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Hey, everybody. Happy to be here with Crown Castle. Brandon Fink, welcome to the call. Excited to interview you today.
Yeah. Thanks, Jason. Happy to be here.
Thanks for the Fantastic.
So I think one of the great things about Crown Castle is a lot of people know you as a voice and data provider, but yet you guys offer so much more breadth and depth in the portfolio. Excited for all the cybersecurity that you guys are doing. Why don’t you let everybody know what you guys are doing from a cybersecurity standpoint and how you’re differentiating yourself?
Yeah, happy to take that question. So with Crown Castle, we’ve expanded our offerings to deliver SOC as a service as an outsourced model. But one of our core differentiators with this offering is that it’s completely vendor agnostic. We’re really focused on the management metrics behind cybersecurity.
So we do have partnerships with certain security tools. So we should be mentioned in the same sentence as a SentinelOne or CrowdStrike. Our XDR platform is Stellar Cyber. But with that being said, we understand certain customers, where they’re at with their contracts and with certain investments.
We have the ability to API integrate into over four fifty different security tools and then leverage our SOAR platform to automatically respond and programmatically triage a lot of those threats coming in. So vendor agnostic platform and one of the most transactional cells we’ve been seeing a lot of too, Jason, that also ties back into our stores, our email security partnered up with Checkpoint. Really happy with that offering and really excited about the capabilities it can deliver to end customers today.
That’s incredible. And then from an SD WAN perspective, you guys are doing more just beyond the SD WAN, correct? And then how much of the opportunity ends up bleeding into a security conversation, whether it be SASE or zero trust?
Totally. Yeah. So we were one of the first service providers to go to market with Versa Networks. So this dates back nine years ago.
We’ve been building up our unified SASE platform since then. We do have secure web gateways located at our POP locations to reduce latency on the remote user side. When we get into those Zero Trust Network access conversations, when we get into MFA conversations, we can do those sort of things with our secure service edge leveraging Versa networks. Additionally, I mentioned Checkpoint earlier on the email security side.
We can do secure access with Checkpoint as well if we get into those data loss prevention type of discussions.
On the SD WAN side, yes, we’ve been doing it. It’s been around. SD WAN is one of those things that’s been around for quite some time, over a decade now. But we do have managed internet router capabilities as well.
So when you’re talking about Crown Castle from a DIA perspective, the next question that we would always want trusted advisors to ask their customers is, what are you using for your router? What are you using for your firewall? Because we can bundle in that solution to deliver enhanced capabilities to our end customers. And that really does converge the network security.
And then when we add in the cyber defense we were talking about earlier, both the cybersecurity and network type of conversations.
There aren’t a lot of suppliers that can actually do all the things that you just mentioned. So I think that that’s fantastic. And a lot of advisors are going to be excited to see the breadth and depth that you’re doing. So let’s talk about what’s your ideal customer profile.
First off, what is it? Is it enterprise? Is it SMB? Where are you winning? Are there certain verticals or industries that you’re seeing success in?
So don’t hate me when I say everything and everyone. That is a very generic answer, but we really have the capability to do that. We are focused a lot on SLED, a lot of health care, a lot of finance. Those are our verticals. And especially with our existing customer base, that is what we’re targeting as we move up the stack into managed solutions. But one of the core differentiators when we talk about ICP is we have no user minimums around our cybersecurity.
So we will take a nine user opportunity, maybe it’s a construction vertical or whatever the case is, and layer in, let’s say, email security, an EDR type of solution. Maybe they need some secure access for remote user, Not going to pay the bills every month, but those are the type of opportunities we’re happy to engage in.
I love it. Now let’s talk about the future. You guys are doing some exciting things. I think you have some acquisitions pending. First off, what are you able to share there? And then what does the roadmap future look like for what Crown Castle is going be focused on for twenty twenty six?
We’re really excited for it, Jason. We have a ton of great momentum that’s happening right now at Crown Castle, especially around managed solutions. And what I do see, which is a little weird going through the acquisition, is Crown is actually hiring to build out our managed solutions department right now. So I think that does show a little bit of where Zayo is focused as we move forward. And like I said, from the managed solutions side, we are really excited to partner up with Zayo on the infrastructure and the fiber side. I think it enhances our capabilities to be that tier one provider and really keep talking to our customers as we move up the stack with those existing fiber relationships.
That’s fantastic. Very excited about that. I think that merger is going to be incredible for you and your organization.
Walk us through a case that I love learning through examples. Tell me an opportunity that came in. What industry was it?
What were their KPIs or their their struggles? What were did they come to you for? And then what did you end up selling them? How did you navigate that conversation?
Yeah, I love this question because it’s closed deals, and it does show where we can win moving forward. So I have two.
One of them was a small manufacturing, two site opportunity that came to us for DIA connection. So they only wanted the fiber. Now, when the advisor brought us in during the conversations around the infrastructure and the fiber side, the was the end user was unfortunately ransomware attacked. So they went down and it did stall the deal on the fiber side.
But while we asked, well, they just got ransomware attack, what are they going to do about it? They obviously didn’t have the right security set up in place at that time. What are they going to be doing moving forward? So what became just that fiber DIA deal, we started getting engaged on the firewall side, on the remote user side.
So that unified SASE environment, we upsold into a two site SD WAN deal with remote user attached. And then we started talking about SOC as a service. So we ended up with the EDR Sentinel-one, Managed Sentinel-one license, deployed, and we deployed our Stellar Cyber XDR in place as well. So what became just that DIA deal, now more of the revenue was associated with the managed solutions piece than with the underlay.
So moving up the stack and having those conversations and with Crown Castle, the trusted advisors in that case was able to hit over that two thousand dollars MRR. They are compensated a little bit better with partner program. With that being said, there is another deal. This was a little higher scale where they did have a current MSSP in place.
They were an existing fiber customer. And the conversation, the KPI they were looking for was trying to reduce annual spend and trying to reduce vendor sprawl as well. So what we were able to do was provide a solution that made sense for them to rip out their current MSSP, deploy our EDR, deploy our XDR. We deployed vulnerability scanning on their critical infrastructure.
We added in incident response as a service as well into that deal and made it appealing enough for them to rip out their current, put in our solution and get those cost savings on an annual basis. But they were also on the network detection response and network traffic analysis side, leveraging our Stellar Cyber offering, able to win their contracts up, get rid of a specific vendor that was doing those solutions for them. So consolidating the environment and now fiber and cyber, I call it surf and turf, you know where to look for at the end customer. It’s a single throat to choke.
It’s Crown Castle.
I loved that story, both stories. The first one, how you were able to pivot, and it shows that when an adviser is talking about voice and data, it’s easy to weave in the security conversation. And there’s a lot of things that can happen and stall deals, but you you and your team did a fantastic job rerouting that conversation and getting security. The second deal shows that you go up market and you can actually sell to those larger customers and be able to talk to them about their holistic environment, not just cyber and then not just circuits. So great job for both of those. What are some ways that advisors who have not been focused on cybersecurity can start to engage customers? Where would you say is the easiest in for them to pivot a conversation?
Totally. So depending on the relationship you have with the end customer, the first question to ask is, are you responsible for cybersecurity? Or can you get me in touch with your team? So once you get there and once you are talking to the right stakeholders at that end user’s organization, what we like to ask is keep it business level.
Don’t need to get in the weeds right away. What cybersecurity tools do you have in place around email security, around EDR, around SIM and XDR, and who are managing those tools today. Like I said in the beginning, we are very focused on metric driven management. So we have over five hundred SOAR playbooks built out on Google Chronicle.
What we will be able to do is deliver a true rate of ninety nine point zero three percent on SIM as our average base right now across our customers.
And we’ll be able to give you a sub ten minute mean time to disposition scoring on EDR and XDR. So when you ask those questions, who’s managing that? Is it outsourced? Or are you doing it in house, Mr.
Customer? We love the in house responses because that makes us lick our chops. Do you know your mean time to disposition? Do you know your true positive rate?
Would you be interested in reducing some of that burden that you’re experiencing on the in house side and moving to more of that outsourced model, especially if it can save you time and if it can save you money. So those are the conversations that we like to have and understanding what the annual spend is when those contracts are up. And sometimes, like I said earlier, we are a vendor agnostic platform. And that’s why advisors should love working with Crown Castle on the cyber side, is we don’t need to rip and replace existing security tool investments, but more so focus on how we can manage those tools better.
So if you have an XDR like a Splunk or a QRadar or a Rapid7, great tools. Who’s managing those? We can API link into that and add additional value without you having to rip out a particular tool and put another one in to work with us.
I love the flexibility. So a lot of organizations are just understaffed. They don’t have the resources. And it’s really tough to have the manpower in order to take care of all those cyber threats that are coming in.
And then do they have the expertise behind it to be able to know what to do when a malicious threat gets in that no one’s ever seen before? So you show a lot of incredible capabilities within your port portfolio. So our trends report just came out, and number one talking point for two thousand twenty five is the same for twenty twenty six: artificial intelligence. So let’s talk a little bit about what are you doing in the AI space, and then how can clients then pivot that conversation into cybersecurity?
Are you helping them with the roadmap, the framework, the AI governance? Are you helping them host the AI? What are the capabilities that Crown Castle has? And then what are you doing to layer security on top of those?
Totally. That’s a great question. So with our cyber defense portfolio, something I haven’t touched on yet is we do have professional services as well. So when it gets into the AI governance space, we do have relationships with third party vendors to bring in a VC, so bring in a fractional CISO.
We can even do penetration testing and vulnerability assessments. But in this case, bring an expert to the table that’s equipped to understand the governance around how you’re implementing AI. I call it swim lanes. I think that’s the most important thing right now with those AI tools a customer might be deploying.
As far as our actual cybersecurity tool, using the Stellar Cyber XDR solution, if we were to license that out, has a ton of machine learning and behavioral analytic engines that are running to understand how your end user’s environment is operating and then using data correlation to find weaker signals, especially with your third party integrations like an SSE tool, identity access management tool, and create stronger alerts that are higher fidelity and true positive rate. So that’s how we’re leveraging the machine learning on the security tool side. But then we also have those professional service resources to bring in on the governance side as well.
I think that’s fantastic. AI is going to be a huge conversation. You definitely need to be talking to clients about artificial intelligence and where they’re at. And I think Crown Castle can meet your customer wherever they’re at, whether they need a framework, governance, road map.
They have a lot of capabilities. I love that you’re doing professional services, managed services. You have such a great portfolio for cybersecurity. Again, I think you might be the best kept secret that people just didn’t realize, and it’s a blessing and a curse.
So for those of you who have not been investing in the new Crown Castle with everything going on today and they’ve what they’ve added as well as the acquisition of Zayo, I think you’re gonna see a lot more advisors really leaning in with Crown Castle’s capabilities. So Brandon, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate that you’re part of our portfolio. We’re so excited to see all the success we’re going to have together in twenty twenty six.
Thanks for your partnership.