Episode 86: The enSaaSification of Everything

Erick and Rich discuss early examples of how MSPs are re-tooling their workforce for the age of agentic AI as well as effective, empathetic techniques for addressing underperforming staff members. Then they’re joined by Chris Black, technical advisor at Xurrent, for a look at that company’s “right of observability” product strategy, and what it says about evolving MSP tool requirements as they grow and mature. And finally, one last thing: An opportunity for friends of a Danish zoo to show their support by feeding their pets to a lynx.

Discussed in this episode:

Building the Workforce of the AI Future

How a “People Company” is Going AI

There’s No ServiceNow for MSPs. Xurrent Aims to Close That Gap.

A zoo in Denmark asked patrons to donate their pets. Not as attractions, but for food

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blastoff. 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 and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I am one of your cos co-hosts on this program on MoSo chief analyst at channel mastered of the organization responsible for this podcast.

I am joined this week as I am every week by your other co-host on the show. His name is Erick Simpson. He is our CEO and chief strategist at Channel Mastered. Erick, how you doing? Doing

Erick: well, rich. Doing really well. In fact I think you’re doing a little bit weller than me this week. Coming back from a little bit of a break.[00:01:00]

Rich: So I spent a, about 10 days on the road. We were both at Channel Con. I was at the it buy design, build it live conference. Immediately after that flew home, got home to Seattle, kinda late a few hours later basically of sleep. I got up in the morning and I flew down to Northern California to wine country in Northern California.

And I spent five days with friends there. So yes, I got a little bit of a break and it was a break that involved a fair amount, not excessive, but a fair amount of consumption, a pretty good wine and a lot of really good food. And it was fantastic.

Erick: After, you know all that travel on the road and conferences and interviews and all that, rich, I’m sure you could have probably used a couple of extra days than the few you did take.

So it’s great to have you back.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And back on the road next week I won’t give away the secret, but we have a pretty exciting interview guest coming along for next week’s show, so stay tuned. More on that coming. But for now, let’s dive into our story of the week.

And this is really an opportunity for me, [00:02:00] Erick, to catch up on some stuff that I wrote for my blog channel Holic which people can [email protected] Holic News. But a couple of different recent posts that have a common underlying thread. And the first of those was about. What I call building the MSP workforce of the future.

And it was inspired by conversations I’ve had with the CEOs mostly of larger MSPs, multi-city roll up scale kind of MSPs. But it’s a topic that MSPs of every size are going to have to think about because we all know pretty much that two, three years from now the robots, the agents are gonna be doing most of the help desk work.

Certainly level one, level two, probably a lot of the level three work. We also know, Erick, that to the degree that you are an MSP, who’s calling card basically is your help desk support. You are competing on commodified commoditized terrain right now, and it’s a bad idea for today. It gets worse and [00:03:00] worse going forward.

Okay. If a lot of the work that MSPs are doing today is going to be done by AI going forward. What will the MSPs workforce, the typical competitive Ms P workforce look like two, three years from now? I’ve spoken to as I said, some MSPs already thinking about and moving towards this future.

Now I’ll provide some examples. Logically it’s a very large MSPI interviewed their CEO Joshua Skees, and they have already pretty much dismantled their service dispatch team. They had a if I remember right, seven or eight people doing that. There is now one person doing that and his or her job is basically just to manage, to oversee the agents that are really doing all the service dispatch work.

So what did they do with the dispatchers? Those people have all been retrained and transitioned into customer success roles. And this is a big picture of where I think you’re gonna see the, or a big part of where I think [00:04:00] you’re gonna see the MSP workforce transition as the technical work, the stuff that can be done by AI is done by ai.

You’re gonna see more of an investment by smart MSPs in the relationship kind of stuff that AI is not gonna be able to handle very well anytime soon. Customer success is a piece of that, obviously. But also, you think about the QBR function. You think about business consulting, business process optimization strategic solution design, all of that stuff that takes time and effort and skill and dialogue.

The stuff that really is done most effectively still by humans and I think will still be done most effectively by humans a few years from now. That’s where you’re gonna MSPs really are gonna need to invest. They’re gonna need to have more of those skills in-house. And then they’re basically making room for that by having fewer people assigned to those purely technical [00:05:00] roles that, they’re gonna be able to do on a very cost effective, affordable basis using this emerging class of AI power tools.

Not exactly the same story, but a similar thing. So I mentioned I was at the Build It Live conference last week. It’s hosted by it, by design. This is a company that has grown to a pretty good sized business providing. Offshore mostly help desk support to MSPs. And okay. If we’re looking at a future in which AG agentic AI is gonna be doing more and more of that work, what kind of a future does it by design have?

They are well aware that this is not a new question there. They have been thinking about this, for a couple of years over there and during the Build It Live conference, they gave us our first glimpse of where they’re headed now that they understand that their sort of meat and potatoes offering is not necessarily going to remain hugely in demand or relevant down the road.

And so essentially they’re gonna be doing two things. They are already at this [00:06:00] point retraining people who are providing help desk skills to provide AI focused skills. And these are skills where they can come in and maybe help you build AI and automation into your process.

Maybe they can serve in the capacity of what Microsoft calls the agent boss I mentioned logically still has somebody. Watching the agents do service dispatch you can outsource that role potentially to it by design. So that’s a piece of where they’re building their future. The other is they introduced a a pretty wide ranging service that they’re calling AI by design.

Which I won’t even get into the details here, but it’s everything from peer groups to tools and templates and roadmaps. It’s really designed to help MSPs get themselves from where they are today to the point of delivering AI based automation solutions to their customers using AI safely and effectively internally.

And you know what’s the common thread here? Obviously is here are. Two [00:07:00] different cases MSPs genErickally, and it by design specifically of companies knowing that the way they’ve done business before it, isn’t, you’re not gonna be able to continue doing that business down the road.

And they’ve been thinking in a serious way. These companies, how do we transition to be competitive and profitable and continue to grow in the future? They’ve come up with appropriate, relevant answers based on who they are and what they do. But these are examples of the kind of thinking everybody in our audience here, every MSP in our audience, Erick, needs to be doing that if they are not doing it already.

Erick: Yeah, rich, it’s it is the topic that that seems to be on everyone’s mind. It certainly is on our minds. Here at MSP Chat, we talk about AI quite a bit, trying to, bring this data and some guidance potentially to our listeners. It’s interesting. I really like the pivot that logically is making.

And I think, [00:08:00] MSPs in, in our audience, are probably, paying heed to this is, re retraining and redeploying these resources that now don’t have to deal with some of that noise. I’ll agree that, being me, being the risk averse engineer, I’ll agree that a large percentage of level one or tier one tickets based upon our identification and categorization of what level one is, of course that’s a little bit different from any of us, but generally it’s pretty much the same things that can be closed within, 30 minutes.

Worst case, 15 minutes. Best case if we can leverage AI for that, then retraining these folks on the service desk, we’ll need less L one technicians, potentially less level two, level three technicians. Into more customer facing, strategically valuable positions is key. The caveat that I’ll have to that answer or to what I’m thinking is not every technician is a people [00:09:00] person.

So take my journey as a, a non-people person engineer, right? I had to rich take lots and lots of not just, training on, on, on how to be a great customer success person or A-V-C-I-O-A-V-C-T-O or someone that engages a lot more frequently with people. But I had to take a lot of soft skills training, a lot of leadership training so that I can adapt my natural behavioral style, which is an introvert.

I’m totally an introvert. If people, don’t believe that, trust me I do a lot of speaking, a lot of traveling, a lot. Engaging engagements with people. But, those of us that are introverts can adapt for a, an extended period of time based upon how battle hardened we are.

But it always catches up with us when we get back home, right? Rich, I’ve gotta just go into a dark room and recharge, right? But I think that if we take that into account and also include that type of retraining and that oversight, and then [00:10:00] measuring performance of our team to make sure that person really is adapting properly and can be successful in more of these customer facing situations, then I think it’s a great strategy.

Now for those folks that say, you know what, that is the last thing that, that I wanna do is have that much face-to-face with customers in a customer success capacity. Another great role for these engineers. Is a technical account manager, which is a little less face-to-face, more technical, or maybe a sales engineer where they’re still heavily, maybe 75% of their time is spent developing, designing, architecting solutions and helping the sales team price them, and then maybe having a little bit of face time.

So there’s a role for everybody. We just have to make sure that we understand how we’re wired as human beings, and we’re deploying those resources in a way that they can be successful. And then measure that and make sure that we’re jumping in when necessary to either [00:11:00] provide guidance or pivot to a different solution.

Rich: Yeah, no, I you’re reminding me, one of the people I interviewed for the article was Peter Melby, who’s the CEO of New Charter, which is a very large mature, sophisticated MSB, and he said exactly what you did. Which is that, this is not a seamless transition in the sense there are people doing help desk work right now who just really aren’t going to be able to move to that customer success, for example.

The kind of role. And there, there will be people who can’t make that transition with the company. You, there are people with skills you don’t have in house and can’t build in house that you’ll have to bring in it. It’s not a necessarily a a quick, easy kind of thing to do.

But that’ll, there, there will be roles for a lot of people, let’s say, that you have on the team right now. And I think that’s one more. Point to emphasize here which is that the right way to think about the productivity that AI is going to bring you? Isn’t I’m gonna shrink the labor pool I like, I’m gonna let people go.

I’m [00:12:00] gonna have a smaller payroll. It’s more about, and I’m gonna reshape the payroll. It might grow, it probably will grow significantly less rapidly than it would have otherwise. But I’m not looking for a reason to get rid of people. I’m looking for a reason to redeploy people to more strategic, higher value, higher profit roles and functions.

And I early in the year in January, I was meeting with some of the executives at Ingram Micro and it same sort of thing there, where they have this advantage platform that they’ve rolled out in that within the last couple of years they’ve been expanding it.

Very heavily AI enabled. It’s automated. A lot of work that people did before. They haven’t gotten rid of those people. They’re now using those people. And investing that time in relationship building and go-to market strategizing with partners. And that’s, I think, the right way for MSPs as well as distributors or vendors to, to be thinking about this, okay, now that I have access to [00:13:00] these resources, what are the smartest ways for me to use them that maybe I just couldn’t afford before?

Erick: Yeah. And I think that it might accelerate the adoption of other solution portfolios as well if we’re redeploying resources to maybe, participate in a, in our cybersecurity. Business unit, right? Or build out a, these solutions or maybe even an AI practice, the person that’s responsible for the AI agent management and all that, the person that’s orchestrating this for EMSP and maybe for customers as well.

So I think, there’s a place for most of the staff, I, and I’m not gonna kid myself or our audience to say will there be some shrinkage maybe. But the MSPs that, that I work with Rich they’re always looking to hire more people. So it’s not like they have excess staff and that, and ai agents and things like that is gonna, force them to look at the payroll and go, yeah, no, I can, release two or three of these folks.

There are positions within that organization that [00:14:00] they can shift to and increase their value to the organization. And while we give them, like you said, more strategic and valuable roles that generate more profit to the organization, thereby allowing that that MSP to compete more effectively in the markets.

Rich: Bottom line tomorrow as today, MSPs will continue to have a team. They will continue to have employees. Those employees might be doing different things, but that means the problem that MSPs face today will continue to be a problem down the road. And then that is identifying and dealing with underperforming employees, which brings us, Erick, to your tip of the week.

Great segue,

Erick: rich, as always. Yeah, the tip of the week is really how we address staff that may be underperforming. Maybe at one point they were high performers. Maybe they’re new hires and they’re just not hitting the marks. We have to hit the ground [00:15:00] running as an MSP practice, and we need to, onboard and ramp our team very quickly to our solutions so that we can deploy and manage those effectively.

And then we need to create other positions or growth within the organization. So when we’re looking at our team, just a couple tips that, that I’ve leveraged in the past and seem to work really well, rich. Number one, identify whether the root cause of that person’s, underperformance today has, is it new?

Has it always been that way? Is it because of a gap in their skillset, or is it because of burnout? The, the book Traction and the methodology to operate and manage a business. That kind of birth, that the entrepreneurial operating system, EOS, we use it at Channel Mastered Rich, as there’s a People Analyzer component to it where, you evaluate your team [00:16:00] periodically in, in three areas.

One is do they get it? Like whatever their role is or their responsibility is, do they get it? Number two is do they want it? And number three is, can they do it right? So sometimes we have staff that, check all three boxes for a while, and then all of a sudden you look at somebody and say, Hey, they’re not performing quite well.

Then you think about these three categories again do they get it? Do they want it? And can they do it? Sometimes they can do it. But maybe they don’t wanna do it anymore, or maybe they don’t get it anymore. We’ve lost them somewhere along the way. So sometimes, underperformance isn’t strictly about inability, but it’s about burnout.

So what do we do when that happens? We need to sit down, we need to be monitoring this carefully rich, pull that person aside, have some one-on-ones, just be very candid and transparent. Maybe set some goals for them, which kind [00:17:00] of bleeds into, and then measure that over time. And give them the support that they need or, come to the realization that, yeah, they’re pretty much, they’re on their way out.

They may say that, there may not be a way to save them. Hopefully it doesn’t get to that point because as an MSP business owner, we’ve invested time, energy, effort in developing that person. They’re a value to our team. They’re a value to our clients. So one of the areas that I find rich that kind of makes it difficult to hold a team member accountable to some performance criteria is there are none.

So we’ve got to establish a role in a description of that role that every team member understands and agrees to, and then sets some performance criteria. This gets us away from performance reviews, rich, where the employee expects to be rewarded just because they’ve made it another year on the job. I’ve been here five years, I deserve a raise.

We’ve gotta shift more toward more [00:18:00] performance based objective measurement, and then align incentives and rewards to support that. Number one, identify whether it’s a burnout issue, something like that. Sit down, counsel, coach that employee if you don’t have a role description. Get role descriptions written, get everybody to understand their role, and then set some migrating to some performance measurement.

You wanna hit these goals? Level one technicians should be closing so many tickets per day. Projects shouldn’t, should be project management and change management should occur properly. The things that can be measured, things that are within that employee’s control, not some arbitrary thing that they’re just, affected by, but can control.

For instance, having lots of meetings where we’re bringing technicians in, all week. How are they gonna hit their KPIs if we’re bringing them into meetings? They have no control over that kind of stuff. And number three, use some incentives. When I had my MSP practice, we had personal goals for every I’m, talk about technicians [00:19:00] now because that’s the majority of, the payroll that we’re leveraging here for MSP.

They, everybody had their personal monthly and quarterly goals. And then we had group goals and we had incentives and rewards. And, one of the things that basically was the thing that was fought over the most competed for the most was having a little trophy sit on your desk for that month because you did better than everybody else.

And that came with a couple of like extra little incentives and things like that. Our team really wasn’t motivated by bonuses and cash rich. The technicians weren’t anyway salespeople. Sure. So we would do we gave them what they wanted. They wanted to go do paintball and they wanted to do group activities with their team.

It was like a SEAL team. They wanted to do this stuff, together. So we created these really cool rewards that they love to do. Delivered it to ’em. So that’s probably the bonus tip, right? Just figure out what motivates every one of your employees. ’cause there’s gonna be a little bit differently.

Don’t try to [00:20:00] categorize and create an incentive program that is baked because you think it’s a great thing, but doesn’t really move the needle for them.

Rich: If there’s a common thread that unites all of that advice, Erick, in, in my mind, what it comes down to is empathy. It, you’ve got a million things to do as an MSP.

You’ve got somebody on the team who’s not getting the job done, and it’s very easy. To rush to the conclusion this person is a bad fit for the job. This person is underqualified or just not a good employee. And the right thing to do here is move them out of the organization. And I think a lot of what you’re talking about is before you jump to that conclusion, maybe exercise.

A little bit of empathy is the issue that this person really just isn’t a good fit for the job, or have I not given them the training they need to do the job? Have I been overwhelming this person? So they’re burned out. So take a little bit of time to figure out what is the root cause [00:21:00] of the issue that I’m I’m witnessing here.

And then similarly what can I do? Maybe the reason they’re underperforming is because I have not defined their role specifically enough. And it, that’s again, putting yourself in their shoes. Maybe the issue here is I have not done a sufficiently good job of providing motivation.

Putting yourself in that employee’s shoes. So it’s not as if I, you’re saying basically that the answer is always going to be that you know that the problem is me and if I do these three things, problem solve, sometimes it will be that person. But there are definitely some things that you can and should do before you jump to that conclusion precisely for what you just said, which is that you have got a lot of investment made in this person and replacing them won’t necessarily be a quicker, easy thing.

Erick: Yeah. I think you crystallized it rich and you remind me that sometimes it might have nothing to do with their role in the organization. We’re [00:22:00] human beings, how many times I’m sure the audience can think of, times when they’ve had something that’s affected them, personally, family.

Health, some other concern that’s weighing on their mind. They’re under an unusually high amount of stress and that’s affecting their job performance. And like you said, rich, just sitting down and having that conversation understand what’s going on, can give us a different perspective and say, okay, now is my turn now to be a leader and support my team member through this.

And, I’ve done that in the past. I’ve made exceptions. We’ve, not to get into any details, but we’ve gone above and beyond to help our team members when they’re going through a personal or a family crisis, because that’s the empathy that we need to show. That’s the trust and loyalty that we want to exhibit to them and it pays off, right?

It means something to them. And they

Rich: remember that. And to bring this back full circle, basically what you’re talking about is leadership. You’re talking about management, and that is [00:23:00] not something AI is gonna be able to do. Anytime soon you’re, empathy is not gonna be a strong suit for ai.

The ability to see and feel and intuit that the reason this person is underperforming is because there’s something in their personal life that you know, that all of that is still I think mostly in the human skillset and will remain so for a while. Alright with that folks Erick and I are gonna take a quick break.

When we come back from the other side, we’re gonna be joined by Chris Black. He is a technical advisor, an interesting vendor. I only recently, within the last few months, learned about, they’re called Zunt, X-U-R-R-E-N-T. Their whole reason for being basically is to bring the kind of capabilities that ServiceNow brings to enterprise IT departments, to MSPs.

They tend to be larger, more sophisticated, mature MSPs. But they have the an idea in mind that at least when you get to a certain scale as an Ms P, you’re probably gonna outgrow your [00:24:00] PSA. You’re gonna need something bigger than that. And we’re gonna talk to Chris about what that is and how Zern is designed to provide that.

So that’s all coming up real soon. Stick around. We’ll be right back

and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment. And the origins of this particular interview go back to roughly March of this year when I encountered somebody I know named Brian Doty, who used to work at ConnectWise at a ConnectWise event.

He is now on the leadership team at a company I had not heard of before called Zer. And I became intrigued about the product and the company. I wound up interviewing the CEO. I wound up writing about this on my blog channel holic, and it turns out to be a different kind of product than I think a lot of the folks in our audience are familiar with in interesting [00:25:00] ways that we’ll be getting into and here to.

Scott, all of that with us is Chris Black. He is the technical advisor at Zern. Chris, welcome to the show. Ah, thanks for having me, rich. Glad to be here. So before we dive in any further and talk about Zunt and what the product does and so on, just tell folks a little bit about yourself.

Who are you and what do you do at Zern?

Chris : My name is Chris Black. I am the technical advisor for Zern. I have over 30, 35 years, not the age myself experience in the shared services MSP realm and. A couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, I sold my MSP to another company out in New York.

And then, yeah, three years later announced I was retiring a bit. And when I said that the CEO of Zu, Kevin reached out to me and said, we’d love your experience. We’d love you to come in and help guide us as we’re expanding our product for the MSP and the Shared Services [00:26:00] marketplace. So I came on and have been helping the product team, the sales team, the marketing team, pretty much everyone within the organization and giving them insight that, only come from running a business and being in the MSP market as long as I have.

Rich: I’ve interviewed Kevin about Zern and the solution before, before we get into the specifics of the product and what it does, I came away from that conversation under the impression that essentially what you guys are trying to do is do for MSPs what ServiceNow does for IT departments right now, but that a typical PSA system doesn’t necessarily, so what is it that an MSP needs at a certain point in their evolution, if not right away, that a typical PSA system can’t do?

Chris : And, a lot of the PSA systems that are out there are just fine. There’s nothing wrong with the PSA tools that are out there. The challenge comes in [00:27:00] when, and again, I’ll age myself here, but the printer, copier, fax all in one does everything. Device is great for running my house on, but as I scale my business and I add complexity to my organization because of all the interconnections between not only my staff and my client staff, I need devices and applications that are specifically built to enable those communications.

And that’s where Zurin falls into this spectrum, if you will. So the smaller PSA tools are great if your organization is just dealing with a handful of clients and you’re not looking to scale. But as you grow your organization, you need something that is specifically designed for let’s face it, incident management and the rest of ITXM.

Erick: Chris, I was just on another call talking with a client about. Their PSA solution and they’ve used different PS a solutions they’ve used Service Now we all have. [00:28:00] Yeah, they’re on they’re on ConnectWise or thinking about and thinking about moving off of ConnectWise. Is zurin service more appropriate for larger, more mature MSPs, or does it also fit the needs of maybe smaller growing MSPs?

Chris : Let’s talk through the biggest challenge that MSPs have. First and foremost, right? One, we’re dealing with IT people, right? So it people want to fix the problem, not tell you what they’re fixing. They want to just get in the weeds and start fixing the problem.

Durant and Status Cast and Zen Duty, and the entire platform that they’ve put together allows for engineers to work on the issue while simultaneously and actively communicating with the clients to keep them informed as to what’s going on. In the MSP world, we all know it, who calls who matters. [00:29:00] So we need to reach out to our clients before they reach out to us.

And with the integrated status cast and Zen duty components of it, and the AI features that we’re building into the platform and have already built in with the virtual agent, that communication is seamless and in real time, which means everyone knows what’s going on at every step of the way. So nobody’s wondering what’s happening.

Rich: Let’s let folks in the audience better understand what the Zern solution does in relation to what we’ve been talking about here. And when I interviewed ke Kevin, and I should say his name is Kevin McGiven. Some folks in our audience might know him from Blog Rhythm. He’s been in this industry for a while.

Done some interesting things.

Chris : He, rich, just real quick, and we can edit this, but that he was actually with LogicMonitor. Oh God. Sorry.

Erick: I’m gonna pause and I’m gonna pause for the edit and then restart. And

Rich: then I’ll just [00:30:00] start the question. Yep.

Chris : Yeah, I did need to see you get hate mail for that over the

Rich: yeah.

So this is probably a good point to start getting into what Zern is, what Zern does, so people can better understand what we’ve been talking about to this point. And when I interviewed Kevin, your CEO and I should just say for folks in the audience, he’s Kevin McGibbon. He used to be the CEO of LogicMonitor.

Some folks might remember him from that role. He is been in the industry a while. He introduced this interesting concept to me to help set up what it is you’re building with Zurich. He said it’s a right of observability platform. So talk a little bit, what is that concept? What does right of observability mean from a Zurich point of view?

And what will that do for MSPs?

Chris : So if you look at observability, and that is in my definition of observability, is a monitoring system that is detecting variations to normal. So once [00:31:00] there is a variation to normal and something is not operating the way it is designed to operate, managing that. Incident or that change from conception to sunset is what Zern is working on.

So it’s the logging the incident, pulling the work, and pulling the knowledge articles to see if there’s like previously well-known documented solutions for resolving it. It’s realtime communication to the end user and informing them of what’s going on. It’s self-service for end users or engineers, or level one, level two, depending upon where it gets escalated.

It’s updating the CMDB. It’s updating the billing system. It’s all the other integrations that go into managing the incident and the alert through completion, so that way you’re gonna have four or five monitoring tools in your environment because of the specialty of it. But once that workflow hits, you need the consistency in the operational [00:32:00] workflow to actually drive efficiencies and repeatable actions.

Erick: So Chris is zurin. I’m wrapping my mind around it. Is it a PSA replacement is or is it a compliment? And to what extent is it a compliment and how do the benefits an MSP gets from using it outweigh maybe adding more another tool to their sprawl and their costs and things like that. Can you help us understand?

Chris : So some of the biggest. Some of the biggest benefits with the Zum platform over a traditional ticketing system. Even Snow and ServiceNow has challenges with this is integrated workflows between different tenants. So if I want to create a change workflow and I want the client to approve it, then it comes back, it goes through a technical approver, then goes through my CCB.

Once my CCB approves it, then the engineer can implement that normally required. [00:33:00] Four or five emails and phone calls and text messages back and forth just to make sure everyone was aware of it. Best case scenario, worst case scenario, we just wouldn’t tell them and we’d do the work without informing them.

But that never leads good outcomes. So Zern and the way it was built allows for seamless connections between tenants, so every client gets their own zunt tenant within that tenant is a service domain for ticketing, whether that’s hr, finance, or manufacturing, or it, and every ZUNT domain gets an authentication.

Engine that normally, we normally point that back to a client’s ad environment or whatever they’re using for their user management, and that allows them to have their own single sign on their own controls while keeping a standard framework on the backend. So we can route tickets, we can route workflows, we can leverage the overall [00:34:00] knowledge article.

So if I wanted to send a ticket to a partner of mine, because we don’t do DBA work, I could set that client up or that partner up with a Zern instance, connect those systems, and within three minutes, I’m routing tickets between the client, me and my partner.

Rich: For somebody in our audience who likes the sound about what you’re talking about, likes the sound conceptually of a ServiceNow like solution, ServiceNow like experience for an MSPH, how ste if somebody decides they might want to add this to their current management stack how steep an adoption curve are we talking about?

And to what extent? You mentioned AI before, I know you folks, like a lot of vendors are building AI into the platform. To what extent does AI maybe factor into the learning curve for Zern?

Chris : Yeah, so one, start off with the first part of that question, [00:35:00] right? So we’ve spent the past year and a half or so revamping the UI of our platform to make it streamlined and easy to use.

We understand that it spends a lot of time in their ITXM platform and we want to make it as clean and as intuitive as possible. In addition to that, we’ve spent a lot of time and effort around building out our AI platform, and there’s gonna be a lot of announcements coming out around this. Next month we are in Belgium for our annual conference at Connect.

Invite everyone to come out. It’s gonna be a good time. There’s gonna be a lot of technical deep dives where we can show off the platform and how things actually work. It allows us to then use natural language to leverage the AI within the platform to give suggested outcomes and suggested remediation steps.

So therefore we can shift left the work. So the level three engineer doesn’t have to be doing the remediation every time. The level two, the level one, they can increase their skillset by going through the notes of the previously closed ticket without [00:36:00] having to search for it.

Erick: Chris, in terms of, integrations. What other integrations are included in the platform and what’s on the roadmap? I’m thinking about, an, a typical MSP, like you and I are former MSPs. We know that we wanna integrate with other platforms, RMM tools, monitoring systems and things like that.

Can you give us an insight after those capabilities?

Chris : Yeah. There’s about a dozen or so native integrations that come out of the box today, including LogicMonitor as you would assume. Enable is one of the ones that’s native out of the box and there’s about eight or nine others that are native today.

There is gonna be a very. Sizable announcement coming in about four weeks here when we get to connect. So I don’t want to, spoil the surprise and not let the product guys have their fun with some of the things. But we have spent a serious amount of time and effort and development over the past 12, 18 [00:37:00] months, setting up our integration roadmap, and they’re about to pay off in a big way.

You’re gonna see the fruits of our labor exponentially grow with the number of integrations that we have. One of the things that I recommend. Whether you’re using Zern or anything else, you wanna make sure that we identify within an organization the single version of truth that we’re going to use as the knowledge that we’re basing our decisions off of.

And with the Zern platform, you now have the ability to connect all of those together so you can maintain a single version of truth. We’re not duplicating data. We’re not like sending emails back and forth and creating 16 copies of a database in order to run reports against it. We can just connect them through this newly to be announced solution here in the next couple of weeks.

Erick: I, I’m looking forward to seeing some of that swag with single version of Truth T-shirts and,

Chris : yeah I actually even called up the to Phil our CPO as Zurich, and I asked him, I said, can I mention what we’re doing yet? He’s I’d prefer not. We are [00:38:00] gonna be announcing it AT Connect.

And I’m like, all right, I’ll wait.

Rich: Chris, you are the or a technical advisor at at Zern. I’ve gotta take advantage of this opportunity because I’ve been writing a little bit recently. Erick and I have been speaking recently on the podcast about this very early nascent emerging trend of vendors experimenting with model context protocol, MCP to utilize chatbots like Claude and Chat GPT, potentially as a front end into their applications.

This is just getting underway, but as somebody who thinks on a technical level about applications, has experience as an MSP, I’m just really curious, is this on your mind, on your radar? Is it something that Zern is looking into? What comes to mind? When I bring that up?

Chris : Yeah. And we’re big fans of leveraging the AI within the existing data that we have in our clients’ four walls because, [00:39:00] just using Gemini or chat GPT or any of the public LLMs that are out there, you’re getting the average of the averages across the globe, right?

Which is great for giving me general answers, but it doesn’t gimme good specific answers around my client’s environment and the context of their environment. Simple example had a client a couple of years ago, there was an outage in his Baltimore location. Happened on a Friday night around nine o’clock.

Our operation center called him up. They said, that’s fine, don’t worry about it. And he calls me about 30 seconds after he gets off the phone with the knock and he says, Chris, if you ever call me for Baltimore again, I will fire you. I do not care about myself after 5:00 PM on Friday until Monday morning at 8:00 AM great. We spent the next week and a half or so with the engineers writing the language and the controls within our ticketing system in order to esce those alerts until Monday morning [00:40:00] when I first started working with Zunt. I actually used that as an example with their technical team. And we sold that use case in about 30 seconds using the natural language AI gen, like code generation.

So now we could quickly adapt our client’s requirements into real world, control. So they were getting exactly the configuration they needed.

Erick: Chris, let’s talk a little bit about agentic ai. So how far do you feel agentic AI can assist Zunt and how are you thinking about it? As something that you wanna add to the Zurich platform?

Chris : As with everything we are, we have our fingers in a lot of different areas of ai and we’re working to evaluate the usefulness and the benefit to our clients.

We are a big believer in an implementation of practical AI and being able to [00:41:00] drive. Real world outcomes. Yeah. One of the nice things about AI is it provides answers. The downside is a lot of times it doesn’t provide questions. So people want to implement ai, but they’re not sure what they need it for. So as we’re implementing our AI within a Azure platform, whether it’s agen or not, we are looking to deploy it in a way that actually drives real outcomes, right?

Every organization needs, they want to have our tools reduction because they have too many tools. They got tools, sprawl all over the place. There’s a talent shortage, there’s security gaps within the environment themselves. Like how can we shore those areas up to make organizations more, effective and efficient in the way they do things.

And we have a huge team that’s doing all the product development work under Phil, and they’re working in each of those different areas from an AI perspective.

Rich: One, one last [00:42:00] question for you, Chris. We’ve been positioning Zurich and what it does in terms of the requirements of a larger, more mature Ms.

P when you get to a certain scale there are requirements that today’s PSA systems as good as they are, can’t necessarily handle. I’m just wondering if there is, I, because a lot of the folks in our audience are not larger, more mature MSPs or at least not yet. I’m wondering if there’s any kind of a thesis at Zurin about the completeness today of the tool stack available to MSPs beyond those larger, more mature ones.

Are, do you feel like. There’s something that the tools MSPs have been relying on for a couple of decades now that, that those tools are not providing to MSPs and that as this industry grows and evolves and even for those smaller MSPs out there, there’s going to be a need for Zern or a platform like it more broadly.

Is there just a bigger gap in the tool [00:43:00] set out there right now that you feel like you’re at least beginning to address? I think some of the biggest

Chris : gaps is the proliferation of it outside of the four walls within an organization, right? So the ification of everything, right? Everything’s moving to a SaaS-based application that we need to connect and control the integration between the different domains and the support domains.

You need to be able to integrate, you need to be able to work across multiple languages. You need to be able to secure that platform from downstream and upstream adversaries, right? Whether they are friendlies or foes or accidental, you need to be able to protect all sides of the equation. And Zern is uniquely positioned in our security portfolio with our integrations, with our multi-language functionality, with our multi-domain and the in it’s ideally set up for MSPs as they grow.

And whether they’re a small MSP of five [00:44:00] people that want to scale up to a hundred clients, 500 clients, or if it’s the, MSP with 3000 engineers on the backend dealing with, 700 clients or whatever it is to be, you have to be able to, you don’t want engineers swivel sharing all day long.

You lose efficiencies.

Rich: One of the things that makes some of the enterprise IT management systems out there, a less than ideal fit for MSPs is just different definitions of varying standards of multi-tenancy. This can have implications both in terms of efficiency, but also in terms obviously of security.

So what is it, how did you build your def, what is your definition of true multi-tenancy? How do you build that into the product and what are the implications of your application of multi-tenancy in relation to some of these other enterprise focused products?

Chris : And I think over the past 35 [00:45:00] years or so, I’ve run, I don’t know, a hundred different ticketing systems or ITSM systems or ITXM systems in my career.

And most of them, if not every one of ’em outside of Zern. They use rules to isolate clients from each other. The last thing we wanna see, and I’m sure neither one of them are gonna get mad at me for this, but if Coke and Pepsi are both your client, the last thing you want is both of them to know that the other one exists on the same platform, right?

It’s not gonna be a good conversation. So if you’ve ever tried to create rules and make a change to your ITSM system, your ticketing system, whatever you wanna call it, most of the time the change takes three minutes. The research into that change can take three weeks because you have to make sure it’s not gonna break all 100 or 300 or a thousand clients that you have on your platform.

Zern is designed and was born in Europe, so we came from this whole nationalization of data background. [00:46:00] So every client has its own data structure, its own controls. There are hard walls between clients and. We are C five compliant. We have BYOK, right? And a lot of people don’t understand the benefit of BYOK or bring your own key, but we are so isolated from a client perspective, their data is so segmented on the backend that the client can give us a key to encrypt their data with.

And that’s great. I’d love it. Try doing that with another tool. You’re going to encrypt every client’s data with one client’s key, which is never gonna fly. So that’s my definition of multi-tenancy, is if the client can give me a key to encrypt their data with you actually have true multi-tenancy.

Rich: Chris we thank you very much for joining us here on the show and taking us through your thinking at Zern about the management tool needs by MSPs just talking with us about the [00:47:00] product. Interesting stuff for sure. For folks in the audience here who wanna get in touch with you, wanna learn more about Zunt, where would you recommend they go?

Chris : They can go right to the zunt.com website and you know the about us and contact us page. If they wanna reach out to me directly, I am on LinkedIn at Christopher Black, or they can email [email protected] at zunt.com.

Rich: And in the final moments of this interview, I will point out that it, the product is pronounced Zern.

It is spelled X-U-R-R-E-N-T. So you want to go to X-U-R-R-E-N t.com or include that spelling in the email address if you’re reaching out to to Chris. Once again, Chris Black Technical Advisor exert. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break here.

When we come back on the other side, we’re gonna share a few final thoughts about this conversation with Chris. Have a little fun wrap up the show. Stick around. We’ll be right back[00:48:00]

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Glad to have had the opportunity, Erick, to introduce our audience to this solution and and this product. And not so much be as an endorsement of Zern and the product, but just because when I first became aware of it, it opened my eyes to a gap of sorts a different kind of take on what MSPs, at least at a certain scale require in order to continue growing, supporting more customers operate at maximum efficiency.

And it occurred to me as we were speaking with Chris, this is actually a perfect example of something that I’ve been talking about for years and years ago when I was part of the editorial team at Channel Pro. Which is actually only two, three years ago, but it was longer than that.

The incident I’m thinking of, but I wrote an article once upon a time for Channel Pro about the qualities that the fastest growing, most successful MSPs have in common. And it came down to [00:49:00] what I call the three Ss that were three things. They all happened to begin with. S one was standardization and other was specialization, and the third was scalability.

Meaning that from the get go, even when they were brand new, just launching the business, they were thinking in terms of everything that they did about building scalability into the company. And Zern is actually a really interesting application of that principle. You might be a one person, three person, five person.

You might be a smaller MSP right now, and you might not really need the functionality Zern platform provides, but if you are thinking along the lines of. Growing this business for the long term. And you are thinking about scalability because, and believe that’s one of the things successful MSPs focus on here is a good example of what separates the people serious about scalability from the people who are less serious about about scalability.

It’s investing early in a product that does [00:50:00] something that your starter tool set doesn’t.

Erick: Yeah. Rich. And I know, from experience and working with many MSPs that, MSPs will switch platforms because they outgrow a platform, or the platform is not meeting their needs fast enough and things like that.

We’ve seen a lot of new players in the last couple of years come on the scene, as other options for PSA and things like that and. I really appreciate the feature set, the mentality that Zunt brings to bear to this platform. It feels like it’s something that once it’s adopted, it meets all of the current needs as well as has an eye toward the future needs or Ms.

P. So it feels more of a a platform where it, it won’t outgrow or outlast, at least from the conversations that we had with Chris on the podcast and the back the green room conversations that we were having with him before and after the episode. So I’m really looking [00:51:00] forward to the announcements that we can’t share that they’ll be announcing soon and following up with him.

And Rich, just a last thought. You had your three S’s. I would say maybe the fourth s would be the ification of everything. The way Chris mentioned it, I mentioned it to him backstage is kinda sounded almost like a dirty word the way he said it. So that was interesting as well.

Rich: And if you’re wondering what dirty word we’re talking about, just look up Corey Docko and vacation and you’ll know exactly what it is.

We’re not gonna say the word. You’ve probably heard it a lot recently, but that is what what popped into Erick’s head when you heard the ification.

Erick: Yeah, there’s a couple of asterisks in there between, in the very beginning of that,

Rich: just in case you’re in the car with kids. Folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing on this episode of the show, and I’m guessing a lot of folks in our audience, Erick, are in communities or cities that have a zoo nearby.

A lot of our listeners may even consider themselves a [00:52:00] friend of the zoo. ‘Cause it’s a great place to go because place to bring kids. The Aalborg Zoo in Denmark maybe took the friend of the zoo concept just a little bit too far recently. They in a post on Facebook, went out and asked friends of the zoo to donate quote unquote unwanted pets that would be gently euthanized and fed to the animals at the zoo.

And I’m quoting from the the Facebook post here, chickens, rabbits, and Guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators, especially the European Lynx. It needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild. So if you care about the zoo, you care about the European Lynx in particular at your local zoo, and you have bunny rabbits at home, maybe bring one of them in there to feed to the wild animals.

Erick: Yeah, I read that story, rich when I first, started making the rounds and got gone viral and people are [00:53:00] like, oh my goodness. Fluffy. How could they, how would I ever give fluffy away? I and I just think like these animals if, is it something that the owners say, Hey, if you don’t behave, the zoo’s right down the street.

Okay. I’ll poop in the litter box please. I’ll be good.

Rich: Yeah. I yeah. Everyone needs motivation and we’ve just come up with a form of mo motivation for Fluffy here. And folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the show. We thank you so much for joining us. We’re gonna be back in one week’s time with another episode for you.

Until then, I will just remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you are listening to us on audio, but you wanna check us out video, you can go to YouTube, book up MSP chat. You’ll find us there If you are watching the YouTube video, but you’re into audio podcast, you wanna check us out in that format.

Go to Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is to get your audio podcasts. Nearly certain to find us there too. And wherever it is, however it is, you find us, please subscribe, rate, and [00:54:00] review. It truly will help other people discover and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the Great Rest Johns.

It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They’re both part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered Day, already willing and able to help you create a podcast of your very own, if you’d like to do that. And podcasts are a big, tiniest little sliver of what we do for our clients at Channel Mastered.

If you wanna get the big picture, go to www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered that’s ar working one-on-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www.mspMastered.com. So once again, folks, thank you for joining us.

We’re gonna be back in a week Until then I will simply remind you as we always do the very end of the show, you simply can’t spell channel without [00:55:00] MSP.