Episode 99: Hugs for Customers

Erick and Rich talk about the refreshing candor with which ConnectWise acknowledged past mistakes at its IT Nation Connect event and whether or not MSPs will buy into its plans to do better going forward, as well as tips for getting attention and coverage from reporters like Rich. Then they’re joined by Slide co-founders Austin McChord and Michael Fass for an inside look at that company’s next-generation data protection solution for MSPs and, yes, its pending lawsuit with Kaseya. And finally, one last thing: A Düsseldorf museum tour that for just €7 extra comes with an authentically grumpy German guide.

Discussed in this episode:

MSP Chat Episode 35: Achieving Media Mastery

From The Business of Tech: Datto Sues Slide: An Exclusive Investigative Report

‘I try to make them feel as ignorant as possible’: German museum’s ‘grumpy guide’ is surprise hit

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:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blastoff, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 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’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered of the organization responsible for this program.

I am joined physically side by side, once again by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel Mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing? Doing well, rich,

Erick: and I’m happy that we are together for the third time in a row. For an MSP Chat podcast episode, where in the world are we today, rich?

Rich: We, we are quite the road warriors these days as [00:01:00] regular listeners and viewers know. So right now we are about as backstage gets at the Channel Pro Defend event, two days of security content here in Irvine, California, not too far from Erick’s home turf. It about a thousand miles away from mine in Seattle.

And as we are recording this, just minutes ago, you and I came off stage having done a quick little presentation about working with the media,

Erick: right? And very specifically, can you share three quick tips? Rich, right off the top of your head. I’m gonna go off script on us like you love me to do.

Rich: Yes. Yeah. And stay tuned folks. There will be further evidence of that coming up. Or actually that was in an earlier episode. You know how much I love going off script. Let’s see. First of all, you wanna make sure if you’re trying to get your story, whatever that is covered by somebody like me on the media, you wanna make sure that you’re going to that media person with a story that there is some chance they are going to cover, right?

So in my case, I write about the SMB channel. My [00:02:00] readers are overwhelmingly in North AmEricka. You wanna come to me with stories that audience is gonna care about, ’cause that’s all I care about. You come to me with an enterprise IT story and it’s European in nature. I’m not gonna be interested and you’re not gonna get the coverage.

Not only that, you’re gonna get a reputation with me as somebody who doesn’t really take the time to understand what I care about. So know your market. This is a marketing function, working with the media. Know who you’re you’re trying to reach. And make sure you bring them relevant, useful information.

In the interview itself, typically an interview that I do is about 30 minutes long. I typically have an agenda when I come in and let’s just say I’ve got eight or 10 questions I know I wanna ask. What you wanna do is give me every opportunity to ask those questions, all of them. And then you want to answer the questions that I asked, right?

So I know that there are things about your company and about yourself that you might be really interested in me writing about, but you taking that half hour up, talking about what [00:03:00] you wanna talk about and not what I wanna write about, isn’t gonna work for you in the end. Because if the half hour comes and goes.

And I haven’t gotten through my questions and I haven’t collected the information I need to write my story. Maybe I don’t write my story at all. So listen to what I ask, right? Or whoever you’re talking to in the media. Listen to the question, answer the question, be concise about it, ’cause you’ve only got that 30 minutes or so to get the interview done.

And that’s gonna improve your odds of success. And then do not. Do not this it happens more often than you would think. It would, don’t ask me before an interview for the questions in advance that it gets, and no self-respecting journalist does that if you ask me for that anyway. It either means you, you don’t know that, which doesn’t look good for you.

Or you do know that and you think so little of me. That you’re thinking, maybe I’ll just do it anyway. Don’t ask for the questions in advance. No decent journalist is going to give them to you. And then after the interview is done, don’t ask for a chance to see the story before it [00:04:00] runs, to tweak your quotes after the story runs.

The story, my story is my story. And it’s your job to make sure that you are answering the questions that I ask. Not only concisely, but accurately. Anything you say is on the record. I’m gonna put it in, into that story, and once I do, it stays there. We’re not collaborating on this. We’re not negotiating what goes in my story.

So anyway, few few quick tips. So you know what

Erick: I just did there, rich, what you do. I flipped the script on us today. And you gave us our tips of the week. How about that? How about that? How you like that? How you like that. Nicely done. Alright. Off script. Sometimes it works out just fine. See, rich, it’s okay.

Sometimes we’d go off script a little bit.

Rich: And I’ll say this too for regular listeners or viewers of the show the session that we just did and we’re hinting at here is one that Erick and I have done at a few events in the past and we actually did it on the podcast once together.

So if you go back into the [00:05:00] MSP chat archives to episode 35, and I happen to know this ’cause I was just looking to refresh my memory about this episode. 35 of the show includes. This session that I just pulled some material from in its entirety and you’ll get I believe it’s seven or eight at length tips about working with the media.

So go check that out

Erick: and let me tag in some more. Yeah, ’cause. We’ve done this live several times and we generally deliver it to a vendor audience while sessions are going on for attendees at these shows. But these are tried and true techniques that apply to anyone rich, right?

Rich: Absolutely. And in fact I’ll give the MSPs in our audience sort of a bonus tip because this is something that we don’t typically cover in the vendor version of this, but as an MSP, you wanna be a go-to if you have an interest.

In being in the media and being quoted and having that reputation with current and potential customers as such an authority that the media quotes you about stories. A really [00:06:00] important thing to keep in mind is that the people who are gonna reach out to you for a quote about something it related in the news, they’re probably working on a deadline.

And so if somebody sends you an email, somebody calls you up, somebody leaves you a voicemail and says, Hey, I’m working on a story about. Something or, there was the the Microsoft outage, the AWS outage. Recently somebody in the media is writing a story about that. They want to talk to somebody in the industry who has an informed point of view about that.

Somebody reaches out to you. You want to be responsive. To that person as quickly as you can. And the more you do that, the more of a reputation you’re going to develop with that person in the media. As someone who is not only intelligent and articulate and somebody I wanna quote my story, but responsive as well.

And that’s gold in the, you want someone who is both informed and responsive. And so if you aspire to be somebody who was quoted in the media regularly, then you need to be as responsive as you can.

Erick: And, just a couple of thoughts about [00:07:00] that, rich. That’s a really great tip for MSCs. And I have been offered the opportunity to be that person in the past and have not responded rapidly enough.

And of course, the journalist has politely let me know, Hey, thanks for reaching out to me, I already had what I needed and it’s gone to print or publish or whatever, the terminology is for whatever media they’re using. Yeah, be responsive and, it’s a great way to, as you mentioned, become a thought leader, seen as an expert authority.

You’re being quoted in magazines and online journals and things like that. It really helps when you’re competing against, another IT provider or even trying to upset an incumbent MSP. It, it pays dividends when you’re having sales conversations to have these kinds of, I would say, media credit credibility.

Rich: And it’s very similar to something you talk about regularly, which is just a really good use of social media and LinkedIn in particular, instead of talking about [00:08:00] yourself and your company and why people should buy stuff from you, you go on those outlets. And you share thought leadership, you just share useful information and you develop a sort of brand reputation for yourself and your company as thought leaders in the industry.

And then when somebody has a problem or it’s renewal time on a contract with their MSP and they’re shopping the business around, they think of you because they see you on that social media. Same thing if they see you on the TV news, they read about you in the local newspaper. If they read about you online in some media outlet, they know this is somebody in my area who.

Is an expert and and media outlets go to them for input because they are such an expert. Expert.

Erick: Well, rich, you talked about you raised this, the situation of an outage and, the Amazon or the AWS outage of things like that. Your story of the week has something to do with a vulnerability for, from a particular vendor.

Rich: Yeah. As regular listeners and viewers know, Erick and I quite recently attended the [00:09:00] IT Nation Connect event in Orlando. That’s the big or big annual event by ConnectWise. And yes, ConnectWise had some product news at the show. That’s not what what we’re gonna be talking about here, and it’s not really the most striking thing.

About their onstage presentations and the communication from ConnectWise to the MSPs and the audience. What was most striking was something that you and I both noticed independently and talked about a little bit at the show, which was how vulnerable, how vulnerable they were willing to make themselves, how candid they were with the audience, about the fact that they have not gotten everything right by their partners.

In recent years now. Manny Revelo is the CEO of that company. He stepped into that job October of 2024, when he got up on stage to speak at last year’s IT Nation Connect. He’d been on the job a few weeks. At that point he was really just started starting to get up to speed a little bit, and he figured out.

Pretty quickly, not just in those first few weeks, but in those first few months talking to MSPs. [00:10:00] There were some issues out there. There was some, there was a loss of trust basically by a lot of MSPs. In ConnectWise. There were a lot of people who were telling him, I don’t know who my support person is anymore.

I never talked to my partner success manager anymore. You guys make. Product announcements at these shows and tell us that thus and such feature is gonna be ready in a couple of months and a couple of months come and go and the feature doesn’t show up. So there were a lot of issues basically that he was dealing with, and we saw there were some data.

From the analyst formerly known as Canals. They’re now called Omnia, but they do market share figures for all the big R-M-M-P-S-A vendors. And we saw Kaseya step out in front of ConnectWise in the most recent version of that data. And that’s a sign basically that some MSPs weren’t super happy with ConnectWise.

Now. Revelo and all the other ConnectWise executives could have gotten up on stage and just ignored that, glossed over all that, just tried to get [00:11:00] people excited about all the wonderful things that they were doing. They didn’t, they were very. Straightforward and honest and direct in acknowledging the issues that people have talked to them about.

And and in talking about what they were going to do to re-earn the trust of their MSP partners. And there are a number of different things that they talked about, both on stage and in interviews with me. They have created this whole new compensation scheme for anyone in the organization, from an account manager to a support person, to a partner success manager, anyone who works with.

The customer now is compensated not on how much revenue they generate for con ConnectWise, but in how much success you as an MSP have that they can measure. So that’s one thing that they’re going to be doing. You, they’re saying you are never going to hear us again, promise you some product feature that doesn.

Show up anytime they talk at an event like this in public, in a press release or in an interview with somebody like me, they are [00:12:00] never going to talk about anything that will not ship within 90 days of that conversation. And they said, this is not like a commitment that we’re making. This is a promise.

If you hear us say it, we’re actually gonna do it in 90 days. Another thing, and this is, it’s a little hard to believe that this has not existed before, but there is now a roadmap. For ConnectWise that’s available on their website and you can see what’s going to be coming up and when it’s gonna be arriving.

And they’re not gonna be looking down the road beyond 90 days ’cause they never wanna make you a promise for something that they can’t actually deliver on. And then the other thing that they did. In terms of the product’s frustration and dissatisfaction from MSPs, a lot of that has to do with the a IO platform.

A IO is the platform that underlies pretty much everything that ConnectWise. Makes, does offers. They have been working on this, expanding this, delivering this for multiple years now, a good three plus [00:13:00] years at this point. And a big part of the issue that they run in with MSPs is people keep hearing all this talk about a ao and they don’t quite understand.

When is this thing gonna be done? When does it ship? When do the A ZO based features you’re talking about actually appear? And so there were a couple of different things that they talked about. First of all, they tried to help people understand a ZO is a platform, not a product. And they took the blame.

ConnectWise said, this is on us. We made the lines between product and platform blurry in a way that makes it understandable for people to be asking when does this thing ship? But it’s a platform, not a product. And they made that clear to folks. So it’s all, it’s shipping now. They’re using it in a lot of different places and they’re gonna be adding stuff to it.

It will never be done. It will always be a work in progress essentially, but they learned a lot of lessons after that. New leadership team came in about the deficiencies, basically in a SO and they’ve spent the last year, and again, they were very honest on [00:14:00] stage saying this, they spent the last year rebuilding, re-architecting.

They feel like they’ve made a ton of progress, particularly in the last three to six months. And they are saying to partners, to folks like myself in the media you watch. Now that we’ve done all of that rebuilding, a lot of really exciting things are gonna happen on top of a SO in the next six months.

And so really what they were trying to do at this event is regain the trust of people who are a little bit unhappy with them because they really believe that they are on the verge of doing some great things, but they understand. No one’s gonna care if they have lost faith in ConnectWise as a good company to do business with.

And so I guess my question for you, Erick, as a an MSP in recovery, you know how it feels to have a vendor that you do business with, maybe wet you down a little bit and then say, Hey, give us another chance. What, how, what were your impressions coming outta this event and what’s your advice for ConnectWise Partners maybe who are [00:15:00] frustrated in our audience?

Erick: Thanks for asking Rich. ’cause I got a lot of thoughts about this and first of all, first off, I’ll say good on them, right? Good on ConnectWise for identifying where, they had, may had some miscommunications mis misalignment with what MSP’s needs are and are taking corrective action.

But it is the absolute hardest thing to do. To regain the trust of a partner once that trust has been broken or eroded, or shattered. And yes, I’ve talked to as many MSPs as you do, maybe one or two more. And we are seeing these MSPs moving to competitors, and especially some of the newer vendors that are coming up.

The landscape is changing. So it is a tough ask. But they have to ask it of their partners to say, Hey, give us another chance. That ship might have sailed for some partners and they’re just, waiting for [00:16:00] their agreements to term out. But having this approach and having a new focus and being completely transparent and taking, taking the hits as they are doing is commendable.

My favorite part of what I just heard was the shifting of the compensation strategy within ConnectWise, away from revenue targets for ConnectWise to revenue growth for partners. That makes me very happy and I’m sure you know it will do. A lot to stave off some of the partners, that are considering.

I would love to hear more information about that and I’m sure the channel and existing ConnectWise partners would as well. And, beyond the folks that were at the event and hurt some of this stuff, what are the details? Because if you are investing in my business.

That’s the relationship that I want. I’ll allow you, I won’t say I’ll allow you, but I won’t be happy, but [00:17:00] I’ll allow you to recover from mistakes as long as we are aligned with me and my MSP and my practice. As that’s the number one thing that MSPs want in a partner program. Rich is a true business partnership, not just discounts and things like that.

And MDF, I want you to invest in my organization. That’s why enablement and training and. Business coaching and m and a education and all that we’re seeing come out is happening now because, the tides have shifted and MSPs don’t just want another transactional vendor relationship. Heck, they’ve got way too many as it is, right.

I like what I’m hearing

Rich: and we will see what comes next. They got up there in front of the partners. They say, said, we got some things wrong. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it. We are in a good place to, to really hit the ground running in the remainder of 2025 and 2026. And now let’s see if they do.

Let’s see if the tone of how they interact with their partners changes. Let’s see if partner satisfaction and adoption numbers [00:18:00] change. That’s what they are hoping for. I, I, it’s a good start in terms of just the tone that they struck and the attitude that they came to this with.

There was a humility to it. That is refreshing. And let’s see if they can follow through from here. Yep. Folks Erick and I are gonna take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, we’re gonna have a really interesting interview for you. This was recorded at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect event.

It is a conversation between Erick and myself on the one hand, and. Austin McCord and Michael Fast, the co-founders of slide, a very interesting data protection vendor. Relatively new still to the channel landscape here. They sat down and spoke with with us in person. At the show. You may be aware.

There’s a bit of a lawsuit involving a slide on the one hand and Kaseya on the other. Did we get into that a little bit with them? Yes, we did, but we also got into a whole bunch of other interesting topics. So stick around. We will be right back with that interview for you.[00:19:00]

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment. Coming to you once again live from 19 Nations Connect here in Orlando, Florida. We are very pleased to be joined by the two co-founders CEO and Chairman as well of slide. They are Austin McCord and Michael Fast.

Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for having us. Much appreciated. Now it’s almost ridiculous to ask you to do this because I think every MSP here or in the industry knows who both of you are and your background. But for the two people in our audience who are unfamiliar with you, and for folks who are maybe not familiar yet with Sly, just give them a little bit of sense for who you are and what you do.

So

Austin: I’m Michael Fast. CEO of slide. I’ve got a long and winding career as a lawyer and an HR. I’ve been in MSP land ever since I met this fella about, I don’t know, 13, 14 years ago. And we’re on our new [00:20:00] adventure and it’s quite the adventure. And,

Michael: I’m Austin McCort and I originally started Datto right outta college and was on that journey for 14 years and then took a break and we’re back on a different journey.

Rich: Now it’s interesting from a certain perspective, it makes perfect sense that when you came back from your break, you went into backup again, but you didn’t just get back into backup. You built an entirely new stack from the ground up. What was it about backup in today’s era of managed services that felt like it was right for modernization from your standpoint?

I’m gonna go on the, for the technologist on this one. Okay.

Michael: I think the scenario is that this isn’t the kind of thing you woke up and said. I really want to do this, but was a case where we felt like the solutions in the market have stopped getting better and they weren’t improving. And the technology keeps marching forward.

And so you end up with this huge gap between with what’s possible and what’s available to MSPs. And it felt like we just felt compelled to go close that [00:21:00] gap and starting from scratch gives us the ability to build something for the next 20 years, instead of the last 20 years. And and it’s really exciting to deliver that platform today.

See people loving it, enjoying it, like getting excited about it and how different it feels than what we did 20 years ago.

Erick: So guys, thanks for joining again. Yes. There’s a lot of competition in the backup space. We even have platform providers like ConnectWise and others competing head to head in this space.

What makes Slide a better choice for MSPs than anything that’s out there, including some things you may have been involved with before?

Michael: So it’s technology and it’s people. And hands down, we have the best technology. We are the only ones that are delivering a truly modern stack. And so that starts at the hardware level.

Everything is flash. Everything in our on-prem devices is flash. Everything in our cloud is flash. So that’s the basis for it being really fast. And it’s this [00:22:00] modern set of technology built to be much more forward facing. So things like encryption are just on by default. You can. Can’t turn them off.

And it comes with no storage penalty. And so these are meaningfully different than how the other competitors in the field operate. And if you look at the competition that’s out there, they’re all working with Old Tech. All of these businesses has been around for a long time. Arons was around back when I got started.

Axios been around the same amount of time. There’s a lot of these that are just very old. And so we’re the only ones that turned around and said, Hey, we’re gonna write this from the ground up. I would say the thing that we feel like we brought forward from our past lives. Is the attention and focus on the customer and the partnership and that we care a lot about what does that support experience look like?

What does that relationship at sales level feel like? And making sure that we’re really giving those partners that hug and that we’re, making sure that techs are directly accessible, that the whole company is aligned to support them and support them focused in just this area of backup. Most of the other backup vendors are sort of part of these [00:23:00] conglomerated solutions.

And so we’re. Ever gonna call and try to sell them an RM like we’re a calling and, only improving and focusing on this backup area.

Austin: Couldn’t have said it better myself

Erick: And hugs for customers, like Yeah, that came out very clearly.

Austin: Yeah, that’s okay. Our organization is built around some key principles.

Number one, we are MSP only. Ms. P first will never sell around MSPs. Like a lot of the vendors in this space, will never try to circumvent our partners. Their, our partners, their customers are their customers. Our job is to protect them, cover their backs, give them a opportunity to make margin and build their businesses.

We are a cybersecurity product, so that’s why encryption is by default and that’s why a hundred different surface. On this product are different than the old technology that’s in the market now. We are a support focused organization. When you call our tech support, you’re getting direct to tech.

[00:24:00] You’re not getting a, a phone tree. And when you talk to a tech, they didn’t work at Dairy Queen yesterday. So there’s some key elements in our business that come from deep down, this guy and this guy. That form the basis of that partnership experience. And so we think that’s, believe it or not, a huge differentiator.

Rich: Backup has always been an absolutely a critical function for the MSP that remains true. Now, that’s gonna remain true down the road yet Choose your favorite cliche, though. Everybody is talking about data here at this event. It was, data is the oxygen of ai. Data is the gold that makes AI.

Data plays an absolutely central role in ai. And I’m just curious, does protecting AI data feel like a different and emerging? Are you thinking about that at all?

Michael: I think more about how the protected data can help feed these AI tools. And so taking all this data from various different sources and then [00:25:00] making it available across like a single API and a single surface that an AI tool can work with the data that’s stored in slide back up without worrying about interfering with production workloads.

And so the fact that you can use the data that sits in slide to like actually be that ingestion point for an AI knowledge base or a AI agent that’s trying to learn about a business makes a ton of sense. And we see a huge role for us there moving forward.

Erick: Austin back in the DTO days, your company was, you built it around a very strong culture.

And I hear that coming through in this vision here. To what extent does culture. Need to make a very big difference in some of these other PE backed firms. There’s, what are your thoughts on that?

Michael: Culture’s, everything.

Austin: And Michael knows this. Yeah. I had the benefit of being the head of HR for a company in the past, a big company that grew over time.

And culture, as they say, eats strategy for lunch sometimes. [00:26:00] That’s my little corollary. But it, it is more than anything, it is the difference between a company that is gonna be successful and a company that’s not gonna be successful. In my view, it’s the only road. It’s the only playbook I have.

And so I’m gonna play the playbook. I know, and that is obsession with our partners and every touch point in our business. So when I think about a, a customer, I think about an employee. As a customer, I think about a food. Your employee as a prospect. I think about a vendor that I’m gonna work with and integrate with.

I think of them as a customer. I want them to have an incredible experience. Every touch point with Datto, think of you as a customer and I think of our partners as a customer. And so with that mindset through the organization, those values of doing the right thing of doing your life’s work makes all of the touch points sealed off from the bad badness.[00:27:00]

All goodness, all the hugs.

Erick: Yeah, all the hugs. Hashtag

Rich: You guys are leading edge in something that I’ve been really interested in the last few months. What you already have a, the Quad chat bot, I believe. Yep. Hooked up to the data via MCP. I’m really curious to get your perspective. From a longer term point of view, do you see that kind of means of interacting with a solution like yours?

Is there something that you know, some people will use in some cases or just feel like we’re drifting in that sort of direction on a bigger way?

Michael: I think we’re, we are very happy in the position that we’re in that we’re at agnostic. Whether Claude is using our product or a guy named Claude is using our product, like both of those are fine.

And we are, we’re seeking to make our product available for both of those paths and that the right answer is really that hybrid approach and that, no one would really want the product if we walled it off from humans. [00:28:00] But at the same time, making it available to agents means that the product can be used efficiently, it can be used at scale.

And it can free up humans to go interact with customers and go, be involved in different parts of the business. And so that, that combination between the two we think is really the sweet spot. And this is such a cool product in the sense that we’re not worried that Claude’s gonna come try to do our job.

And so we can instead be very open to having those tools

Austin: interact with our systems. That’s all about that. API That goes to the, the future of how backups can be leveraged by ai. Agents, a AI applications as a data layer. It goes to how other applications interact with our product, goes to how users can interact with our product.

Our product is modern,

Erick: rich and I had the opportunity to get a demo at another event, ah of slide. And what I was really impressed with was the ability to just use natural language to query and to have things get done, which was really [00:29:00] impressive. So I, that was something new in.

Unique that I hadn’t seen recently. Rich wrote about the security risk associated with MCP. What are you guys doing about that and what do you think about other folks that might not be as vigilant as they should be about it?

Michael: So we’ve twofold. One, like we have an MCP that caters to people who wanna play on the edge and erod it and it’s open source and you can see all the code of exactly how it works and you can.

Play with it. And its security and access levels are gated by the API key that you choose to generate to feed to it. We have an integrated component that we’re releasing before the end of the year that has a lot more auditability, traction and control inside it. And we’ve spent a ton of time thinking about how do we do this in a way that’s useful, right?

Because like it has to actually do something. It’s gotta use the product in a way that’s helpful to people but still has all of the controls and safety around. Did. And [00:30:00] so that’s something that we’re excited to roll out and give people either the Hey, I want to go my own road route, or the this is how, we can expose the AI in a way that makes the product easier to use and more useful to you.

Erick: And how about folks that maybe looking at things differently from an MCP security perspective

Michael: that don’t want to use it at all? Then they don’t like, there’s both of those, but I guess like the MCP is no more empowered than a user, right? And so if you are, if you have logged in. To the interface, like the MCP can work as you.

And so anything you can do, it can do. And it’s, a step down from that there’s a whole bunch of controls that it can’t go delete all your data, right? It can’t do a bunch of those pieces, but like it still operates in a world where there’s a lot of supervision. And that’s all by design.

Strong governance. Exactly.

Rich: Got it. So I’m a journalist they take away my journalist license if I don’t ask this question. Can you, can we talk about the lawsuit at all or are you sure? Absolutely. Okay. Just let us What do you have to say about it?

Michael: I [00:31:00] think first and foremost and I might be old school here, but we’re believers in the legal system that that it will come to the right answer.

And we are very confident that we did not steal any trade secrets in the building of sly. And so just feel good about that and are working our way through the process. I would say, take a look at what’s publicly available. I know CRN has published some stuff on it. I know Dave Sobel went deep there and look at some of the filings is the best way for people to get an unvarnished view.

And, from our position, our best method is to communicate through the court because that’s where this issue is raised. And I think we’ve spoken pretty clearly there and strongly about how we feel about

Rich: this. And just a quick follow up there. So for anyone who is either a partner now or is on the verge of becoming a partner and is worried this gets to be a distraction, what would you say to

Austin: them?

Rich: Look

Austin: We. Let me ask you this question. Are you surprised A little bit. Are you [00:32:00] surprised? Is anyone surprised? We’re not surprised. I was the general counsel of a company in the past. For a long time, I’ve been involved with a lot of these things. I’m not surprised, and we were not it’s not as if we didn’t go into this thinking that this was gonna be an outcome.

So I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on that. But I do encourage you and your viewers, your listeners, to go and read the court papers and make up your own mind and wear things. Seem to be and ask yourself, are you surprised?

Erick: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. And everyone should do exactly what you just said and come to their own conclusions.

Agree. Let’s pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about 2026 and beyond. What’s on the roadmap for slide. What are some milestones you’re trying to achieve? What’s the big picture vision?

Austin: So we need to get to feature parody, right? We [00:33:00] have the best BCDR product on the market by an order of magnitude, and it doesn’t have feature parody yet.

So that’s actually the most exciting thing about this because you ain’t seen nothing yet thing. But we need to back up Linux systems. We need to back, we need agentless backup. We need to make sure that our inner integrations with these other products are solid. And so some of the blocking and tackling on our BCDR line is gonna be completed virtually in in the earlier part of this year.

And then look, we built this company as a backup company. And MSPs manage data in all different spheres. And we are built as an organization to back up data in all of the places. And this was our first project, right? The big battleship. But there, there’s a reason behind that, right?

We wanted to make sure that, first of all, this is the most neglected piece of the stack. It is the most complicated piece of the stack, got the most moving parts, and it’s where all the foundational technology [00:34:00] for, whether you’re talking about a direct to cloud or a Azure native, or even a cloud to cloud solution or point solutions.

That’s where they’re, that’s where they’re born. And so we started way low down. We work way back.

Michael: Yeah. I think this, the total surface area of what we’re gonna protect is gonna get much larger. And I would say that. The response from the MSP community this year has been so strong and exceeded every expectation that we had written down or thought that we would have happen in the first year.

Yes. And with that, we put a bunch of work into hardening the product and, the feedback that we’ve gotten has been so tremendously positive and,

Austin: and it drives a lot of our roadmap.

Michael: Yeah. And we wanna make sure that as we roll out new stuff, that we meet that same high quality bar. And we are really pumped about expanding that surface area.

Erick: I’m just gonna appreciate the, in case you

Michael: can’t tell

Austin: By just the

Erick: Yeah. You guys are pretty excited. I can tell. And thanks for the un maybe unconscious reference to a great Bachman Turner overdrive song. [00:35:00] You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Austin: Yeah. Hey they were singing the Googo Dolls had, they were playing our song the other night here.

Slide song, but yeah.

Rich: Austin Michael, so great to have you both here on the show, take some time out with us. We really appreciate it. For folks in the audience here who wanna get in touch with you, learn more about you, learn more about Sly, where should they go?

Michael: I think the website’s the front door, so slide tech.

We’re always available.

Rich: Okay, thanks. Off the record, mic fast from slide. Thank you very much for joining us. Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break. Now we come back on the other side. We’re gonna share some final thoughts about this conversation with these two gentlemen here. We’ll have a little fun wrap up the show.

Stick around. We’ll be right back.

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, where we are once again, back in the back room here at the Channel Pro Defend event. Speaking to you a few days after the [00:36:00] conversation that you just listened to or watched with the folks from slide. A lot of interesting things going on there.

A lot of the most interesting things had to do with AI and I was pretty, I hadn’t really thought much about the possibility of using the data repository that these folks are creating for AI purposes, and a non-production workload that you can point a a local language model to.

Yeah, for querying purposes. That was really interesting that they, they are thinking about that and optimizing the product for that. That was new.

Erick: Yeah, that struck me as well. It’s oh, so they’re actually able to use that data to, in, in their AI process and bi analytics, which is very interesting.

What. And you and I have gotten the demo, like we talked about, during the interview at another conference when we stopped by the slide booth and talked to the folks there. And what’s exciting to me was, the demo that we got where [00:37:00] they were just entering normal English language queries.

Find all, backups that, fill in the blank and immediately it would go out and produce, this output. Where Holy cow. If, in, back in My Day, rich as an MSP, it, there was no way we could inspect things that weren’t already built into the reporting engine of that backup vendor solution.

Pretty much it was red light, green light. Did it run, did it fail? And we were, addressing it. Now, the MSP has real business intelligence leveraging the ai. From these backup workloads that, again, it’s kinda once I start thinking about it, like I just keep thinking about the possibilities of it.

So it is interesting to have a conversation about AI, as we often do, without talking about data lakes and, the cost of this and that, and saying, oh no, this is the data that you’re inspecting and it’s in a [00:38:00] backup volume. Interesting stuff.

Rich: One quick last, so you’re bringing up that whole MCP protocol.

I idea and an AI interface that via MCP allows you to query the data. We spoke on a recent episode of the podcast about some of the security risks associated with MSP if you’re not implementing it in an informed way, which is why I brought it up. It’s why we asked them about it in this interview because they have an MCP interview.

Interface. What I heard them saying basically is we have put everything into our MCP implementation. You need to use it securely. And the only thing that I was thinking about as I was listening to that audience is that it’s still putting the onus on the MSP to use those tools. It’s not necessarily, and they might dispute this, and maybe we should have spent more time on it, but it’s not necessarily secure by default.

It is secure if you. Do the right things. All the security [00:39:00] tools you need are there, but you have to make sure that you know what they are and know to use them. And that’s gonna be a ri not, I’m not even thinking about slide in particular. That’s just gonna be a risk factor around MCP, I think for a little while.

Where unless people are loudly telling MSPs who are using that protocol to query data through ai. There are some security measures that you need to put in place there. There may be some risks out there that are unacknowledged and have consequences,

Erick: and I’m glad you positioned it that way, rich.

It’s a larger kind of a conversation because I am positive there’s a good reason for that for them to say, oh. Here’s what we deliver. It’s almost that shared responsibility model. It’s like we don’t know where you’re pointing this thing at, right? If it’s un ins, like we cannot be held responsible for what you do with it afterwards.

We’re securing the product itself and making sure that meets any kind of, security measures, that we’re [00:40:00] targeting. But who knows where you’re going to. Connect it to and things like that. So I’m sure that there’s some good guidance that comes along with it that says, Hey, here’s our best practices.

Here’s how to se secure the things. How far can they or anyone be held responsible with what you do? You could use a car as a weapon, right? Drive responsibly.

Rich: Okay. That leaves us with time for just one last thing, ladies and gentlemen on this episode of the show.

And you go to Europe on vacation, you’re probably gonna visit museums and you visit museums in Europe. You probably wanna get. The complete experience of wherever it is that you are. I don’t know for certain whether I want an experience quite this complete, though. This particular story comes to us from Dusseldorf in Germany where you can not only go to the Kunst POEs, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing, which is one of.

Biggest, best museums in town. You not only go and get a guided tour by somebody who knows a lot about the art on the wall [00:41:00] there, you can actually have that tour guided for you by a locally based performance artist who will do the tour in the persona of a very rude, grumpy, somewhat arrogant.

German person. And so if you really wanna have the Dusseldorf experience, you don’t just wanna go to the museum and get toured around. You wanna get toured around the museum by the stereotypical German art expert. And this is available to you now for I believe, a very reasonable seven euros. Which they label apparently, just to make sure you understand what you’re getting for your money as grumpy and highly unpleasant.

Your guide will be grumpy and highly unpleasant during the 70 minute walk of the museum there. But you will come outta that tour with having had a very German experience.

Erick: Who wouldn’t want that in their cart when they check out Rich? It should be required. I’ll bet they’re selling more museum tours because of that, because it adds a unique experience to that.

Who wouldn’t want a good dressing down as we’re being told, what we don’t know about art? Walking around a German museum,

Rich: you ignorant [00:42:00] AmErickans, you. Yes, the grumpier the better for my seven euros. I say. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the MSP Chat podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

We’re gonna see you again in a week’s time, just by the buy. That will be episode 100 of this podcast. We will not actually officially be celebrating our centennial on that show. We’re gonna save that. For just a little bit later, but we’re coming up on episode 100 of the show. We thank you for being part of the audience.

We’ll be back in a week’s time. Until then, I will just remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means if you’re watching us right now, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is, you get your podcast. Look for MSP chat there. If you’re listening to us right now, you wanna check us out on video, go to YouTube, look us up there.

You’re gonna find us there too. And wherever it is you find us. Please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Rust Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson, who is sitting right here in the room [00:43:00] with us behind the camera right now.

Say hello. Riley. Hi, that’s the voice of the great Riley Simpson who edits to the show for us. Russ Riley. They’re part of the team with us at ch at Channel Mastered. They would be happy to create a podcast for you as well. But podcasts really aren’t what we’re about, first and foremost at Channel Mastered.

First and foremost, we are about helping vendors. Build, create perfect MSP channels. You can learn more about that at www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered, that’s Erick working one-to-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www.mspMastered.com.

So we thank you again for joining us. We’ll be back in a week. Until then, please, ladies and gentlemen, always remember as we always ask you to, you just can’t spell channel. Without [00:44:00] MSP.