HITT- ECI's Solutions for Hybrid Cloud and AI- April 29, 2015

In a recent HITT, experts Graeme Scott, Jason Kaufman, and Matt Douglass explored the revolutionary impact of AIOps on network operations. AIOps leverages AI, machine learning, and big data analytics to automate IT processes, enabling networks to self-heal and respond to issues in real-time. This technology addresses the complexities of modern networks, enhancing visibility and efficiency for IT teams. The panel emphasized the importance of data readiness and understanding customer pain points for successful AIOps implementation. As AI continues to evolve, it is set to augment human tasks in network management, paving the way for a more efficient future.

Transcript is auto-generated.

The Rise of Hybrid Cloud in Enterprise AI

Now hybrid cloud has really emerged as a backbone of enterprise AI, enabling dynamic workloads, real time data processing, and seamless integration across public and private environments.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at hybrid cloud and AI to understand how one is truly driving the other. You’re going to find out today why AI success depends on hybrid cloud strategy and how you’ll benefit as a result.

Telarus VP of cloud, Koby Phillips, presents today’s hit training, joined by Rich Itri chief innovation officer at managed and technology solutions provider, ECI, along with Jason Wiley, who is director of channel and alliances at ECI.

Koby, Rich, Justin, welcome to all three of you. Glad to have you here.

Appreciate it. To be here. Thanks, Doug.

If you guys couldn’t tell by the, headshot, Justin’s definitely from the East Coast.

So I appreciate you guys joining.

Rich, Justin, I and, for those of that, everybody on the call that hasn’t heard of ECI, you know, Rich, Justin, if you guys just wanna kinda give a, you know, minute overview of all the different things that you guys can touch, then we’ll dive into today’s topic. But, you guys have really come into the portfolio portfolio very strong with a couple of massive wins, and you can touch a lot of different pieces of the technology space. Do you mind just giving a little background for everybody on the call?

Sure.

Overview of ECI’s Services and Expertise

So for those who are not familiar with ECI, we’ve been in business now for, you know, about thirty years. We have three kind of pillars to our our solution set. We are a traditional MSP, from help desk services down to core infrastructure, networking, and cloud. We’re an MSSP, so we have our full cyber security practice with well over four hundred cyber clients and proprietary technology that we’ve built in in our MSSP business.

And then we have our data and AI team, which has really evolved over the last two years. Yeah. We did a lot of custom app dev in that group over a number of years. But given the momentum around AI, we really staffed up, and then we’re able to provide full services around data and AI solutions, which is timely.

Right? We’ll we’ll we’ll speak about quite a bit, you know, today.

Yeah. I appreciate that. And you guys, like I said, have have come in. We’ve had some nice nice wins with you guys already, and a a good amount of growth.

Methodology for AI Integration

And a lot of it’s been around that conversation of data and data readiness, AI, centric conversations that we’ve really put you guys into. And, you know, Rich, if you could just highlight some of the methodology and approach that ECI takes to your approach to an organization when they’re they’re coming and going, hey. We we’re interested in AI. We wanna get into AI.

You know, how does ECI come in and make an an impact in that conversation?

You know, look. It it really starts with me you know, there there are a few hurdles, right, that I think every organization looks at when they start to wanna address the, you know, AI strategy. Right? And it’s more around everyone thinks they need to either have their data in, like, this pristine order before they can get started.

They need to have this fully thought out strategy around, you know, AI. And those tend to be stumbling blocks. Right? Like, to do those types of things.

Right? Like, look, I being a CTO, former CTO, so I spent my career as a CTO before joining ECI, You know, ran enterprise organizations. And I can tell you, you know, getting your data in order is kind of like, you know, getting your house a hundred percent. Like, it’s never gonna happen.

Right? You’re always gonna have something you wanna do in in your house. So if you’re waiting for that moment when your data is perfect, it’s probably not gonna happen. Right?

The other piece is, like, defining a a strategy around something like AI is super challenging. Like, the environment changes so quick. You know, there’s so there’s a lot of innovation coming out, you know, on on a regular basis. And what we try and do with clients is, you know, whittle things down a little bit and say, hey.

Look. You need to get something off the ground. These tools are powerful. They can enable your organization.

Let’s start with, like, developing a strategy around security and compliance. Right? To me, when you can frame out your guardrails around what’s acceptable and what’s not, right, from how you’re gonna use your data, you know, how you use certain tools, like, within the organization, that begins to frame the basis for your strategy. Right?

And then the next piece is we really help clients identify what’s an MVP. Right? So a minimally viable product, get something off the ground quick, right, that kind of sits within those guardrails, right, but this shows value to the organization. Because like any new technology, you really wanna build consensus, right, in in in the company around, you know, using this technology and enabling it.

And once you kind of once we begin to work with clients around kind of understanding some of their business problems, helping them develop these guardrails. You know, usually, we land in a place where the data’s already in pretty good shape. We can do some cleansing along the way, and we we could deliver a solid MVP that adds value. Now we can begin to kind of cast a broader strategy and start kind of implementing some AI tooling more broadly across the the organization.

Framework for Implementing AI Solutions

And, you know, Koby, this applies to kind of any tool that you’re gonna use. Right? So we we work with clients that wanna enable Copilot across their organization, you know, to wanting to develop custom solutions that maybe they run off their own GPUs or they’re running off Azure or or AWS.

But, you know, this is a standard kind of framework that to me is is universal, in particular around, you know, AI. Because I think even something simple like turning on Copilot requires the things that I just said. Right? Be or or else you’re gonna turn on the tool and you’re not gonna get the value out of it that that you saw. You’re gonna have security and compliance issues. Right? As well as Microsoft frames that there are things you need to configure, you know, out of the gate and and things you need to think about around data.

So Yeah.

It’s like it’s kinda like buying a Lamborghini, but never never going above sixty miles an hour. Right? You limit yourself based on not the capability of the engine, but the the driver, if you will, if that’s the comfort level, and the driver beat the data in that that scenario. I also love the house, scenario that you had mentioned.

Identifying Opportunities for AI in Organizations

The opportunity for advisors, and if you’re sitting on a call, one of the things that you that I want you guys to key into is this. Every conversation that we’re having right here is a methodology and roadmap that leads to about five to seven projects coming out of that, which then leads to monetization products, etcetera. And as we go through this conversation, I would like you guys to kind of think through the organizations that are feeling a lot of pressure on AI that that you’ve had any kind of conversations with around road mapping or ones that you could target. It’s across every vertical, and it’s across, I would say, target audience mid market and above, but is going to be a really good strong point because those are going to have enough infrastructure to make a dent, as far as what what they need to do.

And anyone that’s been in business fifteen plus years, they’re gonna have some data problems as far as having that stuff organized in a manner that can be utilized for this technology that’s come up. What we’re seeing, guys, is to kind of go off of Rich’s, like, house analogy, is we’ve all been in the we’ve been in a spot where our house maybe needs to get cleaned up a little bit, but we haven’t had the ambition to go and do it. But now we’re having houseguests come over, and we need to get some stuff aligned, and we need to get need to get it going because nobody wants to have a dirty house when they have somebody come and visit them.

The Urgency of Data Organization for AI

And that hour and a half that you spend cleaning a house is the most efficient hour and a half that you’re going to have in that entire span of time. And what we’re seeing is that’s what’s happened with IT organizations and leaders is AI has really cultivated a need to go and clean up their data and do these projects and stuff that they’ve been kind of pressing off to the side where they’re like, we’ll get to it when we get to it. Rich, are you seeing the same thing where, like, that’s no longer an option? Even if it’s getting some stuff in order right away, they’re having to show some kind of value and return back on on this technology frenzy organizationally.

Look. I’ve been doing this for almost thirty years now. I feel old, and I’ve never seen a technology get so much buy in from the c level and the business.

And that that’s an interesting dynamic because, you know, when the senior usually, as as IT professionals, you have to kind of go in and sell the message around innovation. Like, why it’s important to your organization, how it aligns with the business. But in this case, there’s a lot of, you know, business leaders saying, hey. I have an idea.

I think this could be helpful here. And they might know that, like, all the data isn’t in order or it’s not timely or all those types of things. They’re saying, like, go fix that. I wanna get this thing, you know, you know, implemented.

Leveraging AI to Solve Data Challenges

And AI actually helps solve some of the data problems. Like, you know, really good example, PDFs historically were generally challenging to get at, but everyone uses Right? And when I say get at, I mean, they contain tons of information.

We’re reading them, parsing them, putting them into taking this unstructured data, putting it into structured datasets were were very challenging. Right? Now you can do that pretty easily. Right?

So think about all of these businesses that many of, you know, the the people on the call today deal with around, you know, getting PDFs, sending PDFs, having to summarize content in PDFs, right, and store data into databases that are in PDFs. Like, AI is a really good use case for that, and you don’t need to have data in order to do that. Right? You know, we had, you know, a client on the manufacturing side that, you know, gets, you know, maybe a dozen, you know, PDFs a day, so has to summarize them, enter data into a system, and then send emails back out to, you know, other people in the organization.

And when that person goes on vacation, right, that process comes to, you know, a screeching halt. AI was a perfect tool for that. Easy to develop, works out of the gate. We even customize the emails to sound, you know, like the individual who is sending them out.

And now that process runs irrespective whether or not that person is at, you know, their desk, and they’re focusing on other things. Right? And that data, like, didn’t have to be cleansed and stored in a database. It was information that was hitting their inbox every day.

So I think when when you think about AI and some of the efficiencies that can be gained, you know, people need to think about it in terms of, like, what are the manual processes in my organization, and where’s that data coming from? And do I even have that data mastered today?

Transforming Data into Actionable Insights

I think those are important things to to think for.

Well, and I think we’re getting an assist too. Right? There’s a technology buzzword that is gonna rival that of I think everybody on this call probably got tired of hearing digital transformation over the last few years, but it it was relevant. And that’s really how we would connect in and go, what’s your digital transformation plan and what’s this?

Aginta dot ai is about to take that that space. And to kind of give a brief overview of that for the for everybody on the phone, Agentik AI will be a buzzword. It will be talked about. It’s gonna be an in an endpoint to a lot of these companies’ AI roadmaps.

And essentially, what it does is it takes everything Rich just laid out where we do a lot of prompting, a lot of training on modules and stuff like that. And think of it of of having, like, an employee that’s really good at taking task and doing it, but they have zero ambition to go and do anything on their own or create anything outside of that. Agintiq AI brings every component of AI, predictive, conversational, and generative AI into the fold and creates a proactive approach to AI in a lot of ways that can go in and, like, be trained to go and do things on your behalf. And there’s that’s already been available.

But this is really as this thing takes off, all that it’s gonna go from that chat GPT like pressure of, like, give me an internal Internet chat functions to I need to get to an agentic AI state. And the road map from point a to point b has a lot of twists and turns for a lot of organizations in it, and there’s security compliance and everything in there too. Rich, are you are you already feeling some of that buzz come out as far as, like, customers and needing that future or trying to get to that future state without any kind of ability to be prepared for it right now.

Evolving Use Cases for AI

Yeah. You know, it’s really amazing how, you know, a year and a half ago, people were talking about AI and, you know, the use case is more around, like, summarization and kind of, like, you know, really, like, boring task efficiency, summarizing emails, content, board decks, things like that. Now, you know, the conversation really is now about how can I get AI to do things for me? Right?

So it’s taking data, turning it into information that you can take action on. Right? And I think that’s oftentimes, like, the a little bit of a misnomer around, you know, data in and of itself is valuable, but turning data into information that you can take action on is really where the rubber meets the road. And we have a lot of clients now like, look.

Summarization is fine, but they wanna take it to the next level. Right? And developing agents that are very specific to tasks in their organization and then being able to chain those together, right, for different workflows. So for instance, you know, the the example I gave you around the PDFs and the email, well, there was an agent, right, that sat there to listen for the emails and knew which emails to look for.

There’s an agent that knew how to read those PDFs and were trained to read charts and tables that were embedded in those PDFs. Right? Then there was an agent that was trained to summarize, you know, the the the wording. And then there was an agent that was trained to summarize all of the charts and the images.

Right? And then there was an agent that brought it all together and then an agent to send it out. And it sounds like a lot of work, but a project like that takes, you know, several weeks to do and to build.

But think about the automation that that that was there. Right? And it is that story around it took data, raw that was in PDFs. It actually converted it into information and then was able to send it out to people who needed it.

Right? So it took action. Right? They actually did something versus just, you know, sending some of the, you know, summarization.

And there’s a lot of this kind of agentic, you know, platforms now that are really kind of crossing over with RPA. Right? So RPA was a big digital transformation, you know, buzzword, and you saw a lot of people implementing, you know, RPA platforms.

AI really takes it to the next level, right, and and really allows you to kind of, you know, hyper scale, like, automation in in your organization.

Navigating Complexity in AI Implementation

Yeah. And a lot of this stuff can get pretty into the weeds and pretty overwhelming, for advisors. And if as an advisor, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, your clients are too. Right? There is a translation.

I’ve seen it, in my time here over the last decade of our advisors usually under or don’t give themselves enough credit how much they actually know and and hear and and can execute on. And they’ll sit down in a meeting with, you know, a VP or a c level, CIO, CTO, etcetera, and thinking those guys are gonna, you know, have this overwhelming knowledge of this stuff, and they really don’t either. There’s that’s why there is such an advantage to coming in and given a road map or methodology. And, Rich, what I’m hearing from you is, like, you don’t have to have a finished product set of data readiness and cleansing. It needs to be on the road map, and it’s definitely an important state. But to get going, you can bring the data as it’s ready into this environment with ECI, and you guys can create value based around what’s already there for the client. And I think that’s gotta be a little bit of a relief for an advisor to go, Hey.

Implementing Minimum Viable Products in Organizations

I can go into an organization and go, We have an idea of how you can start to get, you know, you called it an MVP earlier, minimum viable product of value right off the bat. It’s gonna be met with security and compliance needs, and then we just start figuring out what the outcome is. What we just talked about, that Agintiq AI, think about a health care organization.

If you can bring, you know, technology in that’s gonna summarize charts, give all of this stuff, give the scheduling, do the insurance and coordination, all of those things built and trained on, which is available to do, that allows a doctor to see two to three to four more patients a day. And then as a business, that adds more profitability to the bottom line. As a society, that allows more people to get seen for health care reasons. Right?

So both of those are are force multiplying of goodness. And then you take that across the board, and this should enable the valuable parts of each organization that free up more time. And that’s one of the major conversations that we start to talk about. Our consultants are gonna go our advisors are gonna go from technology experts to really this is helping them become efficiency experts in business and giving back more time and bottom line.

Real-World Examples of ROI in Financial Services

So you’re you’re gonna see ROI in multiple different ways. What are some of the more, recent examples you guys have seen or some of the more fun ones that you could bring up to the, to the audience of like that you’ve seen make a big impact like that, that had soft, soft, soft value that added a lot to the bottom line as well?

You know, we work a lot in, you know, financial services, and they invest a lot in in technology. And people would often think that is there really a lot of white space for efficiency, and there’s tons. Right? Like, we we built recently a what we called a broker research agent, which, you know, a lot of these traders in the morning get tons of PDFs from various brokers around research and content, you know, different reports.

Right? And some of it could be in emails. Some of it could be in PDFs. And then they have their own internal models as well that they’re running.

And, you know, we were able to help them basically consolidate that information they’re getting every day. Right? Look at their internal data that’s sitting in Excel and maybe other third party market data sources and produce cam reports that they specified. Hey.

These are the twelve things we wanna look at. Here’s how we wanna compare them. And we do that in, like, a minute versus an analyst coming in in the morning, spending an hour to an hour and a half gathering all that data, summarizing it, and getting it over to the traders before the market opens. Right?

And look, everyone’s been watching the stock market lately. You see how volatile it is. You don’t think picking up an hour, an hour and a half in the morning is huge for them? Massive.

Right? Like, now they can focus on what am I gonna do when the market opens versus, okay, here’s the summary.

Oh, now the market’s open. Oh, shoot. What am I gonna do? Right? Type of thing.

And and I think, like, that, you know, the the amount of money and, like, that saved, like, that organization has has been tremendous. Right? And to develop something like that, sure, it took time because of some of the the various different content. But the ROI has been at least ten x, if not more, than, you know, you know, what we developed.

Standardizing Frameworks for AI Deployment

I think one other thing that we’ve tried to do, Koby, to remove some of the complexity that this is having done several projects, we saw that the framework we were building was pretty common. Right? And especially within the Microsoft stack. So we actually codified that.

So we could deploy standard framework using Microsoft Fabric, using Azure AI Foundry, and, like, links into Microsoft PureView from a security and compliance perspective. And we can come to the table with that. Right? Something that we built.

And now we have, like, a number of POCs within our AI library that we can help deploy as starting points for for clients to really, like, accelerate that kind of development piece because it is a very iterative process. Right? Like, sometimes you start out maybe with just, you know, one use case around maybe patient records or other things, and then you quickly see, well, this is helpful. But if I did something over here, that would really, like, you know, add some some level of efficiency.

Right? And the the key thing I think around you know, it’s not just the security and compliance and the MVP, but it’s about being able to pivot quickly too and having use cases to start from. Because people sometimes need ideas to to to get things going.

Well and, I mean, we and we have some questions, and we’ll definitely address those, before we wrap up the segment around, like, how can AI impact, like, service industries and things like that. It’s there’s multi there’s gonna be multiple areas of it that I see. And going into anybody that has a sales organization, this is gonna revolutionize, like, research, collection of notes, setting next appointments, writing follow-up emails, all of those things that let’s face it, that salespeople go, I don’t really love doing that. It’ll do a lot of that for you. And then it can even depending on, like, the organization and their sales methodology, like, say, they have challenger sale or a a different type of methodology, it can actually take notes from, like, a Zoom call like this and then give back feedback and go, hey.

This is, here’s some coaching. Here are some things you missed. Here’s what you could cover next. And so it’s gonna do a lot of things around research and propensity to make the next move, either that’s buy or sell, and give guided road maps to even, like, in the service industry, you got serve yep.

Plumbers and things out there like that to try to hit on this question in the chat. You have the ability to go out and go, hey. If you fix this, you might wanna suggest this as the next stage and let them know that there’s end of life coming on this product. It gives the intelligence and analytics back to the field, you know, representative of that organization to potentially grow in the sales arena on top of, like, getting ahead and do maintenance work for the homeowner.

That’s one thing. And then in the commercial space, it it it expands past that into, additional blueprints. There is not really a boundary of options here, of examples. And that’s the fun and the scary part for a lot of organizations of, how do I actually, like, put it into place and make it efficient across the board.

Right?

Yeah.

The Impact of Hybrid Cloud on AI Implementation

And, you know, Rich, we you know, the the topic here is how does it make an impact on hybrid cloud?

You this stuff has to run somewhere. And a company can either go and invest in building it out on their own infrastructure and and paying for the GPUs and all of that stuff, and a lot of organizations will attempt that. I have a prediction that the ones that’ll do that or the ones that are still wanting to kinda run their own data centers, they’ll abandon that sooner than later, just because space and cost prohibitive over time. Yeah.

But what are you seeing as far as the impact on the relationships with AWS, Azure, Google? You had mentioned some of the you know, I call them blueprints that you guys have built out on on some of the verticals, health care, here’s how you can implement AI.

We’re seeing that across a lot of those as well. Are you guys implementing any of those or helping organizations dip into those LLMs as they as they are available?

Yeah. So that’s one of the the the key things about when you think about building, you know, your AI kind of platform. Building it on your own infrastructure, you lose a level of, like, innovation. Right?

And, like, platforms like Microsoft, you know, like AI Foundry, you can run any model in AI Foundry. Like, we we have test cases where we run Deepsea. Right? We download our own version.

It runs within AI Foundry. Right? You can run GROC. All the the latest models that come out, you can run within AI Foundry.

Right? Same thing with Bedrock. You can run most on AWS Bedrock. You can run most of these, you know, models.

So you you’re not constrained around, like, what you can do, you know, in the cloud. I think Microsoft, in particular, has done an excellent job in building out their their AI platform. And when connected with fabric, you can connect to any data source. And, you know, most clients are running Microsoft three sixty five.

When you live in that ecosystem and you build security and compliance around that, all of this inherent stat security and compliance that you’ve already implemented. So it’s a very synergistic solution in in that regard. Right? And I think, for me, that allows you to get off the ground quickly versus and continue to stay innovative, right, and pivot and run.

If you’re gonna run that stuff off your own GPUs, it’s gonna be challenging. Right? Where I think hybrid cloud comes into play is, look, you could still have your data running off your own infrastructure, but you could create that secure bridge, right, and connectivity into the cloud so you could run the technology against your data without having to move it over the wire and create any additional security concerns. Right?

You know, I I think the these platforms are so flexible now and the ability to integrate data, exist that, you know, that scenario is one that, you know, we see quite a bit of. Like, we have clients say, hey. I have an on prem file server or I have this legacy ERP or this platform. I’m not ready to move it, but it has some really valuable data.

How can I get that information out? Then we work with them around different solutions. Right? Whether it’s API integration, direct database integration, or, like, scheduling a job to run a bunch of PDFs that you then use AI to read.

Like, there’s ways to get at that that information and create value from it, through AI.

Yeah. I would say the the interesting thing that you just kinda laid out is, again, the complexity. I almost wanted to make a joke, but I didn’t think the sarcasm might not land with everyone. I was like, oh, it’s super easy.

Right? The again, going back to what the advantages for our advisors is this is gonna be it’s it seems easy. You can have it do the coding. You can have it do like, AI will do a lot of the infrastructure, like, queue up.

But putting it into an organization, implementing it, managing going forward, putting security, compliance around it, there’s some complexity there that’s gonna be difficult for organizations to do internally. Similar to, like, the the companies that wanted to move to the cloud and struggled and and then move back, That will always be the advantage and the opportunity for our advisors is bringing in organizations like ECI to be able to come in and operate on behalf of those clients and do that as a service.

There’s there’s endless upside to this conversation. Because, guys, what I want you to recognize is the AI conversation really is a fishing lure into everything else. And that Agintiq AI conversation, you’ll see this be a bridge between what we’ve in the channel kind of labeled as CX AI and cloud AI, conversational predictive AI on the CX side, which has been available for a number of years. And then Gen AI, which has really been driving this this explosion the last couple of years around ChatGPT and others, it’s bringing it all together.

It’s not simple. It’s not it’s not overly easy to then implement and put in. It does run you in. But go ahead, Rich. Sorry.

Sorry. I didn’t interrupt you. But, you know, I I think one thing that’s important to your advisers, Corbin, and and you brought up that point around, you know, there’s a journey here. Right?

And Microsoft, you know, acknowledges that as well. So when we work with clients, especially around the Microsoft stack, Microsoft gives incentives through the whole journey. Right? From implementing the security and compliance, Microsoft has an incentive for that that we’re able to help clients fund.

Integrating the data. Microsoft loves when you hook into their data platforms. There’s an incentive for that. Microsoft wants you to use their AI tooling.

There’s incentive for that. You know, so when you start to kind of look at the whole journey and there’s even sub things within there. Right? So even if you’re using, like, something like Microsoft Fabric, well, there’s an incentive.

But then if you stand up like a synopsis database, there’s an incentive for that. And, like, we work with Microsoft on some of these bigger projects to really understand how can we layer those incentives. Right? And make sure that we’re capitalizing on everything along that, you know, journey.

Right? And, you know, again, like, that’s the total cost of the project that we’re able to shrink. Everyone still gets paid on the the the broader, right, you know, scope of the project. But now Microsoft is funding a portion of it, which helps get people off the ground.

Right? And and I think, you know, the cloud you know, we we talked about cloud versus building on prem. The other big thing is that, you know, in cloud, this is OPEX versus CAPEX. Right?

So you’re not coming out of the gate with a big spend. You can get some real ROI by leveraging the cloud, some of these incentives, right, and really driving, like, some some efficiencies in your organization.

Measuring ROI from AI Projects

Yeah. And speaking of ROI, one of the questions in the chat, and we’ll kinda dive into those to make sure we get all those answered before we our segment wraps up here. But what, you know, you you kind of mentioned it a little bit before, but what type of ROI for a client, you know, in that first MVP have you seen be successful?

Is there any, you know, case study that you guys have that you point to with clients and go, hey. We’ve seen somebody else do this, and and that usually is a an easy win, so to speak.

Well, you know, I I don’t know if there’s could be because we’ve crossed, like, a lot of verticals. The one thing I will say is that for the projects that we’ve done in the last eighteen months, the ROI usually will will calculate it for, like, a year, and the client has realized it in in less than six months. Right? So, you know, the ROIs are are fairly tangible. Right? And, you know, something that you you can achieve, you know, a lot quicker than you just outlined, you know, on paper. Because the the the inefficiency is usually a lot bigger than, like, people realize.

And when they go back and look after this has been automated, they’re like, wow. Like, it’s saving a lot more time than we anticipated.

I thought the ROI would be four x. It’s really eight. Right? And, you know, being able to to show that ROI faster, I think, is is valuable, right, in in the journey. Because it allows you to keep getting that, you know, you know, reinvest.

Yeah. And I I I’ve seen it, kinda span across, again, anybody with a sales organization that responds to RFPs, breaking those down and responding within, you know, an hour versus days, tying up organizations. Even in, like, internal search, you get an like, you get an employee going, hey, what’s my what’s my health care, you know, coverage options where they would have to dig through that. It’s not something that’s used already. This is the easy example. It’s there in seconds.

It depends on, again, what data the organization has targeted to utilize to to implement it. But we’ve seen it save a ton of up, a ton of time in HR departments, legal departments, especially sales efficiencies, etcetera. So it, the stated goal part of it is what’s always interesting. When you challenge a customer and you go, what is what are you looking to target?

A lot of customers are just more exploring it and they don’t have a stated goal. So you can help them kind of even craft a, you know, are you looking to have ten percent more efficiency, time back, etcetera? And I think that’s probably why it’s hard to nail down an exact, you know, answer to that question because it has varied project by project so much. But it’s really focused around efficiency and time back has been the overwhelming response from every one of these, that I’ve been a part of personally.

Data Security and Compliance Strategies

On on the data and the e r EHR, API access is one, one mechanism to access it. There’s others as well that you can get around and put it in a more secure, area that that, you know, Rich, I don’t know if you wanna highlight on some of the way that you guys approach, you know, sensitive data materials like that.

So, you know, typically, what we’d like to do, especially when it’s sensitive data, is understand, like, what the client is doing from a DLP perspective and how they align with the regulatory framework, whether it be, you know, HIPAA, HITRUST, you know, CMMC, you know, SEC, FINRA, that type of stuff.

If they’re not doing it, we’ll make some some recommendations.

You know, many of the the clients we deal with have the Microsoft licensing for PureView, which is a great product. You know, I’m a big proponent of it. And you can secure data whether it’s, like, sitting on a server or if it’s in the cloud. So PureView works across, you know, public and private infrastructure.

And we would help the clients implement PureView to secure that data and align with that regulatory framework. Once that’s done, then there’s different methods, as I mentioned before, to get at that information. If they don’t like API access for whatever reason, you know, we can hit the database directly or we can, you know, code a script that runs a series of PDFs, right, that we can then read, and ingest into the platform. So, you know, there’s, you know, different methods.

Right? I I would say, you know, unless there’s a real, like, stringent, you know, reason why they wouldn’t allow pro pro programmable access to that platform, you know, there there’s a way to get around it.

And to I’m gonna dive on a couple of these that I can answer directly.

One that I don’t I I don’t wanna misspeak on, SOC two certification and regulatory compliance. You guys are solid there.

Yeah. Bob, your question, essentially, if an agent recognized a PDF sent to a person for a summary, identifies, and validates the summary, versus what an agent would have summarized. So you’re looking for, like, a validation, like, comparison between two different platforms?

I just wanna make sure. If so, I believe, you know, utilizing a number of different AI engines there would help.

Yeah. We we we have some out of the box stuff based on, like, some of the work that, you know, we’ve done.

Target Audience for Automation Solutions

So target audience on this, I think it’s I think you can have a conversation with directors, but it’s really gonna be VP to c level because you’re gonna get into more on the business conversation, and you’re changing a lot of the landscape, especially when you bring in automation to remove a manual process in, those are the going to be the guys that you’re going to sell it to, and the director and his team are going to be the ones that carry it through.

So the director might get you into that. If they’re seeing a lot of inefficiencies, you can get a lot of detail from the directors and go, hey. What what are some of the things that are driving your teams crazy? Or some of the things in the organization that keep getting broken? And then you go have that conversation and go, we can fix that. Why don’t you get me an audience with, you know, the VP or or c levels, and we’ll jointly go in and pitch it. That becomes obviously a champion, and and you go from there is the way that I’ve seen it quite a bit.

Google Workspaces for you guys as far as do you guys, work with anything in the Google Google area?

We haven’t done any AI projects for, you know, Google Workspaces. You know, our our security solutions support it. We’ve used some of the Gemini models, but we haven’t worked, with, you know, Workspaces yet. Mainly Microsoft and AWS.

Engaging with ECI and Pricing Models

Alright. I got a question. I wanna I’m gonna kick this one to Justin, just to make him talk and get him off mute for a second.

Alright, Justin. If we engage ECI, how do we price the opportunity of discovery in the entry, MVP? I think that’ll vary.

The second part of the question is gonna be, when it grows, and the incentives kick in, does Telarus agents, does the opportunity, continue to grow with the agent that brought it in?

Absolutely. One hundred percent. I’m glad you did this. Most people probably thought I was mute.

And and originally, Doug introduced me as Jason, which I think is a Telarus syndrome because everybody at Telarus is named Jason. So Yeah.

We had a lot of Jason.

So I thought about changing my name.

I I apologize. I thought I said Justin. Sorry.

No worries. It’s fine. Again, like, everybody at ECI is Jason, so I fit right in. Yes. You get paid for the life cycle of the deal, and that that’s typically where I come into play. Like I said, before everybody joined, Rich is the brains. I am the, the brawn, so feel free to to to leverage me to get access to him.

He’s he’s a great guy.

Alright. And then, Jess, I’m gonna hit you with one other one just since we got you off mute.

Hit us with the company website. We had a couple of people, and I you already answered it in there. So is this the eci dot com. Right?

Yep. Eci dot com. So, for some people may have known us in our previous life as EsCastle Integration.

Company Evolution and Rebranding

That’s where we started thirty years ago. We made a couple acquisitions back at the end of twenty nineteen, early twenty twenty. With those acquisitions, we basically rebranded as ECI, and now we’re one company moving forward. So when you see these three little pillars of our castle, that’s to represent the three companies coming together as one.

Yep. Tom, they are not they are not the prison, as brought up in the chat. But, guys, we we are right at, time for our segment. I hope the advisors found this, valuable in understanding.

There are easier entry points to AI now than ever. The data cleansing and stuff definitely has to get done. That’s gonna be the big scope of work that comes into play, and these guys do an amazing job at it. On top of that, like you they mentioned, full stack MSSP, MSP.

They can handle the cloud conversation really well. So, ECI, thank you for joining us and, highlighting some of the your capabilities and where you guys are seeing the market at now and where it’s going in the future. It’s it’s been really great.

Thank you for for having us. It’s been a great conversation as always.

And we’ll, we’ll hang out. We’ll kinda go off camera and mute here and, and let the AcuraSure team take center stage, but we’ll be, hang out just in case there’s any last minute questions before the call concludes.

Very, very good. Thanks, Koby. Thanks, Rich Eitree and Justin Wiley for, your help during the presentation and the q and a. As Koby mentioned, they’ll be hanging out in the, chat window here if you have additional questions, and they’ll be responding to some that weren’t answered during the live part of the call. So keep those coming if you like, and we appreciate the presentation today. Few announcements before we get into our next presentation coming up in just a couple of weeks on Wednesday, May fourteenth.

You can join Telarus virtually from anywhere for our Ascend event. This features everything you need to know about cloud technologies and opportunities.

It continues to be a massive part of successful adviser businesses, and it can lead you into discovery of many other related technology opportunities as well.

This Telarus Ascend event around cloud will deepen your understanding and provide the tools and resources you need to assist your clients in finding their unique solution. Join us Wednesday, May fourteenth at ten AM mountain. That’s noon eastern, and you can do so from anywhere.

I know what many of you are thinking. It is springtime, Doug. It’s the end of April, Doug. I’ve gotta get out of here, Doug, and go somewhere and have a phenomenal experience and feel great about it. I’ve got just the thing.

This Thursday, May first, right here in my hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah, Telarus is hosting the AI and Technology Summit. Come see Telarus in our home base. This is going to be at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Beautiful facility. This will be an all day immersive and business changing event packed with knowledge, tools, and networking opportunities, all carefully designed to help Telarus advisors drive growth and stay ahead in this rapidly evolving AI and technology landscape.

Come see us. We’re gonna be in downtown Salt Lake. You’ll enjoy the day at the hotel and learn from the very best minds how to take full advantage of these AI and technological revolutions in your practice.

Register now using the QR code on your screen, and we will see you here in Salt Lake City this Thursday, May first. Hope you’ll join us.

Well, as noted earlier, we are very pleased today to welcome a new Telarus supplier to to the Telarus family. It’s Acrisure Cyberservices, a multilayered cybersecurity stack backed by security analysts with deep expertise and providing twenty four by seven professional support and zero complexity.

Introduction to Acrisure Cyberservices

Joining us today to introduce this new solution set is AcroSure’s senior VP of business development, Lance Thompson, along with senior account executive, Matthew Torres. Lance, Matt, welcome to our Tuesday call. We are very excited about the Agrisure offering. Tell us more about it.

Yeah. Absolutely. Pleasure to be here. Nice to meet you all. As just mentioned, Matthew Torres here, senior account executive.

Love to have the opportunity to introduce who we are at ACS. And the one thing that really caught my attention during, Koby’s q and a there was the ease for advisors. Right? And that’s where we’re trying to approach from a security perspective, really simplifying and make things easy for the clientele.

And, what we have here at Acrisher Cyberservices is a variety of security services and tools, ranging from general MSP, maybe even the general IT component, all the way to the IBM cloud side, and then MSSP components as well. I know, Lance, you wanted to touch briefly on the MSP and IBM side before I dive into the the security piece. I’ll, hand it over to you there for just a moment for a quick intro as well.

Yes. I’ll keep it very quick because Matthew is a much better, presenter in this environment, I think, than I am, but, I appreciate having a moment. I really enjoyed listening to ECI and and their story. It sounds exciting with what they have to offer.

So, yeah, we’ve been in the business for about thirty years and, started off in the financial industry with banking across the United States, protecting data, offering disaster recovery.

And, it was well before the, the bad actors were, were thought of. I don’t think many of them were born yet.

So what’s interesting is having been in the business, primarily in the financial industry for all those years and watching how this has has morphed into what we’re we’re doing today.

You know, before it was just, you know, storms and rogue employees and floods and electrical outages, and now it’s way, way, way more difficult.

So in twenty twenty, we were, acquired by AcroShare Corporation, one of the largest insurance break brokerages in the world, And, with billions in sales and very, very deep pockets, which gave us the ability to build out a a just marvelous MSSP for our customers and take all the experience we had for all those years and really add to it everything that we need today to be a a full force MSSP, which Matthew will get into in great detail.

I will touch, only briefly because I would rather focus today’s meeting on one topic being, the security stack.

But we are able we have a couple hundred engineers in our MSP with customers across the country.

And, you know, we’ve we’ve built it out, extremely well. We have our own, data centers that we manage in addition to being a goldbender for Microsoft using Azure and and all the public clouds that you would expect.

We also have the ability to bring in our private data centers to do the one offs. And, as you know, the public cloud doesn’t meet everything, though it’s it’s such an important part of our everyday life. There are instances where you want, a one off, you know, custom design to, to an offering to meet a client’s needs. So we have that. And then the other one off, I’ll mention, and I’ll only be very brief. We run a complete production, fully managed IBM Power Cloud.

And a a lot of you, folks that might be close to my age, you might remember the machines is called the a s four hundred that got renamed into IBM Power. And then I Doug, you raised your hand. Thank you. You make me feel better and younger. I appreciate that.

You know, what’s interesting about those machines is they’re always if they’re running an application, it’s an important application, and it’s usually central to the business.

And the administrators are retiring, leading companies with a problem as to how do I continue to use this application without anyone to run it. So we can take it over. We put it in our cloud. It’s fully managed, and, it’s been a great solution for a lot of clients. So let me pivot off those two topics of MSP and IBM Cloud and turn it back over to Matthew Torres, and let’s focus the rest of this conversation on the MSSP.

Holistic Cybersecurity Solutions

Yeah. Thanks, Lance. And, Lance and Doug, you did have a couple comments there in the chat where folks are raising their hands. They are familiar with the a s four hundred, so you guys are not alone.

But, Glenn’s comment there.

Yeah. We we just wanna pivot over to the security side as the primary focus here on our initial conversation.

But for the general audience and all the advisers, the value proposition we have here at Acroshare Cyberservices is not one where we’re coming forward today saying we’ve written some brand new code or have a brand new piece of software that’s gonna revolutionize the industry.

But instead, what we have at ACS is the unique ability to simplify cybersecurity and provide a holistic solution where we can unify a variety of enterprise grade tools that are fully managed on the client’s behalf all under one roof.

So what you might be seeing with, current clients you engage with today that may be on their road to adventure for security or cybersecurity.

They may be utilizing resources or vendors, or disparate vendors and trying to run it all themselves or manage it all themselves.

We’re trying to be able to provide them a one stop shop where they can just wipe their hands and wash their hands of any need to worry about security.

Our solution stack strategically includes seven core security tools that we believe make up a strong security posture.

Now, that’s for literally any organization, but that’s not us claiming that these are the end all be all in tools. There are obviously dozens of other tools that organizations can procure, but our focus is on those four pillars that we believe make up that strong posture.

We believe so much in these core security tools because we actually originally designed the security stack as a means to protect our parent company, Aquasure, which Lance mentioned is a multi billion dollar global operation.

Because of this, we actually did not partner with just one security partner and leverage them for all the tool sets they have available.

Instead, we undertook the more daunting task of evaluating and investigating dozens and dozens of security vendors and competitors.

We were able to identify the best performing industry leaders to partner with in each individual security segment.

Establishment of Security Operations Centers

And then because we have, you know, deep pocket as Lance mentioned, we were actually able to build out our own internal security operation center team to provide the monitoring and management, for any alerts and investigations for our security tool set.

So what you see on the right side Matthew, if I may interrupt real quick, I think an important point is to say we built out two SOCs.

One SOC is dedicated to protecting the mothership, AcroSure.

And by the way, AcroSure is nineteen thousand employees and in twenty three countries, so it’s a very large organization.

And that SOC was built out to protect and remediate any issues for the corporation. We built out a second SOC that is dedicated to our clients, And and they’re US based engineers. Matthew, I just wanted to clarify that that we have two sides.

Nope. Nope. I appreciate that.

So what you’ll see on the screen here is just one of our flyers we can make available for the audience. And on the right side of the screen in that blue portion, I know the font is very small, so it’ll be helpful when you get it, in your inbox. You can open it yourself.

Security Solutions and Partnerships

What we do is we’re highlighting the list of security solutions that we have available and the corresponding partner of choice that we leverage in italics.

So just to give you a quick summary as I’m sure you’re very familiar with all of these industry leading brands, but we partner with, SentinelOne or endpoint detection and response.

We leverage next generation email security with abnormal.

We use vulnerability management and security information and event management through Rapid7.

And we have backup and disaster recovery via our partners at Red Store.

And then we also provide security and awareness training for the employees via our partners at Wiser.

Now it’s important to note that everything that I just mentioned and everything you see on the right side of the screen there is offered as a fully managed offering on behalf of the client.

And the unique thing that we’re able to provide is or is allowing the client to be as involved with the daily monitoring or triaging of alerts as they would like, or they can rely on us as their full blown twenty four by seven security operation center that is there to monitor, investigate, and triage any alerts or alarms that go off.

Client Success Stories Introduction

So with that, I know, what this being our first conversation here, it was mentioned that it might be helpful to mention a few of our success stories, because the wide range of clientele that we have under our belt, you know, is, I guess, very wide, if you will. It’d be redundant.

But we work with organizations anywhere across the spectrum, from construction to manufacturing, casinos, school districts, even municipalities.

No matter the organization, at the end of the day, we’re all essentially IT organizations. We’re all running off of computers, whether it’s laptops or desktops, servers in the Cloud, we’re all in IT organization to some degree. So there does need to be those levels of protection in place.

But we have clients that have come to us looking to increase their overall security strength and posture. We’ve also had clients that are coming to us ask after they’ve actually experienced the cyber incident, whether it’s a data breach or a ransomware or maybe just a significant loss of funds via business email compromise, whatever it may be, they’ll typically come to us looking to approve upon what they’ve been historically doing to make sure those events don’t happen again.

Case Study: Food Manufacturer Incident

Great recent success story we actually have as a client of mine in the Northeast who is a food manufacturer.

They actually came to us because they were having a a a spree of incidents in their area with their peers.

So they were seeing firsthand the impact of a cyber incident to the bottom line for their peers and competitors.

So they actually wanted to put their defenses up and essentially didn’t even put forth a budget. They just said, whatever this costs, we know we need to do this because we see how much it’s costing our peers at the end of the day.

The great thing about it, they signed up for our full stack and actually during our deployment of our solution, we were actually able to detect ransomware trying to be deployed on their legacy systems.

These were systems running, I think Server twenty twelve, the application they have in place wasn’t able to be updated or patched, so it was extremely vulnerable.

We actually caught the threat in the act and prevented that malware from being deployed, saved them from a ransomware incident. So they’re actually a fantastic resource that actually loves telling that story because we were essentially able to be heroes on day one.

Cost Savings and Client Testimonials

We also have clients that have come to us from some of the larger MSSPs, the more well known names because they were investigating alternatives, and they came to us. We put forth our security solution, gave them our general quote, only to find out that we were actually saving them over six figures unintentionally.

Just our standard pricing, our economies of scale across our toolset allows us to be priced in an aggressive manner.

So we not only save this global logistics, distributor, we not only save them over six figures on their annual spend, they’re actually willing to be a fantastic resource for or reference for us because we are a tremendous, air quotes here, a tremendous increase in the level of support and response that they were seeing from our competitors, to quote the client there. And he’ll gladly tell you on a phone call that we blow those other guys out of the water.

Negotiating Power and Pricing Strategy

Well, Matthew, let me steal your, words I heard you say not long ago at another meeting we had.

We negotiated with these, top drawer vendors with the power of a global corporation with billions in sales. And we bought licenses for thousands and thousands and thousands of employees because we had that negotiating power on that kind of volume. It drives our price down, our cost down considerably, and we leverage those same contracts for our clients. So, Matthew, the what I heard you say a week or two ago, we’re providing an enterprise level product at an SMB price.

Maybe you wanna elaborate on that a little bit.

Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. You you summarize it there perfectly. So the unique thing we have is being able to take these very high end tools and brand names that I just mentioned and actually provide those to the small to midsize businesses.

So typically, organizations that would find an abnormal email security or SentinelOne tool just out of their price range, we’re actually able to leverage our economies of scale with hundreds of thousands of assets under management, tens of thousands of endpoints under management. We’re able to approach it from such a low price per unit. We extend that discount to the client, and then we tack on our monitoring and management on top of that at the end of the day. So it’s a unique advantage.

Providing Enterprise Solutions to SMBs

And as I mentioned earlier when I started, the ease for the clients and ease for the advisors, we’re able to take a full suite of enterprise tools with all the bells and whistles turned on. Because, again, we designed this solution for ourselves first. We subscribe to everything.

Those small organizations who are not sure where to go, you know, or if they’re looking to increase their current, security posture, but they don’t know where to begin, we’re giving them the answers to the test essentially saying, we’ve done the due diligence and research. Here’s what we can provide for you at a tremendous value.

Doug, I saw you come off mute. Do you have a question?

I do not.

Oh, alright. Perfect. I know there’s a couple, questions coming in the chat, but just to give a quick summary on the traditional clientele we service, we work anywhere with small organizations all the way up to, you know, enterprise, nearly enterprise range. We’re not afraid to take swings at the big guys. We’ve spoken with some global household brand names out of Italy and Germany.

We can’t mention them, but you would definitely recognize their names, especially in the candy space.

Client Engagement and Market Reach

These are organizations who have billions of dollars in revenue who are actually looking to get completely out of the security game themselves, and we’re looking to just offload the responsibility to a third party.

But we also engage with small to mid sized organizations who may just be looking to enhance the security posture, not sure where to go, or clients that are already having a security spend today and maybe just aren’t happy with the products that are being used or they’re not happy with what they’re spending today. We have a strong use case for any of those types of organizations.

Yeah. So, Matthew, I don’t know if you saw that comment because you were talking. I love the comment where it said, finally, a sock for each foot. I thought that was hilarious, whoever wrote that.

I do I do wanna make a a statement here that because these are higher end products, they’re harder to manage in some cases. But we take the sting and the and the complexity out of that by by the management process. Would you talk about that a little bit?

Oh, I’m sorry. I was trying to read the check. Could you repeat that question? Yeah. I was saying that some of these products may be considered harder to manage because they are such a high end product. Can you talk about how we assist clients with managing these high end products for them and with them?

Management of High-End Security Products

Yeah. Absolutely. So we’re essentially taking the full responsibility for that security stack. We are there to be the twenty four by seven monitoring management team for that client.

So when the bad guys come knocking in the middle of the night, we are there at all hours of the day. But we also make accessible to the client. They have full access to the tenants. No matter what solution you want you see on the screen here, that client can be in the weeds every single day if they would like, but that is entirely up to their prerogative.

But, yeah, hopefully, that answers that question. And I just wanna touch on some of the the chat ones that are coming in. Yes. So engineer certs, comp t I a, c I s s p. We ourselves were SOC two certified and compliant.

We are in the process of doing the cost benefit analysis on whether we’re gonna go down the c m m c route or level one and level two. We have a handful of clients that are in that or mid flight on that journey. So we’re we’re working through that process internally ourselves.

For zero trust, all of our components are compliant or or play well with zero trust technologies, but we don’t have any one product in particular that focuses on the zero trust capabilities.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Services

Matthew, I would like to say that when it comes to the portion of, you know, data backup, data storage, disaster recovery, we do have products that we will store data up in the cloud like so many other people do with a whole host of products. But one of the services we offer and what more of our clients would like to do is we’re able to back up the data in our own data centers, which we mirror in two completely disparate data centers. And then in the event there is an event or a disaster, our engineers are the white glove service to help spin up their VM environment or whatever it takes.

Physical servers, IBM, you name it. We do that with them. So we’ve got two flavors, more of the normal flavor up into a cloud.

Or we can do the high touch in our, own data centers that we’re managing, with our own engineering team.

Absolutely.

And, to the SAC question from Vinay, the two SACs geo redundant, they’re not, geo redundant, but all of our engineering team is scattered actually throughout the country. So we are all domestically located, so we don’t have any overseas support. Everyone is based here in the US.

The headquarters for our organization is in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but our engineering team resides coast to coast, essentially.

Yep.

Closing Remarks and Future Engagement

Lance, Matt, we’re, over top of the hour here.

I’ve got to, pull this in and, close it up for this afternoon. But, wanted to make sure that, we had a chance to thank you for the great presentation, very exciting cybersecurity offerings from AcroSure. We’re thrilled to have you as part of the, Telarus family of suppliers. Cannot wait to have you back on the call soon to find out what kind of success you’re having with our advisors.

Let me give you just another minute to wrap it up.

Yeah. Absolutely. For it.

So I see there’s a bunch of questions we weren’t able to touch, due to a little bit of time constraints. But please, feel free to reach out to myself. If you want to, you know, give me a phone call, shoot me an email. I’d be happy to address any questions that you all have, whether it is strictly around the security space. I saw a couple that were pertaining to data protection in the IBM side. We can walk you through any, client examples that you would like to see. And, Doug, do you know if you’ll be able to just distribute Lance and Mein’s contact information to the group?

Absolutely. You’re welcome to put it here in the chat window. We’ll be on for another couple of minutes yet, with, any announcements, but, of course, send that to us, and we will be able to do that.

And it is on the Telarus website. If you go to that, sure. Yeah. It’s already there. And let me say this. My goal is to not just do this business with Telarus, electronically, but we like to create relationships.

So, I I would like to personalize this a little bit with some of you folks that may want to have a one on one call or even a personal visit, which I was doing in Florida here a couple of weeks ago and met with a number of technology advisors over lunch, couple of dinners. It was delightful. We had, a wonderful time on a Don Goss road trip. It was terrific.

So, allow us to create relationships, and, I think we will both be the benefactors of that.