center at Telarus.
Learn how other technology consultants are transforming their business to sell more UCaaS with special guest, Jerry Goldman with Select Communications.
Learn what UCaaS products and services are available for you to sell today with special guest Amir Hameed, SVP of Worldwide Solution Sales & Engineering at RingCentral.
Learn the fundamentals of UCaas with special guest Shane Speakman, VP of UCaaS at Telarus.
Learn about partner financing options becoming more popular, Telarus new Chairman's Club, Cableco's recognition, Comcast and Masergy coming together, and more news.
In this episode of Hidden Gems featuring Ruby, Richard Murray is joined by Kate Winkler, Chief Executive Officer at Ruby. Learn how to navigate this hybrid universe brought on by the pandemic. Your customers expect fast and responsive customer support, and maybe you're not set up to deliver an incredible experience. Ruby can help! Listen to the full episode below.
In this episode of Telarus Channel Updates, Adam discusses the details of Apollo's acquisitions surrounding Lumen and suppliers. Richard gives an update on the contract negotiations with Cogent and a big change in leadership with Dave Young replacing Garrett Gee. Patrick shares highlights from Telarus Partner Summit.
Watch this video to gain great insights into building your business and growing your wallet share.
Watch this video to gain great insights into building your business and growing your wallet share.
Watch this video to gain great insights into building your business and growing your wallet share.
In this episode of Telarus Channel Updates Adam discusses the options available to you as a partner if you are looking to exit now or in the future, grow in the engineering team, and open roles available at Telarus, Richard is on location in New York where he shares good news about Frontier and Patrick shares how Telarus Partner Summit will take you to the next level from a Trusted Advisor to Digital Strategist.
Watch this video to gain great insights into building your business and growing your wallet share.
In this episode of Telarus Channel Updates, Adam discusses the disruption in the industry, including finance options with Telarus and acquiring other Master Agents, and Richard gives an update on new suppliers that have recently joined the Telarus portfolio and some recognition and awards that Telarus has recently received.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on IGI National Channel Manager, Kimberly Moore, where they discuss what IGI specializes in and best fit opportunities for IGI.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on Olumo CEO, Robert Brown, where they discuss what Olumo specializes in and best fit opportunities for Olumo.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on Defendry SVP, Skyler Stewart, where they discuss a best-fit opportunity for Defendry.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on Everbridge VP of Channel Partnerships, Jasmina Muller, where they discuss a best-fit opportunity for Everbridge.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on Sharpen Sr. Director of Partnerships and Channel, Ritch Caudill, where they discuss a best fit opportunity for Sharpen.
Patrick and Richard share this week's Telarus Channel Updates sponsored by Mitel, where Patrick gives more information on the three new suppliers that joined the Telarus supplier portfolio this week, Richard gives an update on the Race to the Summit series finale and a Partner Summit announcement, and a special guest joins them, Comcast Business Senior Director, National Partner Programs, Albert Krivopisk, to celebrate Telarus being the number one master agent with Comcast for the first three consecutive months of 2021.
In this episode of Business Transformations, Adam Edwards is joined by TelcoDataCloud Director, Asa Grund, where they discuss TelcoDataCloud's journey to get to where they are today and what their future looks like.
In this episode of Anatomy of a Win featuring Hypercore, Telarus SVP of Marketing, Amy Bailey, is joined by CompuNet's Account Manager, Aisa Jenkins, and Business Development Manager, Chris Paskewich, and Hypercore Vice President of Sales, Patrick Davis, where they take a deep-dive into the who, what, and how of a recent win.
In this episode of Anatomy of a Win featuring Verizon, Telarus SVP of Marketing, Amy Bailey, is joined by Verizon Channel Partner Manager, Brian Gault, and Disruptive Innovations Founder and CEO, David Wright, where they dissect a big win with a healthcare company and Verizon fit perfectly as the solution.
In this episode of Hidden Gems featuring Momentum, Richard Murray is joined Momentum Executive Vice President Sales and Marketing, Chuck Piazza, where they discuss how they are more then just a UCaaS provider.
In this episode of Hidden Gems featuring Dialpad, Richard Murray is joined by Dialpad National Channel Director, Michael Baillargeon, discuss the two fundamental things you should consider when choosing a supplier. Did they innovate? Can they execute?
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on RSI VP Sales & Marketing, Trish Kapos, where they discuss what RSI specializes in and best fit opportunities for RSI.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Greg Vandermade, brings on For2Fi CEO, Andrew Gregoire, what For2Fi specializes in and best fit opportunities for For2Fi.
Telarus VP of Sales Engineering, Josh Lupresto, shares what to do when you need to pivot.
Culture and People, is Richard Murray's new series where he explores how others hire their employees for culture, expertise, hits on red flags they have seen in the past, and what they look for now. In this episode, he brings on Dialpad SVP of Global Channel, Mike Kane, to discuss why culture is so important, what it's really about, and the core attributes behind culture that Dialpad looks for.
In this episode of Business Transformations, Adam Edwards is joined Cloud Warriors Founder and CRO, Eric Chanh, and President and CEO, Chris Nebel, by where they discuss Cloud Warrior's journey to get to where they are today and what their future looks like.
In this episode of Telarus Channel Updates, former principals of Chorus Communications, Dan Cronin and Rob Molinaro join Patrick and Adam to share why they chose to be acquired by Telarus and discuss their new roles here.
In this episode of Hidden Gems featuring Telesystem, Richard Murray is joined by Telesystem National Channel Manager, Ray Belair, where they discuss why Telesystem is doing aggregation at a level that their competition isn't.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Karie Atwood, brings on Ruby Partner Development Manager, Tim Bedford, how Ruby helps your customers run an efficient business while making sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Telarus Exclusives is a series where our supplier management team gives a deep-dive of a supplier that is exclusively signed with Telarus as their only master agent. In this episode, Director of Supplier Management, Angela Hefner, brings on Minim Account Manager, Karlee Garcia, where they discuss a best fit opportunity for Minim.