Chad Muckenfuss and Mike Kowalski from Telarus present a comprehensive overview of the cloud market, reviewing 2025 performance and outlining key focus areas for 2026. They discuss the massive $723 billion global cloud spend in 2025, representing 21.5% growth, and emphasize the dominance of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The presentation covers three main focus areas for 2026: cloud infrastructure with multi-cloud management and FinOps, data center consolidation and hybrid cloud solutions, and AI/machine learning implementations. A significant portion addresses the VMware transition crisis, highlighting Broadcom’s October 2027 deadline for VCF9 migration or platform alternatives. The speakers provide practical door-opener conversation starters for technology advisors, emphasizing the importance of asking about Microsoft 365 usage and backup strategies. They stress leveraging Telarus’s solutions engineering team for technical conversations and highlight opportunities in GPU-as-a-service offerings. The session includes interactive Q&A addressing supplier selection, compensation models, and customer pain points, positioning cloud as a critical growth area for technology advisors.
Transcript is auto-generated.
I’m excited to welcome our speakers today, Chad Muckenfuss, our vice president of cloud, and Mike Kowalski, our sales engineer. Gentlemen, we are so excited to have you. I’m gonna go ahead and turn it over to you.
Well, thank you, Cassandra. Appreciate everyone joining today. And this is gonna be more of a state of the union call going over cloud and looking back at twenty twenty five, looking ahead here at twenty twenty six. And I wanna encourage everybody to use that chat to throw questions in in the mix here.
We’ll have a q and a at the end of this. But also, if there’s something that we’re talking about here, as you’re well aware, Mike and I like to have these very conversational. So Mike Kowalski joining me today as our cloud solution architect, He’s based out of California, but both of us are actually together at the Telarus sales kickoff currently in Phoenix, Arizona. So we are coming to you live, even though in separate rooms, to to go over this and look at cloud and where it’s gonna take us this year.
We have some new initiatives that we’re gonna look at and some some old favorites that we’re gonna go over as well. So, Chandler, if you wanna jump to the next slide, we’ll we’ll go ahead and take a look at where we wanna kick things off. And, Mike, you wanna do an introduction here, and then we can jump into to all the discussion.
Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Chad. And, again, everybody, thanks very much for joining. We typically put a lot of thought into these, and we really what really drives that is just the continued participation that we get from you all. So it’s it’s kinda like our our not our second family, but our first family in some some ways. We really like this type of a format because I think it’s gonna be very interaction based.
We really don’t have much of agenda beyond what’s here today. So if you bring up a good topic, we’re happy to dive into it a little bit more. If you have questions about engaging or door openers, you know, throw it in the chat. We’ll definitely address it. But thanks thanks again for joining.
Yeah. So we’re gonna kick things off by looking at twenty twenty five by the numbers here. And one of the key things is it is a huge marketplace in cloud, and we’re gonna throw a lot of numbers around. But one of the key factors that I wanna address going into twenty twenty six here is that you will see a lot of regional events in person and virtual that are gonna focus not only on the big enterprise that we all have, you know, talked about and looked at and done, but also it’s a situation where we’re gonna bring it down market.
We’re gonna look at how cloud can impact the SMB space, how cloud hits mid market, and putting together a plan for all of you to go across everything, all aspects of that, all sectors of that, and be able to open doors, have a very basic conversation for those that aren’t comfortable about talking about cloud, and be able to leverage the SE team here to help open those doors and have those conversations with your customers to help you win more deals. So looking back at twenty twenty five, it was a it was a huge year.
Seven hundred and twenty three billion dollars spent globally on cloud overall. Now that includes private and public cloud. Twenty twenty five had a twenty one and a half percent growth over twenty twenty four. And one of the key factors that I wanna highlight is this is all Gartner numbers here that I that I pulled and put into the into this slide. Twenty percent year over year cloud growth for the past three years.
And it’s continued to, predicted to be, again, a a double digit growth year, probably twenty to twenty five percent growth again this year headed into twenty twenty six.
What are you looking at here, Mike, with with these numbers? When you see this, what what are your thoughts on this?
You know, it’s it’s always going to be a chart that’s up into the right. We hear about changes in the enterprise and the SMB space from maybe large companies like Meta or, you know, collectively collectively HP or Dell or or some of these just ginormous organizations, and they may be going through a layoff. So people may think that there is a problem in the technology space when it’s just quite the opposite. You know, to a certain degree, it perhaps is some people some folks on this call that are offsetting the need to have those types of of employees, and the technology just is not slowing down.
So there while you may hear negative things in the news, there’s always positive reinforcing facts that go into the that, you know, almost eight hundred billion in spend in twenty twenty five. I don’t know if you have numbers for twenty twenty six or twenty twenty six, but it’s certainly going to exceed that number. We have not seen downturns in deal flow. We have not seen downturns in dollar amounts and recurring revenue.
We haven’t seen a lot of businesses stop paying their bill. Like, this is a consistent and steady marketplace to invest your time and efforts for sure.
Yeah. I agree. I think that’s a that’s a great way to, to introduce this as we go through these numbers and then look ahead for what we’re looking at in twenty twenty six together, Mike, is, it’s a great way to spend your time, invest in your in your customers, and begin having those conversations about cloud. It’s it’s no longer something that you can ignore, and it’s something that is obviously a big door opener.
And you can really, really help your customers not just sell a new product, but really help them align with what’s out there in the marketplace and show them the best fit for what their business is across the board. So a couple of other things that I wanna highlight on this slide, and then we’ll move to the next one here. The big three, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, that accounts for sixty five, sixty six percent of global cloud infrastructure. And that to me is amazing because these big three are out there.
They’re driving the marketplace, but they they have some overlap. But the unique thing is that they all have their own their own swim lanes that they stay in. And, you know, AWS focuses on certain things. Azure, obviously, is kind of the big driver.
And then Google Cloud is the up and comer. Not only are they pushing hard with their Google Workspace, and we’re seeing that more and more often. And and I’m gonna ask you, Mike, for your feedback on this here in a second. But Google is also really beginning to embrace, and and I’m gonna share some things here that that I just had a conversation earlier this morning about.
Google’s really embracing the channel community, and they’re coming out. They’re they’re at Google Next right now. It’s happening the same week. But they’re gonna be coming out with a whole new plan to embrace our channel and what that looks like and how we can align our customers to leverage Google Workspace and and all of the Google tools out there. Mike, what’s what are your thoughts on the big three?
Obviously, AWS invented the space. They are are the nine million pound gorilla in the room, and everybody is always continually trying to play catch up. But I think Google is a really good story of what has already happened in the past. AWS comes to the market, gets widely accepted and deployed.
Microsoft Azure you’re like, what? Microsoft Azure? Nobody uses Microsoft Azure, let alone Google Cloud. So what Microsoft did is they went on this big campaign to try to diversify themselves.
These are the workloads that work well for us. These are the businesses that we’re targeting. And by the way, we’re going to give you better financials on it. The commercials are gonna be better.
Not saying cheaper, but, you know, they really tried to build this whole incentive around the their package so that it would get more adoption and it would get widely distributed. They were even paying more commissions at that time so that people would think, hey. AWS, sell them AWS or sell them Azure. And, obviously, it worked great.
You think the two are now both a little bit neck and neck. They they both have their fits. Google has been around for a long time, but it is just now starting to get that traction similar to what Azure did about eight or nine years ago where they’re really bringing incentives to the table to make it so that it could be more adopted. So that means perhaps paying our sales team more, giving them better migration costs to help move customers over, which is, you know, very popular still with Azure and AWS, but also to give that white glove service and just try to differentiate themselves being super channel friendly.
Right? They know that we are a a force to be reckoned with, and they want to work with us. So I think that when you start having these conversations, you don’t have to go in there and start selling Google, but it might be a good chance for you to have the conversation of maybe moving some of that existing spend from AWS or Azure over to Google, and that would be low hanging fruit. Eight, let’s let’s take a look at the the infrastructure.
Let’s look at your use habits. Let’s see if that could be better utilized in a Google environment for less cost, maybe better for performance. And we have the suppliers with those tools that could come in and help with those type of assessments.
Yeah. And I think that’s the key right there, Mike, is is we have the suppliers in our portfolio that can step in and help guide the customer to what is going to be the right choice. Because a majority of our suppliers work in multiple public clouds, you know, multiple hyperscalers. So they’re gonna look at workloads and applications and what’s gonna gonna fit best in those places.
So we have companies like, you know, they just threw up in the chat, which suppliers. So we have companies like ECI that can work in both AWS and Azure. We have companies like UpCurve that focus on the Google Workspace. We have all different types of suppliers that can be leveraged and utilized.
Man, like, Effectual, Lunavy, Rackspace.
They just the the list is is really long. It’s almost a table stakes these days that these cloud service providers or these these MSPs also have this this specialty on their portfolio or else they can’t remain competitive.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So one of the last things on this slide I wanna I wanna just bring up is cloud spend reached four point four percent of our gross domestic product in the United States last year. Four point four percent. That is massive.
And one of the key things here is that’s kind of throwing up some red flags at is this is what it looked like in the dot com bubble. And AI, Mike, as you know, is driving this, and and we all hear AI, and it’ll be a part of our talk track today as well for a little while here. But, again, just goes back to what you were saying in the beginning of the conversation, Mike, is cloud is here to stay. It’s growing tremendously. It’s not stopping. And that’s one of the key things that as you look at this from from a TA side of things, it really is when you begin to, it’s the gift that keeps giving. When you bring cloud to your customers, it’s not like it’s a one and done situation.
More and more and more data gets put into it, and it continues to grow. And the suppliers, again, that we rattled off a list of them here, but the suppliers continue to pay the TAs based on that as well. So, you know, one of the key things that we talk about is aligning with cloud, and it is the gift that keeps giving.
Because how many deals have we have you and I done over the years here, Mike, that you start small, you get in the door, and then it just grows and grows and grows.
So I see the reports every single month. Yep. And and without fail, there’s consistently the same cloud service customers that RTAs have sold that it keeps growing and growing and growing every single month.
Yep. So a couple of the questions that are popping up here, and then we’ll move on to the next slide, is, yes, we can offer Google Workspace now and GCP through UpCurve and some other suppliers. UpCurve is one of our our newer suppliers on the market place that is doing a great job specifically in Google. That’s what they’re really focused on.
We will provide a list of of the, of the suppliers in there, but also Telarus Hub gives a great breakdown of that. So instead of us rattling it off, we’re we’re gonna share the deck here to everyone that attended as well. But you can go into Telarus Hub and go through, and it breaks all of that down. And we’re gonna be announcing some new new cool things this week at SKO that will be released to the TA community next week as far as interactive matrixes and and all that type of thing.
So it’s a it’s a great a great situation. There’s a there’s a question in here about Snowflake. Mike, you wanna take that one?
Yeah. I think this is really kinda sparks another conversation. I just wanna reiterate AWS and Azure typically, if any, compensation, it’s either one to one point five percent of the spend. So really getting in there and trying to advocate that they need to move to a hyperscaler is not the best way or best approach to sell these services.
The way that we would get compensated is if money is given out by one of the hyperscalers, you would get ten percent of that, But then it’s that monthly management, the services that go on top of it, the support is really where the money is made. Now VMware from a multitenant cloud situation is still alive and well, and that is also part of the conversation still. With those, you can do anything from ten to twenty three percent of the spend for the infrastructure. So I think, again, it’s just really important to point out that if you’re looking at a customer that is a very big consumer of the hyperscaler services, it’s the additional services that we need to get on top of there, the security, the network, those those types of things that really build the commission value for our clients.
Now going in there and looking at some of these big spends, you may say it’s best to pull it out and do some repatriation where you’re moving out of cloud and into physical infrastructure, and that’s all upside for our t and TA environment. So that’s where data center gets involved. Selling dedicated private cloud solutions is where they get involved. Moving them to one of the pinnacle partners that can sell and support VMware into the coming decade is let’s take a look at that.
So I don’t necessarily and, again, everybody has their own way of approaching this, but I think going in and finding where the value is currently in their infrastructure or lack of value in their infrastructure and getting that technical conversation starting started with business questions, then we bring the suppliers to the table that fit instead of going to the suppliers and saying, hey. We just found out that x y z sells Google or or or other services, and that’s where we we need to sell a service at that point. Yeah. Better value is fix the problem, be a value, bring multiple options to the table.
Sorry, Chad.
I cut you You’re good.
I cut you off. So, again, Scott just put in the chat here, can we provide info on on how to choose what platform? That goes to what Mike just said, Scott. It’s one of those things that it’s a conversation with your customer first to find out what their needs are, what applications they’re utilizing, all that type of thing, and then we can help guide that. And that’s what our solutions engineering team is here for, is to have those conversations so that you don’t have to. You don’t have to be the technical expert. You leverage our team here at Telarus for those technical conversations and be able to, you know, bring in an expert in cloud, in public cloud, in private cloud, in who all the suppliers are so that we can help narrow that down and find the best solution.
Now, inevitably, you’re going to sell a deal, you’re gonna like the way that it felt, and you’ve had a maybe a great relationship with that supplier, and you’re probably gonna go out and look for that exact type of customer profile again. We see it time and time again, and that’s okay. If you wanna partner with one of your suppliers after making a win or building a relationship and you’re like, I just wanna bring this supplier to the table, if you feel that that’s the the value and the shortcut to doing that, we do not wanna step step on any toes or get in the way of those relationships. The better approach, in my opinion, is let’s get a non biased approach to fixing problems, listening to how we can resolve some of these concerns that they have, and then align them with some of, you know, our favorites that would really fit size of company, use case, all all of the other things.
Yeah. Alright. Chandler, you wanna go to the next slide?
So here’s the the top three cloud focus areas that we’re gonna have for twenty twenty six going in.
Not that this is the be all end all, but these are the top three that we’re gonna discuss. And then we’re gonna go we’re gonna rehash some of our favorites here in the next couple of slides as well. But before we kick this off, you know, the the chat is is alive today, so it’s really good to see. Pros and cons of selling cloud through Telarus MSP partner versus direct.
Well, the biggest thing is the protection for you as a TA out there. So if you are selling this direct, you may get a one time commission. You may get ongoing commissions. But if they decide to cut you off or they decide to change their channel, you’re not protected.
So your your direct contract is typically one of the first to go in the industry. And I’m speaking on that being on the supplier side for a big portion of my career is that when those reorganizations happen and all of that, you are typically not protected in the income that you’ve been earning from that on a direct contract. So we encourage you to leverage a TSD in that space for protection. And most importantly, it’s the expertise for you to go out and hire the the certify certified SEs and solution architects and that type of thing that are at your disposal here has been great.
And I think it’s a a really key differentiator for us here at Telarus is the team that that I’m a part of. I still consider myself a part of it. And and and Mike and the rest of the crew here, we’ve hired some great new ads this year to give us a a bigger, broader footprint across the US from the SC team and really want to be able to leverage that properly in the TA community. So, it’s it’s been great to it’s been great to see the growth on the SE team here.
And with that, we’re gonna jump into what our top three cloud focus areas are heading into twenty twenty six.
Yeah. Chad, real quick. Just just to address a really quick question in the chat.
Any of the suppliers that can do Azure or Microsoft are heavily certified by Microsoft. So they typically give you access to all of the services that are available in in their own ecosystem from Microsoft. So whether that be compute, storage, or fabric, or any of the number of different SQL platforms, they will support that. Now compensation, I’m sorry.
This is a technical call, but you have to check to see if it’s maybe not maybe a commissionable service versus a noncommissionable service. So sometimes it is just something that they include with a basic package. Or if you’re selling something like ExpressRoutes, those typically we don’t go directly to Microsoft. We would use one of our qualified suppliers as well.
Yeah. Great.
Go go ahead and go back.
All good. All good. So this is what it’s about. And sometimes we get pulled off track, and there’s gonna be multiple cloud conversations on the Tuesday call here throughout the year. So keep this coming. We’ll we’ll do our best to address all the questions here.
Cloud infrastructure continues to kinda lead the whole conversation, and we’ve touched on it here from the public cloud side of things. But the key things that I wanted to touch on here, and I’ll get your feedback on it, Mike, is multi cloud management and governance. Governance. So multi cloud would be having certain applications in a private cloud or and that private cloud could be a managed private cloud, like an expedient or a Flexential or a tier point, or it could be a customer’s actual colocation space where they’re managing themselves for workloads and that type of thing, as well as having maybe a Microsoft Azure presence with their Microsoft three sixty five, Entre ID, all those key things that are in the Microsoft space.
So those two things blended together, public cloud and private cloud, all for that multi cloud management and governance. Again, cloud migration is a big cloud migration and repatriation. So what that means is loads that were up in the in the public clouds, they’re bringing some of that back to a private cloud solution that goes right hand in hand with that multi cloud. And then the last thing here, and I’ll kick it over to Mike on this first point, FinOps.
So the financial review of what you have in those public clouds from a licensing perspective, from a usage perspective, how can you leverage that with your customers as a purchasing driver? So taking some of that savings and leveraging it elsewhere in in a cloud spend. They’re already spending that money, so repurposing it elsewhere to to utilize that. Mike, what are your thoughts?
Yeah. And I I gave this feedback a little bit earlier, like, what’s a good door opener? And it’s not I’m here to sell you services. I’m not here to you know, what’s keeping you up at night? Are you part of the digital transformation? I think some of those statements are are a little a little old, and you want to be a little bit fresher when you’re starting to go into these things. So I think using words like strategy, like, is your is your infrastructure strategy working for you?
And wait for a response. Well, I I a lot of the time, they’re gonna be like, I don’t know. Are you getting a good value for the money you’re investing into your IT?
Lot of the times, they’re gonna say, like, I’m not really sure. So I think the spin ops fits perfectly in this for SMB as well as enterprises. Look. You’re spending x amount of money every single month. Is there a value to that?
And if you don’t know, then let me help you. We can bring in different options to analyze your entire environment. Look at that spend. Look at the utilization.
See if there’s any rogue servers out there that got left behind by engineering that are costing your company money. Like, the FinOps package that it offers is it’s an amazing value because anything to do with financials within an organization is is uber important. And if you can get ahold of some of the infrastructure and start taking a look at that oh, yeah. By the way, what if we moved into a technology expense management and we just shifted to look at, are you spending too much over here for your phones?
How do your contracts look like for your circuits? Right? It just kind of is a stepping stone and a kickoff spot to all of these other elements within the business. But FinOps has been really popular.
It is non confrontational. It’s something where you’re offering to analyze their environment. And guess what? At the end of the day, if they’re perfect, and no company is typically perfect, you made a connection, you provided a value for free, and you say you’re looking really good.
Now they have peace of mind. The next time someone asks, are you getting a value out of your spend? You can say yes. And then they’re gonna think about you for that next project, whatever that may be.
So it’s it’s really a fantastic and more and more of our suppliers are starting to offer some form of this, whether it be a turnkey package and they take care of a lot of this for them automatically, or it’s just a window into their environment and they can log in to a portal and they can see green, yellow, and red. Right?
Yep.
Yeah. I think that’s that’s a key factor, and that’s why it’s number one on the list here is that FinOps conversation, and we have multiple suppliers. Again, leverage the hub to to dig into that, leverage the SE team, leverage your PDM as well. So your partner development manager that you are all aligned with can help pull this information in for you and say, hey. You know, let’s get a call set up with with your regional solutions engineer. Let’s get a call set up with, you know, those suppliers that you’re interested in. Let me help you find your way through the hub and figure out what we need to talk to and who we need to talk to.
The role that cares most about FinOps is typically the CFO. So I know Mark just put that in the chat. So the CFO typically is driving that because it’s all about financial. It’s all about the bottom line.
So and then CTO is gonna dovetail right off of that because that CTO role is gonna look to the CFO to approve budgets and look at look at where the spend is happening. And if they can work together, it’s it’s a it’s a huge win across the board. So as we look at the data center and colo as the next one here, consolidation and hybrid cloud, I know we touched on multi cloud. Hybrid cloud is is essentially a a reiteration of that, but it’s it’s the day to day practice of leveraging that multi cloud solution.
So the hybrid cloud is typically day to day applications that are residing in a private cloud. And then a lot of your other applications that are whether it’s just storage, etcetera, up in in a public cloud solution up there used as needed.
Again, or it’s a it’s totally a cloud based application like a Microsoft three sixty five or something like that that resides in the public cloud.
I’m gonna let you kinda jump in. Mike has has been promoted into a role that oversees all of our data center and colo facilities and suppliers. So this is really Mike’s background. So, Mike, I’m gonna let you really run with this point two here because it’s it’s what you know and love. So tell us about your thoughts for twenty twenty six in this in this section.
Yeah. I think we really saw the fruits of our labor in the second half of twenty twenty five really pop in beginning of twenty twenty six.
Probably some of the largest data center deals that we have done really came in at the beginning of the year in January, and that is just because we have more of our TAs that are going out and just simply asking the question about facilities. And that could be a simple question as, hey. I currently know you have you know, we’re talking about IT and security. You told me you have in two thousand servers. Where do you keep those?
Oh, we keep we keep them at one of our facilities that we have it all built out. Is that is that been reliable for you? Has that been any keeping people up at night because it’s going down? Have you considered moving that to a purpose built facility? And they may say, we don’t know. We how much does it cost? What does that look like?
That leads us into having a business conversation into a technical conversation. How much space do they need? How much power do they need? And let’s turn that into an opportunity.
And at the end, at the end of the day, if they don’t buy anything, you’ve got that goodwill effort that you put in. So the next time that they’re opening up a branch office in Houston and they don’t have a facility in Houston, hey. We need to put two hundred servers in Houston. Can you help us?
And that is kind of impetus to get over to that next one and the next one and the next one. Very much the same caliber of of growth within the data center space. If someone I I I was part of this opportunity that sold a online gaming company that one cabinet, and it was, like, fifteen hundred bucks, and they didn’t know how they’re gonna pay for it. We have since sold them data centers behind that one first cabinet deal.
They’re still one of our active customers today with one of our TAs that’s doing very, very well because now they know what these opportunities look like. They know what that buying persona is and how to get to the decision makers to sell these facilities. We are getting single cabs. We are getting hundred kilowatts, two hundred kilowatts, four hundred kilowatts.
We have a five megawatt active opportunity that’s at red lines. We have a twenty megawatt opportunity that is in negotiations for pricing. These are very large, life changing opportunities for our TAs. And, again, it’s a very sticky solution.
When they move in, they rarely move out. And if if it’s getting to a point they’re moving out, it’s maybe because they’re growing and there’s not enough space. So, again, great opportunity to move forward. We have approximately thirty different data center colo suppliers in the portfolio that do it in some way somehow.
We’re looking to add more consistently as we get introduced to them. We are bringing those on board quickly so we can start selling them. If you’re going to a far out location, there’s not any representation from a a Telarus approved supplier. Fine.
Let me know the market. I will find us a supplier, and we will put that deal together quickly based on your opportunity. So data center near and dear, again, not not a secret here. We’re trying to double that number by helping everybody on this call get comfortable with asking those questions and getting involved in those types of opportunities.
So please lean on us so we can help you.
Great.
So, again, kind of hitting the the secondary or the last point here, is AI and machine learning. Ai is is still a major talk track. Your customers still want to talk about it. It’s the number one driving conversation to to just discuss technology with with customers right now. And it’s gonna continue this year and next year, and we’re gonna have that conversation time and time again. And I know it gets frustrating for some of us to really talk about AI and what really is AI versus, you know, maybe RPA or something like that from from years ago.
One of the key things I think that we’re going to see in the next two years is that the change and that whole agentic AI conversation and and where we’re able sell artificial intelligence is gonna go from a plan to actual implementation. We have product sets that are out there in the CX space right now that are very well established and productized and all of that.
On our side of things, on the cloud side, is is the second largest market for artificial intelligence, not from necessarily purely from the data storage side and data readiness and all that type of thing, but actual custom LLM builds. You’ve heard me talk about it. You’re gonna hear myself and Sam, talking about it across the country this year in AI workshops. We want to help you position yourselves as TAs to have that conversation and, again, help guide your customers to the right solution.
Not something that is is going to just check a box quickly for them, but something that’s gonna solve some issues. And the key to all of that is starting small. So with that being said, the AI machine learning will will hit this quickly. But AI platform build outs, AI infrastructure, and GPU compute, I wanna pause there very quickly because Mike and I both have some some good things to to mention about this.
We have companies that offer GPU as a service. We’re getting more and more traction in those offerings. And what’s happening is is that companies that are looking to develop artificial intelligence, roll it out, do q and a testing, do all that type of thing, is they’re leveraging those GPU as a service, suppliers that can offer those NVIDIA chips, offer those things that they can’t get their hands on.
One thing that astounded me in having some conversations with our suppliers over the past couple of months here is all of all globally of the twenty twenty six chipsets, RAM, etcetera, is already spoken for around the world, and that’s gonna be a big thing. So you’re gonna have to begin to leverage and help guide your your customers to some of these as a service type of of suppliers to really gain that. What are your thoughts on that, Mike?
Yeah. I think it’s a whole spectrum on the AI side. People probably sick of hearing it, but it’s it’s really just in its infancy infancy, in my opinion. Yep.
The the first thing like, let’s let’s talk really basic. The first opener is, what is your AI strategy? What are you doing to address any concerns that have to do with AI? And then stop talking.
Listen for a response. We can address everything from that particular level and have that conversation with them. So when their leadership comes, their stakeholders have a meeting with them, anybody wants to talk about it. What’s our AI strategy?
They’re going to know, and there’s huge value to that. Now will an opportunity immediately show itself? Probably won’t present itself right away because these are ongoing conversations. There are so many different routes to take to get to these particular endpoints that we have to simplify.
We have to engage with them more. We have to figure out things. We have to find out what’s commercially available. Are they doing something that’s unique and they wanna create a business off of that?
Are they looking for specific things that may already be packaged with, security as a service? Those are the things that we need to go through and help solve for because at every one of those touch points, there’s something that we can do to help. And if you’re empowering your contacts, your clients to be able to answer these simple questions about their security strategy, their infrastructure strategy, their, their AI strategy so they can have those conversations moving forward, they’re gonna start leaning on you more and more. They’re going to bring you in earlier.
They’re gonna wanna have conversations about something that they just heard from their leadership and say, how could we address this as a team? Because you’ve already proven to yourself that you are knowledge transfer based. You learn all of these things. You’re involved with these conversations, and they pick up on that, and then they move forward with confidence.
So when it comes to the AI, just know there’s really nothing in the AI space that we can’t touch.
A lot of these bigger colo deals that we’re doing, we I don’t wanna say we have lucky TAs, but they have positioned themselves to be the go to to help find these patches of power where then they can expand and or build their own platforms, and they’re really large opportunities.
The others the other side of it is that’s making the data center space a little bit more competitive. So you kind of wanna see if this is really the best path forward because it may not be a sale for two years because that’s what it’ll take to build out. But, again, we have fifty megawatt facilities coming on board. We have sixty watt.
The power is out there. Let’s have those conversations. It all stems from having the biz business conversation around in the AI space, what’s your initiatives for twenty twenty six? Listen to what they have to say, and I I bet you a lot of the times, like, we don’t know what is in the market.
We don’t know what’s available. We don’t know how it can help us.
And that’s really the opportunity for us to be pulled in as an engineer and have those conversations, and we will find an answer for them.
Yep.
Yeah. Chandler, you wanna go to the next slide, please?
So something that’s near and dear to my heart, and you all have heard me time and time again talking about this, is VMware. Well, guess what? The conversations, and I titled this on purpose, the end is near, finally, because we have talked about it for years. Again, you’ve heard me.
You’ve heard Mike. You’ve heard the the solutions engineering team. All of that talk about VMware and where this is going. When Broadcom bought VMware, it was a huge emotional response to most customers of, what do you mean I’m gonna be paying four hundred percent more for licenses that have that I’ve had a fixed cost on for years?
Then they kind of took a step back and said, yeah. I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet, so I’m just gonna extend my licensing, give myself time to decide, and let’s figure it out from there. Well, guess what? Broadcom has put a deadline out there.
It is October of twenty twenty seven, and that is a final drop dead date for VMware users. They’re either going to need to convert to VCF nine, or they’re going to have to figure out in the very, very near future, probably within the next six months or less, of whether they’re gonna move off of their current VMware and to a competitor. And whether that’s Nutanix, whether that’s Openstacks, Proxmox, all of that type of thing, we have that all broken down in a one page, easy to read. Here’s the solution.
You wanna stay with VMware and migrate and get yourself established for this impending change that is not going to to to get kicked down the road any further in October, or do you wanna pull the plug and begin a transition to another platform? And what does that look like? And what are the resources there to help you through that?
This is something that is is now. This is something that you can seize on now. We have the expertise in house here with the with the SE team to have this discussion to point you to the absolute best suppliers out there in the marketplace, and either help that transition to a new platform or do the like for like transition and leverage bridge licensing and do all that type of thing to give your customer the best experience to transition off of their prem and onto a a managed cloud provider for this. So one of the key things I think that that we wanna focus on in the in the first six months of this year is how can we help your customers get this get this get this checked off their list, get these projects moving forward and committed to, and then go from there. Mike, what do you think?
It’s it’s October twenty twenty seven seems like forever away, but it is not. And these these things take time, especially for larger customers. The migration, just the planning takes time. So you have a a I don’t know what I’m gonna do educational phase.
Okay. And I I know what I’m going to do. So then you have a planning phase of migrations, and then you have right. You get that conversation started now so you can present those options to them based on their timelines.
This is really gonna hit some people hard. A lot of customers are saying, you know what? We’re getting hit four hundred, five hundred percent bigger bill, but VMware is we know VMware. We have experts on VMware.
Well, guess what? We’re not throwing that out the door, but VCF nine is a material change from how they do things today. It will be entirely different the way that it’s orchestrated, the way that it’s configured, the way that it runs. Now it’s trying to keep up with the times by making it more integrated to hyperscalers, make it more single pane of glass for management.
So people will get the hang of it, and it it’s not gonna go away. But guess what? We have our cloud service providers that have been doing this for years and years and years.
You go from being a curator of your of your servers and caring for them and feeding for them feeding them to actually going and just focusing on the applications, focusing on your workloads, focusing on revenue generating operations for the company rather than a server slashing, or we have to renew our VMware.
Right? There are a million things that they have to deal with when it’s in their own control.
I think this VCF nine is gonna be good for our environment because it’s down the road, and telling someone to give up on a large investment of servers that they just made a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, it’s a tough conversation, and they’re not gonna move.
But next time you have that conversation with them, you say, look. You don’t have to pull the trigger now, but in two years, this is the road that you’re gonna have to go down. Let’s start talking about potentially a a cloud solution so that we can migrate and you can just get out of this world entirely. So I think that the VMware conversation is still alive. It’s strong, and VCF nine is helping us to perpetuate our idea of what a cloud solution should look like rather than keeping it in the storage closet and hoping for the best with support.
You yeah. And and I appreciate that perspective, Mike, because I’m I’m watching the chat here, and you will see some very tailored VMware conversations that we are putting out. There was a a blog that was listed here that that I did a little while ago.
I some self list there’s some, some self, whatever promotion here for myself. I I did a a channel vision article that drops the end of this week on specifically on VMware and where that’s going and what’s happening with that.
This is something that we need to seize on this year because next year, essentially, it’s gone.
It there is no more, hey. We’ll have this conversation again in twenty twenty seven. Chad, I’m sick of hearing you talk about VMware for the past two and a half years. What’s really gonna happen here?
This is it. So, again, we will have some some very tailored stuff. We will gladly, again, have listings, and we have this the the one pager that we’ve put together of all of our suppliers that touch everything from VMware to all the alternatives out there that we’re happy to share with you as well. So I’ll make sure that that goes out with this deck later after the call here.
So so one of the chat one of the chat questions really quick is who’s best at doing VMware?
Well, Broadcom made it hell for a lot of suppliers and kicked a lot of suppliers out of their program. If you’re not a Pinnacle approved partner, then you are, by Broadcom’s eyes, not a legitimate business running their VMware cloud practice. And we have I believe we have fourteen worldwide. We have seven of them in our portfolio.
I might have that number wrong, but we have a lot of options, and they can do a lot of things. Broadcom also used to allow these Pinnacle partners to resell their VCF licensing. That has since also gone away. They cannot sell VCF licensing for on prem equipment any longer.
The VCF that they have to buy has to be workloads in their own multitenant cloud.
So this they’re really trying to cut the knees off of people trying to round them go round them for this. But, you know, again, this creates opportunity, and we have those resources in the portfolio currently that can satisfy.
Agreed. So I’m going to skip the last couple of slides because it’s gonna go into AI, and I think we can do that in on a later call. I wanna switch over to some q and a here to see some additional questions that that continue to to pop up here on the cloud side of things. So I know Cassandra is is joining us back again here to to kinda help through this. One of the key things that was early in the conversation that I wanna go back to is a couple of of the TAs in the chat were asking, asking, how do we open the door for a cloud conversation? And I wanna take that down to one of the simplest conversations that you can utilize if you’re brand new to cloud and you’re new to this whole transitioning away from selling just circuits and and UCaaS seats of phones and that type of thing, is have the conversation with your customer. Do you utilize Microsoft three sixty five?
Ninety percent of the time, the answer will be yes. We use that for email. We use it for OneDrive. We use it for Teams, whatever that may be.
We think that one of the key things is getting that yes answer, and then the the follow-up question is, great. How do you back that up?
Oh, well, that’s a part of the Microsoft contract. No. It’s not. And that’s one of the things that is out there, and it’s replicated not only, on the Microsoft side, but we have suppliers that can do backup, not just for Microsoft, but for everything from Salesforce to Box dot com to all these other software as a service that your your customers are utilizing, especially in the SMB and mid market space, that are not backed up.
There’s just retention policies that are holding on to that information. There’s no actual backup of that. So it’s a very easy conversation to start with and begin that cloud journey. And, again, once you get some answers back, the follow-up is, I I have I have an engineer that works with me.
I’d love to bring them on a call. Can are you okay if we set up a call and have that conversation and go a little bit deeper into this?
It pulls you out of the conversation to have to be the technical expert. And now you’re bringing in an expert alongside of you to have that conversation that you don’t have to worry about stumbling over something or misspeaking on something like that. It’s a great way to open the door and begin that cloud journey with your customer and help them figure out what’s gonna be a fit.
I do like this question that just was posted, but how best can we identify if a customer has any VMware?
That’s gonna be based off of the IT director. So that’s gonna be a conversation, whether or not they’re using VMware in in their stack internally. That’s something that they should know. The IT director should know or the CIO, CTO, etcetera.
You know, it’s something that that they would be utilizing each and every day to know whether or not they’re they have it or not. Mike?
I I think a leading question would be how has the the acquisition that Broadcom made of VMware impacting your business?
How has the Broadcom your relationship with Broadcom impacted the business? And if they say and and they’ll know what platform they use, they’ll say, we were unscathed. We have all of our workloads in Azure. Right?
Or they’re like, it’s driving us crazy. We have a year left on our contract. We don’t know what we’re going to do next. There could be a number of different responses to that, but how has the Broadcom relationship affected your business?
Yep. Yep.
By the way, they don’t say they’re working on VMware. There’s still tons of opportunity there. There was another question about if it’s a they’ll they’ll say we’re a a cloud first organization. We only have SaaS applications.
Is there an opportunity there? Yeah. There’s absolutely an opportunity there. If you have SaaS applications, that means you have a lot of endpoints floating out there.
And how are they securing those endpoints? It’s not necessarily infrastructure conversation, but it’s a security conversation. Let’s get those locked up. If they’re using GPT or other LLMs, how are they protecting their data from getting populated into the the general AI platform?
Right? There’s there’s a solution for that. There’s things that we can do.
So, yes, even if they’re SaaS only. Even if they’re only server huggers and they only want to do everything themselves, there’s still opportunity there. It’s very difficult to hire these qualified engineers to go work for these IT teams so they can buy that as a service, perhaps.
The conversation Scott just posted in there, you should have these conversation starters in a document. We are, and and we do. Some of them, we are collating those as well to add to that. It’s part of the Telarus University to help you through selling, opening doors, all that type of thing.
So there’s some of that in place now, and we are continuing to work alongside of our education team internally to build those out and give you all those reference points. And, again, I would encourage you to look at some of the live events that are gonna be in your areas too because all of the training that we’re going into this year in live events will have that a part of it. What are the door opener questions? What are the what are the one to three to five questions that can guide you through an AI conversation, a cloud conversation, a CX conversation?
All of that across the board.
Yeah. If I can promote Chad for just a second.
If you guys want to hear more about that, he’s actually doing a beyond the solution cloud, event that’s gonna be February twenty sixth. So it’s the day right after our Telarus Foundation. So he’s gonna be going over a lot of that and some insights and kind of real world scenarios that you can kind of put it to work immediately so you can utilize these things specifically while you were out talking to your customers about cloud.
Yeah. For sure. And and that’s the thing. And you’ll see all of the all of the other ASVPs.
So Graham and Sam Nelson and Samira We all have a basic plan to help open the door for something that is not a comfortable conversation for you all in the TA community. Community. The goal is to simplify it as much as possible, help you get in the door, and then leverage us and the team here from a technical standpoint to help guide you through that process. The first one’s gonna be a little clunky and awkward probably, as it always is, but then the next one’s easier, and the next one’s easier.
And then before you know it, now you have the ability to go into your entire customer base and have a conversation in and around cloud. And you remember, you need to start with cloud, not my other ASVPs. Start with cloud.
So, Chad, I I wanna there was one question that got posted at the very beginning of our webinar, and I don’t I know we briefly talked about it, but if you give bullet points of maybe the five biggest pain points clients are experiencing going into twenty twenty six in a quick, short, like, these are the things that they’re experiencing. Take these notes now. What would you suggest that those are?
Yeah. So I think one of the big things is is the spend even from an SMB side of things. And and I’ll defer to Mike here after I give Mike couple of points is Microsoft three sixty five. Do you have extra licenses?
Did you assign licenses to people that aren’t working there anymore? Like, just giving an an overview of what are you spending on your Microsoft licensing? Where are you buying it from? Is it direct from Microsoft?
Is it, an MSP or an IT vendor that you’re getting it from? What are you doing in and around that? That’s a very, very key one to look at because a lot of times there are extra licensing. Maybe the licensing levels that they bought are not right for the right sized for their business.
They could be doing something else that’s that either bundles more in that they’re they could utilize or all those types of things in and around that space are key.
And one of the one of the other things that a bunch of the TAs also addressed in that question is, what are your pain points? What do you struggle with?
Is it, you know, the owner’s brother in law’s friend that does the IT work for your company still, and you have that router that’s ten years old sitting on your hot water heater in the bathroom? Like, does it need to be looked at? What does your infrastructure look like in the office? All those types of things.
But hitting that question of what are your pain points? What do you struggle with from a technology standpoint on a day to day basis? Maybe you have a distributed workforce. Everybody’s remote, and there is no office anymore.
What does that look like? Is there struggles there? What can we help with in that aspect? So just asking that those two main door openers from my standpoint.
Mike, what are yours?
What do we have? Like, five hundred people in Telarus now? Five hundred resources at the fingertips of our TAs? They’re getting inundated.
Our your contacts are getting inundated with new technology. How does this new technology fit into our bigger, longer term plans as a business? They’re having to research this themselves. They probably have some insight, maybe some groups that they go to.
Maybe they have a wonderful TA that works with Telarus, they’re getting this fed to them. But I think the biggest is their head is spinning with running the business, keeping everything operational, keeping the spending in check, making sure governance is involved.
Maybe they’re having problems with hardware supply chain with the things that are going on. Their head is spinning. They want someone to come in and stop the top. They want to get level set, have a one resource so that they can get this information.
They can make decisions based on creditable feedback, talking to our suppliers who are living and breathing this every day. We do the same. But when it comes down to signing contracts, you’re gonna wanna talk to those suppliers to see how they’re gonna be supported, how they’re gonna take care of them. I always say you can’t judge a business by how they sell you something.
I judge a business by how they take that thing back. Right? You said that these shoes would feel great on my feet. They do not.
If they don’t wanna take they’ll give you, like, no return policy. That is not a credible business. Right? We work with suppliers that will make it right.
They will fix it. They will do what they say they’re going to do, and that’s why they’re in the portfolio. A customer or client direct, they don’t have that benefit. They are just a customer signing a contract with nobody looking out for them except for themselves.
And so we get these luckily, if you’re lucky to have a c level conversation, that guy is scared. He’s scared that he’s gonna make the wrong buying decision. He’s gonna go with the wrong technology, and his bud is on the line for that decision.
We bring him a mountain of information that he can fall back on, and he’ll know, and he’ll sleep better at night, that those things are going to be taken care of. He did not buy a lemon.
Wonderful. That was that was an excellent answer, Mike. And I hate to cut anything off. We’re we’re we’re getting right to the end, and I know everyone’s about to drop here in about three minutes. Is there any way that folks can get ahold of you guys, or who should they talk to if they have additional questions for after this webinar?
Yeah. So the the key to get a hold of us is is to go through your partner development manager. They can rally the troops. They’re gonna introduce you to the regional people that you can actually see and go to lunch with and and mingle with.
Myself. You know, you’re welcome to reach out to me via email. I’m on the road for the next eight weeks. So I will I will get back to you, but it may be a little delayed.
But there’s there’s a lot of travel that I do and and the ASVPs do, the advanced solution VPs travel all over the country to do these in person learnings and to do that kind of stuff. Mike is on the West Coast. We have again, we have three new, actually, four new SEs that we we have brought on board in the last couple of months here. All longtime veterans of the industry.
They come in, highly accredited, and and they’re willing to jump in and start working. So there’s a whole group of them, and we wanna be the best that we can be and bring the right people to the table. So start with your partner development manager.
They’ll bring in the right resources, and then we can we can help grow it from there. So we’re happy to get involved and go as deep and wide as we can.
Awesome. Thank you, Chad. Thank you, Mike, so much again for being with us and for really for such a great presentation talking about cloud.