Understanding Telarus and the Future of Technology Solutions — a CV Podcast

In this episode of CVTV, Telarus is highlighted as a silver sponsor for the upcoming CVX Expo 2024. Koby Phillips, Vice President of Cloud for Telarus, discusses the company’s role as a technology solution distributor, providing valuable resources to technology advisors. They discuss key findings from the 2024-25 Telarus Tech Trends Report, offering insights that help advisors navigate upcoming trends, particularly in the mid-market sector. Telarus emphasizes its commitment to education and enhancing resources for advisors.

Welcome, everybody, to this channel vision presentation, this podcast, and joining us right now. I’m very excited to be speaking with a a silver sponsor for channel vision expo, CVX Expo twenty four. We have with us, Telarus, and in particular, the vice president of advanced solutions cloud. We have Koby Phillips with us. What what’s going on, Koby? How are you doing today?

Doing great. Appreciate being here, Brady. Looking forward to the conversation.

Of course. Myself as well. I’m really excited. And and and I can’t wait to dive in with this Telarus tech trends report and and and even just learn a little bit more about the company. You know? So if we could to start out, could you talk a little bit about Telarus? Tell tell us what it’s all about.

Yeah. Absolutely. So, Telarus is a technology solutions distributor.

Sits in the middle of an emerging industry. Right? That is our channel.

Lovingly referred to by some and be included as our modern distribution channel.

Allows us to provide resources and value to technology advisors of all different, you know, sizes, focus in different segmentations of technology, and try to really help them bridge the gap and bring tremendous value to their customers and the clients that they they go to market with, whether that be in traditional network services, contact center, cloud, cybersecurity, mobility IoT. I think I just covered the entire technology, gas in there. We really have went out and built out some tremendous resources with our engineering teams, thought leadership, and now this tech, the tech trends report for the second year just bringing more highlights to what’s going on, big conversations they could be having with clients to open up more opportunity.

And that’s really what Telarus has really started to specialize in. We understand we sat in the middle of a really great ecosystem between our advisors and our supplier partners and really trying to facilitate the right conversations and bring the right resources to enhance those opportunities on both sides.

Alright. Very good. Could you tell us a little bit about your position within the company? Kind of what you what you do.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So one of the things that we looked at, several years ago now, we started off with contact center. Starting to realize that advisors crave expertise in certain technology landscapes, contact center being one of the, first and emerging ones. As as we saw when we built out our advanced solutions team in that technology discipline, we’re like, hey. We should start expanding this into cybersecurity and cloud.

And again, now we expand into advanced networking and mobility IoT. And it’s really just an, layer that helps drive the education, the alignment with the right suppliers, bringing in the right suppliers in the portfolio, and getting into the weeds with, certain opportunities with our advisors and help support and and mostly actually let me reverse that. Supported by our tremendous engineering and solutions architects. So those guys are the ones doing most of the magic, and we just get to set up here and kinda work on the business while they’re in it.

And it’s a it’s been a really nice one two punch and brings a lot of value back to the, advisors that we end up supporting.

Well, it sounds like a really great setup, Koby. So we’re looking at the twenty twenty four, twenty five, Telarus tech trends report in in particular for this year. Now this original research, it it does pack a lot of kind of insight and thought leadership, and kinda let advisers know what’s coming next and maybe start to factor these trends into their planning as they kinda move forward. What did you find most interesting or or even validating about the report results?

Well, I think in, you know, we started this in twenty twenty three going into into twenty twenty four, and we it was a really great effort, and we got a lot of tremendous information out of it. And the first, you know, the first path, we went out and we, we surveyed and interviewed a ton of enterprise level clients. And when we deliver the information, it’s a little bit slanted towards more of that enterprise level scope and viewpoint. And what I loved about this year and and what validated is our advisor community in our channel really does extremely well in that mid market to small enterprise as well as well as the enterprise in SMB because it but it expands.

But if you really look at it, where we validate, especially in some of these advanced solutions, is what the mid market to small enterprise organizations are looking for, and you’ll see that come out in the tech trends. Again, we sell across the entire stack. If you look at, like, the Fortune five hundred and the number of advisers that have sold into that, it’s probably gonna be about a hundred percent. Like so to say that we can’t go in and sell at the enterprise level as a channel and as a, you know, as advisers is incorrect, but where we see the most value and the most growth is that mid market to small enterprise in the in the report definitely reflects that as well.

That’s really interesting stuff. One of the things that was fascinating for me is, the demand and impact that AI is having in particular on, like, things like buying trends and and resources and and tech prioritization for projects across the technology stack essentially.

How do you see advisers being able to kind of capitalize on all this AI hype?

Well, there’s gonna be a number of different ways. For advisers that have traditionally stuck to selling, like, network or core, like, UCaaS services is what their their core conversations.

Bringing in an AI conversation could change the narrative of how they’re viewed by the organizations that they’re that they’re approaching about it. And then once they get into that and they they take some of the insights and some of the learning, the education from the tech trends report and the the expanded education that comes from the Telarus resources, you start to recognize that there’s always about a there’s always a pattern into something as technology emerges. And right now, you’re starting to see, like, what the companies are looking to do. They’re looking to get more productivity.

They’re looking to get, more alignment with NAI, but it also spans across contact center. It expands across cloud. It expands across cybersecurity, mobility, IoT. There’s so many different use cases that are starting to merge where IT is at the center, and it’s almost like that that, string you can pull the sweater and it starts to kinda unravel all of it.

And it can change the narrative for an adviser from going from, like, transactional or transitional where they’re, you know, just selling a product or helping somebody transition from, like, say, prem to cloud based to transformational, and they’re coming to go, hey. Here’s how this usually works, or here are some resources that can give you guidance here, and it it open them up to a lot of different swim lanes of technology.

Okay. And I clearly, everything is kind of tied together, which makes it really interesting.

The report also kinda talks about how, at least half of IT buyers kind of think that cloud modernization, is a priority, you know, for addressing scalability and security and, cost management and those sort of things.

But according to the data, and I and I kinda have it pulled up right here. Mid market buyers, they’re planning on investing more in moving legacy systems to the cloud over the next two years. Could you talk to us about the gap between mid market and the enterprise customer on on modernization projects and things like that? What kind of opportunities does this create for the adviser?

Tremendous amount of opportunity. And if you start to break down, like, like, the the resources that are available to each enterprises, enterprise level organizations are usually fully or maybe sometimes arguably overstaffed in in IT, and they’re gonna be looking to do a lot more what, referred to as, in source. So you have in source in source, co source, and outsource, right, as far as how you wanna, like, manage different IT, components, from an executive level down. And so a lot of these enterprise level, they’re just looking for products and placements and that, you know, licenses and software.

They’re gonna go manage and do all the things themselves because they have the resources and skill set to do so. The mid market and even, like, even they’ve been to that small enterprise, not as much. They’re more resource starved. There’s there’s not as many, as as much skill set or budget to go up for the skill set.

So they have to look at it a little bit different. So instead of insourcing everything, they look to co source or even outsource. And that’s where the big opportunity for advisors comes in. They come in with one project, and they like, cloud modernization.

A lot of organizations, especially over the last few years, they jumped to the cloud and they moved things, but they didn’t accomplish what they were looking to do in the technology. So the analogy that a lot of people have heard me say and I’ll say here just to to make sure we get it out to another broader audience. It’s like taking your family and moving them, from one part of town to another to get your kids into a better school district. You pack up the U Haul, you do all the stuff, you move, and then you unpack, you get settled, but you still send your kids back to the other school district, the old one.

Right?

So you’re doing you’re making the move or the lift and shift, but you didn’t modernize. You didn’t take advantage of it. And a lot of companies are are strapped for the resources to know how to do that within certain environments. So cloud modernization for that mid market is becoming a priority because of the competitive landscape that they’re in, and they need to get more innovative.

They need to get more efficient and sharper when it comes to their infrastructure or their applications and their data. And so they’re being forced into it, and so they’re having to lean on that co source model in MSP or in cybersecurity in MFSP to come in and do that for them. And when you start to break down the math and you start to break down the force multipliers that getting a good partnership in to an organization like that, all the things that they can start to handle. Another analogy is kinda like when you have a good handyman come to your house, you don’t let them leave if they’re really good at one project without giving them three or four other projects next to you.

So for an adviser, what we’re seeing is, like, if they sell a dollar within these services today, we’re seeing them bill out about a dollar thirty to a dollar fifty twelve to eighteen months down the road. There’s just a tremendous amount of organic growth that happens with organizations asking for more services or or or contracting more services from an MSP or MSSP. So that’s really the big advantage, and it it it is not shrinking. It’s actually growing.

There’s more of a need for those resources and skill set. And then another big component of that is this drive for AI. Right? So just like trying to move to cloud and do cloud modernization, this idea of implementing AI in a technology, companies are gonna wanna do it.

There’s more pressure on companies to put AI in than any other technology in the last probably twenty or thirty years.

And they’re filling it from other executives, from sales and marketing, from competitive landscapes, all of these things. So they’re gonna be looking for those same type of skills in, skill set and resources and depending on advisers to give them the idea of how to go get them, and that’s what’s becoming more and more available in this ecosystem.

Well, that’s really interesting and definitely true, Koby. How would you say that advisers are kind of taking advantage of all this pressure that they’re facing?

Yeah. I mean, what you’re seeing is organizational that organizational pressure that that a is driving. Right? Like, I already mentioned, like, all the different places it’s coming from.

And so that’s forcing, like, IT a lot of IT leaders to kind of put the cart before the horse. And they’re looking for use cases of putting in a technology. There’s there’s examples where we’re in data modernization projects, and we’re looking to save money and do all these things and cut cost. And then we’ll ask about AI, and they’re like, oh, yeah.

We set aside a few million dollars next year to explore where we can put it in. That’s that’s that’s more than one one conversation that that’s happened because of the internal pressures or the external pressures that they’re facing. Really, then it becomes too, like, alright. There’s a few key questions.

Like, what do you guys do in organizationally to get prepared for it? Is your data ready? Are you guys ready? Do you have the right skill set?

So as an adviser, you can start to kinda give them a road map of what you’re what they’re gonna need to do next. And we’re doing a lot of education on that on, on the Telarus University side of things as well as some of our live events.

We have some stuff coming up here, you know, in the next couple of months that really highlights sorry, couple weeks, actually, that really highlight where this is gonna land as far as, like, getting organizations prepared for AI.

And then we get into all the different use cases and things like that as well.

Well, I was gonna ask you about the use cases, actually. Any that you wanna highlight?

Yeah. Again, it’s the use case mostly is stopping them before they make a big mistake and saying, hey. If you’re trying to go in and without getting too into the weeds here, there’s really three levels of of AI. Right?

You have, conversational and predictive, which has dominated the customer experience landscape, and our advisors have been selling. And and we have a ton of, suppliers over the last seven plus years that have done really well in that space. And then, generative. I butcher that word so we’re gonna shorten it to gen AI on my end just to keep me from porky pigging this thing too much.

But gen AI is really what caught everybody’s attention the last couple years. That’s chat g p t and and building what, you know, large language models or LLMs and taking all of this data and collecting all of this data and making it intelligent and and making me better or, you know, taking stuff and saying, hey. Fix this code or write me this type of paper and all the stuff that all the teachers hate all over the place. Right?

And so you have all of these things. And so organizations are looking to jump into that, but they’re not ready for it. Their data is thirty, fifty years old. It’s not organized.

It’s unstructured. So getting that cleaned up, getting that ready, teaching customers and protecting organizations from the security risk. Here’s a great here’s a great use case. You have, you have somebody preparing a report for an executive.

They have their financials. They simply put together an email. They show it. They throw it into a a chat GP or a cloud or some type of engine, and they say, hey.

Clean this up. Make this more presentable for me so I look better to my executives when I present it, and all of that critical information is now public.

And so there’s data leaks and concerns and data integrity. So there’s a lot of checks and balances that are starting to come out. And just like any new technology, you learn as you go, and there’s been a there’s been such a fast adoption and demand for this that people are learning at a pretty rapid pace. So getting the right resources and the right people involved to help you protect your or, like, protect the organizations from themselves is essentially what the biggest use cases are, what they’re solving.

I’ve heard, you know, I’ve heard where they’re putting cameras on manufacturing lines and improving looking for anomalies on product and approving product efficiency by forty, fifty percent. There’s, there’s extreme examples where a whole CRMs got replaced and the companies have profited by thirty plus million dollars. And, so there’s always these big examples. The ones that the one that blew my mind is we had a supplier in the ecosystem help set the price of lobsters.

They went through, and the customer’s data was in three ring binders. So they had to go do data cleanup and cleansing to then get it into a place to put the technology together to help set the price of lobsters. That’s a use case I never thought I would’ve heard, but it’s all for the board. And that’s the that’s the the fun part about what AI can impact, but it’s also the overwhelming part of what AI can do. And so helping your customers evaluate what they’re looking to do, giving them a step one, and then aligning the right resources, to help execute on that.

How does Telarus help educate advisors for those inevitable AI conversations with their clients?

We’re trying to do it across multiple mediums, as far as, like, digitally, in person, live, and work through, different learning paths as well. Like, if you’re if you’re good at, like, reading about it and learning, great. If you’re better at hearing stories, then fantastic.

We’re doing live events where we have AI and tech summits. We have one coming up in Florida on, let me double check the date here so I don’t mess it up because that’d be embarrassing for me.

October seventeenth, and then another one in Irvine, California coming up in November believe November seventh. So we’re trying to hit both coasts. We we hosted a very successful one early in the beginning of the year in Dallas, and we we have seen a lot of conversations opportunities that have spun off of that as well. But what we recognize is there’s the immediate opportunity or, like, the the cleanup and all of that.

The bigger, broader opportunity with AI, again, is just bringing it up if you’re an adviser. Putting yourself in different conversations or enhancing the ones that you’re already having. And then what that can do is, like, it sets in the middle of all of like, think about all the conversations we’ve had and how many different technologies that we’ve covered in just those use cases. We talked about data cleaning, in getting the infrastructure in alignment.

We talked about IoT mobility with cameras and monitoring and and then the data that that, collects. We talked about the other type of AI with CX and, customer experience.

It’s gonna be across the board. So you’re gonna hit on something that’s gonna be relative to most every customer. I’d say eighty plus percent chance that you’re gonna have an offer a conversation that that’s gonna be relevant to what they’re going going through. So more than anything else, it’s to give the confidence back to the advisers to go have that.

And we’re, again, we’re doing that digitally. We’re doing that in person. We’re doing that virtually because we realize this is an opportunity that needs to be, seized within a very, I wouldn’t say, short amount of time, but you wanna take advantage of it before it becomes, like, commoditized as far as insight goes. This is all relatively new and people are trying to figure it out.

That’s the advantage we have is bringing insight and resources that can help them do that. As more time goes by, the more and more it’s gonna make sense, and there’s gonna be more playbooks that customers can go in and look at other resources. And so try to be that first in as far as that insight goes would be the biggest piece of advice that we can give to our advisers.

What sort of things can we expect from Telarus in the future?

More of the same. More more focus on education.

We’re gonna double down on what we’re doing as far as giving insight like this back, this tech trends report.

You know, we do it in couple different versions. So the first version is really for our advisers to take and absorb, and then we re re refactor it to be where they can go and provide it out to their clients and make it more client facing and where they can take advantage of that, that data and and collect that conversational piece with them directly. So we’re gonna continue to build, an engine that supports our advisers and continue to add resources, insight, and try to just help drive those opportunities with them and on their behalf as much as we possibly can.

Alright. And to kinda bring it back to the tech trends report, you can actually access the full report by going to, telarus dot com slash tech trends, and that’s where you can request a copy to read it for yourself.

Koby, if people want more information for anything else, where where can they kinda go online?

Teleris dot com is a great, great place to start.

I would also say our team is not hard to find. We have one of the most, robust and aggressive field sales team. So any advisors that’s looking for any information on Telarus, you can always start with your partner develop manager, and go from there. And but if you’re looking to just source it, I would I would point to the website. Within that, as you get through, you also have Telarus University get into some deep level education where you have one zero one, two zero one, three zero one style courses across multiple different technology planes, both on the tech side and the sales side. So you can pick whatever path was most interesting to you.

And don’t forget also that Telarus is gonna be a silver sponsor at CVX Expo this November in Scottsdale, Arizona. Koby, thank you so much for the time.

Absolutely, Greg. I really appreciate it.

Of course. And while you guys are online checking out Telarus and all the great stuff that they’ve got going on, don’t forget to also visit channel vision mag dot com. On there, you can find archive versions of CVTVs and podcasts and webinars and, great written content, white papers, and so much more. It’s all there on demand on channel vision mag dot com. And, of course, on behalf of our good friends, Telarus, everybody take care.