Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

Oracle continues to expand the reach of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with the new AT&T IoT agreement, Andrew De La Torre, GVP of Technology & Oracle Communications, describes to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR Publication, how Oracles fast OCI architecture will work well with the extensive AT&T IoT implementations.

@Don Witt, Reporting LIVE for The Channel Daily News

Andrew De La Torre, GVP of Technology,  Oracle Communications

The Oracle and AT&T announcement is a major IoT partnering in the communication community.  Andrew De La Torre, GVP of Technology,  Oracle Communications, describes to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR Publication, how Oracles fast OCI architecture will work well with the extensive AT&T IoT implementations. The Oracle Enterprise Communication Platform (ECP) is effectively a horizontal platform that enables connected devices and real-time communications to be embedded into the Industrial solutions that Oracle produces.

This covers several very diverse industries.

These diverse industries can use embedded communication technology in their application development allowing them to participate in real-time communications at Oracles incredibly fast network speeds.

Listen in to Andrew as he provides a very clear understanding of OCI and the security provided.

About: Oracle Cloud is the first public cloud built from the ground up to be a better cloud for every application. By rethinking core engineering and systems design for cloud computing, they created innovations that solve problems that customers have with existing public clouds. They accelerate migrations of existing enterprise workloads, deliver better reliability and performance for all applications, and offer the complete services customers need to build innovative cloud applications. There are six key reasons customers are choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for all their cloud workloads.

Far easier to migrate critical enterprise workloads

Everything you need to build modern cloud native applications

Autonomous services automatically secure, tune, and scale your apps

Oracle Cloud provides the most support for hybrid cloud strategies

Their approach to security—built in, on by default, at no extra charge

OCI offers superior price-performance

Listen in to Andrew as he provides a very clear understanding of OCI and the security provided.

For more information, go to: Oracle

Theresa Szczurek has some advice on how to successfully sell your company, she’s done it three times.

“First define the end you want,” says Theresa Szczurek, PhD. Theresa has decades long experience in technology. She has served as the CIO of the State of Colorado, a calling which included serving on the state cabinet while seeing to the need’s technology of thousands of state workers and vital agencies. She has also developed and sold companies, and this time it is sale number three.

In this podcast, Theresa lays out her advice. It begins with knowing what you want. Persist. Find a buyer with technology alignment. See the money. Be sure it’s real. Listen and watch because in just a few spare minutes we see all of her hard-earned suggestions for sale.

Theresa is available to help with your process and for speaking engagements for groups.

www.TMSWorld.com

Vonage Names Kristy Thomas Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances

“The channel is a critical part of that growth strategy,” says Kristy Thomas, Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances for Vonage. “Today, the channel is critical to Vonage. A majority of our revenue that comes into our organization is through indirect routes to market. Just two months ago Kristy Thomas returned to Vonage, now as the new leadership role. “We'll continue to invest in the channel as a route to market.” That commitment aligns with Ericsson, which is also committed to the channel. Ericsson completed the acquisition of Vonage in 2022.

We learn that Kristy sees a value approach as the way forward in the Vonage’s support of the partners and in turn what the partners are offering their customers. “By bringing that value and being an extension to the IT buyer or additional stakeholders within an organization, the relevance of an MSP or technology advisory firm is stronger than it ever has been because there's just so much noise out there. I say that it is also our job at Vonage to educate our partners on market trends, on what's happening from a buyer behavior, what are best practices when buying communications or CX technology so that they can be more relevant to their customers and helping them make an informed decision when there's so much going on.”

“Now more than ever, businesses are looking to technology advisory firms or MSP firms to help them make informed decisions on technology buying because innovation is happening so fast,” Kristy adds. With that in mind, Kirsty gives us a glimpse of more opportunities for the partners as we learn about leveraging AI.

Visit www.vonage.com

Empowering the MSP Community: MSP Seminar for Growth, MSPAA TEBO Event

“I always like to say that in order for an MSP to really be successful with regards to cybersecurity or specifically with cybersecurity is it has to be internalized before it can really be evangelized,” says Chris Johnson Sr. Director of Cybersecurity Compliance Programs at CompTIA. Chris is the opening keynote speaker at MSPAA’s TEBO conference in Denver, October 9 and 10. “Pick something, start with something. You don't have to do it all at once.” Chris urges a step-by-step process of creating an internal cybersecurity culture, and then utilizing those gains with the clients. “The only way you can take on a whale client is one bite at a time.” Accordingly, the path to building a cybersecurity culture is done in achievable steps, and not all at once.

In this podcast, Chris gives us a glimpse of what he will share with the MSPs.  “We're here for those members, for those MSPs that are just coming into the space, or maybe they've been there a long time, but they're suddenly feeling the need to tackle cybersecurity, whether it's through insurance requirements or clients asking for proof or evidence to support what they're doing.”

Chris Johnson has a diverse work experience in the field of cybersecurity and technology. Chris currently holds the position of Sr. Director of Cybersecurity Compliance Programs at CompTIA since June 2022. Prior to this, they worked as the Technology Director at Mount Pleasant Community School District from July 2018 to June 2022.

Chris also served as a Compliance and Security Advisor at onShore Security from July 2018 to May 2022, and earlier as a Cybersecurity Compliance Strategist from July 2017 to June 2018. In addition, they worked as a Cyber Security Consultant at Pinpoint Solutions LLC from November 2017 to May 2022. Chris also has experience as an Adjunct Professor at Greenville University, where they taught from August 2015 to May 2019. Chris has served as an Advisory Board Member at MyDigitalShield, Inc from December 2016 to August 2018.

Chris has held various roles at WheelHouse IT, including Compliance and Security Advisor, Director of Compliance and Security Strategy, and Director of Strategy and Business Development from July 2016 to June 2018. Chris has also worked as a Medical IT Consultant at Progent from February 2012 to April 2018. Chris is the Co-Founder and CEO of Untangled Solutions, a technology workflow provider for SMB medical practices, from March 2003 to July 2016. Lastly, Chris served on the Partner Advisory Committee at LogMeIn from March 2013 to December 2014.

Chris Johnson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Managing Information Systems from Greenville University, where they studied from 1995 to 1999.

MSPs Can Leverage Evaluations from IFT’s Operational Assessments to Deliver Value-Added Services

BURNABY, BC - September 5, 2024 - According to ongoing Operational Assessment projects from leading business process outsourcing company Integrated Financial Technologies (IFT), there are six back-office areas where many businesses lack efficiency— and these areas represent significant opportunities for MSPs. IFT has identified business processes that are typically in need of improvement including the use of antiquated technology, inadequate data storage, siloed departments, the assignment of specific employees as a single point of information, the inability to cross-sell products, and lack of corporate documentation.

During its assessments, IFT reviews each organization’s processes, workflows, procedures, and infrastructure to help evaluate operations. Based on assessment results, IFT offers  recommendations on how end-companies can optimize their workflows and procedures. Managed service providers can target these areas to provide services that best meet these needs and address the deficiencies of the business community.

Tod Chisholm

“Many of the organizations we assist are successful companies with effective practices, but we find there is always room to drive efficiency and lower costs. This opens the door for MSPs to work with us and fill those technology and service gaps,” said Tod Chisholm, president at IFT. “We typically go on to fulfill opportunities in close to 75 percent of the organizations we assess. In the end, the process delivers value to businesses, while enhancing the MSP’s customer relationships and establishing new revenue streams.”

The top areas for improvement revealed by IFT’s assessments include:

- Use of legacy technology: Many organizations rely on networking systems, applications, and processes that are outdated. This creates complex environments that are difficult to manage and upgrade. As an example, IFT found that many companies still depend on manual data input compared to automated systems for tasks like data processing, employee scheduling, CRM, and other crucial areas of documentation.

- Data storage: A surprising number of organizations utilize on-premises data storage systems, such as on-site server closets that house much of their data. In contrast, cloud-based systems offer increased security and redundancy, often delivering automated back-up and fail-over systems to protect against downtime and data loss in the case of an outage or disaster.

- Assigning staff as a single point of information: Many companies assign a single person to know everything about a product or job function, such as payroll, CRM, or software development. If that person decides to leave the company—or suffers a serious illness—disaster looms. Ideally, company knowledge should be shared with several employees to create redundancy.

- Inability to cross-sell: Many businesses are unwilling to cross-sell added services, leaving money on the table. Companies can use historical data to turn any inbound customer service inquiry into a sales opportunity. Remember, existing customers already have a propensity to buy, so savvy businesses should use nearly every interaction as a sales query.

- Siloed communications: At both small and large companies, there is a tendency for departments to use disparate technologies and proprietary processes. The inability to freely communicate and share information via common platforms and procedures between departments impacts productivity.

- A lack of company-wide documentation: Even businesses that maintain organized, company-wide processes typically do not document procedures and best practices in any concrete way. Communication of workflows, customer engagement practices, personnel policies, and job postings should be provided in a format that is accessible to the entire organization. This helps to create consistency and equity throughout the company,

AT&T APEX is a title sponsor of the upcoming TEBO/MSPAA conference in Denver, Rick Chapes will be delivering one of the opening keynotes

“The APEX model is a collaborative model,” says Rick Chapes Business Center Vice President for AT&T Partner Exchange. “APEX, which stands for AT&T Partner Exchange, is a resale program within AT&T's indirect distribution channel called Partner Solutions. And we work with the MSPs to help them complement their services so that they could develop more of a robust offering in the market.”

Rick will be one of the featured keynote speakers at the upcoming TEBO Conference, Denver CO October 9-10. The event has limited seating and represents a special value-added benefit of membership in the MSPAA.

Rick sees the MSP community as reflected in three pillars: digitization, cloud networking or cloud platforms, mobility. In this podcast, Rick tells us how he sees MSPs advancing on three fronts. “We can educate the MSPs to better understand connectivity and integrate the connectivity into their managed service offering. We'll also be touching on security as well at TEBO. AT&T Partner Exchange's strategy is really the best connectivity provider in America, the best proposition for our MSPs. We're going to continue to invest in our 5G network and in our fiber networks so that we can enhance our next level network capabilities… which will enable the MSPs to integrate those services into their product offerings so they can develop a compelling offer in the market.”

https://www.tebo-denver.com/#/?lang=en

You can integrate between the products very easy, no licensing. Same advantage is for the MSPs and for the channels. They can offer more services. Channel can offer to his customers more product that he doesn't need to have ten or fifteen different products to come to his end user, for his customer.

Gal Naor

“We are a pure software,” says Gal Naor, CEO of StorONE. “You can mix between drives. You can start with SSD with one vendor and later to mix another drives. We are software only that we don't have any other dependency. and you give you all the flexibility to mix between hardware. It could be any server, it could be any vendor, it could be physical or even virtual, as we mentioned that we can operate in the cloud. It could be any location, it's hybrid, it could be on-prem, it could be hybrid cloud, it could be multi-cloud.”

In this podcast, Gall takes us through an introduction to StorONE and their unique approach to storage.

Recently, StorONE collaborated with Accessium Group, a premier healthcare consulting firm specializing in IT services, to deliver high capacity, high performance, HIPAA-compliant storage solutions to the healthcare market. This partnership has successfully enhanced data management capabilities in critical medical fields such as radiology, cardiology, pathology, neurology, and ophthalmology. StorONE’s high-performance storage solutions, powered by cutting-edge technologies like NVMe and advanced tiering algorithms, ensure lightning-fast access to medical images, reducing retrieval times, enhancing data access speeds, and minimizing latency issues. These improvements are critical for timely diagnostics and treatment.

Gal outlines how these technologies can be used in HIPPA related environments, and also in many other industries.

“You can integrate between the products very easy, no licensing. Same advantage is for the MSPs and for the channels. They can offer more services. Channel can offer to his customers more product that he doesn't need to have ten or fifteen different products to come to his end user, for his customer. It can come just with one product that can provide all the storage services and all the storage use cases.”

Additionally, StorONE has reinforced its support for HIPAA with the latest version of its S1 software. This version offers an enhanced set of security features that act as the last line of defense in the event of a cyberattack in a healthcare setting. Key features include:

Auto-Tiering, dynamically transferring sensitive data for optimal utilization

Lockable and Immutable Snapshots that ensure the integrity and consistency of data, helping healthcare organizations meet regulatory requirements for data retention and protection

Ransomware and Rapid Recovery, providing well-defined procedures and tools to detect, respond to, and recover from ransomware attacks

Multi-Admin Approval: Ensures multiple admins and consensus decision-making to prevent unauthorized access, with data security managed at the storage layer

Anomaly Detection and Audit Logs: Identifies security threats, system malfunctions, and other irregularities, essential for robust cybersecurity

About StorONE

Headquartered in New York, StorONE offers the only 100% enterprise software that abstracts hardware and software without any hardware dependency. Our unique technology is designed for high-capacity with high-performance storage solutions. With an eight-year investment in completely rewriting the storage stack from the ground up, StorONE maximizes drive utilization, dramatically reducing the number of disks required and providing state-of-the-art data protection against security threats.

StorONE provides ONE software solution for all storage use cases, supporting any storage protocol, disk type, or location, whether on-premises or in the cloud. By integrating data integrity, retention, protection, replication, and security features into a single product,

“We are basically in the top performing MSPs,” says Ahmed Mahmood, President Ocean Solutions. “We've been growing somewhere between 70 and 150% over the past four or five years. We're staff of about 18 employees now, and we support about 4,500 users across the entire country here. We have clients all over the US. We have some clients with international presence and our focus on cybersecurity and our focus on taking on the responsibility completely of our clients not just kind of break fix or certain tasks in most cases.” Ahmed will join Aida Keehner, CEO of Atruent and Marlo Alexander Owner, Bosque IT on the upcoming MSP Panel Discussion at TEBO. In this podcast we get a look at that panel, and some insights on how Ocean Solutions is achieving success as an MSP.

“Now you all of a sudden need to understand a lot more than a single industry you are in,” says Ahmed. We learn that MSP success today means being on top of the niche markets, verticals or other defined industries, that your MSP serves. Ahmed discusses how he has guided his company to growth. “I would encourage everybody, and I look forward to meet everyone that is going to have the time to meet us at TEBO. It's going to be nice interactive discussion panels. We're trying to give back to the community… Our job is trying to also get our community to work together to improve and help each other.

About the Panel

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often face complex and challenging discussions with their clients and internally within their organizations. Here are some of the most difficult topics we might tackle during this panel discussion.

Client Expectations and Satisfaction: Managing client expectations, especially when they are unrealistic, and ensuring high levels of satisfaction can be challenging. This often involves difficult conversations about what is feasible and the potential trade-offs involved.

Security Threats and Compliance: Addressing cybersecurity threats, compliance with regulations (like GDPR, HIPAA), and managing risk can be particularly challenging. MSPs need to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensure their clients are protected while navigating complex legal requirements.

Staffing and Resource Allocation: Discussions about staffing levels, resource allocation, and managing internal workloads can be challenging, especially if there's a mismatch between client demands and available resources.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) for Managed Service Providers:

Financial Health: Evaluating the financial stability and performance of potential M&A targets.

Operational Compatibility: Assessing how well the operations, systems, and cultures of the companies align.

About Ahmed Mahmood

Information technology leader experienced in architecture deployments, system design deployments, and complex project management. Expertise in current Microsoft systems, wired and wireless network designs and implementation engineering with innovative approaches to security while utilizing best practices as an essential part of every venture. My diverse assignments as a VCTO and senior systems engineer have provided me an unparalleled practical advantage whether troubleshooting a minor issue or reshaping a high-capacity server environment.

“We can now provide lead qualification as a service using AI and help reduce operating costs that traditionally would have been involved in that entire sales funnel,” says Paul Kleen, founder and CEO of Pitchit. Pitchit’s LQaaS takes on the heavy lifting of those very first few steps in the sales process, which can be very hard on people. The AI assisted process takes the brunt of that challenge, leaving a company’s sales force to take on qualified leads and a lead flow that is matched up, better, the way each individual might want to connect. “Voice is not always the best way to get ahold of these people.”

Pitchit’s LQaaS platform, available today, automates the first 24 hours of manual labor required to qualify inbound leads. To date, Pitchit has helped telecom and insurance sales teams qualify 531,000+ leads, save 4,400+ labor hours, book 4,000+ meetings, and close $280 million in customer revenue. Customers using Pitchit experienced a 250% increase in their lead qualification rate, on average.

Pitchit’s industry-first AI LQaaS solution can sync leads from 7,000+ channels — social media, CRM, email, SMS, and more — to quickly quote pricing, book meetings, handle objections, and capture personally identifiable information (PII) before handing qualified leads off to a human sales rep. By focusing on purchase-ready leads, brands with a large volume of B2C sales across multiple consumer touch points can dramatically increase sales qualified lead (SQL) conversion rates, lower the time and cost associated with every sale, and maximize revenue per sales representative. In addition, by reducing sales friction, brands can offer their customers a faster and more personalized sales experience while reducing costs.

In this podcast, Paul gives us a guided tour of LQaaS. While there are clearly some intriguing consumer-facing applications, we also catch a glimpse at some B2B opportunities. As the portfolios of MSPs and MSSPs expand, could this be a platform that finds leads, lining up undiscovered sales processes by matching product, service, need and more?

Visit www.pitchit.ai

“We work in a very customized way on these opportunities to, our trainers will meet with our service provider, understand the end customer, and then there will be a meeting with the end customer stakeholders and our service provider customer to really come up with a customized training agenda that meets the needs of their business,” says Katie Merrill Founder and CEO of B-Lynk. In this podcast, we learn how training is very critical to the entire SaaS industry. The success of many technologies depends on the non-technology workers being able to comfortably use what’s in front of them. B-Lynk offers several approaches to the learning and training challenge: videos, guides, digital books, and content that fits with local language needs.

Customization

“A real bread and butter of our offer has been, end customer end user training,” Katie adds. Different customers need different things. “We work in a very customized way on those opportunities. Our trainers will meet with our service provider, understand the end customer, and then there will be a meeting with the end customer stakeholders and our service provider customer to really come up with a customized training agenda that meets the needs of their business. They know exactly what their agents are going to learn, exactly what their supervisors are going to learn. And then we deliver that training as a service. And if needed and necessary, we can create video content to follow along for future training beyond that initial onboarding.”

Migration as an Opportunity

“I look at migration as really for service providers as an incredible opportunity to reconnect with their customers during this migration process,” says Katie. We learn how partnering with B-Lynk can open new opportunities. Katie also reminds us that “a bad migration is a bad migration.” Not thinking through the training portion can lead to a failed migration and to churn. A service provider can end up on either end of a spectrum of great to terrible experiences.

Visit https://b-lynk.com/