Next Level BizTech

Can a single network deal become the doorway to much more? In this episode of Inside the Win, host Graeme Scott (VP of Network & Mobility at Telarus) welcomes back Mac McClenathan of 11:11 Systems to break down a real-world Network as a Service (NaaS) win—and the cross-sell opportunity it unlocked.

Mac shares how 11:11 has quietly become competitive in the network space over the last 18 months, especially on the managed edge side. This deal came together the way many great channel deals do: through trust, relationships, and a partner who recognized the right opportunity.

In this episode, you'll learn:

🏥 The Deal – A healthcare organization rightsizing from 11 sites to 7, battling aging firewall infrastructure, failed failovers, and configuration loss with their previous aggregator/MSP (running VeloCloud under the hood).

🔧 The Solution – A full network redesign built on managed Fortinet firewalls with built-in security, consolidating SD-WAN and firewall into a single appliance, refreshed switches, simplified failover, and single-vendor aggregation for one point of contact.

📈 The Cross-Sell Proof – How following the wire led to attaching a backup tool and uncovering a future infrastructure opportunity (~$5K/month) on top of the ~$8K/month network deal. Mac reveals his internal 6-month cross-sell tracker currently sitting at an impressive 44% attach rate.

This is land-and-expand in full display. If you're an advisor looking at network refreshes, renewals, or responding to a client incident, this episode shows exactly how strategic partnership with 11:11 can turn one opportunity into many.

Engage Mac and his team at 11:11 for your next network deal.

🎧 Subscribe to Inside the Win for more real-world wins and expert breakdowns.

Quiq founder and CEO Mike Myer joins Josh Lupresto to explain why voice is the real battleground for AI in customer experience. Learn how multimodal AI agents combine voice, text, and mobile handoffs to resolve issues end-to-end, why voice is "super hard" to make conversational (interruptions, pauses, latency), and how AI can assist human agents with back-end data entry and system integration. Real-world use cases include a health insurer handling spiky enrollment volume, a garage door troubleshooting QR handoff, and a resort AC rebooking demo. Discover the ideal AI customer profile, the "process guide" approach for business users, and where AI-powered CX is headed by 2027.

In this Cybersecurity Edition of Inside the Win, VP of Cybersecurity Sumera Riaz sits down with senior engineer Josh Haselhorst to break down how a simple circuit renewal at seven locations grew into a $17K MRR deal—complete with dual disparate circuits, a Fortinet NextGen SD-WAN refresh, outsourced firewall management, and a clear runway to XDR/SIEM/SOAR.

You'll learn:

• How to partner with an existing MSP instead of competing with them

• Why "everything is connected to everything" opens cross-sell opportunities

• How to move a client from MPLS to SD-WAN without a costly rip-and-replace

• How platform consolidation (fewer devices, fewer portals) lowers spend and lifts the burden off thin IT teams

• How to position security as certainty—not just another product

Watch to see how solving the network problem the right way set up a SOC and XDR conversation for the future.

In one 48-hour stretch this year, roughly $285 billion evaporated off the value of the world's software companies. The press called it the "SaaSpocalypse" — the fear that AI agents would gut the per-seat software model that the entire industry was built on.

But here's the take: this isn't software dying. It's a reshuffle — and nobody's guiding your customers through it. In this episode, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, breaks down why the SaaSpocalypse is one of the best opportunities advisors have had in years.

You'll learn:
• What the SaaSpocalypse actually is (and why Airtable selling for a tenth of its value isn't what it looks like)
• How to sort every customer's software stack into three buckets: overspend, leverage, and gaps
• Why helping customers cut wasted spend grows the relationship instead of shrinking it
• Where this all maps to the Telarus Solution Map — license optimization, cloud, AI, security, and connectivity
• Four questions to ask a customer Monday morning to open real pipeline

You're not the budget cutter. You're the portfolio manager for your customer's entire tech spend — and that's the most valuable seat in the building.

In this episode of Inside the Win, Chad Muckenfuss and partner development manager Jeff Farley discuss a critical success story involving a brand new partner. Jeff describes how Telarus responded to an emergency call regarding a municipality experiencing a DDoS attack that had lasted for 36 hours. By coordinating with suppliers to provide remote cloud-based remediation overnight, the team was able to restore normal operations for the customer within 24 hours. The incident resulted in a significant long-term win for the partner, who secured a one year contract for monthly monitoring following the successful resolution.

The price of intelligence just collapsed a thousandfold in three years—so why are AI bills still going up? In Part 2 of the AI Inference Flip, host Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, breaks down what happens when useful intelligence becomes an abundant utility, just like mechanical power, energy, information, and computing before it.

This episode is all about the money: where cheap, abundant intelligence actually creates business value, and how you—the trusted advisor—help customers find it. Josh unpacks the Jevons paradox (why cheaper intelligence means more usage, not less), the concept of "LLM-flation," and the three buckets where value lives: cost savings, doing the previously-too-expensive at scale, and building genuinely new capabilities that weren't possible at any price.

You'll walk away with the exact questions to ask your customers to connect nearly-free intelligence to a number their CFO cares about—and why "point them at the abundance, not the savings" is the advisor move that makes you indispensable.

If this reframes how you see AI, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Rate and comment to help the show.

Next Level BizTech — hosted by Josh Lupresto, Telarus.

In this edition of Inside the Win focused on Customer Experience (CX), Brent Wilford and Israel Lemprakes from Kore.ai discuss a successful implementation for a healthcare customer. The customer, a rapidly growing sleep business, faced operational challenges due to a manual, multi-step CPAP patient onboarding process involving various systems and human labor. Kore.ai provided an AI outbound agent capable of orchestrating complex workflows, including patient authentication, explaining rental processes, confirming shipping addresses, and updating CRMs like Zoho. Unlike competitors that focused solely on natural voice quality, Kore.ai differentiated itself through its ability to execute transactions and coordinate across multiple platforms such as Microsoft Bookings and Five9. The implementation allowed the customer to scale operations, reduce manual strain, and position Kore.ai as a long-term AI platform for future use cases like prescription renewals and authorization.

Microsoft Copilot rollouts promise huge productivity gains — but are organizations really getting value? In this episode of Next Level BizTech, Josh Lupresto talks with Denis O’Shea, founder & CEO of Mobile Mentor (soon “Mentor”), about why most Copilot and AI deployments stall, how to measure ROI, and the five foundations every enterprise needs to scale AI securely: clear use-case definition, data security (DSPM & Purview), role-based empowerment/training, agent identity/lifecycle controls, and empirical ROI measurement.

Denis shares real-world examples — from large school districts to healthcare providers — and explains how Microsoft’s control plane (Entra, Intune, Defender, Purview) can win the platform race when properly configured. He also warns about shadow AI, Gen Z-driven workarounds, the exploding agent economy, and the coming tidal wave of token/spend management. Learn how partners can leverage Microsoft funding (ECIF/MCI) to accelerate safe adoption and what probing questions advisors should ask now about data, agents, and spend.

Tune in to discover practical next steps to prove Copilot’s value, reduce risk, and turn AI pilots into measurable business outcomes. Subscribe to Next Level BizTech and share your thoughts — where is your organization on the five foundations?

In this episode of Inside the Win, Graeme Scott from Telarus and David Beagle from Ooma discuss the growing market for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) replacement. Beagle explains how major carriers like AT&T are aggressively shutting down copper infrastructure, creating a massive opportunity for partners to migrate customers to modern solutions. He introduces the POTS Tracker, an AI-driven tool that scrapes FCC filings to help partners identify market shifts and protect their customer base. The discussion features a detailed case study of a large school district in Georgia where Ooma successfully implemented 1100 lines and 300 devices, outperforming competitors through superior management software and the AirDial device's specific capabilities for emergency use cases. Beagle concludes by advising partners to look for distributed environments like municipalities and retail to find large-scale opportunities.

When new tech walks into a customer’s environment, who’s asking the hard questions? In this episode Josh Lupresto (SVP, Sales Engineering — Telarus) breaks down the real risk behind the headlines: devices with cameras and microphones, low-cost AI models, and shiny demos that may be vaporware, unsafe, or legitimately worth doing. Using the viral example of a robot dog with a hidden backdoor and an open‑weight AI model that rattled Washington, Josh shows why unbiased advisors matter more than ever.

What you’ll learn:

• The three buckets every new technology falls into: Vaporware, Unsafe, or Real & Worth Doing
• How cheap, capable tech can turn into compliance, continuity, and security nightmares
• Why a vendor won’t tell you what you need to know — and how you can become the trusted advisor who does

Questions to open the conversation (use these with customers):

1. Do you have a full inventory of every connected device and software, and do you know where each one sends its data?
2. For the newest tech you’ve added, who makes it and where does the data live?
3. How many AI tools have teams adopted in the last six months — and were they evaluated?
4. If a tool you depend on gets banned or the vendor vanishes, what would break and do you have a Plan B?