Ep.171-How Licensing Rules the Game—Even When You Don’t See Its Adjacent Reach- Ed Tybursky, Remend
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Transcript is auto-generated.
Josh Lupresto (00:01)
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success 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 got a cool topic for you today. We’re talking about licensing. We’re talking about infrastructure, all those things. Specifically, we’re talking about how licensing rules the game even when you don’t see its adjacent reach. And on with us today, we’ve got a man who I’ve known a long time in the space, Mr. Ed Tybursky of Remend welcome on, man.
Ed Tybursky (00:39)
Yeah, great to be here. Full circle, so to speak. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (00:42)
I know, crazy.
⁓ Let’s talk a little bit about, before we get into kind of the topic of the hour here, fill us in just a little bit about you. know, kind of give us your, you know, I’d like to hear everybody’s life path on this story, right? How did you get into this space? Were you always destined for tech? And then kind of walk us through a little bit about what got you into this and then we’ll get into Remind.
Ed Tybursky (01:05)
Yeah, it’s interesting. So no, probably like most people, I started this path in my life ⁓ in music. So I was a music theory and composition major that turned into law enforcement, which found myself becoming a programmer for a small actuary firm doing insurance software out of the Bay Area. you know, full circle, I think I’ve touched pretty much every industry that led me kind of into the voice and telecom area at Octel, Lucent. ⁓
in the room when they named Avaya. And I remember thinking, this VoIP thing is never going to take off. Just a full man’s game. And I went to print.com in the dot com era, but that lasted about a whole 90 days. So full circle, I would say. A little bit of everything in my career really focused kind of more on the software end from a development perspective. And then ended up at a small startup in the Bay Area called GoBeam, which
If you’re in the channel, if you’re in telecom, you’ve heard of GoBeam. They were one of the pioneer UC providers back in the early 2000s. Some familiar names in the ecosystem. Stayed there about five years through the Covad, not to be confused with COVID. ⁓ Yeah, the Covad acquisition, which I believe became Megapath to now Fusion Connect, some kind of way around that. then moved over into architecture and was really focused on infrastructure for about a decade at Wells Fargo.
Josh Lupresto (02:16)
Totally different.
Ed Tybursky (02:31)
through the Walkovia merger and kind of ended up through transition and faults and really kind of a bet in a way, meaning that I was more of a utility guy and then started focusing on licensing kind of right around circa 2008, mostly for friends and consulting firms and just kind of helping them figure out some of the pitfalls. Mostly when you’re working for a large enterprise, you’re finding yourselves in these conversations often. So it’s kind of a…
long road, but lot of dips and turns and here I am.
Josh Lupresto (03:03)
So I love the path. ⁓ Walk us through, guess, then, OK, who’s Remend, right? mean, you’re getting into some complex environments. You’re in SAP and Oracle and all these things. mean, what’s your edge when you walk into those? And I guess, you know, who is Remend for anybody that doesn’t know?
Ed Tybursky (03:22)
Yeah, so Remend is primarily a software advisory firm. So we focus on tier one publishers. So if you think tier one, you think SAP, you think Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, believe it or not, still a lot of IBM out there. What we do in the world of software is really think of it, and for your audience, think of it as TEM. So remove TEM and put in SAM, Software Asset Management. We help people understand their usage. We do a forensic audit on the usability of all of their entitlements. We look back.
at certain dates of time, we compare that to their entitlements. And then we tell them a story of kind of how they’re structured within their contract. So Remend is an independent firm. We’ve focused on not reselling. We focused on helping customers really understand the value of those entitlements. A lot of these contracts are legacy contracts, meaning that some, you know, we’ve seen contracts from the eighties, right? So the value of those assets, it’s kind of like commodity could be worth more, could be worth less. We help the customers determine that and then kind of
set them on a path to really understanding what the value of the software is and the opportunity to lower that cost.
Josh Lupresto (04:26)
love that such a such a different angle right I mean I don’t I don’t I don’t hear a lot of people coming at it kind of wedging in having a conversation like that so it’s got to be very well received on ⁓ my gosh finally somebody that understands this right that speaks our language
Ed Tybursky (04:40)
Yeah, one of the differentiators I would say for us, in particular around the space, that we’re not, these publishers aren’t bringing us business. We’re not on the hook in any type of compliance partnership with them and a lot of the major firms, particularly the big four, rely upon revenue, specifically from SAP and Oracle and a lot of these environments. So are you really getting kind of that independent technology advisory conversation happening with these large firms? So there is an opportunity.
you know, for us entering these conversations saying, look, we’re going to take an independent, holistical view. We’re motivated to help you save money. We’re not motivated to provide you with a bunch of implementation services that are correlating to our relationship with, or you will. So it’s a little bit of a different kind of niche there in our approach.
Josh Lupresto (05:20)
Yeah.
So take us back, through all this experience, I’d love to hear about the lessons that people have learned along the way, right? Whether we’ve stubbed our own toe or we’ve had a great mentor that we’ve been surrounded with, what’s a lesson that you learned that’s kind of stuck with you?
Ed Tybursky (05:42)
There’s a lot, right? So there’s a lot. mean, you and I are a lesson. We met what, 10 years ago or so, and it took me X amount of time for us to really start kind of gaining momentum in this pillar. I think the biggest lesson in my world, language matters. what I mean by that is that if a customer is under audit with a particular vendor, what we say can have dramatic effects to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. So some of the lessons you learn.
along the way is you flip up, you make mistakes, spend a lot more time listening versus kind of dictating. And then it kind of translates to some of the way that I’ve had mentors tell me some of the best opportunities come from listening. So the lessons I would say the biggest lesson I’ve learned is to listen more, to stop talking as much as I do because I love, we’re technicians, we just love to architect 24 7. ⁓ But sometimes that has gotten me in trouble, I would say long ago.
You you say a little too much, you give a little too much away, and then all of sudden, you know, things tend to walk away from you. So I think I really center on that. You know, obviously I’ve been in this field since the 90s. So there’s a, there’s a lot of little things that I could probably illustrate, but I would say, yeah, cornerstone around listening.
Josh Lupresto (06:57)
Fair. Okay, so let’s, before we kind of get into present day and start talking about like some of this, we’re talking a little bit about it, right? Some of this adjacent reach the licensing gives you. I mean, walk us back through early days discovery calls as you kind of got into this space. What were they like? What did you learn about uncovering needs? Like I think advisors love to hear how people uncovered and maybe walk us through what you did early and what you learned there.
Ed Tybursky (07:22)
Yeah, the earliest days were a little bit more reactive, right? So I think this is where kind of the markets have changed a little bit. So if you go back circa 2010-ish around that area, a lot of the inbound was very reactive. So I call it ambulance chasing, of like the lawyers waiting in the emergency room for their auto victim to come in, and they can make a ton of money. And there is a lot of money that happened in that. it was such a reactive, meaning that when you’re looking at publishers like Oracle, they’re so punitive to the customer.
So if there was a customer we had, they literally cure cancer. mean, that’s their business. They were looking at kind of a compliance situation of a million dollars. And when I explained to them that Oracle will take the million dollars in lieu of you curing cancer, it was a little bit of an eye awakening for them. And so in the early days, a lot of it was that. was really reactionary. So business was just coming. So it’s kind of like,
Who do I call? So we’re not Ghostbusters, but we are Remend, and they’re calling us, and we’re getting them out of these hurdles, and through a lot of remediation and consulting, and just how their view of software has happened. would say over today, things have changed a little bit. I know we’ll kind of get into that, or I can get into it now, but the market is shifting to more of folks looking at kind of a proactive approach, in particular in the economic climate. What is our future state going to look like?
In the licensing world, Oracle did a significant kind of, ⁓ or I would say unique, where 71 % of all infrastructure is still on-prem. We think cloud is this major transformative initiative that it’s all too late. We’re all too late to the game. But as of October, 71 % of all workloads are still on-prem. ⁓
Josh Lupresto (09:12)
Which is
crazy because coming fresh off of doing Google Next and doing re-invent, here we are. I started playing with AWS maybe 08, 09 when it had two services. Now it’s approaching a $100 billion run rate. Google’s approaching a $50 billion run rate and yet I think that’s great to call out. 71 % is still on-prem.
Ed Tybursky (09:37)
still on-prem, still opportunities, still hyperscalers are still investing in moving these workloads and kind of transforming, we can get into some of the data tiers related to what AWS is doing at Aurora and how they’re attacking these workloads. But the reality is the core systems that are running your customers’ businesses are still in the data center, are still in a rack, are still in an old piece of infrastructure that because of licensing and how it affects it,
There’s a little bit of dust on it, but they’re just blowing on it and hoping and praying it doesn’t go down. And that’s quickly coming to an end where folks, it’s getting more more expensive. Infrastructure’s aging. It’s starting to retire. What is the opportunity there? I think it’s still vast, to be honest.
Josh Lupresto (10:21)
I mean, yeah, let’s, I mean, let’s, let’s, let’s dive into that. Right. You talked about what AWS is doing, what they’re seeing with Aurora compounding on the Oracle. What’s, some of your thoughts there?
Ed Tybursky (10:31)
I think from a transition perspective, makes a lot of sense. There are funding changes, right? So AWS is coming in saying, look, you have Oracle workloads, we’ll fund the transformation to Aurora. It is interesting. Does it work? Some of the times. Some of the times, there’s a Postgres component. There’s Hadoop. There’s a lot of other variants and flavors. At the end of the day, Oracle still makes the best database server. It just does. These investments that folks have made, particularly in Oracle,
they’re binding, meaning they can’t get out. So if you do these migrations, you’re still on the hook for the licensing elements of it. So it is slowing some of that adoption. While it’s being funded, it sounds like a great story. It really may not be the option of your customer. And as a technology advisor, this is where you kind of enter in and say, listen, we have some solutions. Now, Aurora might make sense for AWS. Does it make sense for you as an organization? How about you look at these hybrid solutions? And when you start looking at companies like Expedient and what they’re doing and some of the other
I would say hybrid environments, or even the hyperscalers, even Rackspace and these other organizations that were legacy names in the industry. They are providing unique things and housing for some of these infrastructures. And the answer is, when you go to a hyperscaler, in particular with Oracle, you could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact on licensing because of the way Oracle interprets a core. So it gets a lot more complex. ⁓
It’s one of those ones that we can get off on a tangent here. So I want to be careful to back a little.
Josh Lupresto (12:03)
Yeah, no, it’s fair.
No, it’s a good, it’s a good call out. mean, I think the, the, the theme is that people need to not forget is that AWS has map funds, Azure migration, there’s funds, Google now rolling out now that we’ve got opportunity to monetize this on our channel and the supplier base, people like rapid scale, things like that. there’s, there’s ability to do migrations. These guys are hungry to do it. So I love, I don’t want people to forget that call out. So that’s good.
Ed Tybursky (12:31)
Yeah, that’s an important one.
Josh Lupresto (12:32)
Okay, so let’s, I like to always kind of talk about how we think things are gonna go versus how they actually go. And so if you think about this as the deals have grown and you’re in these customer conversations, when did you start realizing that, you maybe what the client thinks they need that’s like, I need this ERP license is really just the start of another converse, a bigger conversation.
Ed Tybursky (12:58)
Luckily, that’s kind of the cornerstone of our business. So a lot of the impact is, I need this. I need to buy this. And it correlates to licensing. When they say, in particular, an ERP, I need more ERP users. Great. Let’s analyze usage. Let’s understand what Mr. Lupresto, as an individual, has done over the past 18 months. And this is where it kind of crosses into the TEM conversation. Oh, he’s logged into the system one time. Well,
There’s an annual cost associated with this, and you have Betsy over here that’s doing X, Y, and Z. And when you start looking at the enterprise ecosystem of usage, it really changes that conversation dramatically. Two, no, you don’t actually need to buy more. The conversation has now shifted to you can actually reduce here, and maybe you’re overprovisioned by 200. Now what do we do? And by the way,
If you get off of this aging infrastructure and you remove yourself and we kind of leverage some of these hybrid conversions, I can probably save you about $100,000 a year of OpEx because we can drop X, and Z. So every conversation for us is leading in from an infrastructure perspective, combining with licensing. They’re always tied into it together. I can tell you from my experience, every customer, we all have this handled. Everything’s handled. And we start going down path one. And honestly, we always end up on path 17.
You know, the variant of options is, is this is where it goes back to listening. You’re listening to customers needs, but then you’re also giving them options and how we determine the best path to go forward is we provide data and real costs associated with those environments saying, here’s the fiscal impact of making these decisions. You can do whatever you want. We’re just here to provide you options. And if you want to write a $10 million check, I’m not here to stop you. Please go right ahead. However, this conversation I had earlier today is.
don’t write the $10 million check, why don’t you write a $400,000 check instead? And you start having these unique entry points into conversations and then with departments that you probably have never touched before, right? So it’s a broad question to answer, I would say, for us.
Josh Lupresto (14:58)
Ew.
Well, we talk about this at the events and we talk about what we put out the tech trends report and some of the things that that initially showed us was, people are looking at cost cutting, ⁓ but cost cutting to fund innovation. So what might seem like on the surface to somebody that if a customer comes to you and says, I want to look for some analysis on my license and you think, I don’t know there’s any money to be made on that. Well, here you are if you save some money on those licensing.
How many times are you saving the money on licensing to fund the migration to the infrastructure, to fund the migration somewhere else, right?
Ed Tybursky (15:37)
All the time. That’s the freeing of OPEX in relation to what they’re already using. And let’s be clear. When we’re restructuring, it’s contractual. It’s not functional in a sense. folks aren’t, you’re not going to your laptop and all of a sudden something’s missing. And if it is missing, it’s possible in the sense, but you’ve never used it. So if that’s the day you want to decide to use that functionality and all of a sudden it’s gone, it is a different conversation with management.
going up and saying, you know, this is something I need, but that’s a fraction of what we’re doing. You know, in the, in the Microsoft world and how we attack Microsoft and where a lot of the audience is going to be interested in is, you know, yes, we’ve had the opportunity to lower seven figures of optics that have shifted to some of the providers in particularly in the UC and CCAS space that basically we saved them the run rate within Microsoft and it funded their digital transformation initiative. So it really,
And how to defund that? Well, we’re pulling the SIP logs. So part of the output is we understand the way usability has and believe it or not, they had an asterisk system. And so you kind of look at it and say, that’s really interesting global rollout and asterisk. yeah, we’re in 68 countries. And so you start having these conversations and it’s just the path just keeps opening and opening up, but it’s all just data driven and it’s all starts with licensing, which is really interesting if you think about it, because the
Josh Lupresto (16:47)
Yeah.
Ed Tybursky (17:05)
It’s not so much we need to cost save and where are we going to, you know, there’s the usual places to look, you know, and easily grab, you know, these savings. The hard part in software is you really have to forensically look at it and understand usage over an 18 month period, right? And then, but it does paint the story.
Josh Lupresto (17:24)
point. All right, let’s go into an example. So walk us through something that starts in one lane, ERP software, infrastructure, and just ends up pulling through all these other things. I walk us through how a deal like that transpires or what was the turning point.
Ed Tybursky (17:39)
Well, we can use a couple examples. One is a lot of software audits kind of lead into a lot of digital transformation. But specifically, I can just pull one out, and I’ll use the Microsoft example. It really was a restructuring of an enterprise agreement on a termed agreement, which we can’t participate in anyways. Let’s be clear, right? So it’s kind of those ones that there’s an EA. So from an opportunity, it leads into really, why are you doing this? And what is your roadmap? And then just start having the roadmap conversation.
One example, another example is digital transformation. You you get into kind of these infrastructure pieces and as you’re pulling out data, you know, you’re seeing rapid seven in the environment. You’re having conversations on the database and then a provider’s coming in talking about an XDR with a certain element on a single host and the CISO is losing his mind and you’re then switching to, you shouldn’t be this excited about a Trellix XDR instance on a single host. What are you doing?
for your entire security posture. So in our world, there’s not one example. I can give you 1,000 of literally the deployment of the specific entitlements have a correlation to what their infrastructure is doing and how they’re changing. But specifically, we’ve had a lot of telecommunication pivots just from the SIP analysis that we’re pulling out of the M365 environment and saying, great, you have a Cisco on-prem. That’s amazing. I understand that.
You have 5,000 calling plans with Microsoft. No, we don’t. Yeah, you do. Here’s the data. So you don’t have a Cisco strategy. You have a Cisco strategy with your employees are just providing calling plans for Teams integration. It’s a very different data-driven conversation.
Josh Lupresto (19:25)
Do
you find, I guess, let’s playbook some of these engagements a little bit. start us off with, and I know the stat is that 62 % of all stats that are made up, so let’s make up our stat to our best effort here. What percentage of the time do you feel like the customers even expect the conversation to pivot when you uncover things like this?
Ed Tybursky (19:50)
Never. Never. They’re surprised. It’s always a surprise. It’s pretty much, I would say, 90 % of the time, it’s a surprise in calling out. ⁓ It’s interesting because you mentioned rapid scale. I can’t tell you how many times I hear.
well, we’re thinking of doing this or it’s being led by AWS or with a single vendor. And then you start kind of peeling back with these, with the CIOs and IT directors and saying, what is the motivation of this planning? What are you truly trying to do? It’s always such a single layer approach. so as a TA, you’re always looking at a multi-layer approach, right? Bringing in yourself and your team to kind of understand, look at this holistically and say, what is the path that let’s follow? But
What was the impression of the customer? How did we get there? We were probably having an Oracle conversation. And he said, by the way, we’re, yeah, we’re considering migrating our entire database, our entire ecosystem to AWS. And my comment was you have 16 data petabytes of storage. How do you possibly believe you’re going to do that? Well, AWS said, and now you’re in a conversation that just pivoted. Did he expect to be there? No. But did I listened and then the conversation kind of organically had happened. So, you know, when you look at.
In an Oracle world, believe it or not, there’s still CBL out there. Still a thing. By the way, the CIO, hey, how do we get out of CBL? Because we need to move to Salesforce. Interesting. You’re moving to Salesforce. How are you handling your CX? Well, we’re looking at X, Y, and Z. We can help you with that. And those are some of the conversions, conversations that come out. That’s why I said the pivot for me is a little bit interesting, because as a TA, in a sense, you’re always listening and trying to provide value.
And a customer once told me, he said, the greatest value to you isn’t that you save me in compliance, is that I can call you for anything. And you’ll point me to a number of vendors that will be able to provide me a solution to save me time and research. And I always liked that he said that to me.
Josh Lupresto (21:52)
Yeah, I like it. Let’s go sell him some more stuff. okay, so think about this. I like to talk about the ripple effect. So there’s a lot of ripple effect in these tech decisions. And I think it’s hard to, if you don’t have that radar up, if you’re not looking for these things, you don’t know quite what that ripple effect is. So how do you walk into these conversations, help the clients understand this downstream impact when you’re thinking of that licensing and platform? Is it just a
Ed Tybursky (21:56)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (22:23)
I don’t think you need that and that just takes the shock off or how do you navigate that?
Ed Tybursky (22:30)
It’s long process. nothing I’m saying just happens overnight. There’s a lot of the larger the organization, the larger the ego. So you have to overcome. It’s typically the most junior person has the largest bite. a lot of barking. ⁓ We leverage data. the data, like I said, when we give X amount of options, it can get up to 17 different paths you can go. But the data and the numbers, luckily for us, the CFO consumes a lot of the
the output that we have. Why? Because it has a financial impact. And if there’s reasoning in relation to why that’s going to happen, they’ll typically listen. How we get there really is leveraging publishers and providers within your portfolio. So they’ve been vetted. They have financials. They have a financial standing. They have status. They have references. And it’s something you can go to a customer and say, listen, this is a well-vetted.
organization, and this is how they stack up. So they’re looking at a company like us that has just saved them $100 million and giving them kind of a recommendation and saying, are some of our valued providers that you’re able to kind of leverage. Now, like I said earlier, the bigger you are, the longer it takes. The average deal in kind of the enterprises could be up to 18 months. just the way it is, right? But crisis also can avert and rapidly speed that up. So we see that a lot too.
It’s ⁓ an interesting kind of way in our world that we approach this, but is there any kind of secret into navigating it? Trust. It just comes down to trust. It took me a long way to get there, but trust. When they trust you and you’ve provided valuable service and valuable recommendations, they will pretty much bring you to the seat of the table to at least give an opinion on whatever it is that they need.
Josh Lupresto (24:23)
So for those advisors then that have sold a single product to this customer and they want to go expand that dimension, what’s your advice for spotting those pivot points or calling out those pivot points that then open up the next 16 paths?
Ed Tybursky (24:43)
I think a lot of it is just understanding the roadmap, right? Get out of the weeds. So I see a lot of advisors really in the technical weeds with folks. it’s just our nature in particular, if we’ve come from a solutions background, that we want to just get our hands on the keyboard. I mean, it’s still to this day, it’s really hard for me to just not do it all. ⁓ You have to have a strategy meeting. Talk about trends, a lot of the content within here and a lot of the stuff that’s coming out of, would say, even TLRS University.
leverage a lot of that stuff to kind of put in your own words and have established QBRs with your customer where you’re talking about trends. something may just dawn and a light will go off and say, yeah, we’ve actually been thinking about that. If you’re not present in your customer, they will move on without you. ⁓ Some of my best success has been from what are your goals over the next 18 months as an organization? Where are you trying to go? If they’re in retail, that’s a great one.
Obviously, they’re not selling a lot of sweaters. What’s your approach over the unforeseeable future that your supply chain may be squeezed by the current economic climate? These are conversations. We have some quick wins. Maybe you’re in a mobility discussion. Maybe you’re in a temp discussion. Maybe you’re in leveraging your core or kind of around what your expertise are. They’re all looking for solutions. ⁓ I was on the call yesterday with the VP of IT of a large brand. ⁓ He said, when can you
fly down to Studio City, have lunch. I want to show you everything we have. it just, yeah, I hope you’re not busy next week. I think my advice really is just try as hard as you can to understand what their objectives are over the next 18 months.
Josh Lupresto (26:14)
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Yeah, you know, ⁓ the QBR thing is great. I would love to see more out of that, more people doing that, because show me something that hasn’t come from sitting down with one of your great customers in a QBR, right? Just that, I think some people struggle to find, well, what’s the right way for me to approach this customer that now I need them to know that I’m confident in helping in all these other areas? And I’ll never forget.
One of the eye-opening moments a year two ago with ⁓ a partner that had a big customer and we had sold hundreds of thousands of dollars, four or five different products over the years to this customer. This is the guy that is the contract signer. I mean, he intimately knows all the products that we have sold, right? He’s been in all the discussions and he’d said, hey, I got a question for you guys. Yeah, yeah, you bet.
How do you guys get paid again? we go, dude, this is like year four into the relationship. Like you trust us that much that you don’t even care that you haven’t thought about it, you haven’t asked about it. I’m sure we’ve brought it up numerous times, but it gives you context to go, these people are in a different world. They have priorities, they have things, they need to have these strategy sessions drawn out. So I love that call out, challenge everybody to go.
Do more of your QBRs with your top customers. Like nothing bad is going to come of that.
Ed Tybursky (27:58)
No, you shouldn’t be afraid to get in front of them at any point. mean, we’re in a relationship business. Trust is formed by relationships. And absolutely get in front of your customers and keep bringing it up. All they can tell you is no, or hang up on you, just call back.
Josh Lupresto (28:13)
Yeah. It’s all right, man. For every,
for every, ⁓ for all, for all the nine nos, the one is a yes. That’s all that matters. What’s the, what’s the, ⁓ batting average example I got to use. only got to hit three out of every 10 to make it in the hall of fame. Like it’s not that bad.
Ed Tybursky (28:28)
Yeah,
it’s not that bad. It’s not that bad.
Josh Lupresto (28:32)
⁓ Okay, maybe final thought here, I guess, as you think about this, we got an evolving landscape, we got just weird times where people are looking to optimize and then figure out also have to invest for AI. mean, all these trends coming out, what’s your kind of advice to bring this home and what do you see as maybe just some of the next triggers, the next things to unlock opportunities coming up?
Ed Tybursky (29:00)
Well, think I could talk about a couple of things. So one is software. So if you’re looking at software, and we talk about that 71 % of infrastructure on premise, these publishers are motivated to migrate their current spend in the millions with an uplift. They don’t know the value of their assets. And really put yourself kind of in the middle of these conversations, because
you know, lot of publishers are going to bully their customers into making long-term decisions, right, or locking them into things that they may not be aware of. And why? Because they don’t have time, right? So it’s just, you know, the reverse of, you know, they didn’t understand how some folks are being paid to, they just, they have trust in a platform. Obviously they’re just going to migrate and look at these opportunities, but make no mistake, these vendors are getting aggressive. You know, they’re also adding a lot of the components that
pertain to some of the folks watching this. So you want to keep top of mind that changes are happening. They’re looking at infrastructure changes. Publishers are changing them to lock-ins where they’re leveraging a hyperscaler through a subscription model that only they control, and they set the terms and the price. So that is happening within everybody’s customers today. So it’s always great to just stay aware of what’s going on and what the changes might be, because you never know what kind of opportunity.
They might just be shopping for a new ERP. You never know, right, if you don’t ask the question. So as far as on the AI front, AI is everywhere, right? So I’ve told a lot of this. We’ve done a lot with AI. The interesting thing with AI is it’s not a one size fits all. It’s never going to be. And one department may use a yellow. The other department may use a core.
You may have Genesis creeping in and next thing you know, there’s five different implementations. We have a customer that’s using four different vendors to solve 12 different problems within their ecosystem. So, you know, AI is going to continue to evolve. It’s never going to be a set and forget. It’s going to be a constant conversation you want to bring up in your QBRs. How is this working? know, attrition does matter. Are you getting value, you know, and continuously having those conversations within your customer base because you never know.
One vendor is great for one, another vendor might be great for a second thing, X, and Z. So what I can say globally though, if I tie it all together, there’s some interesting things that are happening kind of in the network space. know, meter is something that we’re really interested in looking at primarily in what, you know, in our smart, how we handling smart net negotiations and then kind of looking through an OpEx model and kind of changing some of the infrastructure and lowering costs through, you know, some of the renegotiations we’re doing at that level is pretty interesting. But
The landscape to some eyes, software, obviously AI is already there, but even the networking, everything’s going to an optics model. everybody is Broadcom, right? I mean, we all know what Broadcom did. Subscriptions are the way, right? These companies want to offer, you know, they want to manage their businesses on a subscription model. And I mean, for heaven’s sakes, you know, I bought for a customer, we helped them procure like an old Maximo environment. That’s like old is old. People still use it.
And IBM wanted to sell them a subscription for on-prem. it’s everywhere. Every customer wants to put everybody in on this type of subscription. So I would say for me in my world over the next five years, every publisher, every company is going to be putting a gun to their customer’s head and saying, you need to buy our subscription for something that may or may not have value to you in your.
Josh Lupresto (32:20)
Thank
I love it. That’s a great place to wrap. Ed, good to catch up. Appreciate you coming on. ⁓ Awesome. Awesome topic, man. Awesome. Okay. Everybody that wraps us up for today, as always, don’t forget, you can catch this every Wednesday when it drops Wednesday morning, catch it on Spotify, Apple Music. Be sure to follow, subscribe, all that good stuff so that you get these before anybody else does. So until next time, I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus.
Ed Tybursky (32:46)
No, thank you. Thank you.
Josh Lupresto (33:09)
Ed Tybursky of Remend This has been how licensing rules the game, even when you don’t see its adjacent reach. Thanks everybody.