Graeme Scott, VP of Network and Mobility, leads a comprehensive ‘State of the Union’ discussion with senior field solution engineer Josh Hazelhorst and principal solution architect Jason Kaufman about the top networking and mobility trends that shaped 2025 and will impact 2026. The presentation covers ten key trends in a top-ten list format: how networking became critical business infrastructure again, SD-WAN becoming table stakes, SASE creating complexity despite promises of simplification, wireless traffic now exceeding wired in most enterprises, mobility gaining executive attention, IoT explosion exposing security vulnerabilities, POTS replacement creating significant revenue opportunities, customers demanding vendor consolidation, managed services becoming the default solution, and the importance of outcome-based selling over price competition. The discussion emphasizes that network performance is now directly tied to business outcomes, with AI, SaaS applications, and remote work making reliable connectivity mission-critical. The speakers highlight practical opportunities for technology advisors, particularly in POTS replacement projects and helping customers simplify their vendor environments while addressing security concerns in an increasingly connected world.
Transcript is auto-generated.
Networking and mobility have transformed dramatically in just a few years, shaping your cloud performance, security, application experience, IoT, AI, all of it. And the network isn’t behind the scenes anymore. It is very much the experience itself And to help unpack what’s happening across the advanced networking and mobility areas, I’m excited to welcome Graeme Scott, our VP of network and mobility along with senior field solution engineer, Josh Josh Hazelhorst, and principal solution architect, Jason Kaufman. Just a mouthful there. But welcome, Graeme, Josh, Jason. Super excited to have you here. Please take it away.
Yeah. Thanks, Cass. Really excited to be here with a couple of the smartest guys that I know, Josh and Kaufman.
Kaufman, Haas, welcome to the call. Thanks for joining us.
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Yeah. Absolutely. Glad to be on.
Yeah. So today, we’re gonna break some things down. Today, we’re doing the State of the Union. So, Chandlee, you can go ahead and flip it to the next slide there.
State of the union. Obviously, twenty twenty five was a big year in the network space. A lot changed. We had a lot of good conversations over the course of the year.
We’re gonna highlight some of those and just some of the things that we saw with a lot of the deals that came into us and a lot of these kind of things. So we’re gonna talk through what happened in twenty twenty five and how we feel like that’s gonna set us up for twenty twenty six. And, of course, if you guys know me, I love to do these in lists. So we’re gonna break this down like a top ten list, Letterman style, like I have done in the past, have a little bit of fun with it.
So here we go. Let’s kick things off with the twenty twenty six State of the Union trend number one, network brought sexy back. So Cass kinda talked about it at the outset a little bit here, but network kinda became a big deal again in twenty twenty five. And, Gartner tells us that by twenty twenty six, this year, most enterprise workloads will be distributed latency sensitive and performance dependent.
So why does that matter to you out there as a TA? Well, the network’s no longer plumbing. It’s now the foundation for things like AI, SaaS performance, CX, and automation, all of these other tools we’re doing. And when it fails, when the network fails, businesses feel the impact of that immediately.
So let’s open this up to Kaufman. We’ll start with you, Kaufman, on this one. Where are you seeing customers finally treat the network as a business platform and not just connectivity or plumbing?
Two two occasions. Really, it’s the user experience. So exactly what you’re saying from an AI tool usage or SaaS based cloud application usage.
That’s a big one because a lot of customers are finding out that when they were implementing a lot of this stuff, they’re trying to figure out how they’re being held back by the technology that they had implemented, and a lot of it came back to the network. A lot of them assumed, hey. We’re gonna be moving a lot of our infrastructure off-site. We don’t need to have that big network backbone or something that’s latency sensitive and all that stuff that we used to provision because we had all of our infrastructure on-site. They found out, hey. We just moved everything, lift, and shifted it. We still need a ton of bandwidth in order to access those applications even though they aren’t here on premise.
So we’re finding that. And then the meet where you’re at component to where everybody wants to enable their employees, whether they’re they’re at a coffee shop, they’re on the street with a cell phone, or wherever they may be accessing all those applications, you have to have some form of network, whether it’s cellular, Wi Fi, or if they’re at a branch office or something. They need to be able to to have that access. So two components there, enablement and then also the the experience have brought the the back. We still need a pun for it’s gonna be May if we’re sticking to the Justin Timberlake stuff, but we got a few months to figure that one out.
Yeah. Hass, opening it up to you now. I mean, in in your opinion, the sexy never left network. Right? You’ve you’ve always been, the network guy. So what how have you seen that sort of just the the approach and the mentality change a little bit over the last year?
Yeah. When we moved from I needed the interwebs to look at YouTube videos to my business critical money making applications actually lived there also changed the dynamic of, wait a minute, I need hardened, reliable, redundant redundant connections to connect to my money making applications. It used to be the money making application sat in servers in my back closet now. Right?
It doesn’t. Right. Users have no idea where these applications are anymore and frankly don’t care. But I need to be able to connect to them, and I need those applications to be one hundred percent up.
Yeah. And and I think, you know, AI we’ve talked a lot about AI in twenty twenty five. Right? And and a lot of people are, well, hey. AI has sort of necessitated this change. This this move to AI and this is everybody looking at AI has really just kind of highlighted how important the network actually is. Right, Hass?
Yeah. You know, it it it’s it’s funny. It depends on what that application is. Right?
If I’m a remote user, I’m a traveling user, if I’m in sales, if I’m in marketing, if I’m in engineering, my experience used to be it could change and it could have tolerances. Now my experience needs to be the same no matter where I’m at, why I’m at, what device I’m at, what part of the world I’m at. It doesn’t matter anymore. I need perfection and I need it all the time.
So sorry, mister network guy. Go buy a stick of dirty broadband and say I’m good. Check off the box. Boss made me get a hundred gig pipe or a hundred meg pipe or whatever.
Great. No. No. No. No. That’s not good enough anymore. I need I need one hundred percent perfection now.
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So if you’re out there selling network slinging circuits, you know, welcome back to the party. We are now the showcase of the, of the product stack. So love it. Channel, let’s go ahead and move on to our next trend.
SD WAN became the default. So SD WAN is now the standard architecture for multisite enterprises, not a differentiator per Gartner. So what that means is that, you know, something that used to be kind of a feature or an add on is now basically table stakes. So why does this matter?
If everyone had SD WAN selling at SD WAN no longer creates value. Right? So you’ve got to, you know, do these kind of things. So, Kaufman, if SD WAN is now table stakes, what actually differentiates a WAN conversation today?
A lot of it is how to what’s the most efficient way to get data where it needs to go and the people that are accessing it? SD WAN is just a just a component. And Hass always loves to say that SD WAN is not a product. It’s more of an ideology in how a network is designed.
So SD WAN is pretty much part of almost every network that we talk about today, but it’s what’s the most efficient way? Is it are are we using, like, a CloudPop to where we want to minimize the middle mile between the user accessing data here someplace in Florida even though the infrastructure is on the West Coast? How do we minimize the latency and control the most of the traffic that goes from, you know, point a to point b? You know, there’s there’s many different things called you know, that we work with, you know, backbones and, you know, packet based per session based transmission.
So there’s many different types of SD WAN out there. A lot of people just subtract it from the flexibility component of it, and you get away from, like, MPLS, VPLS, and all that stuff. But in order to differentiate yourself, you really wanna look at not only security components, not to take away from future slides that we have here, but then also what’s the most efficient path to make sure that user experience is a hundred percent up and a hundred percent gravy every time they access it?
Yeah. And, Hass, you talked about a little bit on our last slide, this idea of being able to access these critical applications at all time, always up. SD WAN is kind of the way we achieve that in a lot of cases. Correct?
It is. But go back to what Kaufman said, SD WAN is not a thing. Right? It’s not a blinky light. It’s not a box. It’s it’s a it’s a word that marketing companies came up with to confuse customers to buy things that they don’t need.
I was on a call last week and the guy said I hate SD WAN. Don’t even talk to me about SD WAN. Right? I I built, you know, multiple point to point circuits into my hub and then I’m the Internet gateway out for my users.
What do you mean you hate SD WAN? You just dump it. Right? That was a port a piece.
SD WAN is sixteen different things. It’s just it but it’s people have to remember. This this is marketing engine. Right?
It’s it’s now about forget the word and the term. What are you trying to accomplish and how does the application need to behave?
Yeah. Yeah. So, again, just this this idea of managing the network and making sure that the things that you need access to, you have access to at all times in all places is really kind of table stakes now in the environment that, most of our most of our customers are living in. Good stuff.
Centric too, though. Right, Graeme?
It’s Yeah.
If if I if I’ve got some guy that’s rocking on, you know, janitorial services and then other guys that are in my app dev team, does that application need to behave the same for both functions? No. There’s a different tolerance level.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And and, of course, SD WAN is how we achieve all that.
That’s how we you know, whether you build it with a blinking box or whatever. But this idea that, you know, this is now just the way it’s done. It’s table stakes now, I think, for a lot of these enterprises, I think, is really something that we saw, change a little bit over the last couple years. So let’s go ahead and move on to our next slide right now.
Per Gartner, channel slide number three there, Chandler. There we go. SASE became a strategy then a mess. Right? So per Gartner, most enterprises now operate security across four or more major platforms. So what does that mean? That means that a lot of these IT teams have got a ton of stuff going on where, you know, multiple platforms, multiple portals, multiple panes of glasses that they’re using to try and manage their environment.
The promise of SASE was to try and simplify that, right, to create it all in an architecture. But we’re seeing a lot of customers that are doing this sort of taking this DIY approach and creating complexity in the environment. Kaufman, talk us through a little bit of that. I know a lot of the conversations you’re having, especially, you know, on the security side, are just simplifying a lot of this stuff into this SASE framework.
Yeah. A lot of times, like, they lot of customers wanna have one device for one specific component, and they already have a firewall implemented. And a lot of firewall platforms now have an SD WAN module, and they’ve, know, significantly upgraded them in the last, you know, eighteen months to where they have true failover and failback and then also blending multiple circuits together. Like, they have circuit aggregation and many things that, you know, allow them to have the true SD WAN deployment, but they always figure they want they need to have another device that does that type of functionality.
Or they have the SD WAN appliance. They don’t trust the security component inside of it. We’re hearing a lot of that on, like, the VeloCloud, the Meraki stack, surprisingly, you know, the the Cisco name brand. You know, there’s many different platforms out there to where somebody doesn’t an IT staff doesn’t have the confidence that it could do both function.
But they still say they wanna simplify the network, and they wonder how they can do that. So SASE infrastructure now, hey. I can take that firewall component. I’ll get all the next gen features to protect the network, but then I can also use the same platform and minimize how much complexity we are using in all this configuration and management.
And I can simplify that all into one, you know, one organization. Or now we’re seeing that the conversation kinda transmit into not only do I need Sassy, but I need remote employees to be able to access everything, and we’re kinda getting away from the office set. Hoss, what is that now? SSE?
We just dropped the letter there to where Yeah.
Secure service edge. Yeah.
Yeah. So there’s a there’s a lot of this conversation that is, hey. You know, it goes back to, hey. Where’s the where are the people accessing? Where are they accessing accessing to? And how do we secure everything in the middle to give the best security posture out there from a from a transport perspective? So, yes, it is getting simplified, but it also opened the gates to there’s many other ways that we could do this more efficiently to where you don’t need hardware, where you don’t need multiple OEM platforms to make something highly effective.
Yeah. And terms sound like it’s added complexity. Like you mentioned. Right? Now we got SSE.
Right? Secure service edge. We had SASE. Secure access service edge. Is there a difference? So we had SRA, secure remote access.
Was there a difference? Or did marketers just make it sound like there was a difference and it did something different and better? We have other companies say, we were the first to Sassy because we had a router that we turned on a zone based firewall and maybe some URL filtering, and now we’re a security element. Okay.
Right? So it confuses everybody of, oh, I think I need a SASE thing. SASE can be built. SASE can be bolted on in service chain of other components in my environment, or SASE could just be a software that lets my remote users access an application secure.
Yeah. I mean, Hass, this is an idea you’ve shared on a number of calls. Right? This like, SASE is a framework. It’s not really a product. And I think this idea of everybody kinda running out and trying to sell SASE has really kinda muddied the waters a little bit here as far as what we’re really trying to accomplish.
Yeah. And it’s it’s frankly, it’s nobody’s fault because I’m an end user. I am getting flooded with information. I Google something. I get all kinds of stuff on Sassy. And at the end of the day, I probably already have it. I just haven’t turned it on.
Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Okay. Let’s go ahead and move on to topic number four.
And, folks, if you’re with us there out in the chat, drop something in there for us. Let us know you’re listening, and let us know you’re enjoying it. But this is one that’s near and dear to my heart, obviously, as the mobility guy. Wireless became mission critical.
Something that used to be kind of off off in the background, maybe just a background circuit doing a little bit of work for us. All of a sudden is now a big part of the picture. Per Cisco, wireless traffic now exceeds wired traffic in most enterprise environments. So what does that mean for USTA?
When wireless fails, work stops for your customers. It’s no longer an accessory. It’s primary infrastructure. Let’s open up with you on this one, Hass.
Where do we see customers still underinvesting in wireless even though it’s now a business critical, component?
Yeah. So, again, back to that, that that flowchart of that work order I get on Monday morning, boss man said, go get me some four g, some five g as a failover to my failover. Okay, boss. I’ll do that.
And then WAN one and WAN one goes down, WAN two goes down. I flood everything over to four g, and I can’t do any work. Did we not think about how much data was going over WAN one and WAN two before we decided to do this tiny, tiny little data plan on four g? Did we not think about do all applications need to fail over to four g or just a couple business critical application?
We have to remember. We have to think about this as not just a kick the can down the road, and now it’s somebody else’s problem to transport to this application. Right? This is I’ve got a plan for this.
I’ve gotta understand what my applications are, and I’ve gotta understand where those bottlenecks live. And just by sticking in a SIM card into a router, maybe I just created another bottleneck that I didn’t see.
Yeah. Kaufman, you know, the the thing too, I mean, obviously, we we think about wireless a lot as a backup. But in a lot of environments, wireless is it. It’s the primary. It is what gets everything done. So, Kaufman, talk a little bit about how that’s changed and and the capabilities of wireless networks and how they have grown to meet the demand.
Yeah. It really, the information the implementation of five g really changed the landscape and also the improvements with fixed wireless. So a lot of people use the term fixed wireless synop synopsy with cellular. I use it as, like, a point to point connection from the ISP.
So that fiber in the sky is sub ten millisecond, you know, gigabit, you know, Internet connection, you know, weather weather permitting and all that stuff. But but the line of sight connection, you know, beefing those up to where people using those as a primary connection or even cellular, because now cellular five g, you’re getting sub twenty five milliseconds of latency. You’re getting up to a gigabit connection, even sometimes more than that in a high density area. You know, a lot of people use that because you don’t have to go through a whole implementation of installing to a demark, extending that to the network closet.
You know, doing all this stuff in a full project and rollout, all you do is ship somebody a Cradlepoint or a Peplink or one of those little, you know, hockey pucks that’s cellular enabled. They plug it in. It connects to the towers, and you’re good to go. And then you run everything off that business.
So we’ve been able to next day ship stuff like that out and get somebody enabled in a new office or in a disaster type of thing, and then they’re fully enabled to where they can run a lot of their business applications on that environment because it is so latency sensitive now. And it also has, you know, the the robustness of almost a hardline connection. Knows the keyword almost. But there the the technology enables people to do and it goes back to enabling people to do things where they’re at, you know, being in the field, you know, doing something over wireless rather than relying on a hard line connection.
A lot of people are experimenting and finding out that they can run on, you know, primary connection via wireless. I mean, how many times, HOS, does somebody come in saying, hey. I want Starlink. You know, I wanna do every location Starlink because it’s easy just to implement, and I know it’s gonna work because as long as I’m not part of twenty twenty countries internationally, then we could roll Starlink out there.
I mean, there’s a lot of technical considerations that I know we wanna get into, but how many requests do we get for that just because they think it’s simple?
Yeah. And I think the biggest thing you mentioned at Starlink too is is we have to open the eyes of underlying potential risks to those specific critical applications. If you do this, this could happen. Is that tolerable? Is that not tolerable? If it’s not tolerable, we need to have a further discussion.
Yeah. It always blows my mind. Like, you know, I’ve been in this business a little bit and, you know, thinking about what we used to spend on a hardline connection, one gig pipe, whatever. Now you can combine a couple of different technologies together with an SD WAN appliance and create almost, like you said, almost something that’s just as robust as those, large fiber pipes that we used to, you know, spend so much on, even ten years ago.
And just the cost of all this has gone so much down, yet the critical component of the network, as we’ve talked about, still remains. It’s such a big part. It’s it’s the key to everything. And, I just it’s crazy how it’s evolved.
So let’s go ahead and move on to the next slide. We’re at the halfway point here. Another one that’s near and dear to my heart here. Mobility got executive attention.
Trend number five. So a study came out from a group called IDC, the future of work, and they say that mobile devices are now the primary interface for frontline workers and customer engagement. And I know from my own personal experience, that is definitely true. Mobility has become a big deal and has be moved beyond just sort of phones and easy to get ahold of somebody to true productivity, safety, and CX and enablement of employee activity.
So, Kaufman, let’s start with you on this one. What changed when mobility all of a sudden became a broad level conversation instead of just, like, an IT task that somebody had to take care of?
It was when the mobile apps that were created to be completely synopsis with what I can access on a desktop. So I can be in the field and access our CRM. I can access anything from, like, a dispatch application where I can put notes in and do stuff live so I don’t have to take notes and then go back and, you know, rework it all again at the home office. You’re enabling somebody to be more efficient by finishing that task where they’re at and then get real time info as well so they can give an educated response if somebody asks them a question or give them an update on something.
So enabling the employee to do things where they’re at, that has significantly impacted the executive decision to say, hey. We’re gonna provide these these devices. Or and we we saw in the last eighteen months, it was we’re gonna provide devices so we can lock it down and and enable employees in the field so people had two two devices. And then we said, hey.
These devices now are dual SIM, or we can just do a BYOD plan and reimburse people for their own devices. So we pulled back on selling those cellular devices to the employees in the business and just doing a full, like, reimbursement program. Then companies found out, hey. That’s a massive security risk.
I have an employee accessing company data for the same thing that they’re recording videos on TikTok for, and now we’re enabling you know, you know, somebody loses that device. They don’t have the necessary biometrics on it, you know, because we’re relying on them to do their own due care and due diligence. And then now we’ve seen a transmission back into, providing those cell phone devices. So now we can install our MDM platforms.
We can control everything. So now we need to have a full mobile IT staff in order to do all this stuff to where it’s just been a funny tipsy topsy curve on the last eighteen months on how executives have handled this decision on where they wanna put the investment to minimize the risk while enabling employees. It’s just it’s just a massive, roller coaster that’s that’s been fun. But, you know, a lot of it comes back to, hey.
We can have a multisend device and, you know, get a phone number wherever they need to. We can get them wherever device. We can manage the whole thing. That’s actually been taken off pretty well lately.
Yeah. They say the average employee has between two and three devices right now. And, I mean, just thinking of myself. Right?
I got my my Meta Glasses. I’ve got my watch. I’ve got my phone. I’ve got a tablet.
I’ve got all these things that are running around. It makes sense that all of a sudden, the powers that be within the IT stack or or your executives are paying more attention to this. And, Hass, I know it’s a much bigger part of the conversations that you’re having. You know, as a guy that’s done a lot of network stuff, you’re being brought into a lot of mobility conversations over the last year.
Correct?
Yeah. Every day. And and I always say that, you know, if you think about tech as a as a as a jumbo, you know, one thousand puzzle piece set, everything’s connected to everything. Right?
And when mobility came up along, okay. We’ll just we’ll just buy cell phones and tablets for my users or now bring your own device because we don’t wanna worry about it. What is that? Remember, everything’s connected to everything.
So what did that impact on the food chain? Like Kaufman just said, now I’ve got a security risk. Right? If I’m doing, you know, data classification, I’ve got secret secret top secret classified information.
Can I connect to that information from my laptop in my office? Sure. Can I connect it from my, you know, tablet at the hotel? Maybe.
Right? Can I connect to that same top secret classified information from a Wi Fi hotspot in a Starbucks? Absolutely not. How do I control that?
Well, now we’re talking things like zero trust. Right? My point is since everything is connected to everything and we’re always teaching how to go deeper and wider to organizations, I hear the comment all the time. I only do UCaaS and and circuits, or I only do circuits and mobility.
I don’t do cybersecurity. Yes. You do. You absolutely do. Right? Bring in your engineers. We’ll uncover that because there’s fourteen more things we have to sell to that customer.
Yeah. And I think for those of you out there who haven’t had the mobility conversation, you know, what this should hopefully illustrate is that you’ve got a receptive ear now within within these organizations. Right? Executives understand this is a challenge.
The average company spends about for every dollar they spend on traditional connectivity, they spend about a dollar and a half on mobility. So it’s becoming a bigger part of everybody’s budget, and it’s getting the attention of the executive suite. So if you haven’t jumped on the mobility bandwagon, if you haven’t started asking the questions, now is the time you have a receptive ear within the organization. So we talked a little bit about security risk, and this is one that I know you guys love to talk about on our next topic here as we cross the halfway point.
Really appreciate the chat out there. Keep that going. Let us know what you’re thinking. Let us know if you have questions.
But, Kaufman, this is when you and I have been on multiple calls to talk about. IoT is exploding. Right? The number of connected devices is growing so much faster than IT teams have the ability to see or manage them, and it is exposing fragile visibility, security, and governance issues.
IoT, talk a little bit about the problems, not just the opportunity, but the problems that’s been created by this IoT explosion.
Yeah. I mean, the the the core component of it is IoT devices. Even though they’re called smart devices, they’re dumb in relative nature to cybersecurity. I can’t install an endpoint detection tool on it or an antivirus program to help mitigate a risk or, you know, attack to come in from from externally, so you gotta do side channel monitoring.
So you gotta do, like, the scanning, vulnerability patching. You have to isolate the network, and a lot of these companies weren’t doing that legacy. You’d be surprised how many companies in emergency services don’t isolate their networks through micro segmentation or even segment the IoT versus the the hard clients because they just never thought to do that previously. They thought, hey.
You know, this is a secure device. Nobody can get to it. But now we’re seeing all those stories to where you have a full casino going down because somebody hacked the smart sensor in the aquarium or something like that because it didn’t go through the necessary precautions in order to protect that network. So now there’s guidance that’s coming out from a government perspective.
You know, the the the primary infrastructure and all that stuff people are focusing on from a, you know, a threat level perspective. So IoT networks are starting to get a ton of traction because people are starting to see this is a massive vulnerability and exposure that, you know, somebody could get in and completely, you know, completely reorg an entire network. You know, they they could get in and block massive things from happening, and it’s all critical infrastructure. And a lot of people are building smart appliances, smart manufacturing, smart everything that they wanna do, but how are they doing it to where they’re limiting their exposure?
The quicker you give data to something, though, that can act on somebody’s behalf, the quicker it could become a risk. So how do they do that effectively? Hass, I know you had a ton of these conversations where we’ve gone back and forth on what’s the necessary tool sets and all this stuff and segmentation. What do you what do you think on this?
Like, what are you seeing?
Yeah. So, I mean, you when you’re talking IoT, I know you’re digging into, like, you’re in the manufacturing and the warehouses and the SCADA systems, and you’re in environmental and energy companies and stuff like that. And those are those are monster. Those are hardcore use cases.
Right? I live a lot in retail franchise where I’ve got, you know, twenty two hundred locations with zero IT users. And my my I my one IT guy, the dude of my neighbor that knows how to build a web page. Right?
He went down to Costco and got me a bunch of refrigerator sensors. So I know when my deli meats, you know, go above forty five degrees in my refrigerator. But there’s just this this concept, and and I don’t wanna throw more complexities out there or more acronyms or words, but actionable intel. If I have twenty two hundred locations and sixty four of my twenty two hundred locations now have, you know, sixty four degrees in in my in my sandwich closet and and my and my cold calls closet.
What’s the actual intel? What do I do about it? Yeah. Great. I knew it went down.
I knew I have to throw away food or I’m gonna get people sick, but where does that go? So now you got these hubs that all that data goes into. And then all that data creates actionable intel that then comes back to me. So now I know I have to reorder immediately or I know what to do.
I need that actionable intel. But what people still do is remember everything is connected to everything? I’m just gonna tell my facilities manager to go buy me a bunch of refrigerator sensors. Yeah.
No. No. You’re not. That is because is that still is that behind the firewall? Is it protected?
Do I have actionable intel? Is it going into a hub? Where does that data live? How do I get that data?
What do I do about that data? Oh, man. I don’t know. Bossman told me to go get some sensors.
Yeah. We’re missing an element, remember, because everything is connected to everything.
Yeah. I mean, I think just like, you know, when we talk about cybersecurity alerts, like, you know, the point of IoT is to create this data, to collect the data. But then where does it go, and where do you what do you do with it? It’s really exposed a lot of these sort of blind spots and and, like, these gaps that we’ve got within the network. And not even just from a security standpoint, but also from, you know, information flow. Like, getting data from point a to point b expose a lot of, you know, roadblocks and backlogs and in areas where there needs to be some attention paid. Right, Kaufman?
Yes. Definitely.
Short and sweet.
I love it, man.
That was perfect.
I It’s But but but to your point, Graeme, if if these things aren’t built with with a with a fourteen bullet point plan If I install this, what happens up the food chain? What happens down the food chain? If they’re not, then they’re doing it wrong. Yeah. We need to slow down a little bit, take a step back, and see what is the impact if I do blank.
Yeah. Yeah. I think the power of these IoT devices is amazing and what they can do and what they can provide. But, you know, adding them to a network that can’t support the flow of the information and the flow of the data from point a to point b, you know, again, just creates problems. Like, what’s the point of getting the information if you can’t get it where you need it and you can’t access it and do something with it. Like you said, Hass, actionable intel.
Yeah. The the the the Home Depot story with the smart refrigerators, the Samsung refrigerators. Right? Funny story, but what if that was a banking app?
Yeah. Oh my god. What if that was my home mortgage application? Woah. Not such a funny story anymore.
Absolutely.
So one of those things if if we’re looking at the IoT providers in our in our portfolio, most of the time, the way they implement in order to get around these these risks is all the IoT devices have their own cellular card and no Wi Fi card built into them.
So there’s no possible way for it to connect to the local network. So, you know, when we’re talking about segmentation and all this stuff on a network, somebody goes and buys that sensor. If we’re providing that service to one of our IoT solutions, it’s air gapped from the network entirely without the possibility of having a Wi Fi card in there. So there’s inherent security on all those solutions that we would bring to the table. So I just wanna throw that quick insight out there, Graeme, if you don’t mind.
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Alright. So let’s move on to our next one here. Topic number seven, my favorite number seven, by the way.
This is something that’s near and dear to my heart. You guys have heard me talk about this a lot. You’re probably, in fact, sick of hearing about POTS replacement over the last couple of years or last couple of months. We’ve put out a ton of material on it, but the reason we talk about it so much is because POTS replacement made and will make you, our tech advisers, a ton of money.
Made a lot of money in twenty twenty five, and there is a lot of money to be made in twenty twenty six. Hass, I think you were the you you pointed this out at our state of the union last year when we talked about sort of low hanging fruit that’s out there in the marketplace. You talked about pots replacement. Little did we know it would become such a hot topic in twenty twenty five.
Yeah. Let’s talk about old days because we’ve been talking about this pots replacement for fifteen years. Right? It’s always been this fear of, oh my god.
The the FCC is gonna deregulate this, and now you don’t have to fix things. Right? I live in a community way outside of Phoenix, kinda in between Phoenix and Tucson. Everything out here years and years ago was just analog lines.
Right? Just analog lines underground or or over the over the on on the telephone poles. And when there was an issue, you you would you would call into your your AT and Ts or whatever. They would send a technician out.
They would go into the stinking the the little gray can and move some wires from this place to that place and boom, you’re fixed. But then I just broke everybody else down the other street in the other neighborhood. Right? But who cares?
Right? Because you got nine one one services, and we’ll just keep robbing Peter to pay Paul. Well, today, there’s no trucks coming out. Like, I don’t have to come fix your stuff anymore.
What are you gonna do? Right? So, yeah, parts replacement is it’s it’s been live for fifteen years, but it’s now a it’s real live now because that truck that comes out and fixes my issue because a cable broke or a little plastic detent pin busted, I don’t have to come fix it anymore. What are you gonna do about it?
You gotta make money still. Right?
We gotta get off that.
Yeah. And Kaufman, our TA has closed some pretty big deals in the pots replacement space. Lot of opportunity still out there. Talk a little bit about some of the ones that you’ve been involved in.
Yeah. I mean, mostly, it’s just customers kicking the can down because they never believed that it was actually gonna be shut off. And now we’re actually at that point of no return to where exactly what Hotsu was saying, they no longer have to support. It’s not they’re not they don’t have to support in the future. Like, now is the actual time to where they could say no.
So we’re starting to see the customers starting to look at this because they’re like, hey. Not only did our bill increase from three to four x, but then also I’d have no support on here, and we have to go and, you know, fix this stuff on our own. That collectively together is starting to make them to give them the initiative to go finally do something about it. So I’m part of multiple opportunities to where you think a random university or random assisted living facility or something like that needs a whole PRI of lines, or they need you know, a university needs two to three thousand lines.
Just randomly, stuff like that that comes in, hotels, hospital, you know, any type or even retail environment still using POTS lines for their credit card feeds and all that stuff. So you’ll find some low hanging fruit out there on people that, you know, just continually kick the can because they’re like, I’ll just take whatever comes in because it’s not something that seems super pressing. But we’re at that point now to where, you know, they’re gonna lose all their transmission if they don’t do something about it. So there’s numerous opportunities out there that we’re in day in and day out and multiple different technologies that we could bring in that have the battery backups that follow all the compliances that has, you know, the cellular gateways that could hit multiple different cellular technologies for redundancy and then ultimately convert that from digital analog transmission to hit you know, make it the user experience doesn’t change.
It’s just what the network in closet looks like.
Yeah. But there’s still got this. Switch to the next slide, Chandler. Around there.
Yeah. Switch to the next slide, Chandler, as we’re talking about it. We had a lot of comments in the chat here asking about this. Shameless plug here for our report that we put out a couple of months ago.
It has been an extremely popular guide. So if you wanna go ahead and download that, we continually update it. But sorry, Hass. I cut you off there.
What were you saying there before I No.
No. You’re good. I was just saying there’s gotchas. Right? Like, we literally, right this call, had a had a question come in to our end ask an engineering group.
Right? Hey. I need to do a pots in a box world, but I don’t want it to be over Internet.
Okay.
Right.
Then how are we gonna do this? Because it’s not a magic ball. Right? This is not this is not a magician with fairy dust.
It’s a box that needs to plug into something, and I need need to move data from point a to point b. How do I do this without the inter webs? Yeah. I don’t.
Right? It’s not magic. So there’s still things. And Jason mentioned certification, health and life safety.
If I want to do a pot replacement because I have, you know, three analog telephone lines and then maybe cans on a string, that’s one thing. But what if this is for health and life safety, like elevators and alarms and whatever? That’s different.
The the scenario is the same pots in a box solution, but it’s a different solution now.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the key is where do we find these opportunities. Right? If you think about it, pots have been around for a long time.
And so, usually, you’re gonna see it in customers that have some level of maturity. Right? The business that just started two years ago probably doesn’t have any pots lines, but the one that’s been around for fifteen years, I can guarantee you, has a bunch. And the key is helping those customers come up with a plan, because at some point, very soon, they’re gonna be shut off.
We’re already starting to hear dates from AT and T and some of the others where they’re like, hey. Beyond October, AT and T, no moves, add changes for POTS lines. Right? So they’re not repairing them, as you said, Hass.
And I think, you know, customers are gonna be caught if they’re not making a plan. Last part I wanna leave with you guys before we switch topics here. Usually, there’s a lot of money to be saved. Once they start digging in on these POTS lines, they find out, hey.
We’re not even using half of these things. Right? A bunch of them have been, you know, not even working for a couple of months or a couple of years, and we’re still paying bills. So a lot of times, it creates some cost savings that you can use for other things.
So, a really good thing, make sure you’re talking about it with your customers, and make just, hey. Finding out, hey. Do we have any old phone lines kicking around the businesses that we can look at and make some changes?
So Hey, Graeme.
That’s a great point. That this is one of the things we actually use to open up budgets to where somebody’s paying x for a certain amount of line. You know, once they figure out, hey. We’re just gonna move all these lines over to POTS replacement, then they start tracing them to figure out what they’re being used for.
You find out a lot of these has been unused, and they’ve just been paying the bills because they never really looked into it and took the time. But, ultimately, it’s been opening up like, that twenty three channel PRI scenario, a lot of SMBs have twenty three channel PRIs. They’re paying, you know, sometimes up to a hundred a hundred, dollars per port or even more than that, and we could save them a lot of money just by going to accept the PRI implementation. Easy train easy implementation.
I’m gonna use the quotes easy because you never wanna use that word as an engineer. I know Hoff is grinning grinning his feet right now, But, ultimately, it opens up budget to go procure other things. Do they have a cybersecurity initiative? Do they have a cloud migration?
Do they have something they don’t wanna install SASE. I think I gotta use the network term. Sorry, Graeme. Talk about some other yeah.
But it ultimately opens up the budget to do other things and technology initiatives, and you could be the partner on all of that.
Yeah. For sure. Good stuff, guys. If you want more on that, let us know. All of us are happy to talk more about POTS and and and those opportunities for you guys.
But let’s go ahead and move on to our next topic here. Number eight, customers want more from less. And what do I mean by that? Well, CIO dot com did an analysis where they surveyed a bunch of IT leaders, and the average enterprise now manage dozens of IT and security tools across an average of thirty vendors in an enterprise environment.
Now that’s not as extreme in smaller businesses, but still this idea that we’re managing all of these vendors across our, across our environment, customers don’t wanna do that anymore. Complexity is the enemy, not always cost. Customers are overwhelmed by dashboards, contracts, and then, hey. Who do I call when I’ve got a problem with this?
So let’s start with you on this one, Hass. We’re seeing a ton of customers wanting to simplify their vendor environment and get out of this vendor sprawl that we see so much, you know, more from less.
Yeah. Anybody if anybody’s on this call that does, you know, cybersecurity or helps com customers build formal frameworks, CMMC, NIST, ISO, sys eighteen, safeguards rule, or whatever. Right? We get this this this point where we get to the the the world of vendor risk management.
Right? I have too many cooks in the kitchen, too many devices. I’ve service chained too many things. One doesn’t collate with another, one collapses another, one breaks another in the food chain.
Remember, everything is connected to everything. Right? When we get on these discovery calls, most of the time, part of that discovery session is, what have you already invested in, mister customer? We don’t wanna have to rip and replace if we don’t want to.
Why? One, that creates value to the customer. Now he loves you because you’re not trying to sell him something. And two, you may have overlapping technologies in your environment that we can remove one and just turn on a service on the other, and it didn’t cost you any money and it saved you money and, like Jason said earlier, right, opened up budget.
Right? These are the values that we have. The the the people that you that you compete with, the guys on this call, your your CDW reps and your insight reps or whatever, they have no idea what the heck I just said. But we need to not only protect the customer, we need to protect their initial investment so they can go to the CFO and get budget approved.
Right? If we’re just trying to buy something else, that’s not gonna work. They want more from less, but a lot of times, they already have it. They just don’t know the capability of the existing stuff they have.
Yeah. And Kaufman, you know, there was always this idea, think, from an enterprise standpoint. Hey. Let’s go out and get the best of breed in every area we need, and that’s kinda created a bit of a mess at a lot of these larger larger customers.
Yeah. They’re finding out it’s much harder to retain personnel that you train up to be that, you know, focus that SME on that one specific product, then an MSP will go hire them and pay them for more. So now they’re left, you know, figuring out, hey. Do I need to train up somebody else to be, you know, cross platform, or do I need to go hire somebody?
So it’s continued revolving door on the personnel that are supposed to, you know, support this stuff. So in the scenario we’re talking about earlier and just like Hass was saying with service chaining, you know, you got a Meraki SD WAN device. You got a Fortinet or a Palo Alto firewall. You have Juniper switches.
Those are three different platforms all in one network that somebody have to log in to the portal. They have to know what they’re configuring. They have to be familiar with it and the subject matter expert. The the CLI or the command line interface language of a Juniper is different from a Cisco, same with the Fortinet.
You know, they all use same type type of Linux type of language, but there’s differences between where things are located and how to interact and make changes. So knowing those intricacies is adds a lot of complexity, and we’re you know, consolidating everything into one platform makes it easier to manage and also less resources you need to do it. That’s why we’re seeing a lot in the co management space. We’re seeing a lot in the vendor consolidation.
I mean, look at the m and a activity that’s going on in the IT landscape. You know, the the big providers are seeing this as well, and they’re starting to see, hey. We can build these different modules or we can go buy it and just integrate it with our platform. Now we have all these different use cases that we could put under one umbrella.
So they’re starting to see that as well. Companies are starting to transition from best of breed, putting the best in the individual locations, and use best of suite to where, hey. I can get good enough, and but I can make it easier to manage and more simplify my network, and that’s what’s gonna allow me to scale quicker as we as we progress.
Yeah. And we hear it all the time. Right? It says, I think my value is saving my customer money. What if you could save your customer time?
Yeah. Because that is the most valuable asset in the organization. It’s not I saved them thirty eight cents a month. No.
No. No. I saved him fourteen hours a week. That’s money.
Yep. And it’s sometimes hard to quantify that. I get it. But huge. And, you know, we’re gonna I’m gonna kinda segue into our next topic, Kaufman, because I think you really bridged it very, very well.
Topic number nine that we saw a lot of managed services became the default. So, Kaufman, in your answer to our last one, you sort of touched on it. This this you know, hey. We train somebody up to use this thing and then bang, they’re gone to somebody else.
You know, this used to be the world of MSPs, but now we’ve added a lot of these services to our portfolio, and customers need this. There’s an ongoing skill shortage and operational fatigue that are happening within organizations, and they’re just like, to heck with it. Let’s outsource it. And over the last year or so, we’ve added a ton of these options to the portfolio, MSP type services where you have sort of an a managed environment instead of customers trying to do it themselves.
So, Kaufman, why don’t you talk a little bit about sort of the growth there? And, you know, a lot of customers are with the challenges you talked about, they’re just like, to heck with it. I’m just gonna outsource this whole thing.
They’re finally starting to realize that, hey. It’s cheaper to leverage a team of folks and pay as the economies of scale rather than going to hire somebody. Now that salaries are starting to increase with inflation and all that stuff, you know, you’re finding a, you know, an IT analyst position or a network admin. You know, you’re not getting them much cheaper than a fifty, sixty thousand dollars a year.
So that equates to, at minimum, four k a month. For an SMB that has a couple locations and a few endpoints, they can get a full co managed solution or a full managed platform with the software applications, with the hardware as a service to where they never have to worry about hardware breaking or procuring new hardware again on a refresh. They can just outsource that entire thing and have a team of people that work twenty four by seven on their behalf and a phone number to call, you know, that one throat to hug that we were talking about earlier. You know, they could do that to where they don’t have to worry about vacation time, somebody getting sick, or going to buy all the licensing, buy all the hardware, and then have paying somebody to manage it.
They could do that more cost effective way in minimal headaches, and they’re finding it to be much more advantageous advantageous to do that because they’re saving so much money. It’s much cheaper to instead of doing a fifty, sixty thousand dollar a year salary employee, you know, with benefits and all those other risks that come with that, it’s much cheaper to do it with as a service and pay less than a thousand dollars a month for everything included.
So it’s it’s a no brainer when they look at and they sit down and look at the math of it rather than, hey. I’m gonna have more control by having my own IT staff. No. Like, you’re you’re adding a lot of risk to the company by doing it that way. Look at it from a services perspective, and you’re gonna just go go worry about the business. Everything else is handled here.
Hass, anything to add there? I know you you you you’re involved in a lot of these conversations.
Yeah. And then Kaufman mentioned m and a’s. Right? We’ve got customers all the time that are buying, you know, fifteen of these and twenty seven of those and thirty eight of these. And I got Sophos and WatchGuard and Checkpoints and Cisco’s and and I went out and I hired the smartest engineer on the world. I hired Jason Kaufman. Well, first of all, I’m not getting Kaufman for sixty five grand a year.
Second of all Rockies.
Yeah.
Alright. Second of all, I only have one. So, let’s just say this. You’re my IT manager.
You’re my dude. I have two hundred and forty four locations with sixteen different firewalls, and somebody recognized the CPU spike on Thursday at midnight. The heck are you gonna do about it, Kaufman? You’re the smartest dude in the world.
Know, but you just don’t have the time. You don’t have eyeballs. You you you know twenty four seven three sixty five eyes on glass. I’ve gotta outsource this.
I don’t have a choice.
Yeah. Good stuff here. So topic number ten here, and I think this is one that you’re gonna see us leaning into over the course of the year. Our education is kinda building around this now.
This idea that tech advisers who lead with insight win the day. Unfortunately, our slide got cut off there. I guess I used too big a font. But the tech advisers who lead with insight won the day.
And what does that mean? This idea of selling, you know, outcome based selling, selling business outcomes, not just showing up with a price, not just showing up with, hey. I got this thing and it cost you this. Hass, you talked about a little bit earlier.
It’s not about just saving money anymore, thirty eight cents. It’s about, hey. How can I deliver an outcome for the business that saves you time, that makes you more productive?
All of these things that you care about as an enterprise, it’s about delivering value there. Right?
Yeah. Cost savings is is a byproduct. If you’re leading with cost savings, you’re you’re losing because hard cost is not savings. I’ll give you an example.
Working with a customer right now, he’s a Ubiquiti fan, loves his Ubiquiti dream machines. And every one of his locations, he couldn’t get secondary Internet. So what he wants to do, hang a cradle point off it, hang get a four g SIM in there and boom, there’s his failover. Right?
But how do I make sure not all applications if WAN one fails, only business critical applications go over to LTE? Oh, crud. Yeah. You didn’t save any money because now we gotta rip and replace.
We gotta buy different devices because ubiquity June dream machines won’t do this. But I led with, I can save you money selling you cheaper firewalls. That wasn’t the outcome he was looking for. The outcome he was looking for was what do I do if WAM one fails?
Yeah. Cost savings was irrelevant in the conversation.
Yeah. When you’re talking business critical applications, it’s not always about cost. And Kaufman, I know you you when you go through the process of discovery with a lot of the clients that you talk to, budget really doesn’t come up a lot of times until the very end. And often, it’s just a, okay. Tell me how much this is. It’s it’s a done deal. Like, it’s not an obstacle.
Yeah. If you solve their problem, generally, the budget opens up a little bit more because there’s a lot of things between direct cost direct cost comparison on, hey. This firewall is gonna be cheaper than this firewall, but what does this solution allow me to do that this other one doesn’t? Back to what Hass was saying, time is the biggest saver out of all of it.
So, yeah, we can look at a line item skews and say, yes. This firewall is cheaper than this one. But if I have a team that’s focusing and this is not enabling our sales team to go produce revenue or our operations team to go optimize something or do carry some form of test, then, ultimately, the business is suffering because of a technology saving. So when we come in, you know, the biggest question we’re always asking is why?
Why do you perceive that as a solution that you’re looking for? Because you’re not gonna solve this, this, and this. If you do something this way, then, you know, provide those insights and give them that, you know, that solution that, hey. This is gonna enable you and your employees to do this, this, and this.
You know, now you’re expanding the business to say, hey. There’s much more cost allocation and indirect and cost that we need to allocate here to see which move is the best for us here. And I do have a question for everybody on the call. How many people tried scrolling down to see what the last word in that sentence is?
Yeah. That’s my bad, guys. Sorry about that.
Handler, my man, you should’ve you you I I was relying on you to sanity check me on that, but, all good. Well, folks, if you if you like this conversation, this value conversation, this selling business outcomes conversation, then our beyond the solution trainings are for you. As, Kash just put in the in the chat there, we’ve got one coming up on Thursday in network, but we’re doing this across all the product lines where we lead with sales business outcomes, sales based outcomes. So good, what’s you know, good content for those of you guys who want to sort of go a little deeper and wider on this topic of conversation.
So I had a couple of bonus topics here, but I think in the interest of time, I’m just really gonna touch on them briefly. So, Chandler, if you go to the next one, one of the things you guys have heard me talk about this on some of the hits before, but energy is a big deal now. Right? The cost of power, it’s such a huge component of what our customers are spending.
If you’re not asking about this, if you’re not having a conversation about energy, then you should be. And I’m not saying you wanna lead with this information, but just asking, hey. Can I take a look at your power bills? I might be able to save you some money here, is opening up a tremendous amount of opportunity.
So we’ve got some hits in the library that you can look up that dive into this a little bit deeper. Any of us on this call would be happy to have that conversation with you as well. But energy is something we wanna make sure that folks are talking about, asking the questions, a huge part of what people are spending. Also, next slide, if you’re not talking about m d u’s, if you’re not in the m d u conversation, there’s a lot going on there right now.
It used to kinda be off in its own little world and, you know, its own stuff. But because of the mixed use developments that are happening over over the of the country, you’ve got sort of these conversations of enterprise technologies and everything are blending together, making this an area where our advisers are competing and succeeding. So if you’ve got to see some of these opportunities in your portfolio, let us know. We’re happy to help you there.
And I I’m working on a guide to come out on MDU that you guys should see later this year. So let’s go ahead and open it up for some questions now. We’ve only got a few minutes left. Cass, you wanna highlight a couple of the big ones that we had in the chat there?
Obviously, we covered a ton of ground today with a lot of good points. So, anything there we would kinda miss that we maybe wanna dive into a little bit deeper in our last few minutes?
Yeah. Actually, I do have one question here that, kind of came in through q and a, but it said, where did customers struggle most with networking and mobility decisions in twenty twenty five, and how can advisers help them avoid those roadblocks in twenty twenty six?
Kaufman, you wanna take that one?
Sorry. You broke up on me. Can we can you repeat the question?
Yeah. Of course. It was just like, where did customers struggle the most in twenty twenty five when it came to these type of discussions, and how can advisers help them avoid those roadblocks in twenty twenty six?
A lot of it was vendor lock in and figuring out, hey. They only thought there was one trajectory, and it was just going to the primary carrier, seeing what was the best one that they could hit most of their employees with for the best case scenario. So is it Verizon towers for seventy five percent of the employees? Is it T Mobile or AT and T?
But there are other other avenues to where you can have a blend of all the different carriers. So knowing all the different, you know, capabilities and services that are out there, not only the the cellular aggregation, but not only now the IT team has to figure out what MDM solution they’re leverage, how do they make sure that expenses aren’t gonna go through the roof with somebody using their company provided cell phone to watch YouTube videos all the time on the road or Netflix or something. How can they manage all that effectively? And the team you know, figuring out that the team doesn’t have to do that, there’s plenty of services out there that could do this cost effectively to where they can even save money while implementing these services.
A lot of it is around the education of that. And, also, you know, what risks are they inherently bringing in by enabling employees to leverage either their provided cell phones or company provided cell phones and how to lock that down.
Yeah. And I’ll just add to that kinda what we talked about here at the at the conclusion of the webinar where, you know, this outcome based selling is really the key. Right? Not focusing on the outcome, focusing on the products, the speeds and feeds, the bells and whistles, whatever you wanna call it.
That has been something that, you know, caused a lot of deals to vanish, from our TA’s portfolios there as, you know, focusing on pricing, those kind of things. Like, the outcomes is really where we wanna be focused. Hass, last word to you. Anything you wanna add there?
No. I I’m with you guys a hundred percent right. Luckily, I have we have a team of engineers. Even if I have a question, I can lean on the Kaufman’s and the J Dubs and the Trevor’s or the whatever.
Clients don’t have that. A lot of times, I’m the system admin. I get to the work I get a work order. Go buy me blank and find me the cheapest solution you can.
What are you trying to accomplish? A lot of times our system admin has no idea what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s trying to accomplish, get my boss off my back. He told me to buy a Switch.
Right.
But why? Oh, because I’m gonna add thirty five more users. Oh, okay.
Now we have a project. Why are we doing this? How are we doing it? How are they we need to understand that.
Right? And end users just don’t have that. Right? So they go Google it and they go buy the wrong thing every time.
You’ve heard me say a million times. One hundred percent of companies will implement the correct solution in the incorrect sequence one hundred percent of the time. Yeah. They need help, and that’s what we do.
That’s our value. Right?
It’s a nice Hazel stat to leave with.
Hazel stat. Love it.