Episode 93: Jet Engine on a Paper Plane

Erick and Rich talk about some flaws in that now famous MIT study suggesting that 95% of AI pilots end in failure, as well as three techniques for setting the right AI expectations with your clients. Then they’re joined by TD SYNNEX executives Ed Morales and Tracy Holtz for wide-ranging conversations about AI and cloud computing recorded live at the recent TD SYNNEX Inspire conference. And finally, one last thing: who police in San Bruno, California gave the ticket to when a self-driving car made an illegal turn.

Discussed in this episode:

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

Music by Ed Morales

California police pull over a self-driving Waymo for an illegal U-turn, but they can’t ticket

Some guests on this podcast are clients of Channel Mastered. Compensation plays no part in their appearance or the content of the discussion unless the episode they appear on is a “bonus episode” explicitly labeled as sponsored.

Transcript:

 

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With Datto, request a demo and [00:01:00] see the solution live to appreciate the power, peace of mind, and the recurring revenue screen it can bring to you. And now onto the show and 3, 2, 1. Blast off, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of MSP Chat, 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.

My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered Organization responsible for this show. I am joined this week as I am every week by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing? I’m

Erick: doing pretty well, rich, as both you and I have taken a pit stock in between travel.

We were traveling last week. This week we’re in the pits, recharging, refueling, getting tires changed for the new. Track strategy and then next week we are on the road again. So I’m just trying to catch up in between all of this crazy juggling that we’re doing

Rich: once again at, we [00:02:00] are both west Coasters once again out to the East coast next week for Dacon, where among other things on Monday, October 6th, we will be moderating a panel at the Autotask community live pre-day event built into to dataCon.

So that’s around 3:00 PM Eastern, if I remember right. Look it up, join us there. We’ve got three MSPs on the stage with us talking about their tips and tricks for operational excellence using AI and automation, but other techniques as well. Gonna be a really interesting chat and it’s gonna be a really interesting event.

I know that I don’t know what Kase slash data will be announcing, but it’ll be plenty. And I’m looking forward to to finding out what it is and probably. Talking about it on the next episode of the show. But for now let’s dive into our story of the week here, which surprise, surprise is AI related.

And in particular, and I’ll preface where we’re going with this, Erick, by saying I don’t consider either one of us to be like AI boosters, let alone [00:03:00] acceleration. It’s it’s not our job to get people on board the AI train and turn them into believers and so on. But folks in our audience were probably familiar with a study that was published out of MITA few weeks ago and that quite loudly and famously found.

95% of pilots, essentially proof of concept projects around AI fail. Got a lot of media attention. I keep hearing people in our industry citing that number. And the reason I wanna talk about it a little bit is because I wanna make sure that again, we’re not AI boosters, but I do wanna make sure nobody in our audience sees that number and thinks I told you it’s snake oil not going there.

’cause I really don’t think that’s the the conclusion to draw there. So first of all, let’s talk a little bit about the study it and I’m not saying that it’s BS or worthless. It does have some issues though, the finding and basically about the 95% failure rate is based on 52 [00:04:00] interviews. We do a fair amount of market research for our clients at Channel mastered.

Erick I know I would be a little reluctant to make a big, loud proclamation, like 95% of projects fail based on 52 qualitative interviews and nothing essentially quantitative to back that up. The public, the general public can’t see very much about those 52 interviews, so it’s a little bit hard to see what they heard that led them to say this was a failure.

Here’s how they defined success or failure. I’m quoting from the study. Success or failure was determined by whether there is a measurable p and l impact within six months of an AI Pilot’s launch. A couple of issues there and remember they’re talking mostly to larger businesses. Yeah. Six months is aggressive.

For a pilot to be having a measurable p and l impact to prime and timeframe and the definition of success. Some real issues there. Now, that kind of makes the [00:05:00] 95% number a bit of an outlier, but it doesn’t mean that there’s lots of evidence elsewhere that pilots are just succeeding left and right.

I, anecdotally talking to people in the industry, I’ve heard there are, there is a, there are problems with ai proof of concepts. Just recently, within the last two, three weeks, the 4 51 research arm of s and p Market Intelligence published some research in this area. They said 45.6% of the organizations they surveyed are in production with ai.

Another 41.7% are in that pilot proof of concept stage. 46.2% of the people they surveyed said that no single enterprise objective. Have received a strong positive impact from the AI investment so far. So not a great number, right? So 46.2%, no positive impact. That doesn’t sound so terrific. First of all, it’s about half the 95% number we were talking about before, and also, [00:06:00] while it is difficult to find really good I have done some research on this, it’s not easy to find really good, solid data on the success rate for proof of concepts outside of ai.

But the best numbers I’ve seen suggest it’s a little under 50%. Which is what, 46.2% kind of sounds like. So in short, Erick, it it’s not there’s some giant problem around getting value out of a ai. We’re still early days. People are trying to figure out how to do it. We’re seeing perfectly normal success and failure rates based on as good a set of data points as we can find.

Right now. And according, I’ll cite one more study for you. According to some research from OpenText, 92% of MSPs report business growth from ai interest among their customers. And 96% are expecting further growth this year. So this is a market that’s working for plenty of people out [00:07:00] there right now, even if it is early days and evolving.

So next time somebody throws the MIT 95% number at you, here’s what you send back the other way.

Erick: Richard’s, as you rightly mentioned, we do a lot of market research for our clients at Channel Mastered. We do a lot of channel surveys. We do partner focus groups, we meet with internal teams.

Those items that you raised our concerning only having, a very small sample size for data number one, number two, six months. POCs typically last that long or longer before anyone decides whether this is a viable solution for a new technology to start deploying broadly.

And number three, I’ll add, this is not a proven technology. It’s not oh, it’s a, an M 365 migration. We do those in our sleep. We know quickly within six months that there is going to [00:08:00] be ROI, because we’re not. Figuring out how to configure, deploy manage and maintain a new technology. This is already baked.

It is a proven solution. So it’s interesting. I also read those statistics and until you raise these issues, I just thought that’s one study, right? Think about how many studies need that actually occur in order for someone to, have enough data to make up their own minds.

And I will say this too rich, because of that phenomenon and because of the, the buzz around ai, we know that a very high percentage of businesses and enterprises are adopting ai, want to adopt ai. There’s some risk there which I’ll cover.

Rich: My

Erick: tip of the week this week.

Rich: Let’s put right there.

Yeah you picked a great tip of the week, given what we were just talking about. Dive right in, Erick. So

Erick: it’s all about having [00:09:00] poorly aligned client expectations around AI and broad, more broadly, tech innovation, rich. As MSPs, sometimes we are the, the dog that’s being wagged by the tail, right?

Which is the client. Client wants something. We wanna please the client. We, go to bat and try to figure it out on our time and our dime. Because sometimes when we’re not at a level of, project management, deployment and maturity where we say, something to a client like you know what?

This is new technology. We’re gonna do a proof of concept first. We’re gonna work diligently together through these phases to determine what the best way to roll this out is to keep it secure, to have some governance around it, to make sure that we are listening to everyone in the organization before we begin deploying this thing.

Because sometimes we do these things in a vacuum. Heck rich, I’ll, I’ll fess up. I did, we did this in my Ms. P, it’s like a client. I remember this one time a client [00:10:00] wanted a liquor control system and they said, you guys do that kind of thing. And our sales professional said, absolutely.

Came back and we said, what is a liquor control system with anything? We had to partner up with somebody that delivered it. It basically, it’s the thing that measures, how much pour for every liquor goes into drinks and things like that. So it, it addresses shrinkage and that kind of thing.

But we had no idea what it was. MSPs want to please clients, we are more apt to say yes than no. Especially if it’s a sales led conversation, right? There’s always that, kind of battle between sales and engineering. It’s like you told them what, so let’s talk a little bit about how these MSPs should approach this because they’re being pushed rich by their clients to adopt these AI solutions, or in their Q bs or their, VCIO or VCTO meetings, or they’re identifying that there is AI rampant in the environment that we had no idea was in there.

Think about all the free [00:11:00] chat bots that are out there and things like that, and the risk that puts the client and the MSP under, right? Because without proper governance, that data can be made available publicly through the chat bot. So that’s not good stuff. So three tips.

First of all, let’s educate ourselves. As MSPs, let’s find other folks that are delivering solutions. And these are early days, like you said, rich has early days. There’s not a lot of solid baked solutions for these verticals, but we’re seeing movement in this in this area, right? We’re seeing organizations standing up services and solutions to bring AI to the market.

I think I spoke on another episode recently about my sister-in-law who works in the medical field in healthcare, and they are being bombarded by AI specialists that deliver AI solutions for healthcare to, to mind data and get better information and things like that, and make decisions. So that’s happening.

So let’s educate ourselves on what’s out there. What, how do we approach these [00:12:00] conversations, rich from a, a risk averse perspective, pilot some of these programs. First with a small set subset of clients, any small number. Of users within that client organization have, gather all the data, don’t assume this is what the client wants, understand what the need is, understand what they’re looking to achieve, and then consult with your upstream vendors, strategic partners folks in the know that are in that area and delivering that if you’re not doing it yourself already.

And partner up early with someone to do the first couple of pilots and POCs and don’t promise a thing to a client other than we’re going to measure the deployment and measure the effect and understand from this small pilot what the larger solution needs to look like and then move forward carefully.

[00:13:00] After that. It’s that clear AI beliefs and boundaries. So this is interesting, right? What does the client believe the AI is capable of? It’s not George Jetson time, right? It’s not Star Trek. Or we can talk to the computer and we’ve got a little bit of Siri, Alexa, and AI all competing there.

We’re not there yet, right? But what does the client expect? Set clear beliefs. Here’s what we’re going to. Maybe there is a feature that the client really wants that is ca that, that AI will deliver, but we’ve gotta crawl before we walk and run. So be very careful. Meet with the client regularly.

Measure, do phase reviews until you’re comfortable moving forward. And again, don’t try to figure it out on your own dime in your own time. Partner with some experts. Get the client to pay for that proof of concept or that pilot. They are so keen on the technology. Their budget should reflect how keen they really are.

Rich: So a couple of different things there. So first of all, [00:14:00] one interesting finding in that MIT study that we didn’t touch on before is that while, per their really broken standard, these big enterprise AI deployments aren’t or pilots rather aren’t doing so well, there’s a ton of shadow AI usage within the businesses they looked at.

We’ve spoken about that in the podcast before. And those, people using personal AI products like chat, GGPT at work are saying it’s making them more productive. Like that kind of AI deployment is working. So it, in terms of where you can begin with a client, it doesn’t have to be some big digital transformation kind of project.

It can be bringing in copilot and creating a taste for what AI can do that opens them up to something bigger and more ambitious that you can gently, as you said step into. The other thing, I’d be curious to hear an additional thought on it, in terms of setting the right expectations with the customers, what they believe and what you’re telling them.

I’m thinking back to where you started, [00:15:00] where the salespeople wanna close a deal and who knows what they’re gonna say. Any advice in terms of making sure your salespeople are communicating, setting the right expectations with customers and not setting you up for disappointing the client?

Erick: Yeah, that’s a whole other tip of the week, rich.

That’s that sales, engineering phenomenon that has to happen where if it’s a new technology that we’re promoting, absolutely. Have a wingman or wing woman at your side that can help guide those conversations. The technical team values what the sales team does.

It’s sometimes in the day to day, it’s that miscommunication and mis misalignment. Of getting the sales team trained and comfortable in expressing the features and benefits of a solution, but also understanding what the guardrails are around it, what to say, what not to say, and how to say that. So early on, having these meetings, having someone on the engineering team [00:16:00] ride shotgun would be super valuable.

The first four or five conversations. Absolutely. So that there’s a, there’s, I call it the dance, it’s like a, a tango, right? The sales person is leading and the engineer is following, and then they switch a little bit. There’s gotta be a communication. There’s gotta be a, a simple way to reflect that there is a true partnership and a true focus on managing that conversation.

Rather than making the common mistakes where the salesperson is saying something and the engineer says no, that’s not how it works. And you’re arguing with each other in front of the client. But like I said, maybe we’ll do that tip of the week next week. But there has to be some synergy and some understanding.

And the only way to grow together and to be better at what you do is to have that true partnership between a sales resource and an engineering resource that work together for the common good of the client, but also for the

Rich: organization. Makes total sense. I like it. Okay. More to come on that topic folks, but for now, Erick and I are gonna take a quick [00:17:00] break.

When we come back. As we mentioned before, our last trip back east was to Greenville, South Carolina. So we’ve got two interviews coming to you from the TD Cynics and Spire show that we attended in Greenville. The first is with Ed Morales. He’s the VP of AI and high growth technology, strategic business development at TD Cenex.

Perfect person to talk about AI with. The second is with Tracy Holtz. She’s the VP of Cloud at tv Synex perfect person to discuss another high growth market with. We’ve got two interviews for you. Coming up, I chuckle a little bit ’cause at the very beginning of the first of those two interviews with Ed Morales, you’re gonna hear me literally forget what city I’m sitting in because Erick and I have been doing so much travel.

It was just, I don’t know where I am and it doesn’t matter. I was at a TD cynic show. It was great. We had an awesome conversation with Ed Morales and Tracy Holtz, and you’re gonna hear all that coming up right quick after the break.[00:18:00]

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment where we are delighted to be doing the first of an interview twofer here at the TD Synnex Inspire Show in where are we? Greenville?

Ed: South Carolina.

Rich: South Carolina. Thank I’ve been here all week.

I know that. Down a week. Yeah. We’re delighted to be joined by Ed Morales. He is the Vice President of AI and high growth technology, strategic business development, which makes you the perfect guy to talk about AI with for our audience. Awesome. I’m e excited to be here again.

Good to see you again. We’ve been a few months back. I’m gonna circle back to that. Okay. Actually at the end of the interview. But for po folks who don’t know you, haven’t met you before, tell ’em a little bit about yourself, your role at TD

Ed: Synex. Okay. Thank you. Thank you again for the opportunity.

Ed Ross. I’ve been with TD six for now for almost 22 years. I’ve been operating in distribution and all that time. Current focus right now is on helping help our, both our vendors and our resale partners engage in this area of [00:19:00] ai. Coupled with areas around cloud security and data and analytics.

So really my role is to really be the facilitator of enablement for both parties and be that conduit working with our teams to be able to deliver that value.

Rich: Yesterday morning, Raina Thompson, president of TD Synex, north America was the first speaker on stage. And the key thing she wanted to make sure everybody heard was that all of the stuff that you folks are gonna be talking about with the attendees that inspire, right?

And everything you do across the year rolls up to one idea. She said we believe in the power of people to drive technology forward. So talk a little bit about, from your perspective, what TD Synex is doing, maybe specifically in AI or how it reflects that mission.

Ed: It, it reflected in two different ways.

One, how we’re actually leveraging AI internally to streamline operations and making the experience with a partner better for them. Obviously, there’s a couple of things that, and we, I know we’re gonna talk about MSPs, but there are a couple of things that they’re interested in [00:20:00] doing.

One, they wanna optimize their business and optimize opportunity, operations. So we’re doing things within, that’s why this whole partner first tool came out to be able to have one portal for partners to come into and leverage the full breadth of the operational capabilities we have within our organization and help them grow their business as a result of being able to scale across all these different areas that we have focus.

But secondarily is leveraging AI and the means of helping partners understand where they play. One of the interesting things that’s taking place, and this is where we, I think we personalize it, is that AI has become such a, it’s overwhelming for a lot of partners, and where do they start? You keep hearing all this work about Gen AI and AgTech ai, and we have a lot of partners that are traditionally played in infrastructure or cloud or security, and this whole Gentech AI is really foreign to them.

So what we’ve done is, and we’ll talk about it shortly is create a methodology to bring it down to where they’re at, understand where they’re at, and then leading ’em on that journey to where, wherever they wanna [00:21:00] build a business. ’cause there’s opportunity across the full stack and there’s need of expertise across the full stack as well.

Erick: Ed, you brought up two topics that are near and dear to our audience’s hearts and our hearts, MSPs and ai in that last answer. Being a former msp i’m just amazed at this evolution that we’ve seen going from, hardware resale in the early two thousands to, services.

Now we’re looking at ai. So where do you see the biggest plays for MSPs and MSPs regarding AI now and in the next couple of years?

Ed: And I, it plays right into where their sweet spot. And this is where I think part of what we’re doing, and if I may speak to our methodology.

And I’ll answer your question. Within destination ai, we’ve identified three types of partner types where we, one we call aware, which is a partner now who’s become opportunistic. They know they have to sell this, so they may be selling a copilot license on an [00:22:00] A IPC. But they have not really shown where they’re gonna place their bets.

We have a second tier partner that’s called Ready. These are partners who have made some in initial investments, may have a couple of folks on staff that are doing some customized modeling, but still they haven’t really fully monetized their go-to market. And the third area is around the experts. And that’s a very small subset.

Those typically came from the analytic group who naturally did a transition, or the ones selling these Nvidia super pods that have developed a full, they have data SAP who can do the full implementation. Yeah. What we’re doing is, as a result, it, what we’ve really realized is that we’ve been able, with our destination AI solution grade approach, we’ve plotted out technology based on two criteria.

The complexity of the technology and the complexity of the sales motion. And as a result, we can then align certain technologies to the partner based on where they’re at now and where they want to be. So going back to your question, infrastructure, you cannot deploy an AI environment on old [00:23:00] infrastructure.

You have to modernize. And so the part of this is not, but it’s not, we’re just talking about the what, it’s the why. So why do you need to modernize your servers, your storage, your networking, in order to you, because you gotta be able to handle the comp, compute, the computational the large computation, the velocity of those environments.

Plus you’ve gotta, for cyber resiliency, data governance, and data compliance. So as an MSP. And the one constituent’s gonna be reliant, and we can talk about that a little bit more, is the SMB customer. ’cause they’re gonna be reliant ’cause they can’t afford their own data centers that, or hybrid.

They’re gonna need to rely on the MSPs to do this. So them being able to first internally optimize their own infrastructure, optimize their own process is gonna be key one. Then providing those assessments to their downstream customers to identify where those use cases can be implied. So think about the first kind of deployment.

I think you saw the gentleman from Microsoft’s speak here of those areas of focus around the SMB [00:24:00] segment of what’s available to them. So there are discrete use cases available to them, but I think the first step is understanding for our partners, working with us to understand where they play currently and how we can optimize their business to deliver value to their customers.

Because I, this, there’s a lot more we can go into as we have this conversation with. I’m pretty excited about the topic. Yeah, we’re pretty passionate about ourselves.

Rich: I wanna follow up on infrastructure a little bit. That’s what we spoke about when we first met Acto a few months back.

And it showed up as an area getting pretty strong partner adoption and the direction of Technology Airport, which was published in conjunction with the show this week, like you said, I mean it it’s easy to understand what that means. For an enterprise customer that has a data center and they’re gonna need a whole different set of of servers and storage arrays and so on to, to make AI work.

And it’s very different for the SMBs. So for the MSPs in our audience who are serving SMBs and understand in a theoretical sense there is infrastructure that needs to be [00:25:00] in place before you can really put AI to work. What does that look like? What are they actually building, delivering, servicing for their clients?

Ed: It’s twofold. I would say one, it’s either one. First, they, it’s, if they’re developing and they have their own managed services where they’re provide, where they have their own data centers, that they’re providing that service themselves, it’s actually modernizing that those servers, that networking and the storage required on that, including these, the security layers and all these things that are required because now you’re introducing.

A whole new element of complexity and as a result of complexity, you’re obviously gonna need to be able to secure it in a different way. But additionally, if you’re a, if you’re A-C-S-P-M-S-P is selling cloud services. The interesting thing is that, and you’ve probably seen that if you see these, if you’ve ever seen the data of the K growth, there’s been a huge growth of infrastructure sales over the course of the last couple of years.

’cause all the hyperscalers have modernized their data centers with these new technologies. ’cause they knew at some point they’re gonna need to be able to deliver AI and they can’t, they [00:26:00] couldn’t do it either. So as an MSP, you’re gonna be able to deliver in two different modes. And it’s all depending on the cost of compute for the end customer.

In some cases, the customer can be able to be able to do these basically leveraging the infrastructure that the MSPs themselves offer, but they can also develop it or deliver things through the cloud. ’cause as cloud providers have all developed their own and up modernize their own infrastructure to deliver this.

To through the MSP, to the part to the customer. And that’s where the SMB is gonna really need to play because there’s, it’s just gonna be cost, it’s gonna be cost prohibitive for them to be able to do this on their own.

Erick: Oh. So Ed, at your spring high growth conference, and IDC speaker said, I’m reading here that infrastructure spend tends to hold up when it spending slows for economic reasons.

Yes, I remember that. Has that been true this year?

Ed: Yes. We’ve seen, we’ve actually seen a growth of servers and storage primarily within the enterprise [00:27:00] class. ’cause they’re the ones that they’re, they have that immediate need and you’ve and of course because of the purchases with that, we’re seeing within some of the larger hyperscalers, some of the larger MSPs of Modernizer data center.

So it’s, and here’s the thing, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Because again, you cannot deploy an AI application, all old infrastructure. It just won’t work. It’s I always use the analogies like use, like putting a jet engine on a paper airplane. You can get the best app. And I think that’s what’s happening with a lot of the POCs.

The questions they ever get asked. They’re talking about the use case, which a lot of ’em, they, I don’t think they really realize they being, and customers are really sure. They said I either deploy ai, but what exactly and I got, I’ve got some ideas regarding some of the challenges there too, but more so that no one’s really asking what are you gonna run this on?

And so that’s why you need this. You need to modernize. So they answer the question, yes, we’re seeing that trajectory happen and we’re gonna see it over the next course of the next five years. I the one area that I [00:28:00] found fascinating is networking, AI networking. So I’ll just give you an idea.

So we were visiting the gentleman from we were in visiting Nvidia, and the gentleman who runs the Mex line. We asked the question, so how much of the network out there is AI ready? And he said 15% I think. I think he was being generous. Yeah, we, I when you look at the, so AI enabled network, ’cause you need that, it’s got advanced capabilities that, that traditional networking does not have.

It’s required to be able to handle all the traffic and the way it’s being, all the data’s being processed. AI networking in 2024 is 11 billion. It shoots up to 20 to 61 billion by 2030. By 2033 it’s 143 billion. The K growth of AI networking is full almost 39% year over year. It well, whereas traditional networking is 9% and it services somewhere between there.

Exactly. And here’s the thing, those skills, I think what happened when networking became so somewhat commoditized, all the skills would be double deployed, networking. Those all kind [00:29:00] of went away. They all started focusing on security and analytics. Those who start to practice and they both skills are on AI networking.

Are gonna benefit because that’s, I think it’s a gap in in, in capabilities and infrastructure. Understanding that skill, understanding how this all fits and staging the environment for that is gonna be a high, highly valid, skill I believe within our

Erick: channel and within partners. A quick follow up thought, we’re hearing a lot about, where the careers are and it’s all about prompt engineering, data analytics and all that, but there’s a huge opportunity it sounds like, from a networking and infrastructure side.

Ed: Absolutely. Yeah I would agree. And then, and it’s a, it’s not a no, it’s an, and for those who have skills and have passion about the infrastructure, networking, I think more so not they’re gonna, there’s a shortage of resources to be able to understand the technology first, but also be able to deploy and then be able to manage that.

’cause then you’re starting to really look, then you gotta think about the full stack. ’cause everything is now interacting with each other with ai, so it, AI facilitates that, but it also adds another [00:30:00] label, a complexity. But I’m understanding that. From a, if you look at the old OSI stack, right?

That infrastructure layer is gonna be key and how it interacts with the data and the application. That’s why it’s really key to understand all that. So those traditional guys who understand the full T-C-P-I-P stack are gonna benefit all again. So the old becomes new again.

Rich: I wrote a post from my blog about a year ago referring specifically to networking, but infrastructure beyond that is the AI goldmine hiding and playing sight.

Yes. It’s this, you’re really a man. It’s a huge piece of the story. I agree. And everyone goes straight to the software. Yes. Yeah.

Ed: And I think the missing value and so that’s what I’m saying. That’s why, but the, when we started to have conversations with our partners and we showed them the grids and say, look, here’s Cisco’s, or here’s Dell.

Here is HPEs that actually has Aruba or now Juniper networking in it. And they start to see that they’re they’re, when they show, the grid shows all, it plots out the products. And they start to see that, hey, you can play an infrastructure. You’re already in the game. It like, it is [00:31:00] like the sense of relief.

You just now need to sell differently because it’s not, again, not about the what, but the why. And then it’s, and then the how. ’cause it’s a little different sell than traditional sales, but it’s, we have that all available for the partner.

Rich: Per the direction of technology report infrastructure is seeing good partner adoption, let’s look beyond the gold mine in, in plain sight for just a few minutes here.

What else? Right now, where else in AI are you seeing momentum in the market today and keeping maybe MSPs and their SMB customers foremost in mind?

Ed: Oh I’ll say two, two huge areas that the platform as a service that are in the AI platform as a service that all the hyperscalers and Microsoft, Google and AWS have deployed.

We’re seeing a growth of those are about 50% cagr. The adoption ’cause it it’s through those, it’s through those platforms where the SMB is gonna be able to participate in ai. Secondarily, when we’re, a lot of the MSPs are gonna, they’re gonna be required, is really around security. And we’re [00:32:00] seeing relative to security for cloud security for data are roughly about, even within our own businesses, around a 20% quarter, a quarter growth in, in, in AI deployments.

Because as ai, as you probably saw, you’ve seen some of the the speakers today the bad actors are out there leveraging AI to do a lot of attacks and SMBs are probably the most they’re probably they’re probably attacked more than most people realize. I what I lost, that I saw was roughly about 50% of the S of SMB customers are attacked.

And un unfortunately, most of those guys go out of business once they’re attacked. Because they can’t the cost of regain by like the a hundred, like 500, it was a lot. It was within the millions the last time I checked. So they lose credibility, they lose their business. And so it’s important for MSPs to build up their roster of security for those and as in customers and that, those are the two areas that I see hypergrowth right now.

Erick: Let’s continue [00:33:00] that thread Ed, about the MSP. So yeah, what type of investment does an MSP or an MSP need to make in terms of hard dollars to take advantage of the AI opportunity? And then what types of skills do they need their teams to upskill to in order to serve this take advantage of the opportunity for their SMB customers?

Ed: Yeah. Again, it’s, it depends. And like I said, one of my is that not every MSP is created equal, so it’s gonna be re it’s gonna be based on how they go to market and what value they’re delivering to their end customer. Obviously we’re talking about our hardware refresh.

There’s gonna be a, like a cost of a of a refreshed cost there. Obviously a TD Synex has financing off options that help mitigate that cost so that it doesn’t become we can turn that CapEx into an opex pretty quickly and readily, easily. And there’s some really great programs we offer in that regard relative to skills we just talked about, networking, we talk about.

And so it’s understanding. Part of it’s, they don’t know that they, what they don’t know, they don’t [00:34:00] understand that there’s an opportunity there. Like the goldmine, the fact that this is the most obvious thing that we see, but it’s not Propagated is an area that I think that’s because there’s lack of awareness.

So our hoping is our enabling ’em on areas. Hey, if you’re an infrastructure partner here’s places you can play. Matter of fact, one of our AI accelerators that we’re coming out with initially was all based on use cases. We’re actually creating one for AI infrastructure, for cost of compute.

To help partners of all types, whether they’re deploying it on behalf of an end customer or they’re an MSP learning how to take, to do this for themselves. That’s one thing. They are, a lot of these MSPs or partners who wanna get into security, there’s, there are a whole suite of tools now out there by a lot of our security vendors because they understand they need to be able to provide these capabilities down to their end customer.

I think that skill set is gonna be, need to be enhanced on providing so as a service and, enhance the threat detection, all these other things that require at the end, at the endpoint. [00:35:00] But, and, but the other thing that’s gonna be taking place is, and this is the new areas, really operational AI ops for the, for those end customers, which is the new area.

So I, I see three tiers and it, funny enough, it goes up at stack the infrastructure, data, and application. So the answer to your question. It depends on the part we, we have to, we where we engage and we assess them, then we can provide them that guidance on how they can make investments. The investments can be hard cost or investments in time or just re pivoting some of their current skills and just new areas of focus.

And I think that’s, we wanna do is try to take the the complexity out of it and the, that’s why if you ever see our destination chances by guiding them up the mountain, we’re like, we’re, we act in as a Sherpa to guide ’em through that stage. And depending where they’re at, we will take ’em to base camp and we’ll take ’em to the next level and take ’em to, and that’s what we’re designed to do.

Hope that answered your question. Great. Cool. That’s,

Rich: there was a a research study published earlier this week. It was [00:36:00] written by IDC on behalf of Sage. They went out and they studied a bunch of channel partners they separated out with, they called the high performers from the run of the mill.

And they said that 87% of the high performers they analyzed had a dedicated AI practice. And so I was curious, just to get your thoughts. How advantageous is it for a partner to invest to that degree to have an AI practice in the business? How advantageous, how important?

Ed: I think it, in order to remain relevant to your, for themselves and for their customers, an AI practice is a, it is not a, it’s not a n it’s a not a it’s not a nice to have, it’s a need to have.

We, and I think what we’re talking about is that we mentioned earlier there is ability to take and build a practice around your areas of expertise. Whether you’re doing infrastructure, you’re doing security or you’re doing analytics. So I think the profile of the, those who are developing AI practice, I’m [00:37:00] curious to see what, where they’re focused on, but I would agree.

I would say that you would, it’s very important now. And the cool thing about it, with the way we’re going to market, any partner now, if they can develop a practice around AI infrastructure, they can have an AI focused resource. Again, because it’s not about selling the what it’s the how.

And that’s why I believe a practice lead at every different level for every firm is gonna be important. ’cause you’re gonna need it. It’s AI’s pervasive across all technologies. You can’t avoid it anymore.

Erick: So yesterday on stage, Jessica mc, Jessica McDowell, who we’ve had on the show before Yes. Said nobody’s, she seems to know.

Yeah, she is. Nobody seems to know where to start with ai. So Ed, for MSPs that need to get started with ai Yeah. What’s the first

Ed: step they should take? I think understanding the opportunity and I think we’re, this is one of the things we’re trying to present to them. That all AI is not necessarily about agentic [00:38:00] AI or Gen ai.

Ai again, goes back to the full stack. And I believe our ability to introduce them to that the, to the awareness that there’s opportunity where they’re at now, is where I think that’s where they can get started. And if they so choose to wanna develop further skills around security or agentic, we can help them on that journey as well.

Some of these technologies and the way the grid is built the most complex ones are on the right and the are on the lower left. But over time, the things on the right are gonna start to move their way down. And new things are gonna come up at some point in time. Agentic ai and these tools that are coming are gonna become more ubiquitous, over time.

It’s just become, we’re just, it’s foreign to a lot of people right now, but these things are gonna be developed to where I think they’re gonna be much more available for more customers to use. But first, let’s, lets get you ex, let’s get you an expert where you’re at now. Let’s get you selling, understanding what you need to do to help your business now and help your customers now, and introduce things that can help you on that journey to become more higher end developing or [00:39:00] delivering higher end.

And by the way, you can have, you can develop an expertise just on infrastructure alone. You can be an AI expert on security alone or and then, or data or do all three. So the first step I would suggest, if they happen to be a TD six customer, come and engage us with destination ai. Have us do an assessment with you.

Let’s have a discussion to understand your business, and then talk to you about where you can go on the journey. And I’m telling you the one thing we do is we give our partners hope that they can play in this and show them on that vision to the top of the mountain as we have in that, in our, as we depict.

Rich: Ed, we thank you very much for taking time out of a busy show to, to talk about AI with us before. We’ll let you go though. I’ve gotta do this. So we met in May at the high growth conference that Katie Cenex did. I mentioned to some of your colleagues I was gonna be interviewing in a little bit, and they said I’ll add a rockstar, which I assumed they meant metaphorically.

Yeah, but they no. He’s a recording artist and sure enough, back at the hotel I [00:40:00] looked on Spotify, you have multiple albums. They’re quite good. Thank you. Tell folks a little bit about that part of your life.

Ed: Oh my gosh. Thank you. So yeah, so I’ve been I was a professional musician in my twenties.

Funny quick story is that I moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. My, one of my closest friends was a tech support manager at an IT company. I go to visit him for lunch. I met the president, the guy, the next day the guy calls me, Hey, do you need inside a job? He said, yeah. So he hired me for inside sales.

Job moved me a full time. And he said, you never know. It might be a good career move. And here I am 30 years later, but in all that time, the passion of writing music still stayed. So I have been playing and recording professionally since my twenties. I do have music on Spotify, apple, pretty much every media out there.

And thank you for being gracious about it. Yeah I’ve been very passionate about this. And it’s I find in it there’s a lot of musicians and there are a lot of and I, ’cause I’ve been approached by a lot of people in the show since they’ve been able to show some of the music.

And it’s been great to [00:41:00] interact with people. It’s just a passion that keeps me balanced. ‘Cause you’re, whether you’re on stage performing or speaking or whether you’re trying to, I talked about this analogy of being in a band and putting together a team in it.

Everybody’s gotta play their part. In order to play that song properly. And then it’s not about playing parts, it’s about playing the song. So that’s one thing that I try to incorporate in a lot of ways. I go do this together. But yes yeah. Thank you for your kindness. So if anybody’s interested just look at Ed Morales on Spotify and you’ll see some of that music and would be welcome to talk to anybody about this.

If you have a passion, reach out, I’d be glad to connect with you. ’cause just live that passion, live that dream because it’s still there. If it burns in you, you gotta do something with it.

Rich: I love that Ed. Little link to some of that music in the show notes. Oh, for the, absolutely.

Yeah, for sure.

Ed: Oh I’m honored. Done bless. I just hit your mic, so I apologize.

Rich: Ed, I once again, thank you very much for joining us. Very interesting conversation. We really appreciate it. Very cool.

Ed: No, I’m, I’ve, I thoroughly enjoy, I can’t believe it was [00:42:00] only 40 minutes. That’s amazing. Something like that.

That’s amazing. Thank you. Talk done. You’re passionate about the top. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for the time. Appreciate Ed. Thank you.

Rich: So folks Erick and I are gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we’re gonna be joined by Ed’s colleague Tracy Holt. She’s the Vice President of Cloud at TD Cenex.

She’s the second half of our TV Cynics two first Spotlight interview segment. Stick around. We got more to come.

And welcome back to the second part of part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our second spotlight interview segment. Live from the TD Cynics Inspire Show in Greenville, South Carolina. It’s been such a week, Tracy, that I forgot where I was, beginning of the earlier interview with ed Morales.

But now I’m thoroughly grounded folks. We are so pleased to be joined by Tracy Hulk. She’s the Vice President of Cloud here at at TD Synex, another huge [00:43:00] market. Erick and I have known you for a long time. But for folks in our audience who do not know you, have not known you for a long time, tell ’em a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. Yes, your dear friends of mine for many years from Tracy Holtz. I’ve been in the industry for just north of 28 years. Led our security business for many years and then came over into I actually spent a good bit of time in cloud when CSP and MSPs were just really being born, right?

The evolution of moving VAR into MSP. So spent about a couple years there and then moved into security and then been in our hyperscaler space for the last several years. So really exciting. Huge opportunity ahead of us all continuously in the hyperscalers, but and importantly around the new areas of growth, cybersecurity, and ai.

Just leading two of the areas.

Rich: I kicked off the interview with Ed with exactly the same question. I’ll give you a shot at this too. When Reyna Thompson came on stage right at the beginning of day one of the event, the key thing that she really wanted to emphasize is that the guiding principle for everything you folks [00:44:00] do at TD Synex is this idea of believing in the power of people to drive technology forward.

That is the vision, that’s the mission for TD Synex. How does that play out in cloud?

Tracy: Oh, I think it’s actually one of the greatest examples of it as well. In addition to ai, when you think about everything that our people across our hyperscalers team do around enablement to help enable our partners, whether that be presales design, sales, engineering, where we’re doing proof of concepts, true de technical demonstrations to skilling, upskilling our MSPs.

And then really investing in them into these new technologies and then hands-on really helping to enable them around agents as one way example. But we do that in so many different ways, right? Marketing is one extension of that. But definitely I would say our talent is the differentiator in our business.

I get often told and have been told many times over the last couple days that our team is the difference of why they do business at TD Synnex and the [00:45:00] empowerment that we have brought back into their business for fueling their growth.

Erick: So Google had some stage time yesterday and they talked about Google Cloud in the SMB.

Now understand that most MSPs are really focused on Microsoft. Where and how should they look at the Google opportunity for their clients?

Tracy: Yeah, it’s a great example. I think across all the hyperscalers they all have tremendous cloud opportunities. But Google, particularly when you think about where they’re going from an AI transformation leading at the agent and into the workspace and applying that with Gemini that’s really the SMB opportunity.

It certainly scales. Their SMB definition goes to enterprise the lower end of enterprise. So it’s a little bit different than how some other hyperscalers classify SMB as well as like Microsoft as a huge proponent, very large install base, right? And that their definition of S-M-E-S-M-B is very [00:46:00] different in terms of the users and things of that nature.

Rich: We spoke about AI and the previous interview segment there that, that’s all everybody is talking about, obviously these days. Security top of mind for everybody. The other high growth segment that you folks at QD sync focus on is cloud, and it’s a little hilarious to me sometimes the degree to which it’s being overshadowed by ai, it is still a high growth.

Marcus talk to people a little bit about where that growth is, the scale of that growth, and also what are the high growth segments that folks in our audience should be thinking about?

Tracy: Yeah, and I love that you said that, right? AI is certainly all the buzz and certainly very deserving right?

It’s the way that we are transforming our own lives personally, professionally, and really helping to enable productivity and great of lifesaving things in a lot of cases right around agents. However when you still think about what the opportunity that sits in our hyperscalers and pure cloud and the IA and the infrastructure space.

I mean that today in our [00:47:00] Azure business as one great example, we’re leading the globe in US at TD Synex around our infrastructure business, right? Outpacing some of our channel partners at two x the growth, right? So doing some very cool things there. I would say definitely heavily focused on what are the current workloads that those partners have migrated to the cloud?

Where is there as expansion opportunities? Where can we help them identify the financial savings through movement to the cloud? And it’s a journey, right? It’s sometimes there is larger workloads that you’re migrating and you’re gonna get the fundamentally of that savings over a two year opportunity.

And so we spend that time and really working through that and we fund and actually do quite a bit there around the migration services and helping our partners through that opportunity. So a huge opportunity across all hyperscalers, quite frankly in the pure cloud space. And then there is marketplace and I would say the TD Synnex differentiates there with what our StreamOne empowers through [00:48:00] syndication.

And today that was highlighted on main stage, right? Microsoft as being the core component of that today. And future expansion with the other hyperscalers where we’re syndicating the Azure works Azure marketplace. And even now with agents identifying those agents and syndicating that all the way through our Stream one platform, and then to our, ultimately to an end customer, depending on the engagement with the part MSP and a partner.

Erick: Tracy, while selling licenses to customers is required by channel partners, it’s really not where the money’s at. So what kind of guidance can you give our audience around identifying. All these pull through cloud services that can be added on top to really get ’em that margin that they’re looking for.

Tracy: Yeah, so that’s a great question. Erick and I would say while licenses or you look at the workspace that prominently exist in the cloud business, whether that be Google or Microsoft, there’s rich incentives to drive net new customer [00:49:00] business. And so that’s where we’re trying to help with our partners, identify the propensity in their tenants to grow upsell naturally and attach for instance, like copilot M 365 or chat and leading with chat.

In one example, certainly Google has a very strong base there as well. There’s backend incentives, but more, and when you add services attached to that with support and post-sales implementation, you can richen your margin 35, 40%. That’s absolutely where the productivity gains are gained.

Erick: So bundling services around those licenses.

Tracy: Absolutely. Support component for that.

Erick: MRR. Yep.

Tracy: We tried every sale. We talk to our partners and every opportunity, we’re always bundling in services and support and really helping to make sure our partners are doing the same and taking advantage of that opportunity downstream to their clients.

Rich: So coming back to AI a little bit here, there is an intersection between cloud and AI at Microsoft Co-pilot.

So [00:50:00] talk a little bit about how big an opportunity co-pilot is particularly for the MSPs in our audience.

Tracy: Yeah, that’s it’s significant, right? It’s Travis Walter was on stage this morning with Microsoft. He talked quite a bit extensively about copilot and the opportunity in ai. When you think about Microsoft and putting together their AI innovation, it starts with copilot chat.

Of really helping. Fundamentally, many everybody has access to ai. If you’re on business premium today with Microsoft, so you can access chat, you can get the feel for AI and the power of it, right? And that’s really researcher in a lot of ways. Then you start to build out and identify where there’s opportunities to really upsell into N 365, and that’s your core productivity.

I use, it’s my assistant every day. It makes me smarter, makes me be more productive. And it certainly at times, and I’ll laugh about this, makes me sound better because it’ll make me be a little bit more softer with a [00:51:00] message at times. So I love that I have that ability, but it also makes what I used to spend hours doing presentations.

A matter of seconds, right? Or if I’m doing researcher and really trying to analyze data and opportunities, it will then enrich in that. So I absolutely adore copilot because I’m using an and multiple, I would say ai tools, but it’s truly is a differentiator to my day. But then when you start to really think about AI in general, it’s then the agent.

And this is where I get really excited because I like to cha you know, me, I like to really challenge myself. Technically, I’m dangerously technical from all of my years of security. So I’m actually taking AI classes at a local university. It’s actually not local in Florida, but it’s and it’s all about agent building.

And I’m building my own agents, and I’m trying because I feel that’s something I can give back to my partners by truly doing it myself as well. But I also can give back to TD Synex as well. But agents are the way of the future and the current, right? And [00:52:00] so that starts with copilot. In terms of studio and there’s all these great opportunities there to build agents.

And so we’re teaching and helping to enable our partners around agent building and then future is those partners that have those skills and staff on board that can really build around Azure and build their own agents that which in return we wanna wait and bring those agents back into our marketplace, syndicate those opportunities, and then help them through an AI accelerator program to bring ’em to market.

Erick: Yeah. Tracy, we agree that there’s the gateway opportunity is co-pilot Yeah. That leads into these additional opportunities for MSPs. So what’s your sense for the percentage of Microsoft partners that are actually reselling co-pilot and for those that may not be reselling co-pilot and see that opportunity.

What kind of guidance would you give though?

Tracy: Yeah, [00:53:00] that’s a it’s a good question. So I would say percentage, it’s still a small percentage in our overall eco ecosystem, right? Because we have thousands of MSP CSP partners in our Microsoft universe. When you think about that, it’s still relatively about 15% ish, I would say.

And then, but I would tell you that the percentage isn’t really the right indicator because the conversations we’re having and the skilling and the enablement we’re doing around our partner ecosystem to get them enabled around data and security to then be able to sell copilot efficiently and be able to have their plan, that’s where the percentage goes incredibly high.

And so the pipeline is there, the opportunity is there, it’s a longer term, right? We’re gonna absolutely drive them 365 copilot, and we wanna really absolutely triple our numbers and quadruple our numbers. And in partnership with Microsoft. We wanna absolutely see that, and it’s gonna continue over the multiple years.

Erick: A quick follow [00:54:00] up question. Tracy, you’ve spoken several times during our conversation about security, and we know that security is a big component when it comes to ai. So from your experience, your best experience on the security site, can you just talk a little bit about that opportunity, how to frame up the conversation when we’re talking to a customer as an MSP about bringing copilot in and then those other security considerations that they can also deliver?

Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. Support. Security has to be on the forefront of every conversation with ai. It starts with your data. If you don’t have your data first segmented incorrectly aligned, then AI is gonna be inefficient. And not be the greatest ROI in return, or you’re gonna beri pulling that through and that’s really hard.

Security. Absolutely right. You have to, and we’ve launched our SecOps. Opportunity in our stream one, which really helps to provide an MSP partner, the visibility into their security posture in a very simple manner to show red, yellow, and [00:55:00] green where they rank and their tenants rank in terms of security.

And so then it also provides them some recommendations where there’s immediate actions that they can take and we help them through that. And then it also will show them where there’s gaps and risk in their security today. And this is all around getting them ready for AI in addition to that. And yes, they can also fill in with Microsoft or other third party depending on that partner’s preference around different applications and security where they’re weaker, right?

Whether that be, obviously you should absolutely have identity access management, right? There’s core components of security that are absolutely necessary when you move into the cloud. You, it’s even, you have to secure every workload. You have to secure your ai, the future strategy of the architecture.

So definitely Microsoft as being a core component with copilot, as an example, as E three, E five, and their suite of products. That is absolutely, to me, the hero motion of E five with the [00:56:00] strength of the security built into it. To me, that’s your base minimum of a, where I feel you’re most protected with AI in the future and wrapping around other architecture opportunities too, and security.

And then there’s services and an MSP can also take all of that in terms of get ready and help provide a service to their clients around helping them getting ready for ai. And that’s also a services opportunity and the data is a component of that too.

Rich: So we’ve spoken about Microsoft 365 copilot Azure and Hyperscaler, a Google a little bit.

Yep. Are there any other sort of overlooked, undervalued, because a lot of folks in the audience will be familiar with most of those. Are there overlooked, undervalued, kind of cloud opportunities out there that you’d like to highlight?

Tracy: I think all of the strength of the hyperscaler market is so that’s such a very large TAM opportunity, whether that’s AWS, Google and Microsoft, all, each of [00:57:00] them have such rich opportunities today, whether it’s in the SMB all the way to the enterprise.

And there’s a solution of products within each of those security being very prominent in every one of those hyperscalers. I think Joe not gonna stop seeing hyperscalers invest in security acquisitions just given the market and the demands around AI and future strategy innovation. But I would also say that what’s interesting is that I would say we’re seeing this correlation around dynamics.

Especially with ai and if you think about the developers LL landscape, there’s a huge proponent of developers and with Azure customers or getting them to be able to skill around Azure being the forefront of really the agent found, the Azure Foundry and the a AI foundry that I see there. And that core component to me is where there’s some unique opportunity in the market.

And so that starts with power apps and power and the dynamic suite. So we’re really seeing that [00:58:00] be a very strong momentum for us. And something that I’m tying to double efforts in focus around

Erick: Tracy, really interesting conversation. We’ve covered a lot of topics around cloud security, AI agents, chat for folks in our audience that.

Want to take the next step? Can you maybe give them three things to think about as they explore how to take advantage of this opportunity?

Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say get in contact with TD Synex. Certainly you wanna take advantage of all the great enablement we bring to market. So we have practice builders.

Whether you’re very at the beginning stages of ai, security Cloud, we can help you start to build that business, help you core foundationally what it means from a practice. And even if you’re in the middle of, you’re starting to really start to see that acceleration, but you’re leaning towards ai, then we’ll put you in into the ai practice builder.

So that’s one [00:59:00] example. I would also say just leverage our cloud, our hyperscaler cloud team. So we have a hyperscaler cloud agnostic team that can certainly help you really get you in contact with the right resources, the designated and dedicated resources we have around each of the hyperscalers or fundamentally our shared resources that are very rich around all of our practice builders accelerator programs, migration capability services.

So they’re really the great opportunity to lean in and then go into the TD Synex ecosystem of all the tremendous value of our talent internally.

Rich: So before we go, I wanna take advantage of this opportunity to ask you about something that occurred to me earlier today. Second day of general sessions.

There have been a lot of TD Synex executives on stage speaking, and it’s been striking. It took me a little while, but it’s been striking to me to realize that in an industry that continues to be pretty heavily male dominated, how many of those leaders on stage are women?

Tracy: Yes.

Rich: We need as many talented people in [01:00:00] this industry as possible for folks in our audience who would like to be part of getting more women involved in it.

Any advice to them in terms of what you’ve seen here that they might be able to ambulate?

Tracy: Yeah, I absolutely love this question. This is one that’s very near and dear to my heart. I sit on our BRG for our Elevate committee, and I’m part of the board, but enrichening our talent, but going out into local universities, even high schools and speaking about technology and where there’s career opportunities and empowering women to get involved, whether that started at cybersecurity.

’cause I can tell you that my first cybersecurity event I ever went to, I was one of three women at the entire conference. It was extremely male dominated, very different, diverse universe today. And that’s a rewarding to see continue to thrive, but the amount of also females that exit the industry because of other work-life balances or other things, or for, other commitments.

Is still pretty high. So we still need to continue recruiting and empowering our women to and grow them professionally. [01:01:00] So that’s where the BRGs, I would also say there’s a tremendous amount of local chapters that meet up and I’m involved in some of those, like the I-E-M-C-P and some of local women chapters that really provide a great ecosystem of mentors, mentorees, but then even just exposure to the industry Sierra Women of the channels.

A great avenue of that. But just I think just getting engaged in connecting socially and through LinkedIn. I’ve mentored several university students and some of them have pursued career in tech in technology, and some of them have gone into other industries, but I’m continuing to connect with them on a regular basis.

And then most of the time they come back and it has a technology component to it. And one that I would say, is interesting is I remember bringing my niece. To a TD Synex, it was many years ago. Bring your child to Workday. And so my niece side of my cube, and she always told me, auntie, I never wanted to do what you do because you travel too much and you work too many hours.

But then [01:02:00] I thought, wow. So I took back and took a step back from that and reflected on that because I said I didn’t want that to be the vision for why to get involved. And the opportunity of a tremendous career that I’ve had for 30 years in this industry. So I really made a difference in how I approach with my ecosystem of my nieces, my nephews, or even just in local, kind of representation to make sure that I was really tr showing the opportunity and not showing the hours and things like that. And ironically, now my niece sits and works at TD Synex. After many commitments of saying that she wasn’t going to, she does today. And I’ve actually brought in some other great talent into the organization.

And that’s just in seeing them grow. That’s the biggest reward for all of us. Whether you’re on stage as a vp, like we all have been at some part over the last couple of days showing use cases and real life examples of how we help empower our partners and bring value to them. But honestly, the biggest reward that I get is when I can [01:03:00] see my team grow professionally and get advancement.

And that sometimes is internally, sometimes it’s in my organization, sometimes it’s in other organizations. But or outside, that’s the most rewarding we can all get.

Rich: Okay. Tracy Holtz, vice President of Cloud TD Sinek. Thank you so much for taking time out and joining us here on the show.

Tracy: Thank you both very much for the opportunity and thank you for the time.

It’s great to recon, have the opportunity to connect again, dear friends.

Rich: Certainly is. Folks we are going to take another quick break here. On the other side of that, Erick and I are gonna share some final thoughts about Inspire 2025 and these two interviews that you’ve just enjoyed.

Enjoyed we’ll have a little fun. We’ll wrap up the show. Stick around. We’re coming right back

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. And once again, we thank Ed Morales and Tracy Holtz of TD Cenex for taking some time out from a busy conference to sit down with [01:04:00] us for those two very interesting conversations. Obviously a ton we could dive into there. I’ll start maybe with where we left off at the end of the conversation with Tracy when she was talking about what she does personally, what TD Synex does to recruit and advance women within the organization.

And just in case it wasn’t a hundred percent obvious, this isn’t feel good kind of stuff. We know how badly the industry needs to fill the pipeline with more talented people out there and how hard it can be to recruit and so on. And to the degree that there are a lot of women out there who don’t even really consider a career in technology for a whole range of reasons.

Anything you can do to overcome that, it literally as an MSP or as a vendor, it’s gonna give you a competitive edge if you have this deeper, wider candidate pool for positions than your competitors do. You’re looking at at talent that you’re, your competitors are ignoring so.

Good advice from her on some tactics and [01:05:00] techniques and methodologies that work to to achieve the very impressive success based on what we saw on stage and inspire at TD six in terms of getting women in, not even in looked into the industry, but in leadership positions there.

And then the other thing, and I’m sure we’ve spoken about this on the podcast as in the past as well, but you know that the key takeaway from the Ed Morales conversation obviously is that just as you were saying earlier in the show, Erick, you know that there’s this kind of preparatory work you have to do with a customer before you can really deliver value around ai.

Infrastructure is a piece of that. And it tends to get overlooked. On Wall Street, they’re interested in the power and the data centers and so on. But from a solution provider, MSP standpoint, we’re much more focused on the LMS and the applications on the software. But there really is an infrastructure play as well.

And it comes early in the life cycle of these AI solutions. So it’s something to be thinking about now.

Erick: Yeah. And I’m sure that’s gonna perk [01:06:00] the ears up of a lot of our listeners to say, oh, holy cow. This is a large project that needs to include infrastructure and we need to rip and replace.

And again, I think I mentioned a statistic that I saw Jay McBain share on stage at PAX eight Beyond, and it was something like 86 or 87% of businesses either are adopting AI somehow with, chat bots or want to adopt ai. Like I said earlier, rich as long as your wallet is commensurate with your desire, these are really good projects that create a lot of stickiness for partners.

I, other than cybersecurity AI I think even lends itself more to, that the phrase that we banner about here every once in a while is that moving the value of your MSP from the server room to the boardroom when we’re actually able to demonstrate real ROI, not in six months, but, over the course of that first 12 month period.

So another quick tip for the [01:07:00] MSPs is identify what success looks like for the client because it may not be a hard dollar of ROI that they’re looking for. It could be we need to solve this convoluted workflow. I need some agents for. My HR team, my finance team, to make sure that, we can be more efficient or we’re just backlogged on some of the stuff.

Can we clear some of that clutter? So be really keen around, identifying these success criteria that, sometimes aren’t quantitative, but really qualitative for the environment. It could be boosting morale, things like that. Just me thinking out loud about all the different ways that a decision maker sees value, and it may not be what we think they see value in.

It could be something completely different. So again, just lots of more conversations than pre-qualifying when we’re building these solutions. And then let them know, okay, we’re gonna bring in infrastructure too. Here’s what that budget looks like now.

Rich: Lots of listening. Listening very important.

Always. And [01:08:00] particularly in this concept because the technology is new. Folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing. And we’ve been talking about AI altering the show. So let’s wrap it up with one last AI story. And we’re all familiar with the many different conundrums that AI presents us.

Here’s one that I at least had not considered in the past. Who do you ticket? Who gets the ticket? When a driverless car makes an illegal turn? When a car being driven by ai deserves a ticket, who exactly gets the ticket? And this is an issue that came up in San Bruno, California where the San Bruno Police Department observed a Waymo car, self-driving car made an illegal turn in front of them.

They pulled it over. There was nobody behind the wheel. And it’s do we ticket the car? Who do we ticket here? Exactly. And what they ultimately concluded is there is no one to, and this might be the perfect crime Erick, because they had no one to to ticket for this illegal turn. Maybe just another reason for all of us to get [01:09:00] into self-driving cars.

I don’t know. I actually don’t know if there was a passenger on the car, but even if there was, do you do, you ticket the passenger? But it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. One more thing to think through with ai.

Erick: Yeah. No kidding. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah, and I’m just waiting for Waymo’s.

I wanna try one. Riley who edits the podcast and his friends were in San Francisco a week ago or so, and they said, we are definitely gonna get in it way more. And they did. And no, nothing untoward happened. That was good. And they didn’t get pulled over. So that’s extra double plus there.

Rich: I’ll say this. We are at least tentatively scheduled to be in San Francisco for the Microsoft Ignite Conference. Let’s just make that a to-do where we’re gonna go take a way more ride in San Francisco a few months from now.

Erick: Let’s record that on video. Yes. And we’ll insert it into.

Podcast.

Rich: Absolutely. And so you have that to look forward to folks. You also have another episode of the show to look forward to a week from now. We thank you for joining us to listen or watch this [01:10:00] episode of the show. And I will just remind you, this show is both an audio and a vis video podcast, which means if you’re listening to us right now, but you wanna check us out on video, go to YouTube, book up MSP chat.

If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Google, apple, Spotify, wherever it is, you get your audio podcast. You’re gonna find us there too. And wherever you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It helps other people find and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Rust Johns.

It’s edited by the also great Riley Simpson. They’re part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. We have all sorts of different services that we provide to our clients at Channel Mastered. If you’re not familiar with who we are and what we do, I advise you to go to www.channel Mastered.com and get the whole story.

Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered, that’s Erick working with MSPs one-on-one to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn about that at www.mspMastered.com. So once [01:11:00] again, thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in a week. Until then, please remember, as we always urge you to, you can’t spell channel without MSP.