Abstract: Using IT Automation to Scale and Increase Profitability and Quality

One of the most popular conversations to kick off 2022 is AUTOMATION in information technology. By automating IT asset management, you lower costs, increase the quality of your IT infrastructure, and enjoy the efficiency of automating tasks such as importing assets into your asset management tool.  Think of it this way. In the past, many tasks were performed manually resulting in inconsistent results. Automation can feel like magic standard operating procedures. You will discover 5 ways to reduce the total cost of ownership with IT automation. You’ll also have visibility into the integrations that make it all happen (including the magic of APIs).

And a real-world case study detailing the benefits of IT automation will be available for download.

 

Speakers:

Hosts:

• Tim Kubiak, Managing Director, AOM World
• Harry Brelsford, CEO, SMB Nation

Panelists:

• Brian Kane, Senior Director of Technology – NerdsToGo
• Gaidar Magdanurov, Chief Success Officer – Acronis
• Kevin Jaberg, Chief Technology Officer, MapleTronics

 

Transcript from  Using IT Automation to Scale and Increase Profitability and Quality

Harry Brelsford 

Hello, my name is Harry Brelsford. And I’m joined today by Tim Kubiak, who will be your host for the webinar Using IT Automation to Scale and Increase Profitability and Quality. Thank you for joining us. I know we’ve taken time out of your day. Let’s go round with some introductions. Brian, let’s start with you. Please introduce yourself.

 

Brian King 

Yes, my name is Brian King, and I’m the Senior Director of Technology for Propel brands and Nerds to Go

 

Harry Brelsford 

Where are you located Brian?

 

Brian King 

I’m in Dallas, Texas.

 

Harry Brelsford 

There we go. I’m just down the street in Austin. Gaidar from a Cronus please introduce yourself and where you located today.

 

Gaidar Magdanurov 

I am Gaidar Magdanurov.  I’m Chief success officer, the Acronis, and  I’m responsible for technical support education, community market research, and I’m in Boston area.

 

Harry Brelsford

Great Kevin the same?

 

Kevin Jaberg 

Yeah, I am Kevin Jaberg and I’m with MapleTronics. And I’m the Chief Technology Officer. And we are a managed service provider. Amongst other things, and we are located in Goshen Indiana.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Well, there we go. And last but not least Tim Kubiak from AOM World, sir.

 

Tim Kubiak 

Hi, everybody. Kim Kubiak Managing Director of AOM World and CEO of ZPI.

 

Harry Brelsford 

All right. So folks, this is a give and take webinar. So we welcome your questions. If you want to raise your hand, we’re happy to bring you on live. Or you can put the question in the chat feature. And I’ll be happy to read it. But because it’s a panel presentation, we have one slide. So let me show you the slide so you can get to know our panelists just a little bit better. And there we go. Tim, do you see the one slide? I do? Okay, well, let’s get started. So why is automation a big discussion point amongst MSPs? Right, now, let’s go around the horn. Brian, I’m going to pick on you again, since you’re a fellow Texan, and then we’ll go around the horn.

 

Brian King 

Well, that sounds great. Automation is absolutely key to success now. Especially in the small business, we’re dealing with what people are calling a great resignation at the moment. And so because of that, we want to be able to still serve our customers, but scale our services. So if we can’t scale by stacking people on, then we need to find ways to automate at least our routine, day to day services. So that’s where automation plays just such a key role in growing our small business.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Absolutely. Gaidar over to Acronis. I know you talk to a lot of partners, what’s the hubbub? What’s? What’s the buzz on automation?

 

Gaidar Magdanurov 

Yeah, we do talk to a lot of partners, I would say adding to what Brian says is yes, we don’t have enough people to maintain all the required infrastructure elements. But the real problem is also that the infrastructure is growing and growing in complexity, every MSP now has to maintain lots of tools. And it’s just virtually impossible to it’s impossible to maintain without automation anymore. Take like a simple patch management, when you need to deploy a patch to a test environment test to see if everything’s working and then roll it out to the whole infrastructure. It’s complicated for one organization, but when you have hundreds of customers, that becomes extremely complicated. And now without automation with lack of people. It’s just impossible. So we had a panel three months ago, if you remember, I was saying the same phrase over and over again. I’ll keep doing it. Automated I.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, I do remember that. Kevin, over to you.

 

Kevin Jaberg 

Yeah, and in addition to everything else, we view automation. As the ability to add value to the services we offer our clients and doing that without it adding proportional overhead, right and proportional work that goes back to Great resignation and finding workers and stuff like that. But then on top of that, it also keeps things consistent, right? You take away that human error factor, and oops, factor and things like that. So the more we can do that, or works all the time 100%, the better everyone is going to be.

 

Harry Brelsford

Yeah, absolutely. And, Tim, I’m going to come to you with our second talking point, because I know that you’re the CEO of a company that’s still in startup mode in the tech space. And the point is, give some examples of what platforms can be in need to be automated, because I know you’re going through it right now.

 

Tim Kubiak

So it’s funny, when you first asked me to be part of this discussion, I’m like, What do I have to say about automation. But if you really step back, frankly, everything that we’ve built as EPI is about automating our core business, the alternative, though, Ema into the partner ecosystem through distribution. So the truth is, is we’ve taken a 30 year old methodology, and really tried to improve upon it. Now, the one thing I’ll tell you is, I think we’re all at the beginning of what automation is going to become in all of our respective businesses. And we’re only going to see it grow massively in the coming years.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Brian, I remember in particular, we had some lively conversations down in Miami three months ago about platforms and examples. So want to weigh in on that? What platforms should be automated? To teach other that kind of thing? Yeah, absolutely.

 

Brian King 

Oh, I’ll throw some acronyms in here. I mean, primarily, you know, God already mentioned patching. RMM is key. So we’ve got one platform just for managing our endpoints, managing our patching, things like that. But then it’s how do we pull in those key pillars? We have, you know, cybersecurity. We’ve got backup disaster recovery. And then I like to throw in productivity. Because I think teaching people how to be more productive with technology is key. So how do we take each of those separate platforms, which turns into, you know, four panes of glass, six panes of glass? How do we do our best to pull that together so that we know we’re not dropping the ball? So those those really are the key platforms we’re looking to automate?

 

Harry Brelsford

Yep. And guide or you are a platform for the corruptness. So you can talk about the integrations and the automation with your partner from an ISP perspective.

 

Brian King 

Yeah, sounds absolutely. We have to be a platform. I think at this time of age out in this age of automation, you have to be a platform, you have to provide API for third parties to integrate and API’s for partners to integrate with the tools that they use, because what we see is almost every MSP uses lots of different tools. And almost everybody thinking about how can we standardize? How can we consolidate? And to do that what they trying to do is the they write scripts, they build their own products, they try to somehow stitch things together. So we have to be a platform. And as it was we talking about what should be automated, I would say everything should be automated, in a smart way, of course. But most people would start with security and data protection. And the reason for that is just security is so complicated. There are so many things happening, there are new threads all the time that it’s impossible without automation. If you look at any kind of events, log and try to understand what’s going on. It’s it’s complicated. So you have to have special tools, but those tools should be talking to each other. So I would say everything, but start with security and data protection.

 

Harry Brelsford 

We’re gonna talk about security a little bit more later. Kevin, do you want to weigh in and you’re welcome to name platforms. I know, we were talking about integrations with ConnectWise and stuff down at the Cyberfit Summit.

 

Kevin Jaberg 

Yeah. So. So, you know, I would say anything with an API we try to tie into that we use, you know, so platforms that we use are certainly ConnectWise we are tied into a Acronis we are tied into you know, security stuff such as Duo and Cisco Umbrella. You know, the list goes on and on and on and, and like Gaidar said it, you know, all the platforms out there. Most of them have API’s to tie into, and we try to tie into those so that way we can we can get the mean do the things we need to do the way we want to do it and get the information out the way we want it.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yep. Thomas, I see you’ve raised your hand. Where did you go? Let’s see, Thomas, if you want to re raise your hand, I see my friend Thomas back. But there was a second Thomas Thomas, if I can get you on the flip side, I’m going to let you speak, folks feel free to ask questions, we do want to make this interactive, just like we did at the Acronis cyber summit down in Miami three months ago, I think it makes for a more lively conversation. Let’s move on. What is the danger in implementing automation in that’s kind of died, or that’s where I was hinting out, we can now talk about security and some other things who wants to go first, the danger in implementing automations?

 

If I may, I’ll start. So we see it every day with partners. What’s happening is when we tend to automate things and get more efficiency from it, and we very excited about it. We start rollout automation everywhere. And what happens is that when you make a mistake, when you do something manual, it’s just one mistake. But when you do mistake and automation solution that happens everywhere. So again, back to my analogy with patches, if you get a bad patch, and you deploy it to one system, yeah, you lost some time with that particular system, and hopefully, to test system. But if you deployed through automation to all your customers, all devices and all application suddenly broken, you’re in trouble. So for automation, to avoid those dangers, you have to have testing, you have to have ways to send boxes and validate validate what what you’re doing. But also you have to have a way to rollback. Because if you make a small mistake, automation will just scale it. And the second issue with automation is that people who design automation, they should have proper documentation for all of it. So if if you have people leaving or new people joining, the documentation should be in place. So you know, what was automated how it’s working. Because when it becomes a black box, and you know, even though people stick around for a long time at MSPs, when somebody leaves and you don’t know how some things are working, it becomes a huge issue. And you cannot leave without automation anymore anyway. So that communication is the way to mitigate the risk.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, effect all kind of way in one of my clients is growing quickly in the automation area. And here’s what I’ve observed, is, to your point, there are days where you fix one thing in your break to the other, excuse me, cedar fever. The other thing about documentation, that is it’s been my experience to me, and I’m just speaking on my own behalf. But this is the case for onshore resources that, you know, maybe are even in the same location as your versus offshore resources, because I’ve seen flaws and documentation. For whatever reason, with the use of offshore resources, maybe it was the project manager wasn’t doing this job very well, who else would like to weigh in on the dangers of implementations?

 

I’ll jump in here. You know, to to illustrate Gaidar point about being careful, you know, a number of months ago, we, we we deployed something with our managed backup service. And, and we thought we tested it and we thought it was working right. And it looked like it was working or it was doing what we needed to do. And then we rolled it out. And then all of a sudden, we watched our storage usage and our backend increase in day after day after day it increased. And in what we figured out, it took us about a week till we got to see what was going on. But when we figured it out, what we figured out was that when we push the automation to the clients to do this task, it created a new backup chain. And so instead of the chain continuing on, all of a sudden we’re getting a second copy of data, a new seeding and, and, and we did not see it when we’re testing it because we’re our sample was too small. It wasn’t until we put it out globally that we saw it. And then it we saw it in a big way. And so turn wine from that experience that that little thing took us a month to unwind from and get through. And, you know, it’s a lesson learned. You know, I, you know, people would say, Hey, you failed at that. And I’d say we didn’t really fail at it. It just didn’t work the way we thought it was going to and we keep pressing forward. And so, you know, that’s that is a very much an unintended consequences of doing it, or through of automation.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Well, I haven’t heard that phrase since working with a realtor to sell our house a few years ago unintended consequences. Brian, any tales from the trenches?

 

Brian King 

Yeah, um, I kind of want to take the other kind of flip side of what, what Gaidar and Kevin just spoke about. And say one of the, one of the other big dangers and we’ve run into this a little bit is, you know, when you start to rely heavily on automation, it doesn’t mean that you still don’t have a need for resources with a higher skill set. Which, you know, automation is great. But someone still has to configure design and strategize around that automation. Also, keep in mind that with automation, and API’s comes bugs and disconnects and issues and things like that. So automation is great. And it’s absolutely the direction we’re going. We still need skilled resources, to manage the automation to coordinate to develop, and work on that, because we can’t just say, well, everything’s automated I, you know, I don’t, I don’t need stuff I can, I can run this whole thing with one person. So that’s, that’s kind of the flip side of is we just get comfortable with it. Oh, my jobs are working, everything’s automated, this is great. Maybe I don’t need all these people. You still need skilled resources.

 

Harry Brelsford 

There we go. Tim, this is your second rodeo. You’ve done some projects, what? What’s been your experience in the danger of implementing automation? It could be cultural. I mean, you know, it could be the wear and tear on the staff, I don’t know, thoughts.

 

Tim Kubiak 

So one of the things we had a learning experience with was from, frankly, our partner focus group last fall, right. And that was when we looked at what we were planning to automate and our dev and our stack going forward. We hadn’t considered everything that was needed from the MSP level, and terms of staging and implementation of data and assets into their existing tools, ConnectWise and others, right, and we hadn’t considered the downstream impact of how they need to extract the data, to have the end user conversation as part of automation. So for us, that was a huge learning moment and change the direction of what we do.

 

Harry Brelsford 

There we go. So the audience we have today MSP some IT pros, but coming from the infrastructure side, primarily. And so let’s take a second to that what time the table is this question or this comment? What’s the role of API’s and implementing automation, including deficiencies and risks? And I think we could start at a basic level data about what what is an API? And then what are the risks?

 

So yep, so basic API for the platform allowed to extend the platform. So it can be a bunch of scripts, or it can be a library that you can use in your application, maybe calling it from like a Python script or something. But the interesting thing about API’s, if they’re well designed, they expose most of the functionality or maybe all functionality of each particular product that you’re trying to automate. Because you cannot predict what your partners would want to do with weather products. Will they want to provision customers? Will they want to create new plants, configure the plants. So what I would say is that with API’s, what’s important is to make sure that your API is allowed to extend what you have allowed to integrate what you have, and allowed to build solution that will be integrating with your platform. So that’s what we that’s what we do. That’s what we do when we design our platform. And as for the risk was API, there’s one risk that is connected to an 80 product. And I believe everybody on this call wasn’t a situation. And I used to be a developer. So I know how it works. When you design API, and people start using it, they automate stuff, and it works. And then over time, you try to improve things. So your API becomes more sophisticated. But maybe you as part of that something is not really working well, you become a very bad guy for everybody who use that API, because the moment you deploy a new version, everybody is extremely upset, they have to redo their solutions. So the major risk of API’s is that over time, when it evolves, you have to support backward compatibility. And I know a lot of partners who design their complete technical, complete tech stack for all their customers around in this case, a Cronus solution. So let’s say if we were to change anything without allowing partners to test and maybe update something that will be a disaster for that partner. So maintaining the backward compatibility becomes one of the primary tasks for any platform vendor.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Brian, I saw you nodding your head while he was talking. You must have a good story to tell. I hope not about a Acronis.

 

Brian King  So yeah, we’ve we’ve got a team of about 30 developers here. And this is something we deal with on a daily basis. Is it You know, wanting legacy information legacy reports, but also wanting some of the rich features that come with, you know, working with a company like a cornices as they change in advance their API, you know, we want to do the cool new stuff we want to do that well requires changes to our, to our development and things like that to get those things. So a lot of it is, you know, vendor rely and I look at API’s, the same way I look at an open source, when I’m evaluating a vendor, evaluating a company, you know, I run into a company six months ago, very large company, and I said, Hey, you know, what we’re interested in using your platform, you know, what do you integrate with? And the answer I got back was, well, we have solutions for all the things that you want to do. And we really, our API is not open to these other things, we really just want you to use our solution. That’s a bad word for us. I don’t, I don’t need vendors dictating what other vendors I can use. So the fact that, you know, these vendors out here are, are becoming a lot more open to sharing their API’s, and allowing, you know, MSPs, like us to be able to pick and choose the tools that we want to use, but work together work them in tandem, is allowing us to create our own solutions programs for our customers that that fit our needs.

 

Harry Brelsford 

No, absolutely. Kevin, or Tim, do you want to weigh in before we move on?

 

Kevin Jaberg 

Yeah, I mean, we use API’s a lot, and, and a, and we use it for moving a lot of data around and in, the biggest thing we probably do with them today, is not provisioning as much as it is getting the data in a way, so we can report back to our clients in the way that they want to see it. And so we aggregate data from from 3456 sources into one report. So that way, we don’t have to send a client, you know, 10 PDFs every month on all these other things. And we use it for monitoring and managing stuff as well. Um, you know, one of the things though, too, with API’s, you know, the flip side, it’s sort of a double edged sword, you know, that API gives us access into into the platform, and, and all of our client data are all the systems that we’re managing with that platform. And get careful there, you gotta make sure you lock down the API well, so that way, you know, you’re, you’re only you’re, when you make those calls, you’re only doing what your you intended to do. And you have, you know, that notion of least privilege, it follows to the API’s as well. So that way, you don’t want to have an API that gives you access to the world when you when all you need to do is pull over data for reporting.

 

Harry Brelsford

Yeah, and I guess listening to you guys, I would have to take one of the exposures here, is it an attack vector? For a hacker? Right? I mean, not you opening up a, an attack vector? I don’t know if you want that are your in the security company?

 

Yeah, I was. Actually I want to make another example, is that if you don’t expose the API’s, and you have maybe an app that you can accept some parameters, so you can just use the shell and send the parameter to the app, what happens when people tend to automate, and they will write their scripts, or they write their application that will call a shell and send that parameters to the application through the shell. And that’s probably the most dangerous thing you can do. Because the moment you send any kind of text to the shell, somebody can just provide some input. That would be another comment, like, remove everything. You know, that’s, that’s what people can do. So the moment you try to close everything, and instead of API provides some set of common line tools, it becomes more and more complicated, because you don’t know how people will use it. But you will know for a fact that they at some point, somebody will try to call that that your application from their application, they’ll pass some parameter, and that potentially leads to security disaster. So that’s one one issue with not exposing API’s. In case of exposing API’s. There’s lots of other things that you have to consider as well. So the moment you design more complicated system, it means that there are multiple components that can be attacked. So the API itself should validate credentials, authenticate customers and partners, whomever is using the API, make sure that the cost API are allowing only what is reasonable on the system. So API should be secure. And then the application that exposes the API should be secure. But then the application calling the API should be secure. Because it probably the simplest example would be is that if you use API to manage your customers to provision customers customer accounts and so on, somebody can send a comment that will just delete all of the customers from your provisioning. And that will potentially be significant impact for your business because you’ll have to restore it. So the moment you introduce any kind of automation, the first thing you have to think about is how you’re going to secure it. And what Kevin’s had. The principle of least privileges is probably the first step to do your application runs under user and administrator, your API has the minimum access that you need for the particular application. So you try to minimize the surface of attack as much as you can. And the thing is that the attackers are very creative. They’re extremely creative everyday, they invent new ways to attack things. So you may not think that it is possible that somebody will attack your application, but they use automation as well. So they will house covered vulnerabilities in the system, they will discover your application, they will discover open ports, or they will just cover API’s, whatever, they will just cover and they will accidentally or just for fun attack you. So it becomes so easy that everybody is under attack right now. Maybe not even on purpose, if they launched ransomware attack that that users particular vulnerability of particular solution that is exposed through API, your application can be attacked, or your customers can be attacked, for no reason. It’s just because that EPA was exposed. Yep.

 

Harry Brelsford 

So folks, we have two more topics left. And again, thank you for your time today and participating. I see we have the second Thomas back on line. Thomas, number two Thomas Cray you had raised your hand earlier. Anybody can raise their hand if you like. And we’ll bring you on to ask the question live and keep it interactive. In the absence of that, this was a popular one, we’re down at the cyber fit Summit. What are the main statistics or KPIs to monitor to measure and improve automation? Who wants to go first, and that Kevin, we haven’t let you go first?

 

Kevin Jaberg 

Okay, so so we use we use really two metrics, when we look at stuff that we’re looking to automate. And, and we we look at it in two different ways. One is hard call, we call it ROI hours, and we have one bucket is saved in one bucket is avoided. So the saved bucket is when we go back and look through history, and we find manual work that we are doing. And we figure out a way to automate it. Those are our safe, we look at it over a 12 month window. The the other metric we use is avoided which is is goes back to the comment I made earlier about adding value to our products. And so that’s where we’re introducing new things or, or doing new things in our product lines. In the goal is to add a bunch of value with not adding a lot of hours. And so so that was more future future. Looking in terms of how we look at it, the then on when we do the work, then we go back and evaluate how much time it takes to actually do whatever that thing is that we did. And so then we have a ratio of of our spent two hours saved or avoided. So if it’s 50 to one or 10 to one or 101 that gives us a gauge of, of how big of an impact it was for the time we spent.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Okay, Brian, you’re out in the real world. The rest of us are kind of in these academic towers. What, uh, what, what’s you on the what? What are you monitoring? What are you looking to monitor?

 

Brian King 

Sure. So yeah, so we’re looking at Kevin’s right, we’re looking at a lot of the same things, Kevin is. But but if I, if I were to break it down and just make it super basic. So, again, we’re in franchising. So we’ve got many, many MSPs spread across the country trying to replicate into this themselves. So a steady focus really just is, you know, that billable hour utilization, so being billable for as many hours as possible, that are that are nerds are being utilized. And so that’s a metric that’s something that we are very focused on on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, we’re looking at how many hours were worked today, how many of those hours were billable? And if if we worked hours that were not billable, why? How can we improve? And we basically bring those back to the table. So again, we’re looking at a lot of those same metrics, but it really does come down to utilization because Tech’s engineers working for free, doesn’t help any of us. So so that is what we’re trying to improve. That’s we’re trying to automate. You know, Can we can we provide Self Service portals for password resets? You know, again, we bring it back to patching Bring it back to security endpoint updates all these things. Where can we automate save time? But still make sure we’re not missing the boat? And how can we put our field people out there truly billing and making us those those higher billable rates. That’s, that’s where we really bring in the revenue. So that’s what we want our team focused on.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Alright, first Tim, and then then guide our this topic. So Tim, I know you’re in a development cycle that concerns automation. So let’s talk about the metrics of the KPI your data driven. So what what are you hoping to see on the other side?

 

Tim Kubiak 

For us, the metrics look a little bit different, but you know, not distinctly different from utilization, frankly, we track average response time to tickets, time to resolution, things of that. So our metrics, you know, aren’t about billable hours versus non billable hours, it’s about service levels, when there is an incident that ticket is opened. So on our dev cycles, that’s exactly what we’re looking at. And, you know, to comment on self service, you know, in our world, we’ve made it actually so clients can largely be self service to, to launch into that engineering support level.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Okay, got her before we move on?

 

Yeah, so I was talking to a lot of partners. And when we had the panel, last time, I was talking about the metrics that I hear people use, and people were using metrics on how many workloads per technician they support, how many customers, how many hours per workload. So those were the common metrics. And since was, last panel, about three months ago, I was asking people, how is it going with automation, and I was interested to learn what kind of metrics people started to use. And when I’m starting to hear from partners, they start to measure something that I would call automation failure rate. So they automate a task, and they happy with that automation. But then over time, they figure out that they may have tickets created because of the issues with the automation. So they start measuring how many tickets related to the failures of automation, and how many hours was spent. So they can make it make a report and put it into perspective for how many hours they saved versus how many hours they lost because of that automation solution. So that’s an interesting metric actually to to look at. Is your automation, introduce new type of issues in does it require extra hours to fix those issues? So I think, for a lot

 

Harry Brelsford 

Great. We do have Thomas back, Thomas, with your permission, I’m going to see if I can bring you on live. It rolls back to the API integration question. But any questions a good question. So let’s see if we can bring you on. Thomas, similar. Have you allowed to talk? Let’s see. Thomas. Are you there?

 

Thomas

Yes, yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah,

 

Harry Brelsford

absolutely. Thank you for attending. Go ahead and ask your question to the panel.

 

Thomas

Yeah, I was just wondering, because I have created about five or 10, maybe more API integration between our systems. But, you know, I sit down and then I code a lot. And it takes, it takes a very long time to test it. And yeah, so I was just wondering, is there some kind of product or service or any other way that that can help creating these API integrations? Hello,

 

Harry Brelsford 

yeah, yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah, you’re fine. Thank you. Okay, great. Who in any of our panelists want to talk about automation of API, so

 

I can share some some experience. So again, I was I was a developer at some point. And there are lots of companies, startup companies that are looking into kind of helping with API development and testing of API. Frankly, I haven’t seen anything that I would say is the solution. But I think if you would search for companies and services that help you to explore the API or provide like management panels, control panels, they usually suggest some of the approaches and how to design the API’s how to automate the testing of those API’s. Maybe somebody knows, hearing the power, somebody knows the real solution, so it’ll be interesting to, to know about that, too.

 

Harry Brelsford 

All right. Well, Thomas Cray, thank you for your question. Folks. If you have any questions, just raise your hand and we’ll We’ll, we’ll get you back on. Next topic. The, ah, this is one of my favorites. How is automation helping you to scale your company’s rapid growth and expansion? Tim, I’m going to pick on you first. Because you have shared with me the startup you’re involved in, you’re using the E O S methodology, which is just fascinating the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And the whole idea was traction and scalability. So how was automation helping you to scale your company’s rapid growth and expansions? Oops, I think we might have lost his audio.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, Tim, your audio? Yeah, user error,

 

Tim Kubiak 

my apologies. Um, so yeah, we are using Eos, to run the business and scale of business. And we’re using a system of different methods I talked about a little bit earlier, the customer advisory council, we’re working with our suppliers and other things like that. And in terms of our automation, it really is about cutting cycles up, when a partner has an opportunity. It’s about looking back, and finding ways for them to monetize previous sales and previous relationships in a way that they never have. So our automation is really about being able to do things at scale and its speed. So it’s the ability to upload entire states and get a view of them to track and manage where they are beyond the tools that they’re using today. and report back on that. And, you know, we have the internal debates all the time on framework and, you know, programming languages and everything of what the future looks like. And where does AI actually and machine learning factor into the future? So I think for us, automation will look somewhere down that and some predictive analytics in the future as well.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yep. Brian, by the way, shout out to nerds to go I am familiar with the franchise space. And I’m glad you helped me remember that nerds to go as in the franchise field, so shout out to you. This was actually your question. Yes. Yes, the answer your question?

 

Brian King 

Absolutely. Um, no, I love this. This is my favorite. Because, you know, when you’re when you’re one MSP, you’re looking at how do I take my office? My offering my solutions? And how do I share this with all my customers? Well, what we’re doing here in franchising, is I’m looking at how do we standardize? How do I create these solutions? How do I replicate it across dozens of MSPs, across the country, and then help them to replicate it out to their 1000s of customers out there. So automation has really, really made our life a lot easier. Because the questions that we’re answering every day isn’t, you know, oh, how can we deploy a Cronus to this one customer, this group of customers? It’s how can we leverage our RMM integrations are a Cronus integrations or Bitdefender integrations? How can I take that? How can I replicate that out and then continue to grow it, build it scale it, not just for existing franchises, existing MSPs. But we’re opening new ones every month, too. So a lot of that comes back to those vendor relationships, or development team training and our vendor partnerships. So really, building and establishing standards, is what’s helping us, you know, take that and grow it at scale, because we are absolutely growing that at scale. And it’s an exciting, really fun thing to do.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yep. Before I get to Kevin, a guide on this topic, and then we’ll start to wrap up the webinar. We have Thomas back has a question, Thomas, I’m gonna bring you on live. Let’s give it a shot. Hello. Hello, Thomas.

 

Kevin Jaberg 

So yeah, my my question is like, with all the talk about API integration, and standardization, and growth and scale of what is the percentage of MSP services that are standardized versus bespoke today, leading into like how plug and play as a space really, like API wise versus demand for discrete, you know, client customization on a client to client basis?

 

Harry Brelsford 

That are you’re nodding your head, you want to take that one?

 

Gaidar Magdanurov 

So if I correctly understand the question, so that’s, the question is about how popular like API usage versus customization for a particular customer, am I correct? Sort of, but then more specifically, you know, how the, the industry for MSPs servicing their clients. How repeatable or standardized are the offerings where you can do like, hey, this one API integration stack We’ll solve 90% of problems versus MSPs going out there on a client to client basis and having a like you bespoke integrations every time. And what’s the breakout a percentage wise of standardized versus bespoke solutions being needed by the MSP client base? Got it. So from our experience as a platform vendor and conversation with partners, I would say the correct answer would be it depends on the type of MSP and type of customer were we seeing as probably 80% of MSPs, they have some kind of a break fix approach. So they go to a customer, the onboard customer and just maintain whatever customer has. And usually, what they trying to do over time to scale is to standardize some basic components like backup, security, patch management, remote management, so over time, they replace some of the tools with with what they use. And in that case, those tools that they use may be integrated, I mean, implemented integration, but they don’t invest a lot into designing the custom solution for that particular customer. Just because they don’t have time, it’s impossible with with the resources that they have. But at the same time, probably 20% of MSPs, they design their own technology stack. So they put multiple components together into a solution that they can deploy to a customer. And their approach is when they onboard the customer, they just replace everything that customer has with the with their technology stack. And that stack is fully integrated manage, there’s reporting in place on top of it. And that tech stack is usually customizable as well, for the need of particular customer. And what I’m seeing is that quite a few partners, they customize not for the particular customer, but for a particular industry. So there may be some requirements, compliance requirements or requirements to support specific application, so they will customize at the industry level, I frankly, have not seen many MSPs that would tailor their solutions for particular customer for Politico needs a particular customer. I see it with enterprise and with system integrators, but not with MSPs. Right.

 

Here a little bit as well, if I could, you know, we, you know, with our integrations that we work in in terms of our managed services offerings, we automate the things that are that are in that box. So for manage backup, we want to do our handle manage backup the same way for all of our clients. And in that’s what those are the things that we automate it, we don’t go outside the box. So every security is a box, or Managed Services Help Desk is the box, backup is a box, keep things in the box, we do get requests every now and then for something one off, that that a client is wanting. And when we get those, we think through him a little bit and go, is this just a one and done thing? Or is it? Or is this what the clients asking for? Could we apply it to, to all of our clients, if we apply to all of our clients perceive our C where we add value for all of our clients? Then we will do it but as a as a strict one off we we we would not automate it. Yep.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Brian, you told me you’re shaking your head and you wrap up the answer sessions.

 

Brian King 

Absolutely. Y’all jump right. And I will 100% Echo, what guide our simple Kevin said so. So Guidara is right, in that it depends. And Kevin’s approach, in my opinion, is is really one of the better approaches, you have to decide what kind of MSP you want to be. And by doing that, you know, you can say, hey, here’s the RMM solution I’ve chosen. Here’s the cybersecurity stack. Here’s the data protection stack, here’s this, these are the things that I know that a I can integrate with. These are the vendors that I know are better continuing to develop their integrations. I know I can support this, I know I can manage this. And so I’m going to flip this over to kind of the pitch side and the customer side. And this is where you can really be open and honest and go into your customers and say, Hey, Mr. Customer, look, you came to me because you’re looking for help. You’re looking for security, you’re looking for disaster recover. There’s a need. There’s a concern here. We have solved this concern. And we’ve we’ve solved it many, many times over. So instead of coming in and them dictating what we’re going to do, we’ve already picked all our solutions. We just want you to manage it. Nope, you came to us, we’re the experts. We’re gonna manage it the way we manage it, so that it fits into like Kevin said, our boxes are bubbles. When you play with the one offs, and you start diving into that You really do get off track. And if you look at your bottom line, I find that it costs you more than it, then it makes you. So find your niche. Find the vendors you like, find the platform you like, make some really strong decisions and stick to those decisions. It doesn’t mean you can’t add on to it. It doesn’t mean you can’t find a new piece of technology and say, hey, you know what? I think a lot of my clients can benefit from this. I’m going to work on how I bring this in. But it is incredibly rare that I would carve something out completely separate and build something separate. For a specific customer. I want them to play in my sandbox.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yep. All right. Well, I think we’ve covered the the universe in that one. So let’s go back to the final question that’s on the table, folks. And then we’ll get everybody on their merry way. So we had a guide our Europe, how is automation helping you to scale your company’s rapid growth and expansion? And you can think of it in terms of your partners?

 

Yeah, I mean, for us, it’s the key, it’s impossible for us to grow. Because what we trying to do is we’re trying to provide all tools that MSPs need. And at the same time, we are platform companies. So we integrate all the other tools. So the typical partner would have something in place already. I mean, I have not met partners that don’t have backup security or management. So they use something already. Some partners prefer to replace one of the components with a Cronus tack, some partners prefer to replace everything, but that depends on the size of the partner, depends the type of infrastructure, but in most cases, they would have some tools they would like to integrate on a platform. And then they would like to automate, most of our partners stay, they want to grow. And they all experienced the same problem, they don’t have enough people, the infrastructure is becoming more complicated. They trying to acquire more customers. So there’s just no way they can do it without automation. That’s why our platform is designed for integrations with remote management solutions, other backup and security solutions, automation solutions. So whatever you’re using, you can integrate a Cronus. And one thing that I’m hearing from partners, and that’s something that changed over the last three or four years, is that in the past, I would say the like a medium size and larger MSPs would be talking about automation, smaller MSPs would be talking just about the way they support customers make tools that simplify some tasks, but they’re not they will not considering automation as a necessity. Now I’m hearing it from all types of MSPs, even the smallest MSPs with a very few customers, lifestyle business type of MSPs, they start talking about automation, because there’s just no way they can keep their customers without it. So I would say automation is a master. My phrase is automated die is valid.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Kevin, you get to take us out scaling and automation.

 

Well, I will I will keep it pretty simple here. I will say with automation, he had happy teammates because you take the mundane work out of their day to day lives. He had happy clients, because the work they expect to be done is being done, and they get a consistent experience. And so between those two things. You know, that is enough reason for automation in this world today.

 

Harry Brelsford 

Yep, yep, exactly. Well, I want to thank the panelist, Brian, guide, our Kevin, Tim, thanks for CO hosting with me. Tim and I will be back next month with the industry topic of interest. So thank you, audience for your time today. And enjoy the rest of your week. Have a great weekend.

 

Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

 

Thank you, aye. All right.