44. So you're in Azure, what's next? With Guest Chad Muckenfuss
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Tune in to listen as we chat with Chad Muckenfuss, Director of Channel, from Ancero. Ancero is a leading Managed Service Provider with a core focus on all things Microsoft & Azure. We talk about licenses, infrastructure & modernization, along with how to fully uncover these types of customers. You might even hear about how not only does Chad run the channel for Ancero, but may or may not have a cattle farm…
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode. We are here, we are talking cloud, we’re talking Azure, and I’m on with my good friend Chad Muckenfuss, director of channel from Ancero. Chad, welcome on my man.
Chad Muckenfuss (00:32):
Well, thanks for having me, Josh. I’m, uh, I’m excited to talk Azure with you today.
Josh Lupresto (00:37):
Uh, we got a, we got a lot, uh, to talk about. We could, we could certainly narrow this down. But before we do that, before we get into the, the nuts and bolts, uh, I wanna talk a little bit about you. Uh, we’ll get to Ancero, but my favorite part of this whole thing is hearing everybody’s background story. So, Chad, how did you get here? Did you, did you grow up and say, I’m destined to do Azure and all that fun stuff, or what’s the course? Man?
Chad Muckenfuss (00:59):
No, it’s, it’s a windy path for sure. Um, so, uh, born and raised in the greater Philadelphia area in Southern New Jersey. Um, I, uh, I went to Temple University. My degree is in telecommunications and new technologies. Um, one of the few universities that offered that back in the day. Um, showing my age a little bit with that, but, uh, regardless, I’ve always liked technology, uh, always liked to play in that world. Um, but it, my career post-college did not take me right to that place. Um, I went, uh, and worked for, um, a children’s video company as a national marketer right outta college. Uh, traveled the whole US worked, um, primarily in retail stores and all that type of thing. And then from there, um, I started a, um, a, an auto franchise, uh, when General Motors bought Hummer. Um, I started a Hummer franchise in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and ran that for about six years.
Chad Muckenfuss (01:55):
And then finally transitioned into the technology space, um, back when T1s were still, uh, in use and all that regular fund stuff. And, uh, just have grown. Um, always worked in the channel, either, um, on the partner agent side or on, um, on the channel side for, uh, for the different suppliers and really, really like the channel. Have always liked the channel, um, but have been challenged host, uh, post telecom to really grow in cloud. So for the past, uh, three to five years, been focused on that, really digging into it, um, aligning myself with, with some people that are very knowledgeable, uh, like yourself and the whole team there that really understand the cloud and where it’s going and what it’s doing. Um, and hopefully on that trajectory of, of where it’s gonna go in the next five years and, and how, you know, currently we can help some, uh, some partners and everything learn how to leverage the cloud.
Chad Muckenfuss (02:53):
It’s, it’s a difficult transition for a lot of the partners, and that’s one of the key things I think we’ll touch on today. And as a side note, um, outside of my day job here, I, I own and operate a cattle farm. And, um, so, so something a little bit, uh, different, uh, born and raised, I’m third generation, uh, purchased a family farm about, uh, 16 years ago. And so, uh, we raise currently about between 30 and 40 head of beef cattle. Um, I have, uh, pigs. So we have 10 pigs now and about 150 chickens for eggs. And, um, so I leave work every day and, and go home and, and play farmer for, uh, for my free time. So that’s one of those, uh, fun things that, uh, that everybody likes to chat about, uh, more than technology, a lot of times,
Josh Lupresto (03:41):
. Oh yeah. You know, it catches everybody and they go, what? I didn’t see that coming.
Chad Muckenfuss (03:44):
Exactly.
Josh Lupresto (03:45):
I just love it cuz it’s something completely different from this where you probably get to unplug and Yes. Slow it down.
Chad Muckenfuss (03:52):
Yep. Very much so. Very much so. So that’s kind of my life in a nutshell. I have, uh, you know, I’m married, have two, two kids, 14 year old daughter Emma, 12 year old son, Alex. Um, so between soccer and karate and all the fun things that parents do these days, uh, that’s, that’s my world.
Josh Lupresto (04:08):
Love it. Good stuff. Uh, it’s funny you mentioned the, the Hummer. Uh, you know, I grew up in the Midwest. Uh, my dad for about 32 years, uh, worked at a place called AM General. And so their bread, their bread and butter was the military H one contracts.
Chad Muckenfuss (04:25):
I spent so much time in Mishawaka, Indiana and South Bend, Indiana at the plants. Um, so we could, we could chat about all the restaurants and all of that fun stuff. So That’s funny. So AM general was where I started because, uh, general Motors did not have, uh, everything spun up yet. So I flew out and spent months at the factory out there learning, driving off road at the, at the proven grounds and all that kind of stuff. So, yep. Spent a lot of time out there.
Josh Lupresto (04:52):
That’s funny. Now, one, one slightly different life change. I had an opportunity to go work in one of those factories with my dad when I think when the H two was coming out. Yep. And I just went, ah, I just, I think I wanna go a different direction. I didn’t really know what that direction was or where, I didn’t know the whole, you know, Utah thing that wasn’t in the cards yet, but, uh, but no, he was there. Gosh. Yeah. That’s so funny. He was there for a long time. Crazy.
Chad Muckenfuss (05:14):
Yeah. That, that was a great company back in the day. Um, really closeknit group of people. Got to know a lot of them as friends and yeah. Really, really cool company.
Josh Lupresto (05:24):
Crazy. All right, well, we’ll come back to that. Sure. This is, this is all natural right here. Good stuff. Yeah. All right. Uh, let’s, so let’s fast forward now. Let’s talk, and Sarah, let’s talk cloud. For anybody that’s listening to this, that, that doesn’t know who is, and Sarah, what are you guys? Gimme the spiel.
Chad Muckenfuss (05:43):
Sure. So Ancero is a 20 plus year company. Um, we’ve been in business started before MSP and CSP were even words or acronyms or anything like that, was a traditional just IT vendor that would come in, do break, fix, server, spin up, all that type of thing back in the day. And now, uh, we are a true MSP cloud service provider. We are strictly a Microsoft shop. So all we do is Microsoft and Azure Cloud. We bundle, and we’ll get into this I’m sure a little bit later here, but we, we bundle everything together to make it easy for the consumer, um, and the partner to sell and be able to present. But one of the key things that we do is we are intimately involved in the fact finding. So we come alongside the partner, we dig in, we figure out what the customer has, um, what do they need, where are they going, and spend a lot of time up front site surveys, all of that ahead of time to figure out what is the solution that’s gonna work best for this, for this, uh, customer And partners really like that because it takes a lot of the pressure off of them.
Chad Muckenfuss (06:51):
It’s not a spreadsheet that they’ve gotta check a bunch of things off. They, they come to us because they know we can get into those sticky situations, unwind them, and do a great job of getting their customer up and online and billing, which means recurring revenue, which means everybody’s happy at that point.
Josh Lupresto (07:09):
And I, it’s, it’s such a critical weapon too. I mean, the title of this podcast is, so you’re in Azure, you know what now? And I think what, what we’re often coming into from an opportunity perspective is let’s, let’s say not cloud for a second, let’s just say anything. Am I walking into a technology that I’m gonna have to replace? Am I walking into a technology that they’ve already spent a bunch of money in and they just need to make it better? And so I, I think you guys are in such a great spot where you, you make it really easy to understand exactly what you do, exactly, where you focus on and the customers. It, I don’t think you see a lot of people that are, well, we’re thinking about going, they’re already there. And now just based on the timeline of what’s transpired and the economy and all that stuff in the last 36 months, people need help. And I think you guys make it really easy to understand. Great. Stay there. We’ll help you, to your point, I think you said, unwind this, uh, and figure out how to get where you wanna go.
Chad Muckenfuss (08:03):
Yeah, exactly. And, and you’re, you’re right on with that. But a lot of people have begun to make that change, transition to the cloud regardless of what the brand of the cloud is that they’re using, aws, Azure, et cetera. A lot of them have different departments that, that use their company credit cards and spin up all kinds of different servers and forget that they’re there. Uh, it’s, it’s endless what , what the cloud companies will bill for. So there’s so much bloat and, and overuse and or non-use of, of that cloud environment. We’re seeing that more and more and more cloud optimization. We go in, we clean it up, we give them pointers. The other aspect of that on the flip side is they partially transition to cloud. So they partially move some of their applications, but there’s still this server over there that does whatever, and we’re not sure how to get, get it up there. We’re not sure what to do. We come alongside, again, we’ll talk to the software, um, vendor that has that application. We work with them, Hey, can this transition to the cloud? Or what are the specs that are needed for the latest and greatest offering of this? And figure out how to build that in Azure and then move that up so we can do away with that prem based, that last hurdle that they’re trying to get to before they’re fully clouded. So those are kind of the two aspects that, that really, really do well.
Josh Lupresto (09:23):
So your, your role there as director of channel, do you, do you find that are, are people, do they know, is this gonna be a one time, so w based engagement, do they know right away it’s gonna be forever recurring, you know, supplementing the workforce? What are you kind of seeing in that trend?
Chad Muckenfuss (09:42):
So I’m seeing a lot of companies that really don’t know what they have, um, whether specific to your initial point in the cloud, Hey, we’ve got Joss on the server up to try something. Not sure if it’s still there or not. We get these bills, here’s a pile of information, don’t know what’s, what’s really going on. Can you help? We’re spending, pick a number, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, $10,000 a month and up. And we really don’t know what we have. Um, we we’re, uh, Telarus partner has us in a university right now. Each one of the, the parts of the university has different cloud services all over the place. They spin stuff up for a specific project for a class one semester, forget it’s there, but it’s still billing and still ongoing years later, they’re still paying for servers. So that type of thing we get brought into, look at it, when’s the last, you know, last time it was used, what was it for?
Chad Muckenfuss (10:38):
Does anybody know? It’s really all fact finding and then scaling it down, and there’s huge savings and huge benefits to figuring that out. A lot of times, again, back to your original point, we get engaged maybe as a, as just a one time. So w go in, look at something, Hey, we need to do X, we go in, we look at X, and that opens the doors to Y and Z and the rest of it. And all of a sudden it becomes, oh, well, can you look at this? Can you look at that? And one of the things that we do really, really well is we don’t want oust the IT staff. We’re not looking to get rid of an IT director. We’re not looking to replace them. We come alongside of them, wrap ourselves around and fill in all the gaps. There’s so many gaps when it comes to these situations that it’s, it’s a necessity to come alongside of them and help them, because everybody, you can’t know everything about this world. The change is too fast.
Josh Lupresto (11:33):
Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of what we’re sort to see is, hey, I’ve got this environment, uh, can you maybe help me build it, modernize it, and then maybe gimme the keys back, but be there if I need you, kind of this pile light type service. Exactly. So I think that’s where, that’s where you guys are nice to be flexible in. Yeah. If you want us to build it and give it back to you, great. If you want us to build it and completely manage it, great. Uh, you need whatever , great.
Chad Muckenfuss (11:55):
. Exactly. Exactly. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of that whole menu of, oh, well let’s start here. And as we move along, guess what? The, the menu then expands and the entree has become, oh, well, you, I didn’t know you did that, or I didn’t know that we had this much spend in this section. Let’s, let’s look at that. Or, I’ve got server 2012 now that’s gonna be end of life next year. What are we gonna do? Uh, I don’t know what to do. And all of a sudden it becomes a whole nother conversation. So the stickiness of those customers, for lack of a better term, is great for the partners because it just continues to grow. That revenue continues to grow, and, you know, and it becomes a, a long, long time, um, relationship with, with a lot of the end end users and customers.
Josh Lupresto (12:43):
What would you say, I mean, you’ve, you’ve learned a lot doing this and seeing a lot of different environments, and we’re gonna get into innovation, and we’re gonna get into a specific, you know, deal and things like that. But just backing it up, I mean, partners listening to this, what what would you say that you’ve learned or what’s been the most helpful for you throughout the years with this
Chad Muckenfuss (13:03):
? I guess I can summarize. You don’t know what you don’t know. Um, don’t be afraid to ask questions. You, you can’t be an expert on everything out there. The cloud is so expansive and, and offers so many things, just ask questions. There you go back to the elementary school teacher that says, there are no dumb questions. Well, that’s true. There are no dumb questions, because guess what? I ask a lot of them. And I’ve got a, a team of 50 engineers across the country here that are helping me out. Look, um, you know, I’m a glorified sales guy, , I’m not, I’m not an engineer by any stretch, and I have to ask questions every day. Uh, that’s the biggest thing. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to, to look into it and say, Hey, you know what? I really don’t know what’s going on with this customer. Let’s just have a call. We’ll ask some questions. You ask them questions as a partner, and a lot of times the doors open up and oh, it’s an aha moment for everybody.
Josh Lupresto (14:01):
Love it. Good advice. Stay curious. Mm-hmm. , uh, let’s talk about, uh, innovation. You know, this, this is dramatically different than it was two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. What is an Sarah’s approach to staying on top of innovation? Because, you know, it seems like just a few years ago we were talking about getting people off prem onto traditional VMs, and this idea of auto scaling was cool. And now it’s the idea of the easiest server to manage is no server. So we’re talking functions and serverless and all of these things. So how do you guys stay on top of, oh, Microsoft just dropped this new thing or this new thing, we need to be aware of it. What’s your approach to that?
Chad Muckenfuss (14:39):
So, um, we have inside, it’s, it’s an interesting company from the top down. So, um, Randy, who heads up is, uh, oversees our engineering team, really fosters that curiosity that you just mentioned in the last question. Uh, with, with the team of engineers. They are a, a group of people that really dig in. They, they learn, but they take the ownership of learning what the new technologies are themselves too. And then they get together and they talk about it. I mean, the biggest thing, and it hasn’t changed regardless of technology, is communication. Hey, I saw this. Send an email out to the group of a quick snapshot. And, you know, I have a couple of notes here too, of things that we’ll talk about in a little bit that wow, you know, growth of the cloud over the next five years. What Gartner’s saying about that, all those things.
Chad Muckenfuss (15:26):
You see it, you take a snapshot of it, you send it off, you have a discussion over it. That’s really how in the most part, people learn and stay on top of it. From a regulatory standpoint, and we didn’t touch on this yet, but, but Ancero is SOC two, type two certified. We have a lot of of customers that, um, are in the regulatory world, and they need that, whether it’s HIPAA compliance, whether it’s other compliance driven, um, industries. So we’re, we’re kind of mandated to stay on top of some of the new technologies to stay ahead of the curve and, and be that, uh, person that can come to the forefront and say, Hey, this is coming down the pike from, from this government entity or this, uh, governing, uh, organization. You need to be aware of it and you need to update or you need to change, or whatever the messaging needs to be at that point.
Josh Lupresto (16:17):
Good. Uh, let’s talk about differentiators, right? If, if a partner looks at you and has a couple other options for Azure, for Microsoft, for msp, what do you want? I mean, how would you describe, here’s how we’re different. Uh, I know you’ve talked about being isolated to Azure. I don’t know if there’s any other OEMs that you wanna mention that you have proficiencies in, or just how do you speak to that, uh, that technology, that subset differentiators, things like that?
Chad Muckenfuss (16:43):
Well, I’ll talk to the Azure piece first. Um, I think one of the, one of the interesting things with Azure and what we’ve done, our, our secret sauce, if you wanna call it that, is, um, our creativity within Azure. Azure provides a uniform platform for everybody. And it’s how you utilize that and how you bring that in to have it have something unique for yourself, build that out, something unique for Ancero. And what we’ve done is, uh, we’ve done just that. So we’ve, we’ve leveraged automation, we’ve leveraged, um, our knowledge base internally, and I’m not gonna get into the specifics, but, um, we’ve leveraged it to a point where we can bring, uh, Azure to even the SMB world if necessary and, and bring it to a cost effective per user model that not only is the Azure portion of a desktop as a service or the infrastructure aspect of things, but it’s also bundling together the msp um, it’s bundling together, um, the AV and EDR and all the rest of it for on a per user basis that really makes it attractive to, to the end customer. And, and there’s, there’s frankly plenty of margin in it too, um, for, for the rest of us here that are, that are selling it and providing the services as well. So it’s, it’s really a unique, um, unique offering that we bring to the table. And again, it’s purely based around the creativity of, Hey, here’s your box, what are you gonna do with it?
Josh Lupresto (18:13):
Got it. All right. Let’s get into the weeds. Let’s nerd out. Let’s get our propeller hats on. Whatever it is. Uh, so let’s, let’s talk about an example. What, what I loved, and you mentioned it, and it seems like this is always the goodness when, when we get to be involved is somebody comes to us and says, Hey, I have this thing, uh, who do you have that does this? And we as engineers go, oh, but I have 84 questions. There’s definitely so much more here that nobody even realizes. So I’m curious of an example that you have, uh, talk to us about something that you walked into, what were you told it would be? And then really what were all the problems and, you know, and ultimately the outcome. What, what, what, how did we get where we needed to go?
Chad Muckenfuss (18:55):
Sure. So, um, one of the examples, it’s a logistics company, um, in the southeastern part of the us They came, they were having all kinds of issues, um, trouble with some of their applications, trouble with some of that partner brought ’em into us. We start talking with them and begin that process of uncovering what’s going on. Come to find out there’s no firewall. They have no firewall on site. They’re using, they’re using the Comcast modem or spectrum modem or whatever it is. And oh, that’s our firewall. They are contracted with an msp. So the MSP doesn’t have anything. Yes, exactly. firewall,
Josh Lupresto (19:32):
Schmill. That’s what I
Chad Muckenfuss (19:33):
Say. Exactly. Now you don’t need it. Forget about it. , um, the, uh, their cloud services completely misconfigured. And that was the issue that brought them to us, is that their MSP could not figure out how to get this whole cloud environment to work for them in addition to being misconfigured. It was wide open in the sense that it was done on a shared tenant. There was no partitioning. It was mixed together with three other companies. And you could see all the information that you wanted to of all the other companies. Exactly. And that was our response. So it, um, that opened the door for this, this example. We went in, uh, we, we obviously won the deal. We, we went in, we got them a firewall first and foremost. And I, I didn’t touch on the OEM stuff, but we we’re a Sonic Wall fornet Cisco partner.
Chad Muckenfuss (20:21):
So we do all of that work for firewalls. Um, not a problem. So we settled on a firewall for them, got them set up with that, and then begun to move them, transition them out of, it was an AWS cloud instance that was shared and into our Azure. Um, got them spun up, got them, their tenant, moved everything over, and then started to clean up a lot of the software issues that they were having because of Misconfigurations and all of that licensing. We took over all their licensing at that point. Uh, uh, they were using Microsoft Office licensing was all over the place, E one s to E five s, and it was a mess and cleaned all that up for them. What it comes down to a lot of times, and, and it wasn’t a huge company, um, you know, probably 30, 40, maybe 50 users on it, a pretty average company from our standpoint.
Chad Muckenfuss (21:14):
What we found is that between MSP cloud services, maybe some infrastructure, that type of thing, if you add all of that up, the antivirus, um, backup and recovery, all that kind of thing, it usually works out to about 200, $250 a user on average almost every time in that SMB to, to mid-market company, that 500 employees and less, it’s always about that price. We come in between a hundred and 150, depending on what flavor they want per user, includes all of that. And if they want unlimited onsite, then we can roll that at the higher end of things too. And it was a win. They saved a significant amount of money, got it all cleaned up, and are still, you know, two years later, are still a great, great customer of ours with our business to us, which the partner gets tagged on, even though they didn’t even do anything. And, you know, it’s, it’s love it, it’s great. That’s how, that’s how we operate. And one key thing I forgot to mention in there earlier, we’re a hundred percent channel. We have no direct, never had direct, we’ve been a hundred percent channel from day one. So that’s, that’s another unique thing for us in the market
Josh Lupresto (22:22):
Too. Love it. Good answer. Good answer. Partners love to hear that stuff. Um, yeah,
Chad Muckenfuss (22:26):
I’ve got more. I’ve got more. If you wanna hear more, I’ve got other, other examples that, hey,
Josh Lupresto (22:31):
Uh, look, I, that’s what I want. That’s what I wanna get out of this, right? I want, I want partners that are listening to this of different situations, different environments, different things, different problems. Uh, I’m happy if you, if you want to throw maybe something that’s, that’s different, um, out there that people that you stumbled into.
Chad Muckenfuss (22:45):
Here’s a, here’s a good one. Um, it’s a, a larger nonprofit in the northeast here. Um, they deal specifically with homeless issues. Uh, they, they put housing together for homeless, uh, and we were brought in their IT director was, was on his, on his way out, essentially was out the door. Um, and they needed, they knew they needed to clean things up. Their infrastructure was over 12 years old, 26 servers, OnPrem. Nice. Um, they, they were , their switching was 12 years old in all the, but it just worked it. Exactly. And that was their mindset. It just until it, we don’t, we don’t have the budget for it. What are we doing here? They knew that they needed to upgrade. So they brought us in with our, our partner brought us in and, and we started looking at things. They wanted help putting, essentially putting together an RFP and what needed to be done.
Chad Muckenfuss (23:40):
We, we were one of three that the partner brought in one of three MSP CSPs that were brought in. We were the only one that talked about cloud to them. The other two wanted to replace the servers with on-prem servers, all that type of thing. We got their attention by talking cloud to the point where the CFO came to us and said, with his financials blacked out in certain sections and said, what is this gonna look like if we do cloud? I need to sit down and have a real conversation. What does this look like for us? We’re not used to this. We’re not used to a monthly recurring, we’re not used to any of that type of thing. We sit down, we outline it for them, we go through a top to bottom and we save them 20, over $20,000 a month in savings, and it’s a great deal.
Chad Muckenfuss (24:29):
And they love us to death. And we took those 26 OnPrem servers to six cloud servers. So again, we talk, we talk about cloud sprawl and what that looks like. It was the same thing with them, except it was OnPrem. It was, it was server sprawl. Again, very common, especially in the nonprofit world. We do a lot with nonprofits all over the country, and we donate a lot to, to those. We donate time, we donate equipment if it’s available. Uh, this, this one specifically, they needed monitors and we updated all the monitors in our knocks. So we donated all the monitors that were, ah, a couple years old. We put all them out, um, in, in their facilities and all that type of thing. So again, we get that giving back to the community is a key part of, of being a good business too, regardless of where that community may be in the country. So,
Josh Lupresto (25:19):
Nice.
Chad Muckenfuss (25:20):
Let’s, that was a great one. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (25:22):
All right. So let’s see. I’m a partner. I’ve listened to this 20, 25 minutes jacked up and ready to sell Azure. Maybe I’ve not sold Azure Cloud infrastructure before. What is my, is it three, four questions? What’s my talk track? Because I don’t know if my customers in my base need this, have this, but if you’re me and you wanna go back to those customers that I’ve sold some things to, what do I say?
Chad Muckenfuss (25:50):
Are you using computers in your day to day business? I mean, that’s, that’s an opener. , regardless, the answer’s gonna be yes. So, uh, you know, do I think everybody needs to cloud? Absolutely. At one point or another, are you using Microsoft products? Do you use MS 365? Do you, do you have a premise based server? Do you have, do you have cloud servers that you’re not sure what’s going on right now? Can I have, can I, can I come in and talk to you about what you’re utilizing with the cloud? Whether you realize it or not, 30 minutes doesn’t need to be any more than a 30 minute conversation can do it over Zoom. We’re happy to do it in person too. You know, that that’s just really what needs to happen is just have a quick open conversation with the customer. A lot of partners are, are used to, and I understand it, I came from that world, but are used to that the, the telecom discussion of, I can save you 15, 20, 20 5%.
Chad Muckenfuss (26:45):
Here’s a spreadsheet. You know, look, here’s three options. I’ll save you X amount. Mm-hmm. , that doesn’t work anymore. It’s gotta be an intro call, a consultative call, 30 minutes really is, is a great opener just to get an idea. And again, don’t be afraid to ask questions of what you don’t know. Take that information. If the partner’s gonna call their customer directly to try and open the door, we’re, we have a whole partner toolbox that that’s a part of Telarus University and all that type of thing. Um, we’re happy. We’re doing a monthly training too, which is key as well. We just kicked it off last month of how to open the door, how to have that conversation. Just talk about cloud. It’s not Ancero based, it’s just, it’s discussing cloud and digging into that on a piece by piece to help people understand what to do.
Chad Muckenfuss (27:33):
But again, hey, what, what do you do in day to day? Do you use Microsoft Office? Do you use any cloud based apps? Do you have, um, maybe a server in the cloud or one on premise? What do you do for, for backup and recovery? How are you? Cybersecurity is a great door opener these days too. How are you protecting your network? Do you know? Most cases, I don’t know. I’ve got John and it that handles that. Let me get him on a call with you. Maybe we can talk about it. So again, those, those key factors of what do you do every day and are you protected, are probably the two key ones, I would say to open the door.
Josh Lupresto (28:08):
Good, good stuff. I like those. I love questions. Uh, let’s go final thoughts here. So as you look, we talked about innovation. We talked about, you know, moving people from OnPrem to a little bit of VMs to the next level of, of cloud and infrastructure. What’s your, if we just look out a little bit, look out, 12, 24 months, anything different, you want the partners to be prepared for, you know, what are the trends or what would you advise us on? If you look in your crystal ball,
Chad Muckenfuss (28:35):
Look at that optimization side of things. Um, I’m, I’m gonna read this so I get this right here, but public, this is from Gartner Public Cloud market to hit nearly 600 billion in 2023. That means that, to your point, the cloud’s been adopted. It’s, it’s in regular use every day by almost every company out there. So guess what? It’s bloated. There’s plenty of places to trim it down. Start looking at cloud optimization. Start having that conversation or asking that question of, Hey, what stuff do you use in the cloud? What applications are you using? Are they cloud based still? Are you, you know, are you interacting with customers not only from a computer anymore, but off of your cell phone? What are you doing? How is that look? What are you doing to communicate to your customers? All of that revolves around the cloud. And all of that opens the door for opportunity to talk about, Hey, guess what? We can probably trim that down. When’s the last time somebody looked at it? Oh, nobody’s looked at it. Well, great. Let’s, let’s dig into that a little bit and, and optimize it, make it work better for you.
Josh Lupresto (29:39):
Good stuff. All right, Chad, that wraps us up for today, man. That’s, this is good stuff. We covered a lot of good ground, a lot of good questions. I, I really appreciate you coming on, buddy.
Chad Muckenfuss (29:48):
No, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much,
Josh Lupresto (29:49):
Josh. All right. Chad Muckenfuss, director of channel from Ancero. Chad, thanks so much. Until next time, we’re outta here, everybody. I’m your host, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telrus. Tune in next week as we start talking to partners about how these deals have worked in Azure.