Max: 00:10 Hi. I’m Max Clark, founder of itbroker.com. This is a tech deep dive, and I’m here with Eric Hassenstab, who is the VP of client technology solutions with Thrive Networks. And, hopefully, Eric, I I didn’t bungle any of that, and you’re gonna tell me I did a great job.
Eric: 00:24 No. That’s perfect. Thank you very much, Max. Very nice meeting you, and, and good morning to all.
Max: 00:28 We were Eric, we were just talking a moment ago, but you’ve been around the block a little bit. And and prior to prior to Thrive, you were with Sungard, and you’re telling me prior to that, you were with, you were actually out in the field doing enterprise. So if you wanna give me a quick, we should actually probably capture this because I think it’s relevant.
Eric: 00:47 Yeah. I mean, I guess from an experience perspective, I I’ve been in a sales engineering kind of a solution architecture role, for for many years. And it really is being able to work with clients to find out what are the challenges, what are the pain points, what are they up against, what’s keeping keeping them up at night, and really kind of formulating solutions and proposals, to really kind of fulfill those needs or or fill those gaps or kinda kinda help them, as I mentioned, kinda sleep better at night. So depending on the technologies and capabilities, I’ll be able to kinda bring things to bear. I’ve been, I’ve worked whether it’s in, supporting cable companies specifically or enterprise or small business, medium size, midsize companies.
Eric: 01:26 So get a lot of exposure into, various clientele, various kinda needs and and, concerns and, and and the like. And really, it makes it very exciting. So, I mean, it really keeps it interesting. Every day can be something really can truly be just something different.
Max: 01:40 My first exposure with Sun Guard was a little bit over 20 years ago, and we had contracted them to provide a d r BCDR solution where they would literally roll out a semi truck for us and park a truck in the driveway and provide workstations and servers and and feed in our tape backups. And you know, it was it was actually very impressive. Now, fortunately, we never had to use that, but, I know that was pretty common, especially especially enterprises that were based in areas with tornadoes and hurricanes that got a little bit more, you know, natural disasters and on a more frequent basis. So, you know, unique service.
Eric: 02:12 As you mentioned, so Sungard, I mean, they literally developed the, the disaster recovery kind of solution way back in the seventies. And it really was think of it as literally the time share model. I think it was a Sun Oil at the time, had a mainframe and said, you know what? I bought the secondary mainframe. It’s just sitting here doing nothing.
Eric: 02:31 Maybe I can kinda slice out some time if somebody ever needs it for a disaster. And then that’s how the the kind of the product ever kinda came to an evolution. Fast forwarding years later, many years later, they they added and augmented and and kinda kept up with the with the times over the years. Where they where they are today, obviously, it’s a little bit different situation. But
Max: 02:51 We are so we’re here to talk about Thryv, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a little bit. And if you could do me a favor and just let’s start with a quick high level background or overview and and what Thryv is. And so that way, I can make sure that I’m not coming into this with any assumptions that are incorrect and, straight from the horse’s mouth.
Eric: 03:10 Got it. Yep. So Thryv so we are an managed service provider and an MSSP. So and we’re we’re when you think of from that perspective, it’s it’s really kind of a 2 pronged approach where we can support clients whether their, their security needs can be fulfilled with the with, with Thryv as a whole. We don’t outsource.
Eric: 03:31 We’re not looking to to leverage external companies. We have our own security operations center. We have our own staff. We we manage the all the different technology and deliver that for the clients. But we also have the capabilities to do full on IT services as well.
Eric: 03:46 So everything from a managed service provider perspective, so we’re not handing it over. So if we’re not from a security perspective, you have all the eyes and ears and capabilities and and identifying an issue. And then we can also jump in, remediate those issues as well. So for many of our clients, so when you look at the the kind of history of the company and where we’ve grown to, we started way back in, like, 2,000, for example. And then through organic growth as well as many app acquisitions acquisitions over time, we’ve grown to about 2, 1200 employees altogether.
Eric: 04:21 And that 1200 employees are scattered, in the United States as well as now expanded outside of the United States. But when you look at, again, our our clientele that we really kind of focusing in on, it it can range anything from small business up through enterprise. But really from that, they were tailoring the solutions based on really the client needs. In some situations, we’re literally doing soup to nuts, everything. We are their IT staff.
Eric: 04:46 We do everything for them. Whereas some other very large companies, we may be only doing them a specific slice. Maybe we’re only gonna be doing just OS patching or just a security layer, whatever that may be, but be able to kind of fill those gaps and plug those holes, on behalf of the client.
Max: 05:02 So 20 years ago would put you as a Microsoft partner, and a and a background in Microsoft. So, you know, other platforms have become more and more common. Are you still solidly Microsoft focused? Are you seeing, you know, diversity of devices and endpoints and operating systems and and systems? I mean, what, what’s your what’s your operational focus at this point in terms of companies?
Eric: 05:26 Yep. So from a from a a vendor perspective, Microsoft is still a huge player in the in the business. So we’re we are a gold gold partner. We leverage from everything from operating systems that are running on either customer’s infrastructure or Thrive Cloud’s infrastructure as well. Any of those operating systems, we’re providing management, patching, ongoing support on those, as well as we’re doing a lot within Azure environment.
Eric: 05:51 And then in addition to that, Microsoft 365 is a significant practice for us. So we do everything from, migrations into Microsoft 365, hardening kind of optimization, single sign on capabilities, DLP capabilities. But also, we have, as I mentioned, a significant practice for Microsoft collaboration as well. So everything from SharePoint and what a better use and how do you kind of define for your intranet and extranet capabilities and really kind of personalization from your sites and differentiation or segregation from your various departments and and the like. So Microsoft is absolutely a massive player in the space, and and we we have a significant portfolio that aligns with, their products and services.
Max: 06:37 There’s this I find this assumption a lot with companies of, oh, we can just go on a Microsoft 365 or we can go on to a competitive platform. And everything’s just done for us. Like, we don’t need to have somebody help us. We can just you know, Microsoft’s just gonna do it. That’s not usually the case, though, all the time.
Max: 06:52 I mean, we talk about just you know, you you you mentioned migration practice and, you know, moving applications or data from on prem or into cloud or probably also, like, acquisitions, mergers and acquisitions, divestiture divestitures. You know, when you’re when you’re talking with a new company, and I’m gonna go into the SMB versus enterprise here in a moment. When you’re talking to a new company, at what iteration usually you’re finding them with 365? And what are you finding with people in terms of pain points or problems that they’re having with 3 65 that they’re kind of waking up to and saying, okay. We actually do need somebody to help us do these things.
Max: 07:22 Like, you know and and for me, you know, I’ve been doing this for so long. I you know, like, email, antivirus, spam filtering, email filtering, these sorts of things. You know, not to say that Microsoft isn’t doing a good job at this, but compared to layering on specific solutions designed around these needs, it’s not great. I mean, if you were looking at you know, there’s a reason why Proofpoint, Mimecast, and these other platforms are so big today. So, anyways, I don’t wanna preach too much here, but I’m kinda curious.
Max: 07:47 You know, what what is the customer pain point? What does the customer journey look like as as they’re coming to you and and saying you know, raising their hand and saying, hey. You know, we we do need help with 365. And and what kind of help is that?
Eric: 07:57 Yeah. And and you really touched on it in the the beginning about when you look at what’s included in the license, it gives you a huge list of I don’t wanna call it laundry list, but literally a laundry list of of things that could be enabled. They’re not on by default. In most cases, you you really need to know what needs to be turned on and how to turn it on. And so a lot of that is is capabilities that may be built into the license or may need it to be added on.
Eric: 08:21 So if there’s add on and additional licenses that need to be added in there or additional features or dependencies, all those can be kinda layered in. From a defense and depth depth perspective, you touched on also from a layering perspective. So we’ll often lever leverage, platforms that integrate with the Microsoft 365. So, for example, by Checkpoint, Harmony, or using Mimecast, where we can do from an email hygiene perspective of, filtering out if there’s a spear phishing, phishing, malware, and and the like, but also really kinda truly protecting the end user as that mail flow is coming through in that platform. And, again, from our perspective, the performance and capabilities and and, and the like of those 2 platforms, for example, they’re they’re, in my perspective, head and shoulders above what you’d get standard out of the box kind of platform.
Max: 09:15 I was a little cynical when I started seeing Checkpoint Harmony out in the market, and I knew it was a lot of MSPs and MSSPs were were bringing it to their clients because, you know, obviously, there’s probably a an an incentive or or value in terms of their, you know, VAR program or resale program. Mhmm. But it actually is turning out to be a really good platform for people. And, you know, I’ve had to I’ve had to change my thinking about harmony a lot. And just the capabilities of the platform really feel actually pretty fantastic.
Max: 09:46 And then they have a relative they have a solid, you know, I mean, they’re not doing a full sassy play because they don’t have the hardware and the SD WAN appliance. Right? But they’ve got this core component of this overlay for security for a lot of companies, remote access, and secure gateways, and, you know, every other acronym that is on. Right?
Eric: 10:04 Right. Exactly. And and so and you’re hitting on so Checkpoint and Harmony, it was through an acquisition. They acquired a company called Avanon. So it’s difficult to to not shake my head and and to be able to connect continue to say Avanan.
Eric: 10:16 So if I fall into doing that again, I apologize. But so their model is is very interesting. When you look at, like, a a proof point or or a Mimecast, it’s it’s a secure email gateway, something that sits in front of Microsoft 365 and gives that front end kind of it’s gonna pass through this gateway first, then it gets handed to the environment. Whereas a checkpoint is more kinda API communication, but the mail flow itself and the actual data flow is actually going directly to them. So they put in kinda mail rules that says anything that needs to get delivered to Microsoft 365, it’s gonna hairpin, hit Avanon, do all the cleansing, purging, sandboxing, do everything that needs to do to make sure that that data stream is clear, that there’s no embedded or hidden kind of attachment or whatever it may be, and then it gives it back to directly to Microsoft 365.
Eric: 11:09 So at that point from an email delivery, it’s now you know that it’s clean. In addition, it also pulls in things like SharePoint and OneDrive and and Teams and and and the like. So it’s not just focused on just email delivery, which, many of the platforms are only doing the email. It’s doing, much more.
Max: 11:29 Also really important that distinction because if you’ve got a gateway that sits outside of the email platform, it can’t monitor or defend from stuff that’s actually happening internally as well. And there’s there’s plenty of examples of this. I’m not creating this, right, where gain access to internal systems and then use that to then launch attacks or go and traverse laterally inside the organization. Email, of course, is a really big point for that because if you can trick somebody in your finance team to send a wire out because it comes from the right email address, I’ll pick on them. Ubiquiti Networks, wired $40,000,000 out of their account because somebody thought that it was from the CFO and they were buying a company.
Max: 12:04 Now they were lucky they reclaimed most of that money. So, you know, that’s not not a terrible story. As a Microsoft gold partner and as a as an MSP supporting Microsoft, you know, devices and desktops and then a gold partner supporting Azure and 365. It creates a little bit of of conflict of friction for you, doesn’t it? Where you say, you know, Microsoft has, you know, e five secondurity licenses and defender for email, and, you know, they’re they really wanna envelope everything around this estate.
Max: 12:33 And and when you’re talking and and working with a client through these things of, like, how do you how do you help make those decisions? I mean, should we be running Microsoft, you know, defender and Sentinel, or should we be running, you know, a CrowdStrike or a Sentinel 1 or a Carbon Black or fill in the blank EDR? You know, what SIM do we use or what email platform do we use? And do we do we embed that all with Microsoft or do we take some out? So, how how do you guys how do you manage that, and how do you manage that, you know, everything inside of Microsoft versus some stuff inside of Microsoft and somehow?
Eric: 13:05 Yep. And and I think it’s there’s kinda multilayers there. I mean, when you look at from when you’re trying to to bring all things into into Microsoft, I’m not saying that they’re they’re not doing a a a great job. It’s you may not be getting the best of the best in there. And my perspective is where customers can take the approach over there.
Eric: 13:27 I’m just gonna go ahead and buy point vendor solutions, and I’ll try to manage all those individually. And now you’ve got the sprawl of various various vendors and contracts that you have and difficulties. I’ve got various dashboards that I have to manage it all, and I and it’s it’s not coming into a security operation center and the like. So that poses a different challenge. What Thrive what we do essentially is we’ll take the the the approach of what is best for the client themselves.
Eric: 13:54 What is the best way to protect them? And then, again, I’ll go back to keep on mentioning about defense in-depth or layering kind of capability. It’s saying, how are we going to protect this, and what are the various layer layers that we’re gonna have, and what is the best solution to do that? It might be Microsoft or it might be something different. And in that case, we’ll come in with, here’s the solution.
Eric: 14:13 But behind it is is the support that you have. And that’s really, to me, is the value. So anybody can go out and buy an Uppoint solution. If they didn’t configure it properly, they’re not tuning it properly, and they’re not managing it properly, it’s not gonna work well. So in our case, we’ve tuned it.
Eric: 14:29 We optimize it. We continue to support it, and we’re continuing to kinda update and and, manage that along the way. And that to me is the is the value. So having that security operation center and having the the kind of the the wherewithal or the fortitude of the technology and knowledge at our abilities and within our our abilities is is is to me the differentiator.
Max: 14:50 I have seen, this is a big pet peeve of mine where a lot of smaller IT consultancies and MSPs have pushed into the MSSP space, you know, the managed security service provider side of things. And it feels like that’s accelerated to some degree especially with, you know, some of these platforms which offer, you know, a lot of integrated holistic solutions. Right? So, you know, maybe it’s a a Fortinet based system or maybe it’s just their their their Microsoft partner. You know, they’re at whatever tier, but they can sell e 5 or push the client into e 5.
Max: 15:27 And they can present and they can say that they’re, you know, we’re gonna we’re gonna do your security for you as well. And and I have these conversations with companies and you find out this MSP maybe has 6 or 7 engineers. I’m not saying they’re not really good 6 or 7 engineers, but, you know, from coming from that environment decades ago and just understanding that, I’m I’m I’m not starting this from a standpoint of, like, let’s say, bashing that industry, but I I kinda feel like that’s not doing the the customer service. You know? They’re not getting what they think they’re getting and the reason why they’re not getting what I mean, they just don’t even know what they’re not getting that they should be getting.
Max: 16:01 Right? And, you know, at 1200 employees, you know, you are a very large MSP. Like, this is a substantial operation that Thryv is running at this point. How have you how do you approach this with people? I mean, you know, are you in you say I mean, SMB to enterprise is a huge I mean, that is a a vast swath of different market.
Max: 16:24 So you’re competing against other MSPs, especially smaller, you know, mom and pop size. And I say mom and pop, I mean, you know, anything under 20 in a 20 employees in an MSP is I mean, it’s a small MSP operation. They’re they can be very specialized and we can very excellent what they do. But it’s hard to provide security at that size because, you know, you just don’t have the resources for it. So, you know, what does that what does that talk track look like for you, and and how, you know, how do you coach and counsel people through this?
Eric: 16:51 Yeah. And so I mean, and you’re hitting on bolts both ends of the spectrum from a size and scale of either an MSP, a very extremely large kind of, service providers that are out there or our IT outsourcers that are out there, as well as the small smaller boutique shops that that are in there. And some of those boutique shops, they don’t even have their own security operations center. They may outsource that completely to another MSP. And so you’re you’re thinking that, okay.
Eric: 17:16 I’ve contracted with this company, whatever the organization in, and I think Fred is doing a great job. But who are the people that are behind the scenes and who are they leveraging? So where is my data? What am I going through? Who’s who’s if it’s this external company that’s doing the MSSP, looking at security capabilities.
Eric: 17:33 And then they have to swivel chair to the MSP, a different company, to be able to kinda support it. And then to your point about the the size and scale and staff and so forth, you get the smaller the company is, but more limited they’re gonna have from a resources, from a knowledge base, from a experience or or escalation capabilities. Because you have just a much smaller group to be able to work with. So Thryv’s approach is is very different. So, as I mentioned, so we’re not outsourcing, leveraging external companies.
Eric: 18:03 Our security operations center that we have, we leverage directly. It’s our employees monitoring 247, 365. But when we need to jump into a platform, a firewall switch, wireless access point, Microsoft 365 or what it is whatever it is to close that gap or close that issue or remediate that issue, we’re able to jump right in to be able to execute that. From a service delivery perspective, so we take a a very different model also that, we’re not a a pool of 900, technicians that that you’re just calling into a call center. And really what that’s meant to be so we’ll break it into each pod as kinda either from a vertical focus, maybe it’s health care or finance or or other, as well as we’ll define a specific client to a specific pod.
Eric: 18:52 So you get familiarity with the pod members and people that are on that pod staff, and they become very familiar and intimate with your network, your environment. What makes you unique? So you’ll get to know the the the person on a a name to bay name basis. Hopefully, you’re not calling them every single day on on something, but it’s meant to be that giving more of a white glove type of boutique kind of approach, but with all the capabilities to be able to draw in from okay. I’ve I haven’t run into this issue or I didn’t run into this issue issue recently, but I know I can tap into all of these this expertise in either other pods or within other other layers within the organization to be able to draw that in.
Eric: 19:36 So whether it’s a Microsoft going back to that, if it’s a Microsoft related issue or VMware or if it’s a a Meraki or whatever it may be in the technology to be able to say, okay. This is getting a little bit beyond my kind of knowledge and skill set, but I can tap into all of these other kind of knowledge base and and reach directly out to, to, anyone else on on the pods, either my individual pod or external into the other pods. It also gives the ability to say from an overflow. If if for some reason that MSP that has 20 people, if they get an event or, something else that’s going on, they may be taxed right out of the gate where we have the ability to say each pod has overflow capability. So if normally you’re New England 1, for example, that you’re tagged to, you have the ability to roll into.
Eric: 20:28 That’s always your primary pod. But if for some reason it’s running a little hot, we can always roll into Newland 2 or New York or or, or elsewhere.
Max: 20:37 I’m taking notes because there’s stuff I wanna come back to here. Let’s talk about your customer for a moment. You say SMB to enterprise, and there’s no real, like, hard and fast rule for this. I’m I’m curious how you guys classify the segment size and and then so we can kinda dig into that a little bit more.
Eric: 20:53 Yeah. I I mean, I would say that so from a from an SMB perspective, I mean, we we could have, funds small fund companies that might be in New York that could be kind of a from 5 to 20 people within within their organization, or we could have companies that have thousands of employees. I mean, I would say our sweet spots are probably in the the 100 to 2000 kind of employees where the majority of the that’s from a seat perspective. But, really, it’s it’s less on the size of the company. I think it’s more on the mindset of the client to be able to say, you know what?
Eric: 21:28 People that have, kind of I’m in health care or I’m in finance, and I have specific compliance or regulations or audit requirements or achievements that I I must meet, they’ll have the mindset that I need that same defense in-depth kind of methodology to be able to say, I need to secure my environment. I need to have all of these things kind of in place and really kind of working with it as a true partnership versus somebody that’s just going to I mean, that 20 person MSP going back to that might be a perfect fit for someone that doesn’t prioritize that and and maybe some that are on on the fringe of that. But if someone is sincerely or seriously considering kind of I need to not just check the box, but I need to really protect and cover myself and cover those bases, that’s really the the kind of customer mindset that we have.
Max: 22:17 It’s an interesting definition. You know, the SMB and this, like, 50 to a 100 seat 50 to a 100 employees is is really like the barren wasteland in terms of, like, technology and and sophistication because companies have crossed that line into actually needing sophisticated things, but still being too small to whether it’s beyond the radar from the, ISVs and, you know, what’s what’s available to you or just budgets in order to actually deploy some stuff, it gets really tough. It’s tough, you know, in that size. And, you know, you find you find outliers and unicorns and people that are willing to spend anything on their IT infrastructure, which is, you know, the exception, not the rule. And at 20 people, you know, they’re spending, you know, adjusted probably a 1,000, $1500, you know, a seat per month in in total IT infrastructure.
Max: 23:09 And, because they just don’t have the mass to amortize that, you know, in in aggregate, you know, across across a lot of, you know, a lot of different employees. So for you, it’s you know, what I really heard about this is it’s less about size and more about need. You know? Do they have a need that has triggered this? And and you see that more from, you know, audit and compliance and objectives?
Max: 23:32 Or are you seeing that also from, you know, hey. We were with, you know, Bob and Sally’s house of msp.com, and we had a problem, and they went out to market, and and they stumbled into you. And and, you know, you’re taking business that way.
Eric: 23:46 Yeah. And I think it comes in from many different kind of a multi pronged type of approach. So we we’ve had, in numerous times where a client has outgrown the the capabilities of whatever MSP, whoever it may be. And, again, I’m not knocking small MSPs, but you can get to a scale and size and and capabilities or or deficiencies that they have that they’ve just outgrown. And so that’s really from a value perspective is where we can really kind of bring that that client in and really kinda say, here’s the capabilities.
Eric: 24:18 Here’s all the the the layers that we can bring and bring to the equation, and they’re gonna help you. From a from an other end of the kind of the spectrum perspective, when you look at the the very large MSPs, where if you’re literally just treated as just a number, where if you’re getting to the these monsters of a of a of an MSP, you literally may be just okay. You’re just one of the many, and you’re literally calling into a pool. You’re calling into a general pool. You’re not getting that that kind of white glove kind of support, or you’re getting connected with the with somebody that you know.
Eric: 24:52 You’ve had experience. You don’t have to retell that same story over and over and say, this is what’s makes me different. This is what’s in my environment and all. So we we see kind of a combination of both. The end of it from my perspective is educating the client.
Eric: 25:07 So it’s really then there’s you’re always gonna run into I don’t call them tire kicker kickers, but it’s somebody that’s going to say, you know what? I’m just looking for the best price, and I’m looking for the best. They just give me the bare bones kinda whatever it’s gonna be. But when you really kinda educate them and say, you know what? These are the risks that are out there.
Eric: 25:26 And these are the ways that we can help you. And really kinda run through exactly why it’s important to have all the different layers of I mean, it’s just the basic blocking and tackling. Are you doing backups? Are you doing patching? Are you doing do you have a disaster recovery plan?
Eric: 25:40 Or and what’s your goal for that? And then really kinda moving right up the stack to be able to say, where are the gaps along the way? And then identifying, okay, this is something that they’re either willing to accept that risk at that layer or we’re going to kind of we need a solution to help plug that hole. And so it’s through that education, I think, that we find that somebody says, you know what? Why didn’t this other x y z vendor tell me about this?
Eric: 26:07 Why didn’t they run through this scenario? Why didn’t they have that? So I think it’s really to me, it’s it’s it’s really meant to be a collaborative kind of discussion with those clients to be able to say, you know what? Here’s your exposure. Here’s ways that we can help, whether you’re gonna plug that yourself or it’s in ways that we can come in and come in and help plug that hole, but it needs to be done.
Max: 26:29 This is the this is the conflict with IT where you have you know, it’s absolutely essential for every business everywhere now at this point to have a functioning IT. And, waiting for this thunder to to go off here. But at the same time, for most companies, IT is not viewed as, you know, a revenue generating operation for them. It’s it’s an expense. Right?
Max: 26:54 So the friction becomes, okay, well, we have to manage constrained expenses and drive expenses down, not necessarily invest in them. Right? So if you’re you’re kind of in this, like, we need this and it has to work perfectly. And if we if it’s not working, then it’s a problem for us. But at the same time, you know, don’t spend any money on it.
Max: 27:10 Right? And there’s like this there’s always this, like, push and pull I feel like, you know, that happens inside of companies, especially if they’re not technology focused businesses where they’re actually driving revenue out of, you know, out of tech. Now you talk about trading and investment funds, you know, Microsoft Word probably isn’t viewed as critical for most of them, but their turret systems and their trading terminals are absolutely pretty critical to them. And they spend a lot of money on those things. Let’s talk about onboarding.
Max: 27:44 And and you touched on technology, and you started rattling off a bunch of different names. I mean, at this point, what? There’s, you know, yeah. Let’s just call it, you know, half a dozen. Let’s say a dozen main network you know, piece of network gear and firewalls are in the market today.
Max: 27:59 Right? And, you know, you can say Palo, Juniper, Cisco, Meraki, SonicWall, FortiGate. You know? I’m missing a whole WatchGuard. Guard.
Max: 28:08 I’m missing a whole bunch here. Right? And there’s checkpoint I mean, there’s there’s plenty. Right? How from a support infrastructure standpoint, you have a challenge of now being pretty broad to support a diverse customer base.
Max: 28:22 But at the same time, it’s hard to become operationally excellent in a dozen different firewall technologies. So are you taking people on and saying, okay. We’ll we’ll run this, but we wanna replace it. Or is it a, you know, sorry. You’re running this stuff.
Max: 28:36 We just can’t support you because we just can’t support you. Or, you know, like, how what what does an onboarding evaluation look like and and how you know, from a client engagement, you’re gonna have, you know, somebody in a sales capacity going out and developing a relationship that at some point has to turn it over to, you know, an engineer and an engineering team and somebody that can onboard and then go and actually operationalize that support. So, you know, from, like let’s let’s just talk soup to nuts. Like, top to bottom, you know, how does how does this work for Thryv? And how are you engaging with a client, you know, from the beginning and working all the way to, like, onboarding and and doing continuing improvement?
Eric: 29:16 Got it. So from a an evaluation perspective of the platforms first, so we absolutely have our our preferred platforms that we say on on platform essentially. So those are let’s say, for example, it would be, like, FortiGate firewalls that’s sitting in front of, like, Meraki switches or Cisco switches and Meraki wireless access points. There are other platforms that we can support as well, but we’ll usually gravitate to that is as as our platform. You hit on an extremely important point is when you have the expertise on that platform, it makes it a much more consistent repeatable model.
Eric: 29:52 And at the end of the at the end of the day, it’s that’s what you’re selling to the client. It’s the end result. How are you supporting it? How are you delivering it? How are you kind of providing that day to day kind of care and feeding for that environment?
Eric: 30:04 If it’s something where if it and I and I see that oftentimes with real small MSPs with the they’d be willing to take on anything. It’s kinda like, okay. I’ve got thread firewall service over here where and I’ve got SonicWall over there, and I’ve got this this other one that’s Palo Alto. And I’ve got now I don’t have the expertise because I’m running in all these different directions and researching on online on this. And, okay, it was, WatchGuard firewall has this command and Palo has that command and Cisco has this one.
Eric: 30:32 And I’m trying to cover all these bases with a team of 5 people. It’s just yeah. And so what we’ll do is and so we do we have a a tight kind of, solution review process of what is considered kind of off platform and will whether we’ll kind of support it. So not saying that there’s where where the goal is to exclude, but it’s meant to be what’s going to make us successful, what’s gonna make the customer successful. So because what we it’s doing a disservice to the client.
Eric: 31:03 If we said, you know what? We’ll take our new platform, but we only have one person that knows the product. And if that one person knows the product and he goes to Aruba, he’s on vacation, now what are we gonna do? Now we’re gonna be struggling struggling to try to, support and provide the value to that that client. So there are absolute cases that where we’d say we wanna unify the platform.
Eric: 31:25 There’s obviously all always, alternatives and and kind of deviations from that. And, again, that’s where we’ll have a a solution review to be able to say, can this specific platform because maybe the client just bought it 6 months ago. Can we accept this specific platform during this time? But with the intention of maybe down the road, we’re going to kind of move to our our own internal platform or our our on platform platform.
Max: 31:50 So you mentioned FortiGate firewalls in front of Cisco or Meraki switches and access points. And
Eric: 31:57 this
Max: 31:57 is something that’s been very fascinating to me, you know, watching and observing because if you got a Palo Alto firewall, Palo doesn’t sell switches and the access points. Right? So you’re running something else behind it. And replacing the Meraki MX with FortiGate or Apollo makes absolute is a no brainer sense. Right?
Max: 32:17 You know, it absolutely if you’ve had a good experience with the MX, you you very quickly understand why you would not run it. What’s fascinating to me though is how limited FortiGate Fortinet has actually been in penetrating the switch and access point side of the house where it is exceedingly common to see FortiGate firewalls with Meraki switches and access points but very uncommon to see FortiGate firewalls with Fortinet switches and APs. And I I mean, is that something you guys are start I mean, has that is is is Fortinet penetrating this? Are you starting to see refreshes with with, you know, this hardware coming in? Or is it still this is just, like, we run FortiGate firewalls, we run Meraki switches and access points, and that’s just that’s just the way things are everywhere now.
Eric: 33:02 It’s not every day that we run into where we where where we hear of kind of a a a need where a client has FortiGate FortiGate switches or they’re they’re interested in this model. But our our experience are are is has been very positive and and and, and the capabilities both from a a UI and management capability, dashboards, visibility, troubleshooting capabilities with Meraki is is extremely valuable. So be able to have kind of where it’s it’s all in a a cloud portal. Now I need to either provision it. I wanna make a change, and I can make that as a global change or individual regional change.
Eric: 33:40 So it’s a very powerful platform. So that’s from our experience is not to disparage, the for that switches might be, might have come a long way and maybe 40 APs have. But we we know from a consistency and from a platform and from a product perspective perspective, those 2 have, or from a a switch and a wireless access point have have been, have been fantastic. We do also support other wireless access point platforms as well as other switch platforms as well. For example, we’ll do extreme switches, and we’ll do Aruba switches as well.
Eric: 34:14 So but it really depends on on the client need and really what their their goals are and size and scale.
Max: 34:20 Well, I mean, Aruba makes sense because it’s HP. Right? So, you know, you see a lot of HP out in the world still, especially in enterprise. Extreme, I haven’t seen in a long time. Well, that’s not true.
Max: 34:32 But, they do have wonderful purple, you know, look and feel. I mean, you can’t you can’t you can’t discount the purple the purple switches. But I mean, this is all these companies are fighting to expand, you know, what’s the word I’m looking for? I it’s not convergence. It’s, you know, to expand the estate that they’re actually, you know, talking to.
Max: 34:54 Right? And so we’ll just I mean, so Cisco. Right? So Cisco purchases Meraki. You know, Cisco at one point had 3 different SD WAN solutions that they were pushing.
Max: 35:05 They acquire OpenDNS. They acquire Duo. Right? And so now so now you get into this whole thing where you could say, okay. Yeah.
Max: 35:11 You could you could buy everything from Cisco, but it’s not the same console. It’s not the same UI. It’s not the same look and feel. You’re gonna have identity access management and multifactor over here, and you’re gonna have, you know, your secure web gateway CASB DLP function over here. And, well, now if you’re using a Meraki firewall and the MX firewall, then there’s an a a button you can press now and then launch the other console, and you can kinda integrate into it.
Max: 35:36 And then there’s, you know, programmers for sales if you have to have an MX in order to get into certain programs or an umbrella and and things like that that they’re trying to influence. Palo’s doing this with Cortex. You know, Fortinet’s doing this where they’re they’re they’ve got, their their EDR solution and their SIM solution. And and but then over in the corner, you’ve got this small animal called Microsoft. And and, you know, how how how are you guys navigating this from your with your customer of saying, you know, you know, the example.
Max: 36:13 Right? You know, you should have a 40 gate firewall. You should have a Meraki switch, but you should have, you know, Defender EDR, and you should have, you know, this and this for SIM, and we’re gonna use this for threat intel. And we’re you know? And and because, I mean, it’s a lot of Legos.
Max: 36:26 I mean, in some cases, these Legos already exist, which might be the easier example. Like, everything’s already there. You just have to come in and make it work properly. But when when you start talking about taking blocks out and putting new blocks in and, I mean, you get in this crazy Jenga tower very quickly.
Eric: 36:39 Yeah. And I think it kinda comes back to when you were talking about you you’re either managing all trying to manage all of these individual point tools that you have in environment, or you kind of go with this unified one solution that and to not to pick on Microsoft, but they’ll try to promote everything as being all within this one platform. Well, if everything’s all in that one platform, are you getting the best service capability need and and and alike within that one solution? Also, is who’s really behind the scenes? Again, going back to that tuning the expertise, the who’s watching from a security operations center.
Eric: 37:17 Do you have the staffing? Do you have the expertise? Do you have the ability to really kinda do that tuning? And that’s where, again, I I can always kinda gravitate back to Thrive’s strength is is platforms are great. Platforms are platforms, but the end of the end of the day is to deliver that solution.
Eric: 37:33 We’re delivering our product, delivering that the kind of end result for the clients. So from a SIEM perspective, for example, we run both Fortinet’s Fortisim as well as Fortisor. So someone could literally go off the street, buy those licenses, deploy it themselves, and they can manage it. But it’s it’s getting a pilot license, learning how to to learning how to get how to how to fly a plane, doing all that maintenance, and they can take on that role themselves. Or you’re literally kinda saying that, you know what?
Eric: 38:04 Thrive, you’ve got the security operations side. You’ve got the security analyst. You have the operations staff and staff and depth and knowledge and capabilities to be able to deliver that. I want that to be able to deliver it as a service. And again, to me, that’s really the value.
Eric: 38:19 And so whether there’s multiple dashboards that we’re managing or whether it’s kind of one unified kind of a delivery model solution to the client, the end result is they just wanna run their business. And we’re here to provide the kinda the the layers of protection and foundation for them.
Max: 38:34 How do I wanna phrase this? Think about this carefully. There’s a lot of I find a lot of personalities in in IT that still wanna own and operate and manage things themselves. And, of course, that’s crazy to me because I come from that world in doing that. And and, you know, just from a standpoint of being able to take a vacation, forget, like, the operational and organizational risk of, like you know, I I look at in, like, the lens of, like, what happens if I stop a bus, you know, or, you know, one day, like, what what happens?
Max: 39:09 But it’s and and I see this conflict now occurring inside of organizations where there may be the CIO or the CTO of the company understands that risk and they have a limited amount of of staff and headcount. And they’re concerned with, consistency, deliverability, value. Right? Like, it’s just you know, they want their staff doing the high leverage activities for their company. And but then there’s an IT director that maybe isn’t on the same page and still has this idea of, like, oh, I wanna own all this equipment.
Max: 39:43 I wanna manage it myself. And that conflict is really interesting and fascinating to watch on the outside of it because in that case, the the CTO is literally telling the IT director, I want you to do more important stuff for the business. And the IT director is saying, well, I wanna own this firewall and, like, you know, we used to talk about, like, you know, server server hugging. You know, people used to use that term. But I’m it it’s I’m I’m curious how you’re seeing this evolution taking place because, you know, a 24 hour, 7 day a week, you know, like, it’s it’s 7 bodies to have 1 person on call.
Max: 40:12 And, you know, ratios when I was starting was a 100 to a 120 employees per one IT person was kind of the ratio inside of organizations. And I’ve seen these ratios like a 160, a 182100 to 1 kind of size at this point now. So you just don’t have that capability. I don’t care how much RMM you have in place and how much automation you have in place. Like, you just can’t deal with that kind of work internally, you know, and and deliver quality product and quality service back to your back to your company.
Max: 40:42 So, you know, how do you guys see this this this coming out? I mean, at at 50 employees, you probably don’t have you know, the company doesn’t have an in house IT. Right? But at a 1000 employees, they still have in house they have in house IT. Right?
Max: 40:55 Like, that’s you know, it’s a critical function for them.
Eric: 40:59 And and that’s where you’ll see significant differences as as you pointed out from a size and scale of the client. So what we’re delivering to an enterprise company that has, as you mentioned, thousands of employees and and a fully fully staffed IT is going to look very different than somebody that, 4 to 50 person company. And and our value, from whether if it’s somebody that has, hey. You’re not that that’s my role. That’s my job.
Eric: 41:25 I I’m at risk, and I’m now I’m gonna create conflict. We’ll come in and really kinda say, here are the specific needs, and here are the things that that we know that we’re hearing that that you’re whether they’re having challenges with. And these are the individual things that we can help you with. And so we’ll come in, say, for example, if somebody just literally said, you know what? I don’t wanna deal with day to day OS patching.
Eric: 41:50 Can you handle that? And third party patching. We’ll solve that. And for that client, if it’s a large scale client and we’re just solving that for them, we’ll take that on. And so in in security operations center, I mean, everybody knows that.
Eric: 42:03 I mean, security is is red hot because you’re constantly in a in this race to say, I wanna to kinda protect that whatever that asset is before somebody causes an issue in it, kind of a hacker malware or whatever it is. And so when you look at it from a staffing perspective, to to be able to have that 247 secondurity operations center on their own kind of dime, they’re paying a lot for those resources, that staffing, that expertise, and now you have to keep them interested. And so when you, like, think of from a security operations center or security analyst, they wanna be exposed into many different things. And sitting at an MSP, if you’re a security analyst, you’re exposed into many different things. So you’re not just looking at a 50 person company, and this is the way we did it, and this is that little box.
Eric: 42:54 You’re exposed into, oh, you know what? This is what we do for this scale of company. This is how we approach it for that scale of company. So it gives it makes it much more interesting, and therefore, kind of retaining those employees is much more likely. But again, I I kinda go back to it’s it’s we’re not trying to always take the entire elephant and kind of or the whale or whatever you wanna call it and say, I have to solve everything and it’s only our way or no way.
Eric: 43:20 It’s really meant to be, how can we help this specific company with this specific scenario?
Max: 43:26 For the record, in 20 plus years, you talk about this idea of, an IT person saying I’m at risk or worried about you know, they’re gonna bring on an MSP, and that’s gonna lead to their downfall and their exit. In 20 plus years, the only time I’ve seen somebody in IT being exited after bringing an MSP, That company had already made the decision to fire them and was looking for a way to then exit that employee. I have never seen a case where a company hires an MSP, which then results in the exit or reduction in IT staff. And usually, with your point that you just made, they’re looking to free up that resource and that team to do things that create leverage and value for the business as opposed to patching. I mean, who wants to I mean, but seriously, like, who who wants to be, like, we show up and and be like their job.
Max: 44:15 What what’s your job? Oh, I’m I’m responsible for patching a 1,000 workstations. I I mean, you know, I I wanna blow my brains out. Like, I don’t care what tool you’re using. Like, you know, like, give me a break.
Eric: 44:26 Well, I will depend on that. So we have a strong platform team, and that that’s what they focus on. They they’re they do a fantastic job, but it’s it’s they’re
Max: 44:34 for scale across thousands of of clients. Right? Like, it’s a different challenge. It’s not like you’re you’re sitting in a company with 200 desktops. You gotta go run around and make sure, you know, you’re running Windows update on everything.
Max: 44:43 Right? Like, it’s a it’s a completely different thing that you’re talking about.
Eric: 44:46 And and that’s that’s a huge differentiator for for that you’re hitting on. So when you look at Microsoft that rolls out a patch every I mean, the the second Tuesday of the of the month, if that’s an an afterthought for this person, you don’t have somebody that that kinda lives and breathes that on a on a day to day basis. They just do that as a side. I’m a server admin. Now suddenly, I’m gonna handle the patch and now or I’m the network guy during the day, and now suddenly, I’m gonna do this.
Eric: 45:11 Or at night, I’m gonna take on call for security operations center kinda roles. It it makes it really challenging for them internally. And, unfortunately, a lot of times that leads to burnout. But to your point about the kinda elevating the their IT staff and capabilities, it really does that. So, I mean, you look at how a business wants to grow.
Eric: 45:33 Is it just the basic is it interesting to any of those employees to just do the basic blocking and tackling? Those need to get done. Absolutely. All the all the things that that you need to have from a foundation have to get done. But if you can elevate your team to say, here’s what I wanna develop for my capabilities.
Eric: 45:50 Here’s what I wanna offer from, enhancements to differentiate the the organization, whether it’s a new mobile application or it’s a new service or I wanna do spend more with SharePoint. It it’s really allowing them to to kinda grow the team. And, again, going back to making it interesting for those employees. If you’re doing the same kind of monotonous thing day in, day out, the first thing they’re gonna do is look for the door. And then be able to kinda say, you know what?
Eric: 46:16 I’m not challenged. I don’t like this. I’m really bored with what I’m doing. I don’t see a growth path. I don’t see any kind of opportunities ahead of me.
Eric: 46:23 I’m gonna look elsewhere. And that’s that’s where unfortunately leads to a lot of risk for clients.
Max: 46:27 Through, onboarding implementation for Thryv. So, you know, you’ve you’ve gotten to the point a company has signed a contract with you. Let’s say, hypothetically, there are 500 employees and, you know, 1 or 2 IT people internally. You know? So it’s kinda like a midsize.
Max: 46:43 We’re not talking about, like, an SMB with nothing. We’re not talking about a huge enterprise. It’s just looking for 1 or 2 services from you. So I think probably, like, 500, they’re gonna consume a lot of resources from you. What is what what is what is implementation onboarding look like?
Max: 46:58 How long does it take? What steps are you going? Who’s involved? What’s the back and forth? What’s what’s what is that process?
Eric: 47:05 Got it. So so we have a a strong so Thrive has a a strong PMO organization. So project management organ organization. So immediately when somebody signs whatever the opportunity is or whatever the contract is, they are assigned a project manager, and that project manager is essentially becomes the ringleader. So they’ll do everything from drawing in, project engineering resources.
Eric: 47:28 So I need somebody from the, Microsoft kind of focus that’s going to do all of the Office 365 kind of migrations. I wanna go from on prem Exchange to to Microsoft. I wanna have I have a networking team that’s gonna get engaged on for you mentioned about, like, FortiGate firewalls and Meraki switches and the like. So they’ll bring in those individual project engineers for those specific tasks. And if it was a security analyst, for example, that’s brought in for security related tools, each one of those security engineers or, security analysts, I should say, are responsible for their individual swim lane.
Eric: 48:09 So the project manager themselves will be defining here’s the project plan, the Gantt chart, the project plan, whatever it’s going to be. Here’s the cadence for the calls. Making sure that the the resources are defined. Here’s the date that they’re going to be engaged in, and here’s the task that they’re going to complete. Making sure that they’re aligned from a project perspective.
Eric: 48:29 And that may also and does include the customer as well. If say, for example, a customer has a specific dependency that okay. This project needs to be completed for that or we need to order these circuits before it can then implement firewalls. It’s making sure that the customer’s held accountable for that timeline as well as the project engineers internally. And then we’ll set up cadence calls based on customer need.
Eric: 48:55 It might be weekly. It might be a couple times a week, or it might be check ins every other week. So it really depends on on how many individual kind of streams are running simultaneously and really what what is the appetite from the client perspective.
Max: 49:09 At what point is a pod identified and assigned? I mean, is a pod part of the implementation, or do you have an implementation engineers and analysts? And then after that, you get into support and maintenance, then that gets assigned to a pod or, you know, what’s what’s that you know, where’s where’s what’s that transition?
Eric: 49:25 Yep. So from a project engineer perspective, they’re responsible for, whether it’s migrating into, say, for example, on prem, server infrastructure that you have, you wanna migrate into Thrive Cloud. That onboarding that you’re going through where you’re standing up that environment, project engineering is responsible for the kind of the care and feeding. Once that is into a go live state, now that project engineer, the project manager, the account management team has, has interfaces with the service delivery team that now says, okay. We’re all in agreement.
Eric: 50:02 The documentation’s right. The Visio diagram’s completed. We’ve got all of the information is in is captured within our internal systems. I see all the monitoring is set up properly. So all of those individual checklists are are defined and completed.
Eric: 50:16 And at that point is where the acceptance wears from an ongoing support. So that project engineer will then hand over a fully functional and fully complete, system. At the same time, we also have QA kind of going through to validate. Okay. Were any steps missed?
Eric: 50:35 Did we have anything? Was maybe something didn’t have the right monitoring, or we didn’t have the agent loaded on there properly, or, you know, the documentation should have been updated. We’re gonna make sure that it gets updated. So it’s giving that QA process. We have QA process both in our our service delivery service desk perspective of how tickets were handled and smile back capability and and the like.
Eric: 50:57 And making sure that QA process, but also from a from a project perspective.
Max: 51:01 I would assume, although my mother would tell me not to assume, that we’re talking about, you know, a monitoring agent, an RMM agent. I mean, what’s what’s being installed and deployed? I mean, is that that’s also probably based on what services you’re offering and how deep you’re going into a scope of work. But, you know, if you’re going at at 500, let’s assume you’re going pretty deep into, you know, device management. So this is really a push towards, you know, your monitors in place.
Max: 51:27 You’re collecting data. You can test, you know, see what’s happening on the devices. You can remotely manage the devices and connect to them beyond just like an m you know, MDM, but, you know, an actual RMM agent. And then this all gets tied into your own service stuff.
Eric: 51:40 It it is. And and then all of those tools that whether it’s monitoring or RMM, as you mentioned, all feed into our ServiceNow platform. So ServiceNow is our is our it’s from a change management perspective, ITSM, incident management, client portal, everything. So all of the the, backup reports, security reports, or or or or the like is all captured on your client portal. It provides a front end for, end users to be able to open up cases.
Eric: 52:10 They can look at knowledge bases. They can look at self’s, resetting their own passwords, for example. All of that’s right at their fingertips. But when you get into, like, a an admin level or a POC, we call them, a point of contact, they’ll have much more visibility across their entire enterprise. What’s happening?
Eric: 52:28 I wanna see dashboard reports. What’s the speed of answering the call? How are calls being kind of a how are tickets being opened? Is it somebody that’s going through the portal? Is it somebody that’s that’s calling the service desk?
Eric: 52:40 Is it somebody that’s emailing? And you can really see if there’s any kind of patterns. So we have visibility and we we’re looking at all that data as well to be able to see, are there repeating patterns where, you know what, it’s this time of day on Monday where we get a huge volume and it seems to be isolated or or centered around these specific devices or service, well, maybe that’s a red hot area that we really need to kinda focus on. Client has access to all that dashboard and visibility as well. And then from a from a a platform, as I mentioned, monitoring and RMM, all of that feeds into ServiceNow.
Eric: 53:17 So we’ll use that as a CMDB. So all of the inventory, here’s the serial number of your servers, workstations, switches, wireless access points, whatever it may be, all feed into that environment. And then we can do a dip into warranty master to say, okay. Here’s your device. Here’s the serial number.
Eric: 53:36 Here’s when the the contract that you have or service support expires on this such and such date. And they have access to see all of that data, pull an inventory anytime that they wanted to.
Max: 53:45 Do you have clients that still wanna run their own service desks or monitoring infrastructure in addition to yours or wanna tie in with yours with theirs or, you know, they wanna run they’ve been running Jira service desk or they’ve been running their own service now or whatever it may be. And they don’t wanna get rid of what they have because they have data in it, and they wanna still own and maintain that data. Or what would be another example of this? Maybe they wanna maintain, you know, a tier one function help desk with their end users, and then they want to, you know, augment with your teams. So they want the end user interacting with their own internal tools as opposed to, you know, here’s here’s this external partner.
Max: 54:22 How how do you manage that?
Eric: 54:24 So we have, so a couple different solutions that that we have. 1 is, we’re branded as Transform IT. Transform IT is literally so we manage ServiceNow and all of the capabilities. We’ve we’ve spent well over 7 figures of development dollars, essentially, to to kinda awesome optimize and customizing, kind of expand the capabilities of of the platform. And so we extend that to clients.
Eric: 54:49 So they would have say, for example, if there was a company that had their own IT staff, whether it’s 1 person or whether it’s 200 people, they could have a team of IT staff that’s responsible for this specific layer, whatever it may be. Maybe they’re providing help desk support, and Thryv is providing security operation center, all the security kinda capabilities and networking and firewall and the like. So you can define within that same exact ServiceNow kinda portal to be able to say, okay. These are the the incidents or cases that have been opened, and I’m going to route this towards the customer as the primary kind of, triage. And they’re going to close and work on that ticket.
Eric: 55:36 But at any point in time, they could say, you know what, Thrive? I need you to jump in because it doesn’t look like it’s an end user issue. It’s something in the firewall that I think is blocking it. A rule needs to be updated. So that same exact ticket number or we call them cases, that same exact case number could then be transferred directly over.
Eric: 55:55 In addition within the platform, you can do things like I can have technician to technician chat directly through the system to say, okay. I’m just about to send this your way. You can see all the different fields that have been updated with all and it will literally highlight every field. But prior to sending that over to you, I wanna make sure that this is really the reason why. So you can, of course, capture some of the the updates within the ticket and notes.
Eric: 56:20 But if you wanna just literally have a technician to technician, it really kinda gives you that capability, directly within the system. Now an external ticketing system like, Jira or many others that you have these these other platforms, some customers are really embedded and ingrained with that platform. And we have ServiceNow with with the integrations and APIs and and kind of we’ll just call them APIs. There are many platforms that can integrate directly with it. So it we do have the capability to be able to kind of extend if they had their platform and they’ve spent a considerable amount of dollars and and they’re in it for a long term contract and not going away from it.
Eric: 57:01 We can have integrations to be able to say their platform talks with our platform, updates the ticket. And the only difference, I guess, from that perspective is gonna be or not the only, but it’s it’s gonna be in this ticketing platform has this ticket ID. That ticketing platform has that ticket ID. But they all have references and hooks between the 2 to to say, here’s the linkage between
Max: 57:23 Onboarding and offboarding is a challenge everywhere. It was a challenge when, you still had a a primary office locations and people were coming to the office. And now with more and more workforces being remote and remote centric, that accelerates this as a challenge. Are you guys is this something that you’re tackling for your clients? I mean, are you, you know, maintaining equipment life cycles, maintaining, hey, 8, we just hired this person.
Max: 57:54 They need this equipment. They’re this is where they’re at. They need, you know, like, set them up or this person just left. You know? I mean, that in and of itself at at scale becomes I mean, a a 1000 person enterprise has a constant churn of people every month coming in and leaving the organization for whatever reasons.
Max: 58:16 And, you know, and how I think part of the problem that we’ve seen with that over the years is just maintaining inventory and saying, okay. Do we have a strategy of, like, how much workstations do we have on the go? Or do we need to order the workstations or reorder devices? Or do we order from Dell or do order from Lenovo? Whatever the actual Apple, you know, whatever the actual ordering structure is.
Max: 58:36 Is this something that you you have a solution for? Or is this just something that you talk to with the client and say, hey. How do you guys wanna manage this? Do you want us to help you with this? We can help you this way.
Max: 58:43 Like, you know, what what is common in in there nowadays?
Eric: 58:49 Yeah. And so and and I’ll kinda go back to the the power that ServiceNow and the capabilities that are built into the system that so we have a an a a strong onboarding and offboarding capability where you can have, where a client can can log directly on the portal or we can integrate with, HR platforms, for example, that they’ll say this user is starting in on this date. This is the email. This is the information. This is the title of the reporting.
Eric: 59:16 This is the model that we’re going to use. Reference this specific model, meaning that they’re gonna have or Daryl Strawberry or whoever it’s gonna be and model after their their profile. What do they have? What access to the applications? What capabilities?
Eric: 59:31 What what distribution list are they gonna be tagged to? What what other services are they gonna have? Inside the also in that drop down would be, do they need equipment? Do you need monitors, desktops I mean, laptops, docking stations? Do they need other, kind of ancillary equipment as well?
Eric: 59:48 And through that process, it will literally kick off kind of multiple threads. So maybe it’s automation to be able to say, okay. I’m gonna do a procurement request that goes out to a VAR that orders equipment, specifies that it’s going to be auto, into an autopilot provision, and that all of that all the parameters, registry settings, the the stripping up bloatware, installing specific applications, do whatever it needs to do to customize to that specific user is all provisioned directly to it. In addition, we can also layer in that because you’ve modeled after this specific user, here are the other applications or personalization that need to be applied. Or as I mentioned about ordering equipment, it’s a here’s a monitor, docking station, and, and the like that needs to come along with it.
Eric: 01:00:37 And we’ll coordinate all of that as it gets, handed out directly to the client. So Judy starts, next on, we’ll say May 1st because it’s coming up. We’ll go through the process, literally get all the equipment, go through autopilot, get it ready to be provisioned, push that all that config onto the device itself. And then also from the equipment, here’s the monitor, docking station, here’s whatever, devices you need, maybe cabling, and all that gets literally drop shipped to the client. We can have a technician meet that equipment out of out of that site, install the equipment if necessary.
Max: 01:01:11 So you mentioned integrating with a VAR. You guys also function as a VAR with, with certain certain equipment, certain logos? So we
Eric: 01:01:18 we don’t we’re not a VAR, but we so we will leverage if a customer wants to either purchase, equipment. We can leverage VARs to be able to like laptop, for example. They can they can go through but what we do have is we call equipment based managed services. Think of it as much more like a an a a Comcast set top box model where we’ll provide the appliance, whatever that appliance is, but it’s really the all the services that we’re looking to deliver kind of there. So the day to day updates, the day to day kind of support for it, if there’s any kind of rules and any like a firewall, for example, a FortiGate firewall will apply will provide the actual FortiGate, like a 100 f and all of the management that comes with it.
Eric: 01:02:01 So whether it’s reporting capabilities and and configuration or updates and the the day to day care and feeding. We can do that with a very wide array of platforms and services, whether it’s from servers to, to wireless access points and pretty much anything in between.
Max: 01:02:19 But if the if a if a customer said, you know, we we’re gonna buy a 100 Dell laptops. This isn’t something that necessarily that you would you would buy and resell to them as a VAR. You’d say, okay. We’re gonna integrate with Dell. You have a VAR that you’re already using.
Max: 01:02:33 You wanna go out and buy MacBooks because you’ve decided to go into a MacBook you know, an Apple MacBook device, you know, stand you know, standard. You know, they would still maintain that VAR relationship where you’d help them, you know, directly with Apple or directly with Dollar or directly with Lenovo or whatever it was actually.
Eric: 01:02:48 Yeah. So absolutely. So if, so going back to the autopilot, for example, if it’s a if it’s a Windows laptop, and they have a a relationship with, CDW or something like that. If they specified in there that it’s going to be autopilot provision, we can still leverage our autopilot kind of configuration capabilities to be able to say, I’m gonna push this policy. Here’s the applications that are gonna install and the like.
Eric: 01:03:13 If, say, for example, a client on the other end of the spectrum wanted to purchase all of their equipment through Thryv and we’ll through our procurement department, we will reach out to various, whether it’s Dell, whether it’s Anova, whether it’s gonna be Ingram Micro or others to be able to say, I need to order this type of equipment. What is the what is the pricing? What is the the configuration? What’s the availability and the like? And we’ll coordinate all that.
Eric: 01:03:40 So everything from the actual hardware kind of kind of delivery, to setup configuration and the like can all be handled and managed by us. But, again, kinda going back to the not every client is looking to just purchase hardware. If they’re they’re looking for the service that gets delivered, if it’s something like, as I mentioned, whether it’s a a firewall or switch, wireless access point, a server, or anything along those lines, we can just provide that as a service. They don’t have to there’s no capital outlay. They don’t have to pay anything in advance.
Eric: 01:04:14 There’s no maintenance that they have to go and support. It’s just the monthly recurring, for the service.
Max: 01:04:19 Networking in a place perfectly into that. Right? You need a firewall, it’s this much per month. You need a switch, it’s this much per month. You know, for the rest of this, when you say service delivery, how many different approaches to billing, you know, or engagement models does Thryv have?
Max: 01:04:34 Because, I mean, classically, an MSP, Wow. Classically, an MSP is going to market and they’re saying, hey. We’re selling time. You know? And they’re gonna package time in different ways.
Max: 01:04:43 But, really, what they’re doing is they’re selling their their engineering time, you know, at a markup accounting for, you know, beach time. Right? So, you know, when I when we talk, we’ve we’ve talked about a lot of different areas of, you know, of IT augmented augmentation, MSP SOC, all these different things. Right? You know, is how much I mean, what is your billing structure and your engagement structure?
Max: 01:05:08 I mean, are you still encapsulating time where we’re saying, hey. At this size, you know, we’re expecting to spend this much time, or you’re saying, hey. You know, it’s it’s you have this many seats. It’s this you know, this is your options. It’s this price or, you know, you want this level of service.
Max: 01:05:20 You know? And, you know, how you know, what is what is this look like?
Eric: 01:05:23 So, I mean, I would say it’s gonna vary based on on the the size and scale and and what we’re delivering for the client. If we’re only doing a specific point solution going back to OS patching, Here’s the delivery model. Here’s the the monthly recurring. Everything from a Thrive perspective, I would say from a service perspective, is a consistent monthly recurring. You know what your budget is.
Eric: 01:05:45 You know what’s gonna be delivered, and here’s it’s it’s x number of products or or services that you have translates to y. Here’s your here’s your monthly recurring. Maybe not y. It’s probably in a bad bad choice of a letter. But here’s what the actual cost is to deliver this solution.
Eric: 01:06:01 If that scales and I need it 10 times as many, obviously, there’s going to be some kind of scale adjustment that’s gonna go on the other. What we don’t have is we’re not providing kind of a here’s a a 9 to 5 solution at this price and and they and they they then second shift is gonna be a different price and and the other it’s it’s all 247. So at the end of the at the end of the day from our perspective, and especially when when clients that have kind of, the like minded clients that that have kind of the the auditing compliance and and kind of the the the mindset that I need to be up and running at all times, that’s really where we’re delivering. So it’s 247. For all of the security services, it’s 247 for all of the services that we’re delivering.
Eric: 01:06:48 So if Judy is in the middle of the night running into an issue because she can’t open a PowerPoint or can’t connect to email, But it might be critical before because she’s got this important meeting the next morning. I’m not gonna wait till 8 o’clock in the morning to service her. I’m gonna be on the phone with that person resolving the issue in the middle of the night if I need to.
Max: 01:07:05 So do you have clients that they’ll that’ll do, you know, help desk internally themselves, you know, with certain hours and will, you know, then roll over to Thrive for help desk after hours? You know, if so if Judy calls in at 11 o’clock at night, you know, that’s not going on to an on call help desk person inside the company, but it’s going to your team?
Eric: 01:07:24 We do have, it’s it’s not as prevalent, but we do have cases cases where we’ll augment essentially that their their existing, staff or team. We may have ones where I I have boots on the ground. They meaning that they they have on on-site IT staff. As you mentioned, maybe it’s during the day, and they can handle certain things, and they can kinda run around and and support all the local. But they don’t have the staffing or expertise, And they need either a lifeline where they’re con contacting us to be able to say, you know what?
Eric: 01:07:56 A little bit beyond my ski tips, Thrive, can you step in and help me on this situation? We’ll do that. Or we’ll do, as you mentioned, whether it’s after hours kinda takeover or not takeover. But adding and augmenting their actual support where you’re on the okay. Now you’re on the hook that it’s the clock struck at this specific time.
Eric: 01:08:16 But I would say the vast majority of our clients are are are absolutely it’s, it’s Thrive provides this service and and is provides that responsibility and ownership for that. So what again, whether it’s end user support, help desk support, or whether it’s or it’s security related services. Traditionally, we’re not kinda passing the ball back and forth, but it’s not it’s, we look on an individual case basis, essentially.
Max: 01:08:41 Tell me about Thrive Cloud and position it against Azure. I’ve been I and and and, again, assumption on my part, but I wouldn’t say that that decision is going to be on prem versus off prem. Right? Really, it’s probably, you know, your infrastructure versus an Azure infrastructure that clients are looking at.
Eric: 01:09:00 Yeah. It’s one that it it kinda going back to the the education perspective. From our perspective, it’s, you know, what world work what workload belongs where. So we can certainly support Azure. Great platform, very scalable, lots of capabilities, especially when you get into, like, platform as a service and and and the like.
Eric: 01:09:20 But one of the challenges with all kind of a hyperscale clouds is the variability in billing is what we run into. So you’ve got I’ve generated I I kept this platform up and running longer than I expected. I’ve sent too much data. I’ve I’ve run the register too much. And and now suddenly, you’ve got this ebb and flow.
Eric: 01:09:39 Oops. Sorry. I thought my teams was off. You’ve got this this variability in in the billing because it’s now suddenly it was this at this month, and next thing the the next month jumps up and then it goes back down. What a Thrive Cloud really will do is so Thrive taking a step back is what is Thrive Cloud?
Eric: 01:09:58 So we have multiple cloud locations that are at various colocation, very large scale colocation. So we provide everything within our cage environment. So it’s all of our equipment. It’s all managed by us. It’s and part of that is the solution called Thrive Club.
Eric: 01:10:17 So Thrive Club is a true VMware stack as you imagine. We’ll manage up through the operating system potentially higher. We can do OS patching. We could do EDR on top of that. Or a client, if they said they’re gonna handle the the patching and EDR themselves, fine.
Eric: 01:10:34 Well, well, you can just end that the operating system and the licensing that’s there. But really kinda going back to from a a consistency and delivery and from a, a pricing model perspective, they know exactly where the bill is because it’s a it’s a it’s a flat consistent fee on a month to month basis. You have this number of virtual machines. You have this month from a CPU RAM and disk perspective, and here is your backup unit. Here’s what the cost is, and that stays consistent.
Eric: 01:11:03 Obviously, if you ever scaled and you decided, I’m gonna add 4 more virtual machines or 10 more, obviously, that’s gonna get adjusted. But now you know exactly where that fixed fee is. Right? So it’ll really eliminates the variability. Other things that we can do is adding in, like, disaster recovery as a service.
Eric: 01:11:20 So if you’re in, Boston in our Thrive Cloud location and you wanna have complete Arbor region, we have another Thrive Cloud in Texas, for example, where or New York and and others where you can replicate from Thrive Cloud Boston and have your recovery in Texas. So not only do you have immutable backups, you have all of your your data’s kept, and, that and, and and a solid kind of protected state, but, also, if there ever was a disaster, you have the ability to to fail over. We’ll stand that up environment or stand that environment up for you, and provide provide access, for you to be able to get into that environment. Also includes tests. You can have multiple tests per year or a single test per year.
Max: 01:12:03 Super important. If you’re not testing and you’re you’re nothing else, test your backup, please. Please. Please. Please.
Eric: 01:12:08 Great.
Max: 01:12:10 So for companies that are already using, like, Verve, what what’s popular? Veeam and Zerto. Right? It’s like it kinda feels like you’re either on one or the other. Could they actually take and and use you as an as a, an endpoint of target within Veeam and Zerto to, you know, back up their environment into Thrive Cloud and and then be able to execute a Doctor with that?
Eric: 01:12:28 Yeah. And and you hit right on the head, 2 of our, very important vendors. So we leverage Veeam as a as a means for backing up, whether it’s coming from Thrive Cloud and you have resources out of there and you wanted to back that up to a to a remote target, or it’s on prem. If they had, on prem servers, physical or virtual, we can back those up with Veeam. And then, same thing.
Eric: 01:12:50 We can store that into a kind of a immutable kind of target, whether it’s sitting in Texas or Boston or wherever, and be able to kind of protect that data. From a real time replication, Zerto is, has been a fantastic product. I mean, they’re they’re now obviously a HP company, but, they are have been, I don’t wanna call clear leader, but they really are kind of a a a significant leader in in the space. And we’ve had great success. So, again, whether it’s Thrive Cloud you wanna replicate, here’s the VMs that I wanna protect.
Eric: 01:13:25 I’m continuing to push that data, change block tracking and pushing it from point a to point b. And and as those changes are coming in, it’s it’s just going across the wire and and and replicating to the destination. We’ll do that both for customers that have their on prem infrastructure, virtualized infrastructure, either Hyper V or VMware into, into a Thrive Cloud disaster recovery. And, again, it’s to me, it’s it’s delivering the end solution. We’re on the hook for delivering the recovery, executing the recovery, and executing the test.
Max: 01:13:59 Do you do you are you doing this with VMware Horizon? Are you doing desktop as well? And or is this just We
Eric: 01:14:05 do have desktop as a service. We’re not using VMware Horizon. So today, we have a couple different flavors. One is if you wanted to be on Thrive Cloud, for example, we’ll leverage Citrix Cloud as a front end. If you want to be in Azure, we can do Citrix Cloud as a front end, or we can do native Azure Virtual Desktop as well.
Eric: 01:14:27 So we’ll deliver kind of end user support. So all of the the kind of spinning up the desktops, making sure everything’s working, I can’t print, I can’t do something. So all the benefits a regular help desk would deliver, it just happens to be in a virtualized environment.
Max: 01:14:41 Eric, what have we not talked about? I mean, I’m looking at my note sheet here, and I’m trying to think of other really good questions to ask you. But, you know, oh, you know, here’s a here’s a good one. You know, scaled up to 1200 employees. And you mentioned, now pushing international.
Max: 01:14:59 And this makes a lot of sense for anybody that’s a multinational corporation based on the United States that then has operations in other markets. Are you have have you gone as far as multi language support within your environment are you hiring you know native Spanish speakers or French speakers or I mean how how deep into the international space have you gotten
Eric: 01:15:19 so we do have we have some international Spanish is definitely, is definitely one. So we have a we have a pod. We have, architects. We have others that that are are, multilingual. We do have presence in in Singapore.
Eric: 01:15:34 Can’t obviously, UK is not that’s English, so it’s not gonna be, that’s not gonna be the case. But we have, we do have, presence, I would say, in from a Singapore perspective. We’re in Australia, UK, as well as up and down the East Coast and and various places in the United States. But I would say from, what languages specifically, I would say Spanish and English are are probably the the the 2 today.
Max: 01:16:00 Eric, my main takeaway from this is Thryv is much bigger than I thought you were. And, you know, on a on a on a quick glance and a cursory kind of, evaluation examination from the outside, I don’t I I’m actually very pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s it’s, to operate at scale for for this much time, but also at this size is really telling. I mean, it it it says a lot about what it is you guys are doing and that you do it well because, you know, 900 engineers I mean, that is a significant amount of infrastructure. And part of what I’m always looking for in evaluating and talking about is leverage at scale, right, and and creating that.
Max: 01:16:48 You know? You’ve you’ve you’ve spent a ton of money customizing ServiceNow. You know? A 10 person MSP does not have the I mean, they’re picking a platform. They’re gonna pick ServiceNow.
Max: 01:16:56 They’re gonna pick, Kyocera. They’re gonna pick something, and they’re gonna say, okay. This is our platform. And whatever that platform does is what they do. And there is there is an incredible amount of value that gets created once you cross into that, you know, next those next sizes.
Max: 01:17:09 When we talk about, like, the SMB desert. MSPs have the same problem. MSPs smaller than 50 employees are in the same barren wasteland as all the other SMBs that they’re probably supporting out there in the world of just not being big enough to do certain things. I don’t care how good their teams are. Mhmm.
Max: 01:17:24 You just you just can’t. You know? So, I’m very impressed. It’s been an absolute pleasure, you know, going through this. I’ve got a ton of notes.
Max: 01:17:32 I’m sure we could probably talk for another 2 hours and and and and just, you know, go in circles and deeper and deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole. But I will give you the last word. Anything that we have not, you know, dug into that you think we should we should touch on before we wrap this up?
Eric: 01:17:49 Yeah. I I mean, I I get I really wanna thank you for your time, Max. I mean, it it was I I enjoyed the conversation. There’s a a a lots and lots of capabilities that we can have, and that we can provide, I I would say, as at Thrive. And, again, I mean, I think it’s it’s really meant to be The education to me is is really such a huge part of of educating the client, making sure that they they understand exactly here are the ways that we can help.
Eric: 01:18:13 Here are the challenges that you’re up against, and how are the things that kind of align there. So it’s, we’ll, I mean, obviously, I’d love to say that we’re we can provide all things to all all clients. There are definitely going to be fits, and then maybe there’s some that we we don’t. But at the end of the day, it’s somebody. If I can educate a client and really kinda get them to understand, here are the exposures, here are the needs, and here’s what you gotta solve, and they take that on and solve it, it’s protecting them.
Eric: 01:18:41 So and that makes me kind of a obviously, I would love to have it if it was my product and solution that that’s fulfilling that need. But at the end of the day, you’re looking to solve that for them and kinda eliminated that exposure. So and so and what that also creates is an opportunity in their mind for you know what? They provide this good guidance in the past, and I’ll talk to them on the next opportunity.
Max: 01:19:02 Awesome. Again, I’m Max Clark with IT Broker. This is Eric Kastenstab with Thrive Networks, and this was a tech deep dive.
