Ep.170- How Licensing Rules the Game—Even When You Don’t See it's Adjacent Reach w/ Chad Muckenfuss
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Telarus Studio (00:00)
Welcome to the podcast 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 Biz Tech.
Hey everybody, welcome back. We’re here talking about a cool new topic we haven’t talked a lot about in the past, at least from a dedicated perspective. We’re talking about how licensing rules the game even when you don’t see its adjacent reach. Back with us today, back from episode 118, Mr. Chad Muckenfuss, Regional Engineer, Cloud Architect for Telarus Welcome back on, man.
Chad Muckenfuss (00:35)
Thanks for having me back.
Telarus Studio (00:38)
Love it. ⁓ If anybody hasn’t seen your episode 118, we talked a lot about your background. We’re not going to go into background today, but I would encourage everybody to go back and listen to that. It was a lot about managed services as well, so it’s kind of an extension of that track. ⁓ Maybe kick us off with, you’ve grown up in this kind of regional engineering role, newly minted last year into this kind of hybrid cloud architect for the East also.
⁓ Talk to us a little bit about what’s what’s been the biggest evolution in your role or your mindset since some of these changes.
Chad Muckenfuss (01:16)
Yeah, I think one of the biggest things for me has been leaning more and more on the overall team as a whole, because we’re a whole lot smarter as a group than we are individually. And I’ve come to learn that I, lot of my career, I’ve worked kind of as a lone wolf type of thing. Everything from, you know, the rainmaker type model to ⁓ building an engineering team from the ground up in the past. And it’s always been about.
You know me and what can I do and how can I better myself? And what I’ve learned here over the past two years has been, you know what? we are collectively way smarter together and being able to leverage a different take on, on an opportunity, a different viewpoint on a partner, all those types of things have really come together and, and helped me kind of make that next step up into that architect role where I know I’m not alone.
I know I’ve got people to ask questions to, even if I’m gonna get hassled a little bit by my teammates, which is fine. It’s been a really good growth period over the last two years for sure.
Telarus Studio (02:25)
So let’s think about this in your role, I guess, look at it through your lens, right? As this architect engineer, you’re working across a lot of these platforms, right? You’re seeing SAP, you’re seeing customers have Oracle, Private Cloud, Public Cloud. What’s your edge when you step into those environments and kind of how do you help differentiate that approach?
Chad Muckenfuss (02:48)
One of the big things for me ⁓ really has been being involved in so many different opportunities and seeing, coming in, I had worked on a couple of ERP opportunities total over my prior career. And coming here, I’ve probably done eight or 10. So now stepping into an ERP and understanding the nuances and the differences between each different platform from Sage to… ⁓
Oracle NetSuite to Microsoft Dynamics and understanding that Dynamics has a couple of different parts to it. You’ve got the CRM side, you’ve got the traditional ERP side, and all of those things kind of play together and having real world examples now to talk to not only the partners about, but also their customers and say, what are you looking to accomplish? Because
having experience in them, albeit just from a higher level, you can talk to which ones are going to fit. Is it more of a finance-focused ERP, or is it something where they really need something that’s going to fit into the logistics world, or how does that really fit their business model as a customer? It’s been a huge help, and we see so many different opportunities on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis here that it really helps me.
sharpen my edge to say, you know what? I’ve had this before. I’ve had this question before. Here’s where we can go in. Here’s where we can help. And let’s have a detailed discussion. And it also helps in knowing on the supplier side, too, like, hey, these people do a really good job at Oracle NetSuite. These do a really good job at Sage or one of the other ones. So let’s pivot and make sure that we’re bringing the right players to the table quicker.
than having this whole vetting process and going through a bunch of calls and all that kind of thing. And the same thing is true with industry changes. So you mentioned, you know, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. I use this in the talk tracks that I’m now a part of with the cloud side of things. And there was a big push as you’re well aware on the COVID side of things. Hey, let’s get everything up into the public clouds. We’re using Azure, we’re using AWS.
GCP was a small part of that. Now it’s growing substantially. Everything’s public cloud. Well, then cost overrides happen because nobody’s paying attention to what’s going on with the cloud spend. And then all of a sudden a CFO gets a hold of that and it’s like, my God, what am I spending all this money on? I need to pull this back. I need to get a better handle on it. So then CIOs are engaged and assessments are done. And what I’m seeing in the mid market and enterprise space is a transition back to a hybrid cloud model.
Telarus Studio (05:13)
Thank you.
Chad Muckenfuss (05:32)
So you’ve got that private cloud solution that they’re pulling things back to for all of the daily applications that are being utilized on a regular basis. And then leveraging the public cloud for what it’s really good for is storage. ⁓ Obviously, Microsoft has a 365 model. So a SharePoint, a OneDrive, all that kind of stuff is important. But the daily applications, anything that’s driving, especially in manufacturing, really works.
better in a private cloud, public cloud hybrid model. those are kind of the key things that I see on a regular basis from a couple of different aspects there.
Telarus Studio (06:11)
So let’s think about throughout your career, ⁓ hard lessons, right? Give us a, what’s a hard lesson that we haven’t heard yet? Maybe you’ve learned yourself the hard way, you had a great mentor that helped you avoid some of these things. Just give us a good lesson learned.
Chad Muckenfuss (06:29)
⁓ I think one of the key things that I’ve learned is take your time, ⁓ in making decisions in, and trust the process. I know that sounds trite and a little overused probably. I’ve made some, some quick decisions in the past in my career to jump from one company to another. ⁓ and I should have taken some time, you know, joining, joining a startup company that ended.
miserably was a great learning process, but when you’re in the midst of that it kind of sucks. you know, learning to just kind of take a step back, talk to people that you know and trust, ⁓ whether it’s family, whether it’s friends, outside of the industry that you’re in. ⁓ Because they see things way differently than I do and my peers in the industry do because they’re looking at it from really not understanding what I do. I mean, you talk to my family now.
I have no clue what I do. ⁓
Telarus Studio (07:28)
Nobody knows. We’re 15, 10,
15, 20 years in and nobody knows.
Chad Muckenfuss (07:33)
Yeah. But with that being said, again, those lessons learned are going to stick with me for my entire career. They’ve helped me grow. And I think specifically here at Telarus it’s really been, ⁓ a lot of people are willing to help you along that journey and kind of be a sounding board and be
something that is not typical in an organization this size. And I really appreciate that. The culture is really what drew me here. And I’m very thankful that I’m here. And I’m thankful also for the struggles that got me to the place that gets me here too. you know, there’s some pretty bad stories out there of what had happened prior in my career, but I’ve overcome all of them, you know, and really have.
had the people to lean on both from a personal side and a professional side to get me through that. ⁓ again, taking a step back, take the time, make sure it’s the right decision, and then make the move forward, which has been kind of the best words of wisdom I can offer.
Telarus Studio (08:40)
Love it. All right, let’s think about, as we get into this licensing angle a little further, let’s take us back to maybe some of the earliest conversations, right? Think back, these discovery calls when licensing would come up, what was that like? I remember early on just going, ⁓ know, partners bring us all kinds of stuff and we want to be able to sell everything. walk us through what that was like early on and how did you uncover some of those needs and what did you do?
Chad Muckenfuss (09:08)
Well, most of the time in a licensing only model, especially in a, in a TSD situation like we’re in, it’s, it’s minimal compensation. You know, it’s, it’s a, either a one and done from a licensing, you know, from a commission standpoint on licensing, or it is a, you know, a pay as you go type model sometimes on the smaller scale. I think some of the things that I learned real quick was to get an accurate user count because typically
⁓ customers are initially overinflating it. They want to make their company seem bigger and better than it is a lot of times and not that it’s a whatever, but just getting those accurate. Counts and understanding what the customer’s needs are again, starting from an inside solution engineer role, and then moving all the way up over the past couple of years here.
talking with those five and 10 person companies and understanding like, hey, we’ve got a need, but I don’t have the money to necessarily spend for an E5 license for everybody here. ⁓ know, Susie or Mike, who’s going to be answering the phone is not, doesn’t need an E5 license, but the three key people in the business do and balancing that out, understanding that the licensing structure specifically within Microsoft a lot of times.
has a lot of nuances to it. And it changes on a regular basis. So keeping up with that, I’ve got a few really cool websites that are always updating what the licensing looks like and how it matches. And it’s a side-by-side comparison. Small business has business licenses that they can use versus enterprise licensing and understanding the difference in that. And I think going through the Azure 900 certification and
understanding the Microsoft licensing structure kind of gave me the baseline of, Hey, here’s what’s needed. And that easily translates. It’s called something else, you know, in other platforms, but the idea of it is still there. So understanding the needs of the customer though is key and understanding where the different employees fit in the SMB side is really important also. And then you just grow with that. So now in a, in a cloud architect standpoint,
There’s really, really, really good licensing opportunities, but it’s just exponentially larger. We’re talking tens of thousands of licenses in some cases on international companies that are fortune 500, et cetera. That’s a much different conversation than, than, you know, Jim Smith’s CPA firm, ⁓ that, that has five or 10. So it’s just the scale is so dramatically different and all of those opportunities come into us here. So being able to balance them back and forth is,
Telarus Studio (11:44)
Yeah.
Chad Muckenfuss (11:56)
has been good. I’ve learned a lot.
Telarus Studio (11:58)
So let’s think about now as the portfolio of vendors has evolved, right? mean, you flashback 10 years ago, we had probably a tenth or less of the providers that we have now, right? So the portfolio of suppliers has expanded, products has expanded, and we’ve finally gotten some of these things that we’ve wanted for years. So if you think about, when did you realize, I guess, that
This was just the start of a broader conversation that we could grab that, we could grab that, we could grab that. Walk us through kind of how that approaches now.
Chad Muckenfuss (12:30)
Yeah, I think now ⁓ having such a wide variety of suppliers in the portfolio and having a significantly larger group of managed service providers, cloud service providers, people that play in the licensing space ⁓ are really key to growing or we like the phrase land and expand because what happens is we have the licensing opportunity is an easy in.
But again, the compensation is not necessarily the best for the partner or for us in that matter, but it opens the door to your point for what are you doing for backup, disaster recovery? How does this all fit together? Do you realize that Microsoft doesn’t back anything up, that it’s just a retention policy? So having something that backs up your email, your OneDrive, all of those types of things, that conversation goes from a single thread to multi-threaded very quickly and very easily.
Because whether they realize, whether the customer realizes it or not, they need those other services. They need those additional services. And they’re typically coming in thinking about, yeah, I got to renew this license, but it’s not happening ⁓ the way that I want to see it. And then having a broader conversation over the course of 45 minutes to an hour. And then walking away going, wow, there’s a lot to think about here. This isn’t just, yeah, yes or no, do I renew with X company for my licensing?
This is yes for licensing and what do I have to do now for disaster recovery backup? Do I want to move to a virtual desktop model? Do I want to look at, you know, ⁓ securing all of the endpoints and how do I manage all of that from a cybersecurity standpoint? What am I doing with my phones? Do I want that to be a part of the licensing renewal for Microsoft Teams? What do I do from the connectivity standpoint of all of my users? Is it something where
is traditional coax or fiber, or now am I looking at, maybe I just go completely wireless and use mobility from that side of things. So all of those come out of that conversation about license renewal.
Telarus Studio (14:46)
You know, I feel like we’re spoiled a little bit here. And what I mean by that is, to your earlier point of, we get to do so many of these deals and so many of these opportunities. We become so confident in a non-arrogant way that we just know that when we walk into a customer situation, there’s always a goldmine of opportunity there. And I think we go, ⁓ man, we five minutes into this and we go, I am not going to uncover all of this in an hour. Right? And you’d think,
Sometimes I don’t know what my talk track is gonna be, and you know, what are we gonna focus on, what’s this personality gonna be like? And you get into it five, 10 minutes in and you go, my gosh, there’s so many ways here that we can help. think maybe, is sometimes the hardest thing trying to boil down and focus everybody in? Like.
Chad Muckenfuss (15:33)
Yes. Yep. Yeah. And especially
myself, like I have to take it, take a pause and say, wow, there’s like 15 different things that we can help them with here. But, yeah, let me look at this email. What was I supposed to talk about? And, kind of pull back a little bit and then follow up with a partner after the fact and say, Hey, you know what? Let’s address the immediate needs here. But here’s the list of everything else that we can go back and talk about. Once we get these first couple of things addressed for them.
Telarus Studio (15:46)
Yeah.
Chad Muckenfuss (16:02)
And again, the partners love it too, because I just, prior to doing this recording, I was just on a call with a, with a newer partner. They’re scared to death to really talk about, and they admitted this to talk about anything outside of UC and contact center. That’s the world they know they’re comfortable with. And they said, well, how can we utilize you, meaning me and, the engineering team better? And I said, look, you don’t need to know anything other than asking the question to your.
to your customer saying, Hey, I know we’re talking about phones right now, but I’ve got a couple other things that I just want to mention. Do you have a cybersecurity posture for your company right now? Like what’s your plan for cybersecurity? Do you have anything that operates in the cloud or, or how do you handle all of the data? All those kinds of things, just very basic questions. And then the end to all of those questions is, do you mind if we set up a call with one of my engineering resources to have a discussion about some of those things?
outside of the phones and nine times out of ten, probably nine and a half times out of ten. It’s sure. Absolutely. I’d love to talk about that.
Telarus Studio (17:06)
Who turns that down?
Once you know it’s available, why do you turn it down? Why wouldn’t you? I just can’t imagine being a customer in 2025 trying to figure this out yourself. It’s so hard.
Chad Muckenfuss (17:21)
It is. And then you do the Google searches and then you’re bombarded with endless calls and endless just salespeople reaching out to you. Getting an agnostic, a truly agnostic approach to buying any type of technology or investing in any type of technology is really, I mean, it’s worth its weight in gold to customers because it’s just a huge time consumption for them that they don’t have the ability to do a lot of times.
Telarus Studio (17:48)
So let’s walk through a thread then. Let’s pull this up to an example of, okay, you walked in and the project started here. Maybe it was ERP, maybe it was infrastructure. And then how did you take that other places to security, CX, data, you know, where did you go and how?
Chad Muckenfuss (18:06)
Well, I’m to use an example that’s fairly recent within the past couple of months. ⁓ It actually started as a licensing, specifically licensing Microsoft opportunity. The customer was not happy. They were coming out of or wrapping up a Microsoft enterprise agreement and EA agreement as what that’s referred to. And they had several thousand licenses in place and it was all over the place. They didn’t like.
how Microsoft locked them in to not being able to adjust. They liked a, what’s called a cloud service or CSP model better, and it just fit their business model much better. So that’s where we started the conversation and we ended up about 45 days later, they signed off on a well into six figure licensing opportunity with additional managed services.
to be able to go in and come alongside their IT team now. And they have a whole backup and disaster recovery that’s going to be set up leveraging Microsoft Azure. ⁓ They’re doing from on-prem to full cloud-based ⁓ migration for AD. They’ve got all of these things coming on that they knew were there, but just didn’t, have the resources to do it, and, B, ⁓ didn’t really feel comfortable enough with their
knowledge internally on the IT team to be able to handle it. So we came alongside of them and we’re accomplishing all of that. Now what’s on the table is it’s kind of the reverse. UC is now on the table because they want to migrate to Teams. That’s a huge one. They have several thousand users all over the US and Canada and it’s much easier for them to manage a Teams instance than it will be for them to handle.
All different types of phone systems or a typical UC system with, hard, hardwired phones and all that. So they’re just moving pure teams, which is great. Cause again, multiple opportunities and it all goes hand in hand with the, with the licensing aspect of things that we started in the door. So I think that’s a great one because all that the partner was expecting to do was have a conversation in and around the licensing aspect. And now it comes back full circle. They’ve got managed services on top of it.
They’ve got ⁓ a DR ⁓ plan now for the customer and they’ve got UC contact center teed up for the future here before the end of the year. So it was a huge win all the way around for everybody. And I think, again, it was a simple conversation about licensing to start out.
Telarus Studio (20:49)
You know, ⁓ it’s a really great call out and I think maybe this is obvious to some, if not, you know, if I’m a newer partner and I’m thinking about that, right, maybe my vision right now is just how do I conquer this one thing that’s in front of me, right? And I’m gonna move from this, I’m gonna go to that, I’m gonna go to this, gonna go, I gotta build my business and I gotta grow. But my brain, for stuff like this, my brain kinda goes gantt, charty, and grid, and pipeline, and future opportunities, right? Like I can’t.
I can’t tell people enough, bring somebody from the team on, bring you on, have that conversation about what’s expected right now from a licensing perspective. That’s in your CRM, that’s on your project roadmap. Maybe that UC pieces right now, maybe it’s in nine months from now. So you have these cascading, these compounding effects of just a singular customer, but then you go knock down three, four, five, six doors like that.
And you just think about how this pipeline is just massively building so that in, you know, six, 12 to, you know, 18 months, you’ve got more business than you can even focus on. And your next worry is, my gosh, do I have to hire somebody now? Right. And then the commissions are flowing in. And so I think if you, if you stay focused on that, I love that. I’d love seeing that compounding effect, but also just, we know that we can turn one opportunity into three guaranteed every single time.
Chad Muckenfuss (22:15)
One of the cool things that I’ve gotten to do, especially this year, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the road in front of partners throughout the Northeast and Midwest. And one of the key things that we talk about is our swim lanes of technology here. We’ve got that single pager that’s the swim lanes of technology. For all of the ⁓ Northeast road shows that I’ve done, we laminate that. And then we talk about when you go and sit in front of your partner,
slide it across the table with an erasable marker and say, hey, this is kind of the landscape of all the things that I can offer as your technology advisor. Circle some of the things on here that are going to be a fit. And then let’s take a picture with our phones. And I’m going to be able to follow up with you here. And I have some engineering resources that can talk in depth about these opportunities, solutions, whatever it may be.
And then you know what? The, the TA takes that back, wipes it clean and does it again. Because the last thing a TA needs to hear or wants to hear from one of their customers is, ⁓ I didn’t know you did that. I bought here. I went to CDW. I did this. That’s, that’s a, that’s a huge loss. And so this helps eliminate that because it is a bit of an overwhelming document, but it gets the customer thinking and realizing like,
Telarus Studio (23:22)
breaks my heart.
Chad Muckenfuss (23:37)
Chad sitting in front of me here has all of this to offer. I should be working with him on all this stuff, not just this one small portion of what I’m talking to him about. So it’s really been a game changer for a lot of new partners. And I have the privilege of talking to a lot of them and helping them on board and going through a lot of ⁓ questions and answers and all of that. And it’s just been great to see them start, land their first deal with us, and then B, how does that grow? Can we help them grow it?
It’s a cool and exciting process.
Telarus Studio (24:10)
Do you feel, put you on the spot, guess, of statistics, 62 % of all stats are made up, but let’s work on one real quick. What percentage, when you’re sitting with a partner and a customer and that exercise happens, what percentage of end customers realize how much their TAs can really do for them?
What would you say?
Chad Muckenfuss (24:36)
I
think it’s typically, ⁓ I would say it’s between 60 and 65%, maybe a little bit more than that, maybe pushing towards 70. It’s a sliding scale though, because a lot of times in the SMB space and mid-market space, it’s a bit of an aha moment, but they still are gonna kind of pull back a little bit and go, well, I still use, and they have other friends or other people that sell them different parts of that.
As you go up market, so the larger mid market, and then you get into enterprise to them. I mean, it jumps to the 80, 80 plus percent because they don’t have the time to do it. Nor do they have the expertise to do it. And they’d much rather hand it off to somebody that’s that’s agnostic and has engineering resources and can do it all for them and just come back with. Here’s your three options. It’s it’s it’s significantly higher. The larger the company gets and the higher up the scale it goes, but
Even on a minimum, you’re 60, 65 % of the time you’re picking up something else out of that opportunity than what you initially went in for.
Telarus Studio (25:42)
Beautiful. ⁓ Let’s think about here, you know, this is about kind of staying adaptable, right? Let’s think about we’ve got everything’s moving fast. I like we say that on every episode because it’s just true and it gets more true over time. as the customer needs shift, the vendor models evolve, cost cutting, modernization, know, AI, you know, for the sake of cost cutting and who knows what the angle is. How do you keep how do you keep the process agile in these discoveries and not not have
too strict of an agenda as you’re walking in to still be kind of open-minded in this.
Chad Muckenfuss (26:18)
Well, for me, it’s, an interesting process because I rarely know anything more going into it. Then, Hey, here’s the customer. Here’s what they do. And this is what we need to lead the conversation with. And then it’s handed off to me to run with it. So I try and hit kind of the basics of all aspects of, a traditional technology stack within an organization. So you mentioned communications, you mentioned connectivity, you mentioned.
uh, cloud and you know, users as far as what hardware are they using? Are you, are you a PC shop? you a Mac shop? Are you leveraging 365? How many employees use it? All that kind of stuff. And it’s just kind of a general get to know the customer and what their tech stack looks like. And then from there, a lot of times, usually they’ll share openly, Hey, I’m really struggling with this. And that.
All of a sudden just takes a, a line in a different direction. Like, yeah, we can address the primary thing that you’ve talked about nine times out of 10, that thing, the TA is very comfortable with. So if it’s a TA that’s coming in, it’s comfortable with UC and CCAS. They’ve already had the conversation to kind of know where that’s going. I look at it from my standpoint of, yeah, let’s, let’s verify that no problem, but what else is there? So let’s have a conversation about their mindset on cloud.
Are they in it? Is it premise based? You know, based on your, if you’re manufacturing, Hey, do you need on-prem servers at your manufacturing sites? If so great. Can you leverage a private cloud that can provide that on-prem solution for you too? All those types of things, I think just begin to develop. And again, it goes back to the beginning of our conversation here, which is having a lot of these. mean, we’re in four or five, sometimes eight calls a day and.
we’re looking at all kinds of different verticals that we’re talking to. After years of doing that, you kind of get a mindset of, hey, you know what? ⁓ If it’s manufacturing, it’s going to have these things. And we’re only talking about this. So you begin to kind of build based on the specific vertical what’s needed. Same thing with like finance and banking versus PE and hedge funds. Like it’s two totally different worlds of finance and they want two totally different things. But again, it’s just
It’s time, it’s experience, and then it’s also listening to where the customer wants to go is the biggest key. If you’re not listening to what they’re saying and you’ve got this like narrow check, check, check, check, it’s not going to go anywhere. You’re going to get that information, but you’re never going to be able to get a broader picture of what the customer needs.
Telarus Studio (28:55)
Yeah.
So final thoughts then here as we think about the future of AI, evolving infrastructure, securing all that infrastructure, agentic workflows and things like that. I used all the buzzwords I possibly could right ⁓ there. What’s your advice to partners as they’re trying to open up those doors, start these conversations, anything different than kind of what you foundationally built on or where would you take us home here with?
Chad Muckenfuss (29:16)
That was good.
AI for me personally, I love it. ⁓ get a chance because of working here, I get a chance to see a lot of cutting edge, what’s happening. I get to talk about it regularly, not only within our engineering team here, but also what’s happening in the industry and what product sets are out there and based around it. I am pro AI. will say that and scream it from the mountaintops, but it’s a tool.
And you need to learn to utilize this tool, not be afraid of the tool and all of the opportunities that I get to talk about it. I leverage that. I use my kids as an example. I’ve got a 17 year old and a 14 year old. They use chat GPT. I’ve got my son now utilizing anthropic Claude and looking at llama and some of the other stuff out there. They’re embracing it as a tool and not being afraid of it and not using it for, I mean, they use it for goofy things too, but
as any kid would an adult to, but one of the key things is leveraging it, taking that information. And it’s no longer going to be a Google search as we move forward in time, it’s going to be, Hey, did you, did you run that through GPT? Did you, what, what did you get back from that? So that, that nomenclature that we have as a generation of, go Google the answer. That’s not going to be the case moving forward. And AI is moving and growing and learning so quickly.
that it would blow your mind how fast things are changing. And I think we’re just beginning from a, an overall consumer standpoint, we’re just beginning to see the, the, ⁓ aspects of what it’s going to affect. And it will literally touch, I think virtually every aspect of our lives moving forward over the next five years. That’s my prediction on AI. It’s, it’s changing. It’s learning quickly. It’s already digested everything that’s on the internet already. So.
Now it’s just going to continue to build off of that and get better and better and better. So ⁓ hopefully we don’t end up ⁓ in Terminator or something worse.
Telarus Studio (31:36)
yeah,
I know. Well, this is all simulation right now. Now, I like it. mean, I think the, I’m pro, pro, pro. ⁓ It seems like getting into these conversations with customers from an AI, know, licensing leads to co-pilot, leads to data readiness and purview and all of those things. And it seems like we’re really guiding this conversation as to what stage of this do you think you’re at? And the answer is, I didn’t even know there were stages. great, here.
here’s an AI readiness checklist, right? Let’s figure out where you’re at. And to your point, again, it’s let’s bring in resources to help figure out where you are, where you want to go. Some of these are very early conversations. Some of these are already closing. And it’s nice to see that only being a year or two into this, which is great. So it’s really pushing people to modernize faster because I think that people don’t want to be left in the dust from a competitive landscape perspective as far as, well, my competitor did this.
Chad Muckenfuss (32:06)
Yes.
Telarus Studio (32:35)
Those are angles to bring up in conversations to help people kind of raise the bar a little bit against their competitors.
Chad Muckenfuss (32:40)
I totally agree. And I think if you look at it from a standpoint of, know, we we’ve discussed internally about gamification and we can use that on a different one. you know, if my customer or excuse me, if my competition is utilizing this and I choose to hold back before I embrace it or I don’t embrace it at all. Like, do they do they win? Do I win? How does that look like there’s a lot of different angles in that in that aspect of things and saying, hey, you know what?
embracing it now, even if it’s on a basic level and begin to, to look at to your point, data readiness, data governance, having at least kind of the baseline so that you can eventually begin to layer on the AI that makes sense for your business. may not be a fit right now, but six months from now and probably less than a year from now, it will be. so utilize the time to get your data sets ready, get the governance in place that you need.
and begin to say, you know what? I’ve got a strong foundation now. Let’s go out and see what’s going to be the best fit for me in the AI space.
Telarus Studio (33:45)
Okay, my friend, that is where we wrap it up. Chad, appreciate you ⁓ coming back on, man. Talking about good stuff today, licensing and beyond.
Chad Muckenfuss (33:48)
All right.
I appreciate you on again and look forward to the next one.
Telarus Studio (33:56)
Love it, love it. All right, everybody, that wraps us up for today. As always, don’t forget wherever you’re coming to, Spotify coming from there, Apple Music, these drop every Wednesday. So be sure to go on and get that drop as soon as you can. So that wraps us up for today.
and this has been how licensing rules the game. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Till next time.
Chad Muckenfuss (34:19)
See y’all.