Episode 54: Punched in the Face

Don’t worry. Listening to this week’s episode of MSP Chat will be insightful rather than painful. Erick and Rich discuss what a new collaboration agreement between Ingram Micro and AWS Marketplace says about marketplaces and MSPs generally, plus three tips to get end users bought into purchasing advanced security services by keeping them apprised of the latest cyber threats. Then they’re joined by Nadir Merchant, general manager of the IT Operations Suite at Kaseya, for a conversation about AI in managed services and managed service platforms. And finally, one last thing: Why “brain rot” is the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year.

Discussed in this episode:

Nadir Merchant’s Haymakers for Hope donation page

Ingram Micro Signs New Agreement with AWS to Drive Channel Partner Services Capabilities and Scale

Channelholic Hot Take: Ingram Micro and AWS Double Down on Marketplace Collaboration

Which Marketplace? Wrong Question.

Think ‘brain rot’ summed up 2024? Oxford agrees it was the word of the year

 

Transcript:

 

Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one blast off, ladies and gentlemen, welcome another episode of the MSP chat podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big in managed services, I am Rich Friend, Chief Analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for this program.

I am joined as I am every week by our Chief Strategist at Channel Mastered and my co host for this show, Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erick: I’m doing great today, Rich. What could be better than another week closer to Christmas as we record today, right? I can’t, it’s, One of my favorite holidays, sometimes I say Thanksgiving, which is my favorite because there’s so many folks around and we share, we’re thankful for and all that.

But I got to say, I’m, I really appreciate the feeling of giving to others at Christmas time. That’s what gets me going. Not what I get, but what people get. I’m able to, gift others and watch, them be surprised and appreciate it.

Rich: It is very nice. Yeah. I the I find the gift purchasing process to be a little nerve wracking sometimes because I want to get the right thing for the right person and so on, but it is a very nice feeling when you do nail it.

Erick: Yep. Yep. Yep. And how are you getting along today?

Rich: And getting along just fine. Thank you very much. I dunno we don’t have time to get into it. Otherwise I would just point out to people that you are, you’re recuperating in a sense from a Hollywood experience last night.

Erick: Yes. I I just got back from the MSP Titans of the Industry Awards last night.

And let’s just say that we’ll talk a little bit more about that maybe on the next episode and I’ll share some thoughts.

Rich: Okay. Very good. But I’ve seen some pictures, folks, black tie, very impressive. And yeah we’ll get into that down the road, but for now let’s get into our story of the week.

And by the time people are listening to, or watching this podcast, this will actually be last week’s news, but it is very much this week’s news now. The AWS reInvent conference is going on in Las Vegas this week. The big cloud conference for AWS. Huge amounts of news coming out of that show as is the case every year.

Buried in there was one particular piece of news that happens to tie very neatly in with what I wrote about on my blog, Channelholic, last Friday, which is just the whole kind of scene in marketplaces right now. And the key point I was making in my post is we are well past the point of wondering, do MSPs and vendors need to be thinking about how marketplaces factor into their strategy, their go to market, how they serve, how they sell et cetera.

The answer is absolutely yes. According to Canalys, 45 billion will flow through. Just the hyperscaler marketplaces in 2025, that number will rise to 85 billion. In 2028, it’s a giant piece of the channel and the channel economy right now. The more interesting question though, for vendors and MSPs alike is just which marketplace or marketplaces should I be investing in and the basic logic.

And this plays out differently for vendors than it does for MSPs. But essentially what you really have to be thinking about is. Where are my customers? Where are they buying? Cause I want to be wherever the customers are buying. If you’re a vendor, that means you’re going to want to be in as many marketplaces as you can handle.

If you’re an MSP though, it gets a little bit more complicated because theoretically you want to be in a lot of different marketplaces, but from a practical standpoint, that’s very hard to do. And in fact, to, to invest in more than two or three, MSPs is going to be a difficult thing to do. So which ones do you invest in?

There is a logic to picking one of the hyperscaler marketplaces like AWS marketplace, Azure marketplace AWS alone has I think it’s 20, 000 products Hundreds of thousands of people who are buying those products. Collectively AWS and Azure, those marketplaces, there’s something like 360 billion of cloud commitments on account there, heavily from enterprise businesses, obviously.

But there, there’s a ton of money, a huge pile of money that has been essentially pre spent. And the people who have committed that money are just looking for places to spend it. You could imagine an MSP thinking I’m just, if I’m in the Microsoft ecosystem, I’ll just go into the Azure marketplace.

The news this week, that kind of, the one little piece of news that really caught my attention was from Ingram Micro, and in conjunction with the AWS reInvent conference, they announced a new strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, and essentially what it did, there are two big pieces to it Ingram and AWS have been working together for years at this point, But Ingram has committed to [00:05:00] adding a whole bunch of new professional services around the AWS marketplace and solutions available there.

They have integrated the ability to create private offers, which is when somebody like an MSP kind of wraps their services together with a an ISV product and sell it through the marketplace to an end. You can now do that through Xvantage which is the the digital interface for interacting with Ingram micro.

And that. Gets to the thing that I was talking about on the blog last Friday, Erick, which is just the advantage to MSPs in working with whether it’s Ingram micro or TD Cinex or PAX 8 is that you’re going to have first of all, you’re going to get a kind of personal attention from those companies that you will never get from AWS or Microsoft, but you’re also, you’re not giving up access To AWS or the Azure marketplace, essentially all of the the big distributors, Paxate, all these companies.

Incorporate, they integrate with the marketplaces. And in fact allow you to mix and match, pick and choose which marketplace you’re buying things from. And then of course they also have the ability to add professional services from the distributors or from Pax8 itself to the order. I think even though there will be a lot of temptation on the part of MSPs to be thinking about investing in hyperscaler marketplaces, I think the the big distributors, the companies like Pax8, they’ve done a really smart job of pivoting just the way that they pivoted when pick, pack and ship disappeared.

And all of a sudden everything was in the cloud and people said distributions going away. They figured out a way to remain very relevant in the era of cloud computing. And it feels they are doing a very good job of remaining relevant to MSPs in the era of hyperscaler marketplaces.

Erick: Rich, it’s really interesting.

I had a couple of thoughts as I was listening to you talk about this emerging story. This is the opportunity, one thought, this is the opportunity that MSPs Can latch onto that allows them to realize that concept of for every dollar of a low margin subscription that I resell to my client, I can pull through another eight or 9 of services attached to it, right?

So making it easy to, but to have these bundles of services available to partners is really interesting. That the new. Announcement by Ingram in collaboration with AWS. I think that’s really interesting. The second thought I had Rich was, when you were talking about, there’s so many marketplaces and things like that, it’s probably not a good idea for, an MSP to participate in too many of them.

It made me think about the airline wars, where every, the top three airlines have their partner program, if you will, their frequent flyer program. It’s always, who has the best opportunity for me. Sometimes, Rich, you and I each have our preferred program that we fly through because, It gives us points, it gives us status, it gives us upgrades.

And think about the other way, if we spread that over too many other airlines, then we lose those valuable benefits. So this is how I thought that’s interesting because now if you’re investing in a primary distributed relationship, you do get the benefit of all that spend, providing valuable benefits back to you and the relationship.

And you don’t. You’re not just a transactional customer to them now, right? You can participate in some of their higher level programs where you get even better benefits and love and things like that. So just. Two quick thoughts.

Rich: And it’s interesting you bring up that second point in particular, and I can’t recall if we talked about this on the podcast before or not, but just a few weeks back PAX eight introduced a partner program.

And in a lot of ways it really resembles an airline loyalty program in that there are five tiers, but they’re basically measuring which tier you land in on how much spend you drive through their marketplace. And the higher you ascend through the ranks, the more kind of rewards you get. And in fact, there’s a whole.

Emerging point system where you can collect points and cash them in various ways. And they’re clearly thinking exactly along those lines, even for MSPs who are maybe not going to invest in eight different marketplaces, not going to invest in AWS or the Azure marketplace.

They’re going to go with the kind of company that they’ve been doing business with and in other ways for years, like Ingram, TD, Synex, D& H, et cetera. Just within that sort of limited competition set, the Pax 8 folks are thinking, I want to incentivize people to place their in investment with us for exactly the kind of reason you’re talking about.

Erick: That’s it’s, I, you almost think they may have hired some folks from the airline industry to help with some of [00:10:00] the strategy because they’re all loyalty programs in one form or another at the end of the day.

Rich: Yeah. You know what Erick, let’s move on to your tip of the week, and we’ve been talking about a kind of threat by the hyperscaler marketplaces to distributors and companies like Pax8.

Threats of a very different kind factor into this week’s tip.

Erick: Yeah, so the tip is this week’s tip is built all around that the challenge that I sense that some MSPs are facing in getting every single one of their clients to say yes to an enhanced cyber security portfolio or bundle of services, something that strengthens them.

They’re their cybersecurity posture. I’ve written blogs about this. We’ve talked about it, Rich. It’s having that cybersecurity conversation with your clients to convince them to move forward. And, I probably shared my stance on the podcast before that there is no good excuse.

There is no good objection for a client to decline. Enhancing their cybersecurity posture, right? There’s just too much risk for them, for you, the MSP and by extension, all of your other clients, when they get breached, what do you do? You go save them to the expense of the other clients that are paying you.

For those same services, because Hey, MSPs are here to help, right? That’s who we are. So a couple of thoughts, how do we influence these clients to move in the move toward the light, Carol Ann, move in the right direction to adopt a strengthened cybersecurity posture, investing in your enhanced cybersecurity portfolio.

And, my position, rich is. You should have a basic minimum set of services that at least addresses the requirements of an SMB’s cyber liability insurance policy. Maybe they’re unregulated, but they have to adhere to that because that’s the only way that a small business can pay for the recovery.

Of a breach or a cybersecurity incident is to file a claim against that policy. And as you and I have talked about before, and a lot of our listeners know more and more clients are their claims are being declined because the insurance company will find something they’re looking for things right to avoid paying out.

Have a good, better, best bundle of services, but how do we lead our clients and prospects and how do we gain more prospects? Because we are doing specific activities to educate them as to the risks that are out there. Three quick tips, rich conduct, regular cybersecurity webinars and lunch and learns.

Get your strategic vendor partners to come in and help put these things on, get some MDF heck I’ve even seen vendors that will send somebody to speak at a lunch and learn, right? We talked about a loyalty programs, right? If you are that, that go to partner. You have a better chance of getting MDF and getting giveaways and getting folks to Come speak at your lunch and learns and on your webinars.

So that’s one thing. Just you’re, you are here to inform the public. You’re inviting your clients. You’re inviting your prospects, keeping them apprised of the latest threats and best practices to mitigate them. Number two, provide regular threat reports to your existing clients and maybe prospects. If you’re dealing with a specific vertical, you can create a search.

You can subscribe to maybe some of your cybersecurity vendors have threat reports that you can distribute that aligns with the vertical or the business model that your clients are in and you’re just sending those off, just letting them know, Hey, this is what’s happening in your industry right now. We should get on a call and chat about how we can get you protected against these threats.

And then the third one, Rich, is the, this is the obvious one, right? Yeah. It’s just continually updating your security stack. The things that you were in your cybersecurity bundle five years ago, many of them may not be suitable to combat today’s threats and keep your clients and yourself secure.

I don’t recommend, ripping and replacing things every month or every quarter, but certainly take a good look at your stack. Twice a year, probably a good barometer, right? Whenever we change the clocks back, maybe that’s a good tip, right? You’re changing your clocks back. You’re changing the batteries in your smoke alarm, smoke detectors, and you’re evaluating your cyber security stack.

Rich: What’s critical about what you’re talking about there. Cause what I hear so often these days from MSPs is that, as you said, the cyber insurance companies are doing a lot of. The security sales work for the MSP now, and that the SMBs increasingly understand they need to be insured and there are just minimum requirements that they need to have to get coverage.

But that’s the basic bundle. And [00:15:00] I think what you’re talking about is that more advanced bundle, which we know is really going to keep that customer far safer than a basic bundle will, and I, I wonder, Erick if The degree to which, and maybe it’s because I’m a writer, the degree to which storytelling kind of factors into this, because I, there’s so much cybersecurity news, so many hacks and ransomware incidents in the news, they tend to involve larger companies.

And I just wonder if the way to overcome the security by obscurity objection is to just develop a repertoire of stories about companies like you, whoever you are and user. No longer in business because they didn’t think they needed this protection or that technology and that nobody would ever target them.

I sense that you gotta make the threat feel real and feel concrete in addition to sharing threat reports and and webinars and so on and so forth.

Erick: Yeah, you’re right, Rich. Good call out. A couple of things here. So I do recommend that MSPs have a Google alert for any kind of threats that are in their geography.

Let’s say, Hey, I want to see get your keywords out for security breaches, security incidents, ransom attacks, and things like that in your geographic area and have those alerts, pop up. Chances are you’ll find one or two that are relevant to your target market in your geographic area.

So definitely do that. And the other thing that you mentioned, Rich, which is a good call out is that basic bundle is the minimum that I would suggest that you do. MSPs require every single one of their clients sign up for. That is just a minute. If you want to do business with me or continue to do business with me, then you have to subscribe to at least this minimum bundle.

And again, it doesn’t have to be just what the cyber liability insurance policy requires. It’s whatever you feel should be in that minimum bundle that you feel provides you the peace of mind. That you’re doing enough to protect your clients and yourself against the common threats out there. And then you can iterate from there with a better and a best.

A bundle of services moving forward.

Rich: I absolutely love the the alert suggestion there. I’ve not heard that before. That’s a super easy thing for everyone to do. And it’s not like you’re necessarily going to get a flood of hits on that, but boy, if you, even if you just get a trickle over the course of the year, you can get a lot of mileage out of that and it costs you absolutely nothing.

So great tip embedded within a larger tip there, which was also great. Folks, we are going to take a quick break here. When we come back, we will be joined by Nadir Merchant. He’s a general manager at ISEA. He runs their IT operations suite, RMM, PSA, et cetera. But he’s also their foremost thinker about artificial intelligence.

And we’re going to get into that topic with him a little bit in this upcoming interview segment here, which we will begin momentarily when we get back from this break. Stick around. We’ll be right back.

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Folks, I’m not positive when you will be a senior listening to this episode, but we are recording it on Monday, December 2nd, which is to say two years and three days, precisely, since the world learned about this crazy new thing called chat GPT.

And my goodness, what hasn’t changed in the world or our industry since then. Which is why I am very excited to have this week’s interview guest with us. It is Nadir Merchant. He is the general manager of the IT operations suite at Kaseya. He is also there are authority on all things artificial intelligence.

Give a very interesting presentation on that topic at the DattoCon event just a few weeks back right now. Nadir, welcome to the show. Of course. Thanks for having me, Rich and Erick. I’m so happy to be here. So for folks who are new to you, I’m not even going to bother accommodating people who are new to Kaseya.

Everybody knows Kaseya, but for folks who are new to you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do at Kaseya.

Nadir: Yeah, so I joined Kaseya as part of the IT Glue acquisition way back in 2016. I was the original CTO at it glue. So I joined it glue when we were just getting started to build out the engineering function.

I led that engineering organization until we were acquired by Kaseya. And since I’ve now taken on a larger responsibility for all of our tools aimed at making it operations more efficient. So we call that MSP and it operations. So that’s things like PSA billing automation, VCIO, anything in that realm, along with the.

integrations between the products, because ultimately that’s aimed at making technicians more efficient. And along comes that Cooper and all of our AI initiatives. So I own all of those areas. My role is to make sure that we’re building the right things for our customers. So it’s owning the roadmap, make sure we’re delivering on that roadmap, figure out the product strategy and ultimately helping make it [00:20:00] teams more efficient.

Rich: Fantastic. And before we dive specifically into the AI piece of those responsibilities, there is something else I want to bring up. Because there is a big date in your life coming up in a few months now, tell folks a little bit what is Haymakers for Hope? And how are you involved with that organization?

Sure.

Nadir: So haymakers for hope is an organization that helps raise money for cancer research. They do this by putting on charity boxing matches. They’ve been doing it for many years. They travel around the country and they do charity boxing matches all over the United States. And they’re doing their first inaugural event here in Miami.

Miami is the Kaseya headquarters also happens to be where I live. I moved here three years ago. So they’re doing their first inaugural event here in South Beach in Miami on March 6th of next year and I did volunteer to fight in that match. So I will be doing my first ever boxing match. I’ve never fought before.

It’ll be very interesting on March 6th. I’m looking forward to fighting so I’m raising money for that. Trying to raise as much money as we can for cancer research. I’ve chosen the lymphoma and leukemia society to donate all of my Personal donations to because I did did have no, sorry. Hodgkin’s lymphoma stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma a little over 10 years ago.

So I went through chemo and did all that. After I finished chemo, I did a race to, to raise money for that organization as well, did a triathlon. And now I decided after I finished my 10 year anniversary of being cancer free to get back to this fundraising. And we’re looking to raise 25, 000 for the lymphoma and leukemia society through direct contributions to my fights.

Overall, the event will raise over 600, 000.

Rich: So it’s a very good cause. Also a fun way for those of us who are not in the ring at least to to support it, we we have a link to the donation page and the show notes I encourage everybody to go click through to that link and make a a donation as I have, and then to put the is this going to be live streamed?

Can I actually watch the,

Nadir: the boxing match? You will be able to watch, there will be a live stream. So you’ll be able to see it online. If you’re in Miami, you can also come down to the theater and then watch us fight in person there. But for everybody, not in Miami, you’ll be able to watch on the live screen, particularly if you’re somebody who’s not a big fan of Kaseya, or you’re mad about it glue, not implementing your latest and greatest feature.

You’ll probably want to tune in to watch me get punched in the face. So please check it out.

Rich: Last question about this before we move on, who are you fighting and can you take him?

Nadir: I actually don’t know who I’m fighting yet. So the way they do this is everybody volunteers for the fight. They select the fighters, but there’s a two month process of doing the matchup.

So they actually watch your training footage and they watch your weight for two months. And then in January, they’ll actually tell us who the matchups are. So that way they can balance the fight and make them as even as possible. And can I take the person? I don’t know. We’ll see. Like I said, I’ve never fought before.

I’ve been training for a while. I train very hard, but I’m not an exceptionally gifted boxer by any means. So it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

Erick: Nadir, you’re selling yourself short. You were showing me videos of you practicing while we were at dinner. At DattoCon one evening and I was suitably impressed.

You are definitely taking it very seriously being your first fight and also I will also be contributing to that worthy cause and rooting for you. Thank you, Erick. You bet. Hey, so I’ve got a question about, now we’re going to pivot into some of this AI conversation because at DattoCon, you said that AI is the biggest technological revolution since the internet.

I happen to believe that too, as well. But also it’ll take a long time to reach its potential with, all of the, the concerns that everybody has. So give us a sense for where you think we are now specifically in regards to AI and managed services, where we’re going and how long you think it’ll take us to get there.

Nadir: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, Erick. I think that when we look at revolutionary technology, there’s always excitement around what it’s going to do, and we often tend to think it’s going to happen much faster than we thought. Think about Waymo had a proof of concept for a fully driving autonomous car over 15 years ago.

And if you asked anybody, when that was first unveiled to the world, we all thought, Hey we won’t be driving anymore. We’ll be napping on our way to work in 10 years. And here we are 15 years later, and we’re still a long way out. So I think with AI, we’re in the early phases. I think that where we are today is in my opinion, somewhat analogous to the internet in the early nineties, right?

In the early nineties, we could see the potential of the internet was readily available to anybody who wanted it, but it wasn’t nearly as revolutionary as it is today. The potential was there and it was able to do things that were unfathomable 15 years earlier. The level of communication and access we have through just basic old school, non HTML, email and bold and board systems was still unbelievable, but it wasn’t ubiquitous yet.

And it wasn’t really changing the entire world. So I think AI is the same way. I think there’s cool things that are happening in the world [00:25:00] today that would not be AI. Capabilities that simply just would not be possible. And those are making meaningful impacts within pockets. And they’re showing us the future of where we could be going, but I still think it’s a long ways out.

I think we’re many years away from from truly revolutionizing the world. That being said, when you look at the rate of adoption of technology, Overwhelmingly, we’re seeing it get faster and faster, right? Technology that are going from zero to massive in a faster rate than they have historically.

So I don’t think it’s going to take the quite 40 years of the internet to get there, but I don’t think it’s going to be a three year process. I do think it’s probably more like a 10 year, 15 year process.

Rich: So one of the the mistakes that writers like me who cover the industry have a tendency to make is we’ll just talk about AI as if it’s synonymous with generative AI.

And it’s not, there is a distinction there. And so chat GPT is ever so slightly older than two years now. Artificial intelligence, machine learning. They’ve been around for a long time. You folks at Kaseya. We’re doing a lot already in AI before the debut of chat GPT. How has generative AI changed, accelerated?

How has it factored into the AI strategy at Casaya?

Nadir: Yeah. So what it’s doing is it’s accelerating and enabling us so it’s accelerating us in ways where we can now use AI to do things that we could would take us a lot longer than it would previously, right? The other thing it’s doing is enabling us to provide outcomes that would just not be possible without it, right?

There’s certain things that we could never do with a traditional algorithm that AI allows us to do. For example, we launched inside of Autotask. The ability for autotest to automatically write a ticket summarization, right? So resolution comes in or you hit a button and it says here’s exactly what happened.

It describes exactly what happened to the ticket, puts it in the resolution summary, saves the text five, five, 10 minutes from having to write it out. Or if they’re writing their notes to their customer to be able to put in that couple of bullet points and have it provide a well formed response to the customer without the technician having to spend the time really writing a really nice response.

You can’t do that with a traditional agro. There’s no way, right? It’s just the take capability is just more rare. So Jenny is allowing us to do that sort of thing that would just would not be possible without it. In other cases, it’s just making it faster, easier, building traditional algorithm algorithms takes a long time and it takes human learning to teach the algorithm what to do.

You build an algorithm, you test it in the real world, you look at the results, you talk to human beings to get the anecdotal feedback of how it’s working, and you tune your algorithm. And then you do it over and over and over again. This is how Google search got awesome, right? Just constantly tuning their algorithms and be better and better.

And we could do that today in certain use cases, like we’re doing suggested related items inside of it glue or it glue will just tell a user, Hey, we think this document you’re looking at should be related to this password or this config or whatever other things we find. We could do that with a very traditional algorithm by guessing what the algorithm should be and then testing with users and just continue to iterate until he got really good.

But Jenny, I just makes us better and it just does it automatically. It looks at the data and makes its own assumptions and it learns itself. So it’s almost like going through that algorithm process, but without human intervention and with the system being able to make those adjustments in real time based on users behavior.

So it makes it just massively more efficient. We just, it would take us months or years to do something that very effectively. Without Jenny, I, with Jenny, I, Jenny, I it happens.

Erick: Yeah. And the deer I think we all agree that, AI is a game changer, right? Notwithstanding the folks that think, we’re running fast towards Skynet and, the machines taking over the world and all that.

But you made a you alluded to Waymo and having the, the self driving car a minute ago. When I was young, I always thought we’d be flying cars by now. Like I watched for Jetsons, right? So the dominant factor right now, or the dominant metaphor with AI is the co pilot, right? So what are your expectations in terms of where the co pilot is today?

In assisting us and then basically becoming an autopilot itself, completing tasks on its own. Where do you see that going?

Nadir: To me, I think the big thing is for us as human beings, as operators of technology and creators of the technology to figure out the use cases, because it doesn’t matter how good these GPT engines are.

If we don’t have a purpose for them. One of the analogies I gave on stage at DattoCon was you talked about these two devices called the Rabbit AI and the Humane AI both really cool little wearable devices that could do incredible powerful things that the world could never see 10 or 15 years ago, right?

They have cameras in them, they observe the world around you and they tell you about what you’re looking at. They give you directions on how to go places, do all this cool stuff, but commercially they’ve been a complete [00:30:00] failure. Nobody’s buying them because. There’s no purpose behind them. They’re just there because they’re freaking cool and they’re absolutely freaking cool from a technology perspective.

But it’s okay, why do I want to use this thing? Why am I going to walk around with this thing? So I think it’s us it’s incumbent on us as technologists to figure out how do people actually want to harness these things? How can I enhance the lives of users? How can I make businesses more efficient?

How can I help make businesses make more money and build AI with a purpose to do those things? And then that will actually really drive adoption in the next level of automation. So like inside of our community, one thing that we’re evaluating is taking our Cooper bots to the next level through AI by being able to fully automatically resolve a problem without any human interaction.

Today, this happens with rules engine and, an it team can go create a Cooper bot where we say, okay, in this circumstance, I want you to do these things and resolve this ticket. That’s the type of thing where we can look at the data around how people are using it and just create coupons fully autonomously that can just resolve specific problems.

Without any sort of human configuration or intervention at all. But they have to be very purpose built, right? I have, as an MSP owner or an IT team have to be able to say, I want the automated internet troubleshooting, Cooper bought automation, AI to be turned on, turn that on, and then it goes and does that thing by getting specific and really understanding the outcome that we’re trying to drive, it allows us to create that fully, truly autonomous automation Otherwise.

The system has to decide what actions to take and what doesn’t. And that’s where it gets really potentially scary for people. And also quite frankly, dangerous to implement, because if I can’t predict what’s going to happen, even if I’m not like tinfoil hat paranoid about the situation, but I just, how can I allow software just to do whatever it wants without me knowing how to predict what’s going to happen?

My business, I can’t operate a business without knowing how the tools that I’m using are going to work.

Rich: So speaking of autonomous AI actually this is something I wanted to bring up because one of the hottest trends in AI let’s say is so called agentic AI. Salesforce made a huge splash recently when they introduced agent force.

There are a lot of people now tossing around this concept and this phrase, agentic AI. For starters, just help us understand a little bit, the distinction what agentic AI is, what’s the distinction between agentic AI and AI as it’s been practiced, let’s say for the last two years or so.

And then if you can talk a little bit about how agentic AI may or may not play a part in your plans around AI at Kaseya.

Nadir: So this is definitely an area that we’re exploring. So a gentic air really first to I would call it a use case of AI more than a different type of AI, right? People like to give things fancy names because it gives some people them to hold on to and get excited about in Google.

And it makes it more tangible, right? But really it’s just gen AI with a specific purpose. And that’s really to be a point of interaction. So instead of having a human being driving their action, my bot, my technologies is actually doing that for you. And this specific use case is very compelling to a lot of organizations.

Cause we’d think about what are the outcomes that we’re trying to get from businesses? We want them to be more profitable. We want them to be more efficient and having a computer handle this type of frontline interaction with a end customer and user has the potentially massively beneficial to a lot of organizations.

Cause it’s a huge area of cost, right? If I’m running an organization and I have a large support team, And I have to pay these human beings and I have to make sure it’s staffed 24 seven in order to provide my customers with ready made answers. It’s very, very time consuming and very expensive to do this.

So if I can have a computer system do that for me, or even if just reduce the load by taking the kind of first level of that down, it’s massively beneficial. In our our world, that’s even more so than most organizations. Cause the support person is the biggest cost of most of those organizations or MIT organizations.

So even if we just can help with that frontline support, it can be massively beneficial. And that’s definitely what we are exploring today inside of Casaya. There’s a couple of different levels to this. There’s one is on our side, supporting our customers, right? How can we leverage AI to be able to better support our customers directly?

There’s a few different ways that we can look at that. And then for the same thing down to our customers down to their end customers, right? Inside of our unified client portal that we’re actively working on, we noticed this at at DattoCon just a few weeks ago, we are looking at having this type of chat support built in where we could have a chat system respond directly to an end user who needs help.

So they say, click on the, I need help from my MSP button. They can type in their question, their query, and we can just handle it for them without MSP ever having to see it. And we create a ticket and auto close it so we can put some time on it. So they have tracking so they know what the interaction was and they could see the logs of everything that happened, but they don’t [00:35:00] actually need to be involved in real time in helping that customer get help.

So those are some of the things that we’re exploring there to make that easier.

Erick: Nadir, when I had my own MSP practice way back in the early days, right. One of the challenges that we experienced was, making sure that our technicians did everything the same way, according to process that we had templates for their responses to clients.

We, we explored outsourcing our NOC to an outsource provider. In India and, having some of those just back in those early days the, the language barriers and challenges where we could never have them complete a ticket and send that to a client, our team would always have to parse it.

So I’m excited about some of the things that you talked about. And for MSPs in general is leveraging AI to help. Make sure that we are doing things the same way based on our processes, that we are capturing what the ticket resolution was and formatting it properly, around the guardrails that we put it to help, streamline what technicians do.

As AI becomes more and more prevalent for MSPs to use through platforms like Haseya, And more of the routine work is being handled by the AI. What do you think is going to happen with the qualifications that MSPs will begin looking for technicians? Do you see that changing and the requirements change as some of this more day to day stuff or noisy things are being managed by AI?

What happens to the existing technicians and what are MSPs going to be looking for? In terms of qualifications for more technical staff to come on board.

Nadir: So I think this looks a lot like we will look like the transformation that we’ve seen in software development around DevOps, right? So you think 15 or so years ago, we used to have systems administrators run our infrastructure.

So if you were a software development organization, you’re hosting software or you’re providing software to people to run on prem, you’d have systems administrators, which were responsible for building your servers, building all your infrastructure around it and maintaining and managing all that.

Some of them had scripting abilities and they would do just rent, run some scripts to automate some specific tasks. But for the most part, they were doing relatively. manual systems administration type work. They were typically experts in the operating system. They were typically fairly competent at networking and their whole purpose in life was to make sure the servers kept running and that they were well patched and secured and maintained, but mostly that they kept running.

And then we had the DevOps revolution or transformation came in place and we started seeing a ton of automation. Start to replace a lot of the work that those systems administrators were doing in the world was saying, Oh my God, what’s going on this. There’s not going to be any need for systems administrators and they’re all going to go away.

And the reality is what we’ve seen is they’ve evolved, right? They went from being systems administrators, making a hundred thousand dollars a year to now being DevOps engineers, making. quarter million dollars a year. And instead of managing 20 or 30 servers, they’re now managing fleets of servers or fleets of infrastructure on AWS and Azure and Google compute cloud and platforms like this.

So the role has shifted. It’s more technical, it’s more coding focused, and it’s more sophisticated, but the fundamental purpose of the role still exists. And that’s make sure that the application, the workloads that are being run on these servers are continuing to function, yet they’re secure and they always have good uptime.

The way we execute that job is very different. It’s matured. It’s much more advanced, and we’re dealing with bigger and more complicated environments. But those bigger, more complicated environments allow us to support the demands of organizations today. So the demands have risen. Needs of what we have to deliver have risen.

So that has compensated for the fact that now a person is doing a lot more than what they did without the automation. The jobs are still there. People are still getting paid. They’re more complicated and bigger roles than they were previously. I think we’ll see the same thing in IT. So I think IT people will have to get more sophisticated.

They’ll be doing more challenging and more meaningful work, and they will need a higher level of technical know how, whether that comes through certification or education or just on the job learning, I think that we’ll see a level up. So tier ones will become more like tier threes and so on and so forth all the way up.

And then I think they’ll also probably become more customer facing to an extent. I think, going on sites and dealing with the things that any sort of automation can’t deal with are going to have to become a big part of that technician’s role. And When you do that, you need to have a different type of demeanor and attitude than you would if you’re somebody who gets to spend their entire time behind the computer and not be directly customer facing.

Doesn’t mean they have to go be [00:40:00] salesperson or they have to be like super, customer facing, but if you’re going to go on site as a technician, even if your job is technical and you’re there to, deal with some wiring or racking or whatever, you still want to be, a little bit more presentable than, the, Traditional say gray beard network administrator is hiding in a basement and never to see a human being.

Rich: You were talking before in the context of agentic AI, about two different use cases for that one from to say it to the MSP and other from the MSP to their end user. Theoretically, both of those use cases exist as well for RPA robotic process automation, which is you guys deliver via Cooper bots.

And I just recently wrote an article about an RPA vendor that it’s a few years old. And for the first time, they just recently added some functionality specifically designed to help their partners automate process for customers, as opposed to automating their own processes. Talk a little bit about that.

Use case that opportunity as a revenue source a growth opportunity for MSPs and where you see maybe Kaseya enabling that down the road.

Nadir: Yeah. So I think as a revenue opportunity for our customers, for MSPs, it’s pretty interesting because it allows them to not have to go by or recommend their customer go by third party solutions.

And. They can then consume that cost by providing the service directly, but also it gives them the technical capability to be able to provide that simple example today is doing an MSP and they have a customer that needs some sort of automation between the marketing automation and their CRM.

Very common example today is the marketing team goes and buys Zapier and then they go implement that. The problem is the marketing team people are generally not super technical, right? Especially the people who are really good at marketing. Now, larger marketing or operations tend to have their own like developers and they’re really, into the technical weeds, but a lot of marketing organizations are smaller.

They don’t have that. So now they get stuck. They need to go use a third party tool like Zapier. They don’t really have technical people. So they fumble their way through it or they end up. Outsourcing that they hire somebody to help them and get everything set up. If they do that, they still need to figure out how to support it.

And they need to spend a lot of money doing it. This having that capability as part of something like Cooper bots provides. MSP is the ability to capture that, that spend, right? And because they’re using it through something like Cooper bots, they’ll be familiar with it. They don’t have to go learn a tool like a Zapier or some of these other third party RPA type tools.

If it’s part of a tool stack, they’re already using, they’re already familiar with it. It becomes easy for them to enable. So I think the opportunity is really interesting, Rich. For us to help drive more revenue, the MSP allow the MSP to capture more of their downstream customer spend that they were already to make anyways.

So that’s definitely an area that’s of interest to us. The thing that makes it a little bit challenging is the tool set that we need to integrate with is very different from what we’re used to. Then what we need to integrate for the MSP zone use case. So that will provide some limitations on what we can, can’t do there.

But definitely in the major players, that’s definitely an area of interest to us, like things like Microsoft and Google and Salesforce and being integrated to those major parties. So that way they can do the big nuts and bolts automations that their customers might want, but it’s definitely an area of interest, but we can’t be like as app here and have, integrations of 10, 000 tools.

It just doesn’t work for us.

Erick: We’ve talked a lot about kind of current where we are today, Nadir, and you expect, in 10 years, but can you look into your crystal ball and give us your expectations of how AI is going to evolve or mature for MSPs? Let’s say in the next year or two, what are the big swings that you think are going to happen?

Nadir: Sure. So I can talk specifically about what we’re doing and what we’re exploring. We’ve already announced some of the things that we’re doing, so I’ll talk about those first. And then there’s some things that, I could tell you that we’re exploring that. I’m not sure I’m not ready to announce anything yet, we’re exploring some areas of interest.

One of the things that we announced at DattoCon was the smart SOP generator for it. This thing is really cool. I almost use a cuss word to describe it there. I restrain myself. Smart SOP generator allows a technician to choose to record their actions. They hit a little record button.

And then they go and take some actions inside their web browser, whatever it is that they want to do. And the smart SOP generator will capture everything that they’re doing. It’ll write written instructions and take screenshots that it’ll annotate and create an SOP that describes exactly what they did.

This is really cool technology that will make it massively easier for organizations to build SOPs. This is actively in development today. We have a working proof of concept. I showed the proof of concept that’ll come and we are getting ready to launch this thing in January. This will be available for all it glue customers.

So this is super exciting. So one of the fun things that we’re actively working on. The next thing is for auto task and BMS for both PSA tools. This gets into what we were talking about earlier is the kind of frontline chat support. This is a little bit farther out. We’re probably going to launch it at Kaseya Connect in April of next year, which will be the biggest MSP show.

I know you two gentlemen, we will be there. I would [00:45:00] encourage all of your audience members to be there as well. Probably the over 6, 000 people at Kaseya Connect next year, but we are going to announce a connect and launch be generally available for all of our PSA customers, a an automated knowledge base.

chat system. So a natural language process to interact with our knowledge base. They’ll be able to hit a little chat button, type in a query, type in a problem, ask it whatever they want. And it’ll explain to them how to do that inside the PSA tool. Okay. So it’s not quite a chat bot in the sense it’s not meant to be like an interactive conversation, but it’s a natural language engine where you can ask it a question and it can give you a human being, consumable answer, how you do something.

It’s going to do this by reading our, Knowledge base for it glue and for auto task and BMS and also looking at the ticket history and then be able to put those things together and say, okay, here’s the best way to do that. So you want to know how to accomplish a task to solve a specific ticket. You want to know how to configure something in the PSA tool.

You want to know how to get some outcome of automation within the PSA tool. Simply ask the bot and it’ll give you instructions on how to do it. So that’s something that we’re able to launch at connect fixture. So those are the ones that are actively in development, like really deep in development right now.

And then there’s areas that we’re exploring. Natural language engine for reporting is something that’s very interesting to me. One of the biggest challenges that we see when it comes to reporting is that it can be very cumbersome to learn and build reports using the BI engines that exist inside the PSA tools today.

And even in reporting tools tend to be a little bit simpler, make it easier. That’s why they exist to be easier than the PSA reporting, but they’re still tend to be too complicated. And a lot of times I talk to business owners who want to know better insights, but they don’t have the staff to, so to go and figure out how to do all these things or how to get them according to the need.

So to have a natural language processing engine, they could just simply say, show me my profitability by customer by month for the last 18 months and have it, they’ll give that to them. I think it’s really interesting. So we’re exploring whether or not we can do that in a way that’s effective enough, these types of AI things, if they’re 80 percent good, they’re really cool, but they’re not actually useful.

It’s a matter of like, how good can we make it in order to make it really usable and releasable for the entire world? That’s an area that we’re exploring there. We’re also exploring having I T would be able to write an S O P from a response from a prompt. So to be able to say, Hey, write me an S O P one for every customer on how to upgrade their network infrastructure, have it then look at the data and I to move to figure out what’s going on with that infrastructure and then write S O P S in each of those customers for those specific things.

I think that’s really interesting. Solving that on a narrow use case, write an S O P for doing a firmware update on a Cisco one, two, three switch is a very easy thing to do. But the problem is you could just use chat GPT or Microsoft copilot to do that today and copy paste it in. So all we’re doing is save it or copy paste if we do that.

It’s not very interesting. But to have it be intelligent enough to look at the infrastructure that’s in place based on the documentation and to do that for every customer without the technician having to go look up the current infrastructure. Firmware version, the current model numbers and things like that gets pretty interesting and very powerful for helping our organization save time.

So that’s an area that we’re exploring to see if we can figure that out in an effective way in IT.

Rich: Very cool. It gives us a little hint of what to look forward to at Kaseya Connect Global in in April and some things that’ll actually arrive between now and then. Now,

Nadir: as I said, I’ve got one other thing I forgot.

We will be making a major RMM AI announcements at connect as well. I’m not ready to talk about exactly what it is yet, but it’s going to be very cool. Much cooler than what we see in the world today around RMM and AI. And that’ll be I connect. We’ll be doing that.

Rich: And so you honestly think I’m just going to let you go after you drop.

Can you give us even when you say a major RMM PSA in terms of Function out what just put us in the

Nadir: zone. We’re going to launch an AI feature for RMM that helps create automation in a way that the market hasn’t seen yet. And I’m not just talking about some, chat prompt to be able to write a script for you automatically.

That’s boring. You’ve been doing that for two years. The world is doing that for two years and it’s just a copy paste away. No we’re looking much broader than that. So I think it’s gonna be very cool.

Rich: Okay. Okay. And I, I will just remind folks in the audience there, there has been something big from Kaseya at every big event that they’ve done, so the first Kaseya 365 SKU launched at Kaseya Connect Global this spring, DattoCon a few weeks ago, we get Kaseya 365, so they’re in a cadence where there’s something really big that arrives every time they do a major event.

And I’m wondering if this. This is a hint about what the big thing is for the spring, but we will find out in just a few months time. Between now and then Nadir, you are both going to punch someone in the face and get your own face punched. We have the we have the link to your Haymakers for Hope donation page in the show notes, but for folks who don’t have access to the show notes right now but want to donate, where should they go to learn more and learn about the timing and contribute some money?

Nadir: Yeah, so the website for [00:50:00] the donation page is tinyurl. com forward slash tinyurl. H four H dash Miami. So try to keep it as simple as possible. Tiny URL. com slash H four H dash Miami is my personal donation page. I think we’re almost at 9, 000 raised on a goal of 25, 000. So thank you to everybody who has contributed or is planning to contribute in the near future.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Rich: Thank you near for taking time out of a busy day to join us. Very interesting conversation. And I’m sure we will check in with you again in the future on AI and and other topics. Who knows? We might have you back on in spring to talk about whatever is coming there.

Thank you very much. For folks in the audience who might want to get in touch, learn more about you where would you point folks to connect with you?

Nadir: Connect with me on LinkedIn. The deer merchant hopefully they can see my spelling of my name on the screen there. Just hit me up on LinkedIn find me on there.

You’re connect with me. You can message me on there. You could also ask your, if you’re a customer ask your account manager, they’d be happy to get a call set up with me. If you want to get on the call.

Rich: Okay. Phenomenal. Thank you again, Nadir. Folks, Erick and I are going to take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, we’re going to share a few final thoughts about this very interesting conversation with Nadir Merchant.

Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We are coming right back. All

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. And once again, thank you very much to Nadir Merchant of Kaseya. We certainly talk plenty as everyone in the industry does about AI these days Erick. And yet I still always find it useful, enlightening to talk with somebody who thinks about it as much and as deeply as Nadir does.

I always come away from that with insights. I will say, I, I raised the question about agentic AI in there in part, because one of the things I’m working on today is a post that we’ll touch on that. I’ve got a post that goes into that in greater depth. Coming up on on channel Holick in a few weeks.

And it is one of those, vaguely defined multiple kind of definition topics. It was very good to get a good, clear, crisp definition from him. And then the other thing that I’ll just reiterate, we spent some time talking about it was that whole robotic process automation conversation.

And this whole idea. That the same technology that is enabling an MSP to run their business more efficiently can enable all of their customers to run their business more efficiently as well. And essentially, it turns RPA from this tool that is, useful to you, Into something that is a revenue source for everybody that you work with this potentially massive new revenue source.

And so the excitement around AI is good and justified, but don’t don’t sleep on RPA either, particularly as it concerns your customers.

Erick: Yeah, rich. I really appreciated the part of the conversation where we talked about, not fearing. AI, as a technician or an MSP or your role, it’s looking at this as a way to say as we create these things that allow us to upscale and do different things, it’s this might be a bad analogy, right?

But we used to, farming with hand tools and things like that. Then we created machinery to do it. And now we have operators that manage the machinery. And I think that wasn’t the dearest point is like you need someone there to still manage all of this stuff. And you need to add more value to the organization in other ways.

So as we begin to create, more and more solutions are based around AI that allow us to do the menial paths that are always the last thing on the list that take time, like grading SOPs, Nadir talked about that functionality and, automatically. In the future, perhaps closing tickets around some sort of a rule set that we define if it’s this kind of this repetitive thing, an easy one for me to be like.

Users, need some password change or something like that, right? There may be some rules around that. So it’s very interesting that whole concept around not fearing it, but embracing it so that you can be better yourself and grow. I think that was. That was really impactful for

Rich: me and not to try to turn this into a fear based conversation.

But the flip side of that, of course, is that your competitors who are not fearing it are going to get more and more productive. And they’re going to have the ability to Grow, take on customers support more users, more devices, more cloud solutions with a smaller number of technicians than you.

You put yourself at a competitive disadvantage if you wait too long before really getting smart about putting out a work in your business.

Erick: Yeah, absolutely. And yes, I will be cheering Nadir on as he It’s into his I’m going to call it a prize fight for chain makers for hope so excited to

Rich: to see that.

And once again, we’ve got the link in the show notes there. Please do a click through and and [00:55:00] donate. It is all for a worthy cause. Folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing this week. And Erick, every year around this time, the Oxford English Dictionary chooses a word of the year.

And they just, a few days ago, they chose the word of the year. Technically speaking, it’s two words. As you may have heard, this year’s word of the year is brain rot. And the Oxford University Press, which does the Oxford English Dictionary, said this phrase gained new prominence in 2024, its frequency of use increased 230 percent from the year before, and they are defining it.

And the OED is like the, go to source of of definitions. Brain rot, according to the Oxford English dictionary is the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overcompensation of material, particularly online content considered to be trivial.

Or unchallenging. This might be the AI sort of tie in to our one last thing this week Erick, because AI is kickin out all sorts of stuff on the on the internet right now. It’s not necessarily the greatest stuff. We’ve heard a lot about slop, AI slop. We’re all swimming in AI slop, and it is producing brain rot.

I know I I resemble that word of the

Erick: year. You know what? I, at first, when I read that was the word of the year. I’m like, what? And then when I read the definition, I’m like, Oh yeah. And rich I’ll add that it’s AI and it’s AI being generated by folks that. That are just flooding the internet with, just noise and garbage and opinions and just, it is such a brain rotting experience.

Let’s just put it that way.

Rich: So in, in moderation, folks the easiest way to avoid brain rot is to just. Stop doom scrolling. But folks that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the MSP chat podcast. We thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to be back in a week’s time with another episode for you until then, I will remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means if you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, Go to wherever it is.

You get your audio podcast, Spotify, Google, Apple, you name it. You’re going to find us there. If you’re listening to the audio version, but you’d be curious to check it out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP chat, however it is you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other people find and enjoy the program just like you do.

This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They are part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They are ready, willing, and able to create a podcast for you. And podcasts, believe me, are a tiny part of what we do for our clients at Channel Mastered.

If you want to learn more about what we do, go to www. channelmastered. com. That channel mastered. com channel mastered has a sister organization called MSP master that is Erick working directly one to one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. So you can learn more about that organization at www.

mspmastered. com. So once again, we for joining us. We’ll see you in a week until then, please, ladies and gentlemen, always remember you can’t spell channel without M S P.