64. What's the value in SASE and global backbones? With Guest Josh Haselhorst
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You won’t want to miss this episode on SDWAN and SASE! Listen in as we have Josh Haselhorst, an industry-leading SDWAN expert, and we talk about the importance of SDWAN and Global Backbones. Josh clues us in on how he made his way into the technology scene but also gives us a glimpse into the future with a new phrase, “Software Defined Everything”, and AiOPS. There are so many great things, you’ll have to listen twice!
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back. We’re talking about SDWAN advanced networking, SASE global backbones, a whole bunch of stuff. You may know what that is, you may not. Either way, we have got the, the world renowned industry Best subject matter expert here. Josh Haselhorst Telarus sales engineer on Mr. Haselhorst. Welcome.
Josh Haselhorst (00:39):
Well, thank you, sir. I’m glad to be back. These are fun to do.
Josh Lupresto (00:43):
So before we get into this today, before we kick it off, I wanna remind everybody that we’ve got a lovely sponsor that is supporting us on this. Today’s episode is sponsored by Aryaka, and if you don’t know, they’re a leading global provider of SDWAN and SASE Solutions. So if you’re a business out there struggling, slow, unreliable networks, they’re holding your company back you wanna consider Aryaka global managed network solution that they have that gives you agility, gives you speed, all the things that you need to compete in today’s landscape. So, enough on that we’ll come back to our sponsor later. I wanna kick it off with you. You know, it’s been a little while since you’ve been on the show, Mr. Haselhorst. So I wanna talk about, remind everybody how you got started in the career. Anything different that we, that, you know, any secrets out there about how you kind of got to where you’re at.
Josh Haselhorst (01:30):
You know, that’s funny. I actually got a question from from one of our suppliers the other day, and he, he asked us kind of the same thing. Is he, what are the, what were the steps that it took to get, like your certification level and where you’re at today and whatever. And it’s, it, it’s kind of a, I guess a, a long drawn out, funny story. I’ll try to con collapse it. But, you know, people go, you know, get outta high school and you go to college and you go get your degree and then, you know, you maybe go get your bachelor’s and then you go get your, your master’s in, in a cybersecurity or computer sciences, or maybe go even crazy or get your pd PhD in computer sciences, right? Yeah. I didn’t do any of that
Josh Haselhorst (02:04):
I, I didn’t know anything about tech, right? I, I, grad, I’m old, right? I’m, I’m 49 years older. I turned 50 in August, but I, I graduated high school, joined the Navy. Cuz I had literally no idea what else to do with my life. I knew I wanted to move out of the house. I knew I wanted to see the world, but I, you know, I joined the Navy and become a, a, a jet mechanic after years and years, right? When I got out of the Navy my parents lived in Colorado. I was at point MAU in, in, in California, right? Rough duty station, get up in the morning, surf every morning, right?
Josh Haselhorst (02:44):
Yes. Yeah. So without four roommates, you can’t live there, right? So went to Colorado and my, my stepdad taught me how to run heavy equipment at Denver International Airport. So I’m gonna be a heavy equipment operator. Well, it got cold in Denver,
Josh Haselhorst (03:41):
Then ended up, you know, after a few years, becoming a boat mechanic. And then, then I started racing the boats and you know, anyway, cut two years and years later, met my wife my wife and I, you know, living together. We got, we got married and then after we lived together, right? So I, cuz I do everything correct,
Josh Haselhorst (04:27):
You know, trust me with your life. I, I, no, I’m horrible at that. So that didn’t really work out. I B m was hiring at the time and I thought, well, I don’t even know what that is, right? This is, this sounds like computers and stuff. But they hired me for some unknown reason. I guess they needed a body that could, you know, breathe and walk without falling down. So I, I took the job
Josh Haselhorst (05:16):
So then you’re thinking about company use cases and product placement and what fits where and why. And, you know, it just kinda started evolving from there. And luckily I worked for a bunch of, you know, manufacturers, big VARs and integrators that, you know, back then, they’d send you to school. I mean, you don’t have to go to Harvard and all this other stuff. They would send you to these, you know, technical deep dive schools for weeks and months and get these advanced certifications. And it just started growing from there years and years later. I’ve been doing this for 23 years now, right? Years and years later. I don’t sell anything anymore. I simply teach we coach and advise, we talk, talk to, you know, partners, selling agents, resellers, VARs, MSPs, end users, and, and really just kind of listen to the business and the use case of what are you trying to solve.
Josh Haselhorst (06:09):
And then, okay, what technology fits that use case. But more importantly, what supplier supports and manages that technology, the way the use case needs it supported from a business and risk management operational standpoint, not just, you know, blinky lights and whose logo is on a metal a metal case in Iraq. That becomes irrelevant now. So the job today from a pre-sales engineer, SDWAN cybersecurity engineer guy here at Telarus, to, to listen to understand that use case and not only help the IT team, but help business and operations around risk management as well. And so we’re marrying business with it, which prior to, I don’t know, a few years ago, business leaders thought the job of everything from it, was it. And what they’re realizing now is SDWAN Cybersecurity, all these other things that’s 10% it, well, it’s 90% risk management business operations.
Josh Lupresto (07:08):
I, yeah, I, I I love the story. I love the color there. And, and you kind of lead right into the next thing I was gonna ask is, you know, when you originally came on board, the idea was be know a little about a lot because we don’t know what’s gonna get thrown into you, right? As, as you’re working with partners and, and, and customers alike, how or why do you feel that that role has had to evolve to what it’s had to evolve to over the last couple years? What’s driven that?
Josh Haselhorst (07:34):
Yeah. So even us, you know, when we’ve, when I first started here at Telarus, right? I think we had three of us in pre-sales engineering, right? And we had to know everything a little about everything, right? Software, hardware, switch route, it, it, it, you had to know a little bit about everything. But the way it’s kind of rolled in, in the way we’ve expanded internally is now we are just, we are a team of engineers. I believe we’re at 14, 15 coming up, right? It, we are still that you gotta know a lot about a, you know, a little about a lot. You actually gotta know a lot about a lot. But more importantly, you’ve gotta be highly certified in specific disciplines that you are going to concentrate on. Because we’re not the smartest guy in the room. I can’t know everything about everything, but I can know absolutely everything about my little piece of the world, right?
Josh Haselhorst (08:21):
And then if I need a, oh man, this sounds like voice or this sounds like contact center, then I grab one of those engineers that live and breathe in that world, right? So a lot of times, like our partners, our agents, or even the end users in these calls, we’ll have multiple of us on, because there’s usually multiple projects and a lot of moving parts. And me personally, I want the best of the best in that discipline to talk about that discipline. I don’t want a generalist, I want a monster, right? And that’s kind of what we’ve built and that’s how the organization has, has, has morphed. Really
Josh Lupresto (08:49):
Love it. All right. So, so let’s talk here. Wan you know, this years ago, you know, we, we, we talked before about kind of what the general evolution of how we got to kind of why SDWAN, right? And it was, you know, it was failover and it was resiliency. Now we’re talking about SASE and adding that. Walk me through here, from your perspective, how’d you first learn about this whole broader SDWAN and SASE landscaping? Maybe just, you know, for anybody that’s not familiar, let’s define that.
Josh Haselhorst (09:19):
Interesting. So I, I think my first evolution into this SDN, SDWAN world, I mean, in my day, way back server storage world, right? We were doing things like data, compression engines, reputation filtering. We were doing things like load balancers, which oh, by the way, oh yeah, that’s SDWAN too. But that was kind of the origination, right? But really in the SDWAN that, that our world recognizes up to a certain point in time was things like voice failover and, and, and video, you know, perfection and application performance and stuff like that. And, and my first dip into what they call mainstream SDWAN, which is marketers went crazy, right? So SDWAN, just so everybody knows on the call, is not an actual thing. It’s a theoretical idea. Theoretical design based around risk management and risk tolerance of business critical applications, right?
Josh Haselhorst (10:08):
It can be anything. So it can be failover failback, because I need, I got an application that, you know, if internet one fails, I need to be on internet too, and I can’t manually push a button. Well, that qualifies, right? So any of those fail over failback scenarios qualify as SDWAN. But really where I got into it was I was with a voice vendor, a voice manufacturer, and I was a sales rep that ended up doing my own installs, so became my own engineer. And we would get to this point of this whole cloud voice world of, Hey, internet is not that great, and voice isn’t wonderful over this whole interwebs thing. So we’re gonna stick with our PRIs and our SIP trunks and our PBXs, right? And usually when you got to the point of you deployed this cloud voice solution, world’s gonna be wonderful.
Josh Haselhorst (10:59):
It’s easier to deploy, easier to manage, but the, the traffic patterns and the quality’s not amazing, right? So now end users are gonna call ’em to support and support might go in there and try to fine tune some things and try to fix some configurations. And then ultimately it comes back to that sales rep or the install tech. You know, this thing is horrible. I won off my contract, yada, yada, yada. And so SDWAN to us was a fix. Oh my God, if you deploy this magic box now, the thing I sold you months ago will actually work correctly,
Josh Haselhorst (11:45):
So it was a, it was a bandaid to keep from people trying to get outta their contracts and suing, right? Yeah. And, and then it was a thought of, guys, why don’t we do this proactively? Why doesn’t it just come with the solution so we don’t have customer service issues? So that was really my first dig into the, okay, this could be a magic little box. Now it is a networking apparatus, right? Which means I need networking back, back then. I need networking skillset to be able to do these things in the, in the installation or whatever. But the automation of it was there too to where you didn’t have to be a command line genius to do these installs. Yeah. My only problem with it was the upfront piece of, you know, if we brought in multiple circuits from disparate vendors and we link aggregated and tied those circuits together, and then, you know, we, by deploying things like SDWAN, and then we rolled out these session-based or flow-based applications, the customer service department is not gonna give flooded with trouble tickets and calls because it actually works. So why didn’t we do it in the first place and build a resilient, redundant, secure network first? I don’t know. I don’t know. Money ideas, thought process. So now it’s flipped, is we’re gonna build that redundant, reliable, secure network first, and then all these other things that we want to do, just become an application. It just made it simple. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (13:14):
Great, great point. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna come back a little bit to the modernization and, and, and how that’s helped customers. But real quick, I wanna get back that quick, like what I promised at the beginning word from our sponsor here. So, you know, thinking about Aryaka for a second, being a leader in SDWAN and SASE solutions, look, they’re committed to helping businesses achieve what peak network performance scalability. And they’ve got a cloud native platform that gives you, like you mentioned, application performance, faster time to value and reduce complexity. And upcoming, actually, you’ll, what you’ll actually hear from is Aryakas Unified SASE offering the innovative network solutions on the next coming podcast with Ryan Livesay, who is the SVP of Solutions Engineering at Aryaka. I don’t wanna give a spoiler alert, but in that episode, we’re gonna talk about pressing challenges that are facing businesses, trends, strategies, how to optimize the network, and how Aryaka is kind of leading that way.
Josh Lupresto (14:03):
Last but not least if you do wanna stay up to date with the latest industry insights and technology trends, be sure that you go subscribe to Ariana’s Dreamers and Doers podcast. And in that they talk about industry experts they bring on best practices, lessons in leadership, and more. So don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from some of the best. They’ve got some good stuff on there. All right, back to the show. Let’s talk evolution here for just a second. If we define now where we talked in the beginning of what SDWAN was and some of your first experiences in it, and then we saw all this rage and, and rave about SASE, and this is gonna be the next big thing, I think we were all caught up in the midst of tools, tools, tools, tools. So when people originally started asking about, geez, what’s SASE? I found myself just kind of using the word convergence to, to some of these tools, right? So I’m curious from your perspective, if we think about a customer’s environment, what the customer is going through, how do you feel that SDWAN with adding in SASE to this, helps them evolve and helps them modernize?
Josh Haselhorst (15:12):
Yeah, no, great, great question. So the origination, o o of SDWAN was what we talked about, right? Your link aggregation, your application performance, right? Better uptime than just q o s policies, right? Automatic reroute around anomalies type situation, right? And then the advanced firewalls, the next gen gen firewall guys came in and said, wait a minute. I’m doing the entire perimeter security world and I’m doing routing. Why can’t I do realtime advanced routing as well as doing that perimeter security, right? So now I’m an advanced firewall that does SDWAN. Oh geez, I just became a secure access service edge, didn’t I? Now these terms, we hear SDWAN, SASE CASB, ZTNA, SSE remember what they are? They’re, they’re terms and their theoretical ideas, they’re not a thing anymore. These are, these are things that marketing companies flood your customers with.
Josh Haselhorst (16:06):
And we’ll talk about these things here in a, like, things like ZTNA, oh my God, I gotta do Z zero trust. Well, there’s 13 different ways to do this, right? So you mentioned the word convergence. So the origination, the intent of SASE was let’s collapse these environments. Why do I have a firewall here? And a router over there? I’ve got my email encryption tool over there. I’ve got my EDR, XDR tool over there. I went and bought this deep packet inspection thing over there. Then I went and got, you know, direct connects to connect me to my cloud services over there. And pretty soon I’ve got 27 tool sets now for an operator that’s got a hundred guys in it, and each one of us dedicated to their specific discipline, right? That’s my firewall guy. That’s my endpoint guy.
Josh Haselhorst (16:47):
On and on. This, this works, this is fine. But what had happened is, especially through pandemic, is we started collapsing not only the environments, but staff Yeah. Is now, you know, I had 13 Josh Luprestos, and now I have two, and my 13 Josh Luprestos used to support, you know, 250, 300 guys. I got two now doing it. But yet you still have those 19 tool sets. No, let me ask you this. If I gave you 19 different portals, 19 different management interfaces, could you possibly do your job correctly daily for my organization? You might have all the best breed products in the world, the greatest architecture in the world, probably every certification. And I know you’re smart as a whip, every certification on the planet, you’re s the smartest dude in the room. It’s not about smarts and tech, it’s about scalability. I can’t possibly manage all of these interfaces.
Josh Haselhorst (17:40):
It’s no longer possible. And then I can’t troubleshoot anything. And then, by the way, boss, you’re asking me to do desktop support and web design, and you’re asking me how do I, you know, know, use technology to create revenue? Man, I don’t know. I’m, I’m in the attic pulling cable. I, I fixed Sally’s mouse pad because, you know, she spilled coffee on it. Where’s the time? So that collapsing these environments into give me one interface, give me a single pane of glass where I can see all my, you know, perimeter security, my policies, my URL and content filtering, my connected ips, my top users, my top applications. Let me troubleshoot, let me, they see things like latency and jitter and mos, but don’t make me log into 14 different things in order to do this. And that was the evolution. And then the next evolution was, okay, back to the operations standpoint, you just gave me lean it, I don’t have a security operation center.
Josh Haselhorst (18:31):
I don’t have guys 24 7, 365 eyes on glass with nine data analysts doing incident response in real time. Well, good lord, what do I do about that then? Because, you know, I look at my firewall logs on Fridays. Well, good, cuz you know, threat actors only work on Fridays, so we should be covered. The thing is, is especially with, with the security mechanisms that are going on, is these attacks happen every day, all day 24 7, 365. They’re way better than us. And if I don’t have eyes on glass and I know you do in your security blog or your security security podcasts about, you know, cyber insurance and what are the requirements and all this. But this is, this is, to my point of, you said the word converged. I need to be able to converge not only my WAN architecture and my application behavior controls, but I need to be able to converge my cybersecurity tool sets as well, but still have those data forensics guys, those data analysts guys that are protecting my environment in real time, whether it’s best of breed product and service chaining or not.
Josh Haselhorst (19:31):
Right? So then I’m a SASE, and then now that I have 24/7/365 sock eyes on glass with guys like incident response teams, what am I now, oh, that’s another marketing term. Now I’m a CASB, I’m a cloud access security broker, right? So convergence. Yeah. The other word I like is I don’t like, I hate it. You hear me all the time. Digital transformation. Well, if I’m doing everything digital, I’m doing everything cloud, how can I have operational efficiencies If I’ve got 19 different products and 19 different portals to manage ’em? I can’t. It’s impossible. No matter how smart the guy is.
Josh Lupresto (20:06):
Yeah, fair point. Let’s, let’s talk for a second about some of the hurdles, right? I, I would like people to kind of understand that have not gone through a discovery process like this because you’re with partners and in customers doing probing discovery calls all the time. What are some of the challenges that you see along the way? And then how do you help people talk through that? Or at least understand that maybe it isn’t a challenge and you know, this is how you would see roi, something like that. How do you quantify that?
Josh Haselhorst (20:36):
Yeah, so when we’re talking to technologists technologists have a a, a certain thing in mind. They got a work order. Boss man says, I need this business result. And now I go start doing due diligence around that technology. Back to the word convergence. We need to, we need to figure out a way to converge business leader conversation with technologist conversation. And that’s the biggest challenge today because the IT guy, let’s just say I’m the system admin, or let’s say I’m the telecom guy. My business outcome is to get my products and services that I’m bringing in-house to my users to work perfectly, to work seamlessly and work simply, right? In a security world, we got this term usable security. I can’t just throw a bunch of security countermeasures at my business leaders and expect that they’re not gonna find workarounds around them because it, it’s a pain and it’s another process, right?
Josh Haselhorst (21:32):
I have to do this easy and elegant. This is kinda how UCaaS and CCaaS came about is, is let’s, let’s converge everything. Let’s integrate all tool sets into these platforms. So it’s easier to mal manage. It’s simple and it’s elegant. But my business leaders, I need to make their job simple and elegant also. So if I go buy a bunch of switches and routers, I go buy a bunch of firewalls or buy a bunch of cybersecurity countermeasures that may be good for me and my IT team. But what did it do to the business as an organization as a whole? Did it open their eyes to best practices? Maybe I went and got a backup recovery archive solution. Am I following in accordance with best practices? Well, an IT leader may not know if they’re following it to best practices based on risk management and risk tolerance of the organization.
Josh Haselhorst (22:18):
But if we can marry it with OT and IT with OT and the business leader office, the C-suite, and all be lockstep in what the next evolution is, these projects are easier not only deploy to manage and to get budget approved, because now we’re not even talking about tech, we’re talking about risk management, right? Can I mitigate a risk? Do I need to transfer a risk to a third party? Can I avoid this risk? Right? and is there a financial risk around that? If we look at everything we do from SDWAN cybersecurity world, right? And think about the risk management approach from the business leaders to it, these projects now get eyes open of, oh my goodness, okay, I wasn’t following best practices. I wanted to roll out UCaaS, but I didn’t build a reliable, redundant, redundant, you know, connection. What’s the risk of that? Well, the risk is back to that usable right? Is I’m gonna deploy, you know, this, this UCaaS system to all my users and they hate it cuz it’s choppy. So now they use their cell phone. Yeah, I just wasted my organization’s money because I did not have that 100% adoption rate, which was the risk of financial risk. So we have to eliminate that, but the only way to eliminate risk or to even talk about risk is to get the business leaders and the IT leaders in the same room on the same page.
Josh Lupresto (23:39):
Good, good point. All right. Getting to the tail end here, just a couple more questions. So walk us through, now that we’ve kind of built up the idea, we, we, you know, SDWAN is mature. There’s a lot of different flavors. We’re now talking convergence, a lot of different tool sets, and we bolt sassan, the title of this track ride is, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna answer here in a minute, the value of global backbones. But walk me through an example, right? We’re talking SASE, we’re talking SDWAN. Gimme an example where you just were part of a major transformation because of this technology. What did the environment look like when you walked in? What was the problem? What did you learn? And then ultimately kinda what was put in place.
Josh Haselhorst (24:19):
Yeah. I’ll even talk about kind of a, a recent one, right? And I’ve done a lot of Aryaka, I’ve done a lot of everybody, but I’ve done a lot of Aryaka, to this point in this specific use case, right? Is I had a global operator locations in Indonesia, Spain, Newfoundland, Australia, mainland China, couple locations in us, right? And they were using old school DM VPN, which turned into Cisco iWAN, right? But it was a way to interconnect all locations, right? Using routing tables instead of, you know, switching technologies, right? Basically kind of virtual MPLS if you will. But they were still doing things like distributed file shares. So the guys in China would come back to the LA facility for specific files or applications or whatever. And you know, well no matter what kind of circuit I have, you know, speed of light is speed of light, but multiply that by distance and guess what I have now?
Josh Haselhorst (25:12):
I have latency. So the issue was latency. And this was kind of the advent of edge compute, right? It’s, oh my God, let’s just get ’em closer to the edge so they don’t have to backhaul all the way over, right? But I needed to, I needed to mesh all of these locations together. I needed to get away outside of mainland China, away from the government eyeballs, you know, sucking down all packets and, and inspecting, cuz that just slowed everything down. I needed to quit back hauling and hair pinning two locations that tend then get over to Azure, if you will, right? So I needed a network topology, not necessarily SDWAN yet, but I needed a network topology that would connect all of my locations and, and kill that middle mile latency game, right? So this is what a backbone operator does, right? Some of ’em call ’em NAS providers network as a service operators, some of ’em call ’em MPLS as a service, right?
Josh Haselhorst (26:00):
But this is what a backbone operator does, is instead of me getting MPLS or me trying to create mesh in IP sec and hub and spoke and all this other stuff myself, I just become a node of their private layer too. And now they’re taking me to the nearest edge resources. They’re doing things like automatic pop reroute, right? For example, I’m in, I’m in Arizona, right? And maybe my nearest pop, you know, from a, from a carrier hotel to say one Wilshire in la Well, what happens if one wilshire in LA goes down? Cuz that’s never in the world ever happened, right? It, it happens. Well, could you automatically reroute me to Portland and then get me over to Azure West so I can still continue to do my job without getting high latency? Well, a lot of operators are, well, no, no, it the pops down, the pops down this way.
Josh Haselhorst (26:45):
I can do automatic pop reroutes and I can become a note of somebody else’s MPLS. I always say, what’s the biggest baddest network on the planet, the biggest, baddest network on the planet
Josh Haselhorst (27:31):
So I’m gonna need SDWAN too. Well, by the way, yeah, Aryaka does that also. So we can put you on the Aryaka backbone and then we can put a app, an appliance inside each location and now what we’re doing, link aggregation, Port correction, dynamic pass selection, pick a color of a UCaaS provider, it’s gonna work perfectly, right? So we started with, I needed better middle mile, lower middle mile latency to, I need local link aggregation at a hundred percent uptime. And then it was a, we’re gonna start moving our on-prem applications into multi-cloud regions. I’m gonna put some over in Alibaba. I’m gonna put some over in Oracle Cloud, some in ibm, some in Azure, aws, G ccp, whichever ones were right for those specific applications, right? But now how am I gonna connect to ’em? So then they were thinking we’re gonna go direct connects or, and express routes and all that other stuff.
Josh Haselhorst (28:16):
Well, yet, what did I just say about, you know, that convergence. Now another portal, another piece, another complexity. By the way, platforms like Aryaka, since I’m on their layer two, they are my multi-cloud OnRamp. So it’s already there. I just have to turn it on. So really we took the, I have a, a firewall that kind of does SDWAN and I need direct connects and I need layer two and I need layer three and collapse that environment into a no. You need one architecture that you can centrally manage your IT guys, your cybersecurity guys, your networking guys are all using the same exact tool set. No more silos in the organization. And oh, by the way, all these other Next Level, next gen applications that you want to bring into your organization to make you money using it, to me, they’re just applications now connect to ’em, turn ’em on. Easy, easy, right? So simplification and elegance, but then collapse their environment. I think if they were gonna go best of breed, which is probably what they were talking about to begin with, I bet they would’ve been hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments and all just adding complexity this way. They created simplification and elegance. And I bet doing everything in an all-in one was probably a quarter of the cost of doing siloed.
Josh Lupresto (29:32):
Love it. Love it. Great example. Well that, that definitely answers the question, right? If you remember the title of this track for everybody was SDWAN in Advanced Networking. What is the value of SASE and Global Backbones anyway? And I’m not even gonna recap it because I think you just put so many reasons into that example of what the value of somebody that has a global backbone is there’s, there’s 15 reasons in that last bit that you had alone. So, great stuff in there. All right two final thoughts here real quick cuz we wrap this up. First thought I, if I’m a partner and I’ve you know, my, my customers are looking to modernize a little bit here. Maybe they didn’t do SDWAN n maybe they did do SDWAN, but they’re, you know, maybe tools are sprawled out there. I want to approach my customers. I don’t really know where to start. Is it a security conversation? Is it a network conversation? I’m a big probing questions guy. So if you, if you have a partner that, that listens to this and says, Hey, I wanna go see if I can tee up a couple discussions for you, what would you recommend that I go, you know, what’s my quick talk track to the customers, my prospects?
Josh Haselhorst (30:34):
You know, I, I always go back to why, and, and, and I say the word why and I’m putting my risk management hat on in right now, right? Is, you know, a client comes to a partner, Hey, I need a, a secondary internet circuit for what? Why? Well, I’m gonna roll out an application that needs failover. Okay? Do you need that application to be in a hundred percent uptime or is failover fail back tolerable based on risk management? Oh God no. I needed a hundred percent up. Okay? Cuz now we just opened the conversation. Now we, we know we have to talk SDWAN, but then we have to get into the weeds a little bit of, does your existing firewalls, can they do SDWAN by just maybe an OS or a firmware update or, or can they not? Maybe we can protect the investment up front and just say, listen, you just have to turn on that control.
Josh Haselhorst (31:21):
Or maybe, okay, it’s time to upgrade, but then we hear, oh yeah, I’ve got these older firewalls that are long in the tooth. Well guess what we just did? Well, we sold ’em a circuit, we talked about SDWAN, but now we’re gonna replace their firewalls too, which now starts bringing us into that SASE CASB conversation. So how do I have these conversations? They’re really easy. It’s just asking the customer why, why do you need another circuit? Cuz I’m gonna go you guys, oh, what ucas are you looking at? How do you need it to behave? How do you need it to perform? Right? What is the risk tolerance around these applications that starts dictating what kind of SDWAN is, is is correct? Do I have remote users? Should I be looking at ZTNA, SASE, or CASB? What that starts kind of dictating, but what is the easy button, Josh?
Josh Haselhorst (32:01):
The easy button is the customer. When the customer comes to a to a to a partner, he says, I need blank technology. He may not know back to that business in operations world. He may not know the backend conversations that the C-suite is having. Maybe that C-suite is saying, listen, in, in three months, we’re gonna integrate Jira or Orcada or Salesforce or Service Manager, or we’re gonna do Kubernetes or whatever. He may not know that, but Boss Man said, listen, you olarisneed to get a secondary circuit. If we know what the applications that are coming down the pipe are going to be the next evolution of the organization, then we can start properly, properly determining risk management around those applications, which then determine which platforms are correct. Sometimes we can protect the, the initial investment. Sometimes it is a forklift upgrade, but it all depends.
Josh Haselhorst (32:51):
So I guess the easy button is not so easy because the customer’s googling this and he sees 927 options, like everybody that’s listening to this call, go do yourself a favor, go Google Zero Trust. You will see 927 different options, different methodologies, different ways. Well, the customer’s doing that too. So what is the value of TSB in the world? What is the value of like Telarus and Telarus engineering? The value to that end user is he’s looking at so many different options. He doesn’t know what’s perfect for his use case. So I need to reach out to my broker, my agent and say, Hey, listen, I’m trying to do this. Can you get the engineering team on a call with me to help me determine which one, which platform is correct? And then that supported the, the, the supportability world, right? How do I need it supported?
Josh Haselhorst (33:39):
Even if I’m a specific platform, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the people I bought that platform from support that platform the way I need it supported based on logistics and operations, right? And that’s where customers make mistakes. When we’re teaching customers the same thing. I always say that. I say, I say this every single time I have a meeting. 100% of customers will buy the correct countermeasure in the incorrect sequence 100% of the time. So they need you. They, they need that selling agent to say, listen, maybe I just wanna bounce an idea off you. Let’s get the engineering guys to the table and let’s put that risk management hat on and say, okay, what’s the risk of this? Is that okay? What’s the risk of that? Is that okay? And, and, and then, and determine what is, what is that perfect solution? What is that perfect fit?
Josh Lupresto (34:25):
Love it. All right. Final thought. This is a hard one because, you know, to your point, this technology has changed a lot, but I want to look at our crystal ball here. If we look out 12 months or so you know obviously you’ve given a, you’ve given a great talk track to help people understand this, to go back and maybe have some additional conversations. But if people are planning out their next 12 months of prospecting and customer conversations and just, you know, working on projects and doing QBR with the customers is there anything that you want us to consider from a future perspective? What, what do we need to be aware about that might be coming down that they might be getting asked about? Walk us through, you know, 12 to to 24 months. Anything we need to be aware of additionally?
Josh Haselhorst (35:07):
Yeah, yeah. And, and, and this, this platform I’m going to talk about is actually out there in the market. Now it’s not highly marketed because it’s still in development. It is not perfect and re ready for, you know, GA and is. It’s, but the idea and the theory’s there, and it is already available in, in, in some, in some shape or form. But picture this, we talked about that convergence of IT, OT operations, C-Suite, right? C-Suite has their own applications that they use to manage their businesses. HR has their own to manage their businesses. It has their own to manage their business. Cybersecurity, networking. All these pieces of the organization are also siloed. And they have their own technologies that they use, right? Sales divisions use things like Salesforce and IT support teams use guys like, you know, CAEA or jira. What if all of these applications from C-suite business applications all the way into booking my janitorial staff?
Josh Haselhorst (36:06):
What if every single application from my entire organization got collapsed into like a digital front door? Meaning one portal, one orchestration, almost like our sup, almost like our supplier webpage, right? Oh, I wanna look at SDWAN and click it. Boom. There’s all of your SDWAN platforms and there’s the management and orchestration of it. Ooh, I wanna look at my cybersecurity. Boom, there’s all of your firewalls and orchestration into manage of it. Incident response systems, backup recovery and archive systems, ticketing and alert systems, all in the same single pane of glass. One interface to manage my entire organization, Mr. Lupresto, we’re talking SDE now. Software defined everything. Not SDWAN, not SASE, not CASB. SDE software defined everything. And these platforms exist. There are, there are companies out there that are, that are developing it at a rapid pace and pretty soon back to that best of breed in protecting somebody’s investment.
Josh Haselhorst (37:04):
I’ve got endpoint over here and I got MDR over here and EDR over here. What if we could take that investment and suck it all into one management interface? Maybe I wouldn’t have to do forklift upgrades. Maybe I could, I could protect that investment. But now I just created simplification and elegance to manage my entire organization and operation. And then when we talk about converging the business leaders and train of thought with it, guess what they’re saying? They’re using the same platform I’m using. So they get to see the risks, they get to see best practices, they get to see my chats. When we talked unified communication, that was the whole point of UC, right? Is to collapse everything into one platform. But what if I could integrate my uc stack into this also? So my telephony, my security, my business operations, my manufacturing, everything, my sayta systems, everything is in one management orchestration.
Josh Haselhorst (38:00):
And now when a ticket comes in, it goes to that team and that person, it goes to the telecom guy, it goes to the correct teams at the correct time when the incident happens, there’s a study out there. This was done in a retail franchise environment, a quick service restaurant, 2000 location, quick service restaurant. They said any incident a switch port was out. A an access point went down the phone system’s down, internet went down. It would, they, they would, the study said it would take 20 minutes for anybody in support to respond to that anomaly, right? 20 minutes. So doing stuff like this, the study found that I go from 20 minutes respond time to any anomaly, to a five minute respond time to any anomaly. The dollar figure for C-suite, the dollar was that 20 minute response time on that 2000 units.
Josh Haselhorst (38:52):
Those 2000 operators was roughly two $20,000 per minute in a downtime situation. Now, if you could take that $20,000 per minute in a downtime situation, remember it, 20 minutes to respond to five, you just went from $20,000 per minute to $9,000 per minute. You think the CFO and paying attention to those numbers love. And that’s what, that’s what this next evolution is gonna be, is it itself is gonna be almost irrelevant. You still need the same tool sets, but now we’ve gotta manage them in a, in a ergonomical converged way. So it is, it is UC, it’s, it’s unified technology as a service. And I’m gonna coin the phrase SDE. Nobody
Josh Lupresto (39:35):
Said I love it. I love it.
Josh Haselhorst (39:36):
That’s great software to find everything. It came from Haselhorst just saying
Josh Lupresto (39:40):
SDE, AI ops and more. All right, man. Well look that we, there’s a lot of stuff here to unpack. You’re gonna have to go listen to this a couple times. Haselhorst, appreciate you, man. Knowledge drop as always. Thanks for coming on.
Josh Haselhorst (39:52):
Absolutely love it. Call me anytime for the partners out there. Reach out to your engineering resources. We’re here to help.
Josh Lupresto (39:59):
Love it. Okay, everybody that wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus, Josh Haselhorst sales engineer, and all things SDWAN. Till next time. Thanks everybody.