HITT- The future of wireless services and network convergence- Feb 4, 2025

In a live Q&A session following a training on wireless services and network convergence, experts discussed the importance of adapting to industry changes and the growing demand for seamless connectivity across devices. They highlighted the significance of integrating network, mobility, and IoT solutions, as well as the evolving role of AI in optimizing these technologies. The conversation also touched on the necessity of understanding customer needs and the complexities of network architecture, particularly in relation to cybersecurity and bandwidth requirements. The panel emphasized the importance of a strong network foundation for business success and the need for flexibility in solutions to meet diverse customer challenges. Overall, the session provided valuable insights into the future trends and expectations for 2025.

Transcript is auto-generated.

Introduction to Wireless Services Growth

As always, your questions and comments are welcome in the chat window for a live q and a, which will follow today’s high intensity tech training. It’s the fourth installment in our State of the Union series. Today, we dive deep into the explosive growth of wireless services and examine how today’s critical connectivity options are shaped by network convergence, transformative impact of AI and IoT.

We’ve got a panel of experts to to rival any other you could put together. Today’s panel of experts is comprised of Brinton Gunderson. He is field solutions engineer at Telarus, Josh Haselhorst, senior field solutions engineer, and all of it hosted by Telarus VP of advanced networking and mobility, Graeme Scott. Hey, Graeme. Everybody, welcome back to our Tuesday call. It’s good to see you guys.

Yeah. Thanks so much. Really glad to be here. It’s been a little bit since I’ve been on the call.

So it’s good to come back and, and be here.

Really appreciate the intro, Doug. We’re gonna go ahead and jump right in here. So twenty twenty four was a big year for the advanced network practice. Why?

Well, it was our first year. Right? We, we kind of, our inception year for advanced network was twenty twenty four. So I wanna spend a little bit of time breaking down why why we added advanced network to the advanced solutions, category, Talk about how we see advanced network and mobility and all of these other aspects bringing together, and then talk a little bit with our panel of experts, Josh and Brinton, about what we saw this year, what kind of trends we’re noticing, and what we expect in twenty twenty five.

Importance of Advanced Networks

So go ahead and take that slide down, Chandler. We’re gonna go ahead and move to this one. So why advanced network? Right?

Why did we bring that? Well, as we all know in this industry, it’s extremely important to stay on top of new trends and new technology, And we’ve done that really well here at Telarus over the years. Everybody remembers the cable rocket ship from about ten years ago. Kit Telarus was one of the first to jump on that and understand the power and impact that cable was gonna have on the business landscape.

And as a result of that, our our partners and Telarus were very successful in that space.

Continuing that we, you know, saw the trends with advanced solutions and a lot of this was due to feedback from you, our partners and tech advisors telling us what you were seeing out there in the field. And so as a result of that, we develop practices around each of those areas.

Cloud, CX, and of course cybersecurity.

So we’ve been very successful in those areas. Again, thanks primarily to you as our TAs and partners trusting us with your business and your opportunities. And, those practices have grown tremendously as you’ve heard from many of my colleagues over the past two hit sessions that we’ve done.

What we found though is if we continue to grow, network was also having seen major changes. Right? As we’ve noticed with these advanced solutions, advanced solutions require advanced networks. Network deals were getting bigger, they were getting more complex, and there was more going on.

Not to mention, technology was also developing in this space very rapidly. Things like SD WAN that had been around for a little while are continuing to evolve and, of course, the emergence of Sassy over the last couple of years and what that means for the network world. So as a result of that, we decided to put some additional focus on the advanced network space and really kind of bring a little bit of discipline and educational content around it because you as our TAs asked for it. So one of the most common questions I get when I’m out in the field is, Graeme, how do you combine network, mobility, and IoT into one practice?

Customer-Centric Network Solutions

Well, actually, it’s pretty easy if you look at it from the point of view of the customer. Okay? If we step back and put our customer hats on, what do customers want from their network? Well, they want a seamless experience.

Okay? I want the ability to go from my terminal or my desktop to my laptop to my mobile phone, and even my IOT devices like watches and wearables, and have access to the same applications, and be able to do the same things that I can do on any one of them. So that seamless experience is what kinda drives the culmination of all of these practices together. So bringing network, mobility, and IoT, all from the perspective of the user wanting access to their critical applications and anything where it regardless of where they are.

So things like network assets and infrastructure, and that would include, you know, large data pipes, broadband circuits, things like switches, routers, all of that infrastructure combined with our mobile devices. Right? Our phones are such a big part of everything we do these days. Having access to our applications on those devices is super critical.

And then, of course, IoT devices and data, starting with things like wearables, like, I wanna be able to get emails on my watch when I’m on the go. And then, of course, into the business world, IoT is becoming a big part of what’s going on. And the data that’s being collected by those IoT devices need transport to where it can be used somewhere for, for business purposes. So again, that’s where that IoT world meshes with network.

Emergence of Alternative Connectivity

And then, of course, we’ve seen a whole emergence of a bunch of what we call alternative connectivity.

Things like five g, four g, and of course satellite is a big deal. And then our wireless products, as I mentioned, five g, four g becoming a bigger part of the picture. And of course, no session would be complete without talking about AI. And, of course, one of the areas we’re seeing a huge impact with that is in the IoT space, creating more realistic solutions around IoT. So all of those things together are elements that our business customers are using in their environment to deliver results for their business, and they want access to all of that in the same way across multiple platforms. So that’s where you get this idea of bringing all of these things together into one practice, looking at it from the perspective of the user.

So hopefully that makes sense. Give you guys a little background of where we’re going and where where the idea for the advanced network practice came from.

Again, we are seeing a huge amount of growth in this area as the demand for these advanced solutions like CX, large contact center, cloud continues to grow. The demands on the network also continue to grow. And as a result of that, we needed to put a little more focus on it, and we did that in twenty twenty four. So, Chandler, I’m gonna get you to go ahead and close that, screen there, and let’s bring both Josh and Brenton up here. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us today. Why don’t you just sort of touch a little bit on what I just said, where you guys are seeing this convergence, and talk a little bit about the kinds of deals you guys are seeing over the last year and how those have grown. Josh, let’s start with you.

The Evolution of SD-WAN

Yeah. You know, and I think a lot of people on this call know that, you know, I’m passionate about in the SD WAN world. Right?

But but like the slide you were showing, right, what people need to realize is everything’s connected to everything. And when we’re talking tech, when we’re talking stack, when we’re talking cloud, we’re talking applications, it’s just a giant puzzle piece. They all fit together, but they need to fit together in a specific way. Right?

When we’re talking about, okay, we’re gonna start doing things like SD WAN to do site to site connectivity, Or we’re gonna do things SD WAN to do things like site to cloud or multi cloud connectivity. Right? Let’s replace MPLS or or let’s take applications and put them in a hundred percent uptime scenarios. Right?

People think, okay. That’s SD WAN. Right? SD WAN is the multisite connectivity piece and and the application control piece.

SD WAN is not a thing anymore. Because of because of the convergence of all of this stuff, because of simplification and elegance and building an entire route switch firewall, next gen cybersecurity in these all in one platforms, SD WAN is no it’s no longer a thing. It’s a marketing term to get people to buy things that they don’t necessarily need to buy. The game changer is everything you’re talking about is all about the application. For the end user, for that customer, it’s the business critical applications that make me money. You talk about mobility. You talk about IoT.

IoT sensors need to behave in a totally different methodology as, say, like, CCaaS or or real time voice. Right? It that transport can be different. I don’t need to go out and get, you know, multiple ten gig pipes to support IoT devices. I can run those over a different mode of transport.

SD WAN, the origination of it, we’re talking things like forward error correction, dynamic fast selection, teaching business critical applications how I need them to behave in real time. Right?

But then the theory of split tunneling comes in. Okay. I’m gonna I’m gonna give locations, local Internet breakout, but I’m also doing a hub and spoke for, you know, my databases or my workloads at my at my local data center, my own. Right?

But now there’s a new theory what’s called network splicing.

Not creating VLANs and guest Wi Fi and stuff like this, but network splicing is now a new term to confuse everybody on the planet because, oh my god, the SD WAN platform I bought last year doesn’t do network splicing. Stop it.

What network splicing is now doing is it’s saying, okay.

Which application needs to perform and behave in a different way than other applications?

And now if I’m not a network genius, I don’t know how I want Office three sixty five Zoom to behave, five nines to behave or whatever. But now with the advent of AI in some of these platforms, right, the SD WAN platform will learn by machine learning and AI how those business critical applications need to behave and will automatically tune how they’re doing those application reroutes so the customer doesn’t have to do these massive configurations. Right? We see a lot of guys out there going, I’m gonna buy Cisco.

I’m gonna buy Palo. I’m gonna buy Fortinet. And then they get stuck with the, oh my god. I didn’t know I had to do this full configuration of every single application.

Well, yeah, you do in some of those platforms. But in today’s world, there’s a lot of SDMAN platforms out there that will learn those applications by himself, but here’s the rub. And this is why I’m bringing Britain. This is what we’ve been seeing an absolute ton is, okay, throw bandwidth at it. Give me a five gig, ten gig, hundred net, whatever it happens to beat.

Wait a minute. To me, SD-WAN, the actual transport, I don’t care. Right? Because the application is gonna determine the best path in real time, and it’s gonna reroute around anomalies. How whatever.

What are those applications? How does that workload look like? How do they need to behave? What are the requirements of that specific application?

Brinton and I work on big deals all the time to where it say, hey, man. Go get me a a ten gig point to point. And then Brinton comes over the top and says, are you sure? What applications?

What’s the workload? What’s that data look like? How does it need to behave? Because maybe a ten gig maybe you want a ten gig transport, but maybe ten gig point to point wasn’t correct.

Maybe ten gig wave was more correct.

Unfortunately, agents and and end users themselves, they’re not gonna know the difference. Right? So the easy button, hey, Brinton, this guy wants sticks. He wants transport.

This is his use case. What’s the best way? Brinton, we’re working on a couple big ones right now to where that was the agent request. Right?

Hey, man. Give me some point to point ten gig sticks. And then Braden comes over the top, advanced networking. Right?

What does that mean?

What’s the data? What’s the transport? How does it need to behave? Where are the locations? Are you adding locations? Right? Braden, can you talk to that?

Yeah. And, I mean, it really comes back to the the customer requirements, and I like how Kobe puts it. You know, follow the data, follow what the applications need.

And, you know, I think over the last seven years, we’ve seen SD WAN really mature. And what it is is a simplification of the routing protocols and the difficult things to configure.

You know, ten years ago, you had to have a CCIE to have PFR or performance based routing. But now you can do that with a simple overlay SD WAN network and don’t worry about the the the transport underneath.

But we are seeing a lot of, services and requests for maybe services that aren’t quite right. And as we dig into that application of follow the data, we find out that, well, maybe we should shift to this other type of product or something that’s a little more elegant.

You know, late low latency request is something that’s that’s really big right now. People are trying to get their data to the destination or or retrieve it as quickly as possible. And so we need to understand is is this something that can afford the jitter? Can it afford the latency?

Do we do we, design this architecture to, to that? Or do we need just blasting fast wave circuits like you’re you’re talking about? So depending on the requirements from the business and the outcome that we’re looking for, that’s that’s exactly where we’re going to be from an engineering perspective. We we just wanna understand what the outcome that you’re looking for, and then we’ll place the technology that’s going to, work the best for that.

Navigating Customer Requirements

Yeah. I think I saw a comment, which is a great comment. Right? Hey. I got some customers, man.

All they got is DSL, IDSL, ADSL. First of all, SD WAN doesn’t care about the transport. Pair DSL with four g. Pair four g with satellite.

Satellite with DIA. DIA with broadband. It doesn’t care because it’s gonna take that application. It’s gonna reroute in real time around those anomalies.

Right? But to that point, some customers don’t have a choice of that what kind of circuit can I get in a specific location because it is location specific? However, there are alternatives. Right?

You can do Starlink. You can do Viasat. You can do four g five d. You can do SIMLISH.

You can do eSIMs. There’s a million ways to create that transport. Not everybody, Britney, gets a a a capability of doing ten gig waves.

Right? We had one the other day. It was a a a dark fiber we request out in the middle of a cornfield that that that didn’t even exist. So sometimes, there are purple squirrels out there, meaning the customer is gonna ask you guys for a specific thing that absolutely doesn’t exist for their environment.

But when you bring the, like, the Telarus engineering guys to the table, we’re gonna find them alternatives. You can do this or you can do that. You can do this or you can do that. But remember, everything’s connected to everything.

If you do this, it might break that piece of the puzzle, so watch out. If you do this, it might break that piece of the puzzle, so watch out. Right? Back to the IoT stuff, I got sensors.

I got refrigerant sensors. I got HVAC sensors. Do I need to run those over my hundred meg, ten gig DIA pipes?

Not necessarily.

Right? I got, my TV screens for my digital displays in my, in my health care operator that’s just running, you know, ads and and content or whatever. Do I need to run that through my firewall and eat a capacity? No. So back to that idea of of split tunneling or network splicing, we now have that availability to take that specific application, application by application by application, and tell it what mode of transport and also tell it how I need it to behave over that mode of transport. Right?

I just need to figure out how to work in purple squirrel.

Yeah. I love squirrel.

That’s so cool.

That’s what I learned today.

That doesn’t exist.

Yeah. Yeah. I think this idea, you know, and, again, it’s the concept that, you know, the way we use our networks has changed so much over the last couple of years. Right?

This idea of a purpose built network for what you’re trying to accomplish. I mean, you know, the past, we would just throw and I was, you know, guilty of this in in a previous role where I was a bandwidth seller. Right? Primarily, you just throw bandwidth at it.

Right? And you try to solve a problem with bandwidth. You know, that’s not the best approach now, and especially as we’re seeing the emergence of things like IoT and other other things that are out there in the ecosystem that require different modes of transport. It’s not enough just to put up a big pipe with some Wi Fi hotspots and you’re good.

The Importance of Network Foundation

This purpose built custom type setup is really the direction we’re going. And I think, you know, again, advanced solutions require advanced networks. And, Brent, I want you to just sort of touch on, you know, when we were having our prep call for this, you talked about a lot of times the network is somewhat the afterthought.

Right? We start talking about what we wanna do. We wanna put together a proposal for you know, we’re putting putting in some c c x solution or a large cloud play and we almost come to the network at the end of it when in reality the network is the foundation that keeps that whole engine running. So talk a little bit about that, Brinton, and how how partners and tech advisors can, you know, make sure that they’re checking that box when they start to have those conversations about those other advanced solutions.

Yeah. That that’s a good point. So I think the approach, maybe sometimes is, hey. SD WAN is the the fix it all. It it’s gonna come in and just fix everything. However, you still have to do that top down networking architecture. Find out what the applications are in the business, what’s critical.

You know, five years ago, voice was always, you know, almost always at the top. But what we’re seeing as a trend is maybe voice isn’t the most important type of communication anymore. So understanding where the servers live, where the application is following that data, what’s what’s really the highest requirement, then you can back into the architecture that’s required. You know, there’s there’s gonna be different requirements for, you know, an environment that’s heavy branch or heavy data center. So depending on what that is, you’re gonna back into the architecture and how the lines and how the services need to be conditioned.

If you if you don’t have really many real time and TCP retainment type failovers required, well, another SD WAN solution might be available and easier to use.

You know, these large SD WAN backbone providers, they they do a fantastic job at retaining your your information, retaining that, those circuits in the WAN in a way that’s just top tier. But, honestly, it’s not required in every situation.

So just understanding where the applications are, what is the most important to the client, and also getting the data back to make good decisions about the network going forward. So the telemetry that’s coming in, one of the one of the things is reporting has really improved over the last years, and, it it’s great to see that. Now what I feel like that’s going to transform is now AI can get its hands on some of this information and make better, better re reports, better decisions, and and make it easier for all of us to orchestrate a network, to tune the network from a fail failover perspective, that conditioning, component. But back to the point, Graeme, not every scenario has the same. It’s not, hey. We’ll just slap SD WAN on here, and it’s gonna fix everything. There’s many subversions of SD WAN that that need to be considered depending on the applications that are being used.

Siloed Departments and Their Impact

Yeah. And and some clients are siloed still. Right? I got my security guys. I got my network guys.

I got my voice guys, and they all have different requirements. But if we don’t know holistically everybody’s requirements in all those divisions, it’s really hard to say, oh, throw Meraki out, throw a cradle point out. And now they’re the manufacturers, Palo Alto is the best, Cisco is the best, Meraki is the and blah blah blah. There’s no such thing as one size fits all in in for organizations anymore.

Right? What if I’m an international player and I’ve got locations in Mainland China and my latency is because of the Chinese firewall, the inspection traffic. Right? Is there a way to reroute that those applications around that Chinese inspection zone to reduce that latency?

Yeah. Is that SD WAN? Yeah. It’s just a different color, purple squirrel. Right? It’s just a different kind of SD WAN.

Right? So we need to understand one. Yeah. I saw something in the chat. Why is voice no longer, right, the the big time application?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Depends on the use case. What if I’m a Waffle House?

Voice is an application, but you’re not I’m not making money over voice. So if a call drops or it’s just failover, failback methodology, that’s probably tolerable. It’s probably it’s probably good enough. But we need to determine what are those money making applications?

What are the business critical applications and how do they need to behave? Well, then determine what kind of SD WAN. But to Graeme’s point and Brinton’s point, we still need to transport data somehow. So back to that advanced networking is what applications need what kind of network, and then that network plugs into what kind of SD WAN for what kind of applications.

Navigating Overlapping Technologies

Right? The pieces of the puzzle, they all come together. And, Graeme, you mentioned SaaSy and CASB and SD WAN or whatever. A lot of companies out there buy something and then buy more something, especially in cybersecurity, and then they have overlapping conflicting technologies.

Right? Maybe you already have MDR and EDR and seven SOC and and SOAR in the platform that you bought two years ago. Maybe you didn’t. Right?

Are you service changing multiple platforms or is this an all in one? Right? So it really all depends on that use case. But I always say, keep in mind, the number one thing that these customers are thinking about is risk and money.

How do I decrease risk? How do I protect my money? Well, what if applications make you money? Those are your business critical applications.

Yeah. And and, you know, to your point, that may or may not be voice. Right? But voice is voice is just one application that rides on the network, and I think each business is gonna be different based on what they prioritize.

You know? So I think that’s really what we’re getting at here. We’re not saying voice is dead. A lot of chat comments on that in the chat.

You know, and SC WAN’s not dead either yet, but, you know, we’re working on it. And, so all of these applications function a little bit differently, and it’s really key to dig in with your customers and find out what’s important to them and what’s important to the way they do business. And we wanna make sure that the network is built to support those things. Again, it’s no longer a one size fits all where we’re just dropping in a large, data pipe and and kinda going from there.

Organizational Initiatives and Network Support

And, Josh, I love what you talked about is this sort of siloed organization because I think that is something that that we’re seeing a lot. You know, one part of the organization will pursue some kind of initiative to maybe you know, hey. We wanna revamp our whole CCaaS platform or whatever. And they don’t come back to the other parts of the organization and ask, hey.

Do we have the network to support what we’re trying to do over here? Right? We wanna go to the cloud. We wanna do this.

Do we have the network to support those initiatives? And everybody knows what happens if you, you know, build a house on a shaky foundation, cracks in the wall, things collapse. Right? So that network as the foundation of all these other technologies is really key.

So we wanna make sure we’re bringing that conversation back to the network when we can regardless of what other applications we’re putting in place because a bad network is gonna mean poor performance in a lot of these other areas.

Yeah. Yeah. No. Great. I’ll I’ll give you an example. I’m on a call yesterday morning with one of our partners, and it’s a it’s a a large organization, bunch of hotels throughout the throughout the globe or whatnot.

And the the conversation was around network, right, Internet service providers and SD WAN. And when we got on the call, we started having this conversation about what are you actually trying to do? What are your business critical applications? Why do you even need SD WAN?

Right? Why is it just fail over to four g gonna be just fine? Right? You guys are a bunch of hotels.

Who cares?

Once we got through about twenty minutes of the conversation, more players from the end user organizations started piping up. Right? Originally, we were just talking to the network guy. Right?

Internet circuits and SD WAN. Let’s keep my circuits up. But then we determine, oh, wait a minute. We’re gonna do a cloud contact center for this hotel.

So this is gonna end up being a a a five nines, a nice in contact, a Ceranova, or whatever, and that’s when the tails turn. How do you need that application to behave? Do you require one hundred percent perfect voice uptime? Can you afford jitter packet loss latency calls drop?

And the answer was, oh my god. No.

But the first comment was, I need SD WAN and circuits. Let’s look at a checkpoint or Cisco Meraki or whatever. And then it was like, wait a minute.

That’s not gonna put your UCaaS and your CCaaS application a hundred percent off time. So to them, what was their business critical application for that conversation?

It was voice. And their original thought of SD WAN in circuits, that’s not gonna cut it, fellas. This is a totally different SD WAN animal now. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And that’s that’s what I love about the position that we’re in. We’re just in a a place where we can adapt. We have the tools and the and the suppliers and the technology that we can adapt to the requirements of a customer.

If you go in and and speak to an IT department that’s they have a lot of expertise in the security side and they have some cost from, you know, edge security, SaaSy played, you know, obviously may not be the the right path for them and vice versa. If they’re strong on the networking side and they need help on the on the security side, we we can augment the customer and meet them where they need to be, and just understand their challenges from the forefront and show them the trends that are happening and help them with their networking and that that foundational aspect. We we we don’t we don’t have a bunch of square pegs in our in our back pocket.

Adapting to Customer Needs

We have all the pegs. So we can understand the situation. Just be curious and why they want to make these changes, and then drive forward from there. Yeah.

No companies out there saying, I wanna give somebody money for more Internet. I wanna give somebody more money for for routers and switches.

The the the the answer is and and, Grant, we were talking about this earlier. Right? The art of the big deal. How do you guys get these wrap accounts where you started with I need a circuit, and then you dropped it on a router that turned into a SaaS, that turned into a CASB, that turned on a full cybersecurity, that turned into big wave pipes that how did these small deals I need a couple of circuits and a cradle point turn into how are these fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars in MRR?

That’s how. Because everything’s connected to everything. Right, Britney? We ask that what applications are we talking about?

We’re talking about voice. Checkpoint’s not gonna do it. Cisco’s not gonna do it. Meraki’s not gonna do it.

Palo’s not gonna do it. What devices and what technologies have you already invested in, mister customer? Well, I’m a Fortinet shop. I’m a Cisco shop.

I’m a Apollo shop or whatever. Sometimes what they’ve already invested in has the capability of doing what they want for advanced route. Right? Advanced networking.

Just by a different configuration or activating things like SD WAN or whatever. Other times, it’s no longer a fit. Maybe it was a fit last year, but now you’re doing Cloud Voice. Now you’re doing CCaaS.

Now I’m doing my favorite one. Now you’re doing desktop as a service in a international player or or a national player, and I’ve got multi regions.

Well, are we gonna backhaul all of that traffic to LA to support my guys in Florida? Or now we’re gonna do edge compute and let those guys in Florida connect to the nearest pop in Florida instead of going all the way back to LA and all the way back creating more latency. Right? There’s always gonna be something different and there’s always a business driver, what I call the unknowns, that sometimes we’re not privy to on that initial customer call.

Understanding Customer Requirements

Right? And that’s what kind of Britney and I and and the rest of the engineering team do, Graeme. You hear us all the time is, why? Why do you need that circuit?

Why do you need that speed? What is the application? How do you need the application to perform and behave? Where are the workloads?

Where are the users connecting to those workloads? In those workloads, what are the users allowed to access in those workloads? Can they access business critical top secret data from their home office or a physical office? Can they also access top data critical information from a public Wi Fi at a a Starbucks or an airport?

Well, the answer is no. So now when now we talk things like ZTNA.

But it all comes together, and that’s how you turn a I need a circuit request into a no. We’re doing a full on wrap account that satisfies the network guy, the telecom guy, the cybersecurity guy, the data center guy. Right? It all has to connect. And if it doesn’t, what happens is these customers will buy the correct product in the incorrect sequence one hundred percent of the time. Yeah.

The Importance of Network Quality

We have I’m a big analogy guy, and I love talking about, you know, you could have the shiniest, coolest car in the world, but if you don’t have great roads to drive it on, it’s gonna be a bumpy experience.

Right? And so we just wanna make sure that, you know, when we’re having these conversations, we’re checking the box. Do we have what we need at the network level to support all the other stuff that we’re trying to do as a business? And I think we wanna make sure that that conversation is coming in through our team. We’re here to help you guys with that. We’re here to have those conversations and make sure that you’re setting up your customers for success when they implement those other advanced solutions.

Yeah.

So I wanna change gears here a little bit. Josh, you sort of touched on it, so I’ll start with you. The other thing we’re starting to see is, you know, you talked about convergence earlier. Right? How everything fits together. Everything’s a piece.

You know, cybersecurity is a big huge thing nowadays. I mean, it has been for a number of years. Tons of our partners I know focus on those areas.

Let’s talk a little bit about what’s happening at the network level with cybersecurity, specifically how SaaSy and cybersecurity are kinda meeting to, really give customers a a fully comprehensive solution.

Defining SaaSy and Its Implications

Yeah. So let’s go to marketing terms. I said SD WAN is not a thing. Sassy. That doesn’t mean you’ve got attitude, girl.

Secure access service edge. But what does that mean? And then CASB and CTNA. Let’s kinda go through that.

Right? SD WAN, failover, failback methodology, connect multiple locations to multiple locations. Bigger. Right? Throw a firewall on that thing?

Boom. Now I’m a secure access service engine. I’ll give you an example. Fortinet is great at this.

Fortinet is a great marketing engine, forty two different product lines. Everything’s called Forta something.

Okay. So I go get a a Fortigate. What is a Fortigate, Brinton? It’s a router that says Fortinet on it.

Is it? What if I turn on my next gen firewall on that FortiGate? What is it now? Oh, now it’s a Fortinet.

Well, if I have FortiGate as routers at multiple locations and I turned on the next gen firewall functionality, did I just become forward to SaaSy? Yes.

Secure access service center. Right? So you still have a lot of players out there. Your checkpoints, your Palos, your your, Ciscos, your Fortinet set that service chain multiple products together to create SaaSy and Caspian’s e t n a.

But a lot of times, it’s still separate you use user interfaces. A lot of times, it’s multiple boxes in order to accomplish this. Other Sassy players have come to the table and said, now wait a minute. We are SD WAN, and we are application conditioning and controls or whatever.

But, no, we’re a cybersecurity company. We’re gonna start at the security operation center as a service. We’re gonna add in security band management. We’re gonna add in manage detection response, endpoint detection and response, next gen firewall capability.

Boom boom. And we’re gonna allow these customers to just kind of pick and choose ad hoc because what happens if, hey. I was already invested in Rapid seven for NDR, and I was already invested in cross track for EDR. My contracts don’t come up for another two years.

The Flexibility of Platform as a Service

You’re not gonna throw that to garbage. But if you start with these platforms as a service, these SaaS, I can start with just as the way of bandwidth conditioning. And later, my Palos come due, I don’t have a firewall project. I I could make the next gen firewall.

And then my endpoint detection or response platform, my CrowdStrike, my seven one or whatever comes due. Do I gotta go renegotiate those contracts to re up, or can I go on my orchestrator and just activate that control? Now I got MDR, EDR. Right?

So that’s the beauty of the platforms as a service. Right? Your CATOs, your Ariapas, your Verses, your Open Systems. Right?

There’s a lot of these guys. But my point is people get afraid of these because it sounds like, oh my god. Complex, gigantic, expensive. No.

No. No. No. No. These are kind of pay as you grow type of situations. You don’t have to rip and replace everything.

You can start small and grow into the organization.

The beauty though when you’re doing these all in ones is all telemetry, north, south, east, west all go into one correlating engine.

What if I go out and I buy Fortinet, turn on the firewall, then I go bolt on a Vevo cloud for my SD WAN, and then I go get endpoint detection response from a crowd strike or whatever.

How is all that telemetry correlating into a single interface, north, south, east, west traffic, where my data analyst, my data forensics see everything simultaneously one? It it it’s virtually impossible to do that. Service training is not the wrong thing because, again, islands in organizations. Right? And sometimes we have to do that.

But these other players have just created this elegance and then simplicity of, hey, man. Now you want MDR, EDR? Push the button, and all telemetry goes into a single source of truth. Right? Just clean and elegant so these guys don’t have to be monster cybersecurity strategist. Right? They just activate the controls and and the more they activate, the bigger the ROI.

The Importance of Time in Cybersecurity

Because I’m no longer a service. And keep in mind, everybody on this call, including your customers, the number one thing on the planet the number one asset on the planet is time. Your time and your customer’s time. If you can save your customer’s time by not having to log in to multiple user interfaces to see what’s going on in your organization, you can give them a single pane of glass.

You just save me time. Time is money. Right? So there’s a lot of platforms out there.

How do I know which one? That’s when you kinda involve us and say, listen. This is our thought. This is our theory.

What am I missing? What are the pieces of the puzzle that need to be connected or not connected?

What assets and investments do I have to protect so I don’t have to rip and replace? Right? How do I integrate all these things? And that’s where we come in as we help that client understand potential risks and make sure that we’re doing the right things and putting the right things in the right sequence at the right time.

And, Josh, I like the aspect about, you know, ZTNA is being integrated into all of the networking, not just from an SRA perspective or a remote worker per you know, you know, if if they’re out and trying to protect those applications, that next generation VPN, that’s being spread across all the all of the network components. So integrating that telemetry from an MDR, SOC, SIM perspective back into the network so we can have better intelligence. This kind of open telemetry feel that we’re getting from from and the stories from all of the suppliers, I think is a a progression in the way of just knowing the identity of your users, where they’re going, and to either be able to block them, allow them, and not just from that GASB side, but anywhere in the network.

Integrating Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)

It doesn’t matter if you’re going to a printer. Doing that, ZTNA aspect, hey. Are you allowed to do this based on your identity or group? That tighter integration is just something that I I think all the suppliers and all the customers are asking for and wanting to get more out of.

And it’s good to see kind of this, kumbaya almost Yeah. Telemetry, breaking API process happening.

But to that point, right, this is advanced networking class. Right? Is that’s why we need to understand the applications and the workloads and not only applications, workloads, but where are they? If all of my workloads are in my on prem data centers, in my closet, on my servers and storage, all this other stuff, right, that is a different way to do things like security mode access.

That’s a different way to do things like next gen firewalls. Right? Ingress, egress traffic into my hub. I need the next gen firewalls, all this other stuff.

But wait a minute.

What if I went one hundred percent cloud adoption and every one of my applications are SaaS based cloud apps?

And all of my users just go directly to those cloud apps.

That even more creates a a a need for ZTNA and control onboard, employees in a way that’s seamless, crisp, and ubiquitous every single time you need that same template to happen. Yeah. On board, off board. It just makes from a policy perspective and a framework, it it’s it’s, you know, the approach has changed. None of the concepts none of these concepts are new. These have been around for fifteen, you know, the identity based man or identity based routing and things like they they’ve been around forever. But orchestrating it into a tool that makes it simple for customers to use instead of gigantic platforms that take, you know, hundreds line of of code.

And that and now I’ve gotta worry about same thing when it was on prem. Right? Like you said, it’s it’s theoretical design. The architecture hasn’t changed.

It’s just a matter where the workloads live. Right? I saw a question I checked real quick on z t and a. Right?

Basically, securing mode access, but also accessibility and authentication. I’m gonna authenticate who I am, where I am, what workloads I’m allowed to access, where physically I’m allowed to access, where those hosts are. Right? I’ve got players right now, large multi site organizations that were hundreds of Merakis, hundreds of foreigners, hundreds of Palo Altos from a from a firewall standpoint that I went all cloud apps. Why do I have on prem firewalls?

The Shift from On-Premise to Cloud Solutions

So now we’re doing a not a firewall replacement project is dropping a SD WAN appliance to link out big load mount your ISP connections. Right? But all your cloud apps are cloud apps, man. Not the z t n a.

I don’t even need local firewalls anymore. Right? If everything is cloud, why do I have on prem firewalls? Why make people come to me and then go back out there?

It doesn’t make any any sense anymore. So but the theoretical architecture is the same. I still need intrusion detection, intrusion protection, unified threat management, rules based access, identity BS access, privilege access management. I still need all these things, but I don’t need to buy them, stick them in a box with blinky lights, and stick them in my wiring closet anymore.

Right?

I just need to activate a subscription so now Josh has a horse can get into workloads. He’s allowed to get into into the workloads where he’s allowed to, how he’s allowed to. Back to the Cisco game. Cisco loves selling product.

Right? I go about Cisco umbrella and Cisco ice and a Cisco firepower and a blah blah blah blah. Pretty soon I got a Levanteing Cisco product. In today’s world, I don’t need to buy all that anymore, man.

I just need to get a licensed subscription. In that use case, a ZTNA platform, you know, AppDates, Alkiras, keep going.

Palo Prisma access, Check Point Harmony, Zscaler. I mean, there’s there’s a dozen of these guys. By the way, no one size fits all on those either. Right?

But we need to help these customers create that simplification and elegance. They’re afraid. Oh my god. I’m used to my own stack stack stack. I’m used to all it, but now I got all cloud apps, which means the theory is still there. The tools still need to live somewhere, but they don’t need to live physically in your wiring closet anymore.

Yeah. And I think what we’re seeing, right, if you look at surveys asking, you know, hey. How do customers wanna buy? And and a lot of our large suppliers have paid a lot of attention to that, which is why you’re seeing them sort of go broad with their product set.

Vendor Management and Customer Preferences

But, you you know, Josh, you talked about they’re scared. Right? I mean, you’ve got your IT team that’s scared there. Meanwhile, you’ve got the CFO over here saying, I don’t want fifteen hundred vendors.

I want I want a platform where I can do everything from one platform.

And, you know, that’s a challenge sort of balancing that where you’ve got those two things back and forth.

I know Doug’s coming on here, which means we’re running short on time.

Ton of stuff we didn’t even get to here today. But, Josh, maybe just sort of touch quickly and then Brit and you two on this idea of, you know, buying from a single vendor. And somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of customers surveyed said that they are minimizing the amount of vendors that they deal with and this idea of vendor sprawl. They’re moving away from it. Challenging in a world that we’re describing here.

Yeah. So let’s do this real quick. Let’s take our technology hat off and put our risk management hat on. There’s still two rules of thought here.

Service chain with multiple vendors, I don’t have all my eggs in one basket. If I have all my eggs in one basket and something breaks, oh my god. Here’s the rub. If you want a service chain and you have a large IT staff that can control all of those applications and all of those portals, fine.

Service chain all you want, best practices, do your thing, get send, get socket, sore, all that. You’re good. Right? If you’re lean IT, I’m gonna give you an example, Graeme.

Balancing Complexity and Simplicity in IT Solutions

You just give me thirteen portals and eleven boxes that I have to manage before I go home for work, before I go home, you know, I can’t. You gave me too many tools. This is what’s called tool sets for all. And that’s where these all in ones come in is, hey, man.

We still need all seventeen tools, but I need an easier, more elegant way to manage them.

Yeah. And I’m I’m seeing very similar conversations happening. We’ll meet with an IT group. They’re they’re systems engineers.

You know? The the IT team is is you know, they wanna keep their infrastructure up and their internal services up. They may not have the, security expertise that they need. They may not have the networking expertise that they need.

So these all in one simple orchestrated, applications that they can overlay on transport just makes it so much more simple. And reducing those point solutions, not only does you know, reduces the amount of complexity and expertise that you need, but just footprint power, all all all the the portals like Josh stated. Just having one place that you can go to to get the answers that you need is just it’s simplicity. That’s that’s what we all want in our lives.

You know? You wanna reduce the amount of complexity and components. And, you know, sometimes there’s cases where you’re gonna have to do a service chain because of the business requirement or the the situation.

But having a strategy, looking forward to, okay, we do want to get to this reduced footprint, overall in one, two, four, you know, what however long that road map looks like.

Yeah. And here’s the easy button, Graeme. I know we said a lot of things, and sometimes it could get complex, includes you, or whatever. Here’s the easy button.

Mister customer, you wanted to buy bandwidth? Mister customer, you wanna SDUAN? Mister customer, you wanna router or a switch or a firewall? Whatever that happens to be.

Can I bring my engineer on this call? And we will uncover what are the applications, where are they at, where do they reside, how they need flow, blah blah. We’ll do all this for you.

Yeah. There’s a million things we didn’t get to in this, in this thing. We have a lot a laundry list of stuff, but that I mean, that you know, there’s a lot going on in the network space. And I think, that sort of illustrates why we’ve put a enhanced focus on it this year. Doug, over to you, man. Thanks. What what do we see in the in the any questions we wanna highlight?

Tried to get We we did cover a lot today.

There’s a a lot of questions that are out there. I’m just going to try to summarize a couple of them quickly. The easy button really touched on one of them, Sam had asked earlier. Where do we obtain these network qualifying questions that we want to be sure and ask?

Bring in that engineer. You’re going to have to look at this on a, a specific sort of a basis. I did wanna go back to one thing because we’ve talked about a number of different types of technology, and there’s a little bit of a question as to how realistic some of them are and how much of it is marketing hype these days. How can we help clients get past the marketing hype that they’re hearing and focus on the true data needs that they may have?

Navigating Marketing Hype in Technology

Yeah. I think question.

Yeah. That’s a great question.

Every day, Britney. You see it every day too is, hey, man. I wanna buy this product or I wanna buy that product.

One of the powers of working with TSDs like us is we only bring out those suppliers, those OEMs, those manufacturers that are vetted, have a true proven track record, have used cases, have wins.

We do have bleeding edge tech, but we’ve got proven bleeding edge tech. There’s new tech out there every day that we’re not gonna bring to the table. Just because some marketing slick said, oh, I’m the next greatest and best. I’ve never sold to anybody, and I got two two employees.

No. We’re not bringing those players to the table. We’re only going to bring the best of the best that are perfect for the specific use case. And that includes sales, support, operations, day two support, installation, ins whatever it needs to be for that use case. Right?

I gotta I gotta Nesco bought a company that does SD WAN. Right?

I don’t think they sold a single product in the US ever. So would I go pitch that to one of these guys’ customers? Absolutely not. Does it work? Theoretically.

But I’m not gonna put my mom’s company on that thing. You know what I mean? So everything is proven. Everything is tried. And that is a big risk. Think about your customer. How does he know if this is proven and vetted and real, or is this just some marketing fluff and I subscribe to something I’m never gonna use?

Yeah. I think that’s the key. Right? Is that these guys see hundreds of opportunities over the course of a month, get a chance to sort of, you know, take a run on a number of different technologies.

So trying to sift through what’s going on, you know, bring it to our team. They’re here to help. They’ve seen it. They’ve looked under the hood on most of these things and can really help guide you as far as, making sure you’re putting the best foot forward with your customer.

Yeah. And a lot of times, just to one interject it. A lot of times, you’re gonna have multiple engineers on those calls. Brit might work on multiple contracts and accounts together because I’m doing the SD WAN and the firewall and then maybe the z t and a then but but Burton’s coming over the top.

Do you need RIB and IEGRP and BGP and jumbo frames and should this be a wave or a point of man, I don’t know that stuff. I don’t wanna know that stuff. Right? But Britain does, so we bring Britain to those tables so we can make sure we’re uncovering all of our bases.

Right? I love I love BGP.

I love BGP.

I know you do.

Do this.

Protocols protocols protocols.

I don’t wanna go with that. Question I wanna get to before we get too far away here. Opportunities vary by marketplace.

From your perspective, obviously, bandwidth’s still a huge issue, but there seems to be a little bit of a controversy as to whether or not bandwidth opportunities are or bandwidth solutions, I should say. Are we maxing out in certain areas in terms of what is available for bandwidth? Zachary is saying that he’s seeing a lot of, good deals on large bandwidth. You think that’s really because of we have an oversupply in certain areas, or is the oversubscription ratio changing?

Yeah. I’ll I’ll jump in on this one. And I think, you know, really what you’re seeing is, you know, back in the day, what the answer was always throw bandwidth at it. Right?

Individual Business Needs and Network Solutions

And that becomes a challenge in areas where there’s not a lot of good bandwidth options. So it’s really key. Each business has to be looked at individually to be like, what applications are important to the business? And let’s make sure that your network is set up to support those applications.

So the cost of things like SD WAN and those types of appliances has come down so much that it allows smaller organizations to implement those types of solutions to maximize the resources that they have. And I think that’s really what it’s all about. Not everybody can go out there and afford to throw a bunch of bandwidth that stuff. They need to make every dollar count and because of that you need to make sure you’ve got the right infrastructure, the right solution in place to enable that.

And I think that’s really what it comes down to. Each market is different. You’re right.

Things aren’t available in every market, but a lot of these technologies are and they allow the business regardless of where they are to optimize their spend and their network for what they need.

Financial Risks in Bandwidth Acquisition

Yeah. And some sometimes you gotta be careful. Back to financial risk. Right? I’m gonna go get a couple of ten gig sticks, and now I wanna SD WAN.

And, hey, by the way, that’s twenty gig maximum throughput capacity. Those SD WAN tunnel licenses are gonna eat you up. Did you realize that maybe I didn’t need twenty gig? Maybe a hundred meg would have been just fine.

You know? So we gotta worry about the financial risk too.

And, I’m I’m seeing a a large wave of services going to data centers and connecting data centers together and extending lands.

I have more one hundred gig and four hundred gig requests than I’ve ever seen. And, you know, making sure the client understands what control they have of those services.

I mean, that’s that’s kinda like plain dumb type of networking, but it’s really important to get the architecture right and what’s going to go into that. These AI projects that clients are having, they need really, really big, super low latency circuits, and and, you know, we can we can do that.

If it’s connecting just to the nearest AWS region, yeah, there’s certain architectures that play better in the latency world than others. So, again, back to the the big deal and how we can help with that, understanding what the what the project looks like, what the client is trying to, you know, have that business outcome, and we put the right technology in place.

Understanding Application Requirements

Yeah. Needs versus wants. Right, Graeme? You said just throw bandwidth at it. Well, wait a minute. What’s that application? You’re asking for a chocolate cake, but maybe a small strawberry cupcake is actually what you need.

Right.

Yeah. Money, time, and voice is still viable. All great stuff. Bingo. Graeme, last word to you. Anything else?

Yeah. No. Just, I think just to wrap this up, I mean, there’s a lot going on in this space. Right?

We didn’t even get a chance to really touch on the impact of wireless and what’s going on there. Lots going on. Please please bring our team in. There’s so much opportunity to uncover when we have these conversations, when we really start to dig in with these customers, and it helps you put your best foot forward.

Right?

When you’re selling them solutions, your name relies on those solutions. You wanna make sure those solutions are supported by the right network. It all begins and ends with the network. If the network’s not there to support what they’re trying to do, there’s gonna be challenges, and nobody wants that.

Absolutely true.

Graeme, Josh, Brinton, thank you so much. Terrific presentation. Fabulous discussion. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more questions coming on.

Get these folks involved and the Telarus teams. They will help you. Thanks, guys. Great presentation.

Thank you.