ZeroTek

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Rich: [00:00:00] Okay, rich Freeman on the show floor here at I. T. Nation 2024. With the man, the myth, the legend, Peter Sandefur, Peter, I’m so glad to be joined here. Here we are at an event held by connect wise. One of the pioneering names in this industry. You are responsible for one of the pioneering names in this industry as well.

Tell folks who are unfamiliar with you, if there are any, your background before we talk about what you’re doing now.

Peter: Oh, the background, that’s way back. Okay, 2003. 2003, three companies started off in this business. It was us, it was Adable, it was Kaseya. All all great companies. All three of those companies changed ownership ten years later in 2013.

Which is really interesting because they all cashed out basically. In our, in the case of our business, which is Level Platforms, with the product managed workplace, we had about 5, 000 MSPs that use the product for remote monitoring and management. We sold the business in 2013. It’s currently owned by Barracuda, which is wonderful.

They’ve been fantastic partners to do that. They really did well by it. But when I sold RRM, I thought RRM, this is from 2013, was finished. Who is going to be managing servers, and worse, what is an MSP going to do that’s going to get money? Because if I looked at MSPs, which we have thousands of them, I know them, I love them, I want them to be successful.

And I said, managing servers and PCs, you are not going to be successful. And then I said let’s be constructive. What are you going to do? And I said what are you going to do? And I concluded. It was not just myself, but other people, colleagues, and we researched, Hey, what’s next for MSPs?

And we concluded that that I that it was time to look at something different. And looking at, so we started off thinking it would be SaaS management. SaaS management seemed like a good thing, it’s all going to be SaaS. So then we did some research on it, we built a little SaaS management product.

And nobody wanted to pay more than 27 cents for any part of that product. So he said okay, nice name, nice problem, but nobody, no money. And and they said, and by the way, what is the problem anyways? So this was the insight was with identity access management. Identity was the key technology.

Identity access management technology fundamentally did everything that an MSP, that our little model would do. Post servers and PCs and everything else. So we said that’s, this is obviously the place to start. Identity access matters, Nick.

Rich: And we were talking about this off the air just a little bit before.

Cause I’ve been, have been writing for a while, that identity security and cloud security and security, period, are increasingly synonymous. But you were saying, and you’re, you were just hinting at this before, identity goes beyond security.

Peter: Yeah.

Rich: Identity is bigger than

Peter: all of it. Identity, you have you have no security without identity.

And that’s a public, that’s a statement that everybody in the IA and business knows. Like it is the foundation. You can’t be doing any security if you don’t have identity. Period. Yeah. So it’s course, but not only that, but it does much more. Already read news about just all of the features.

That an MSP would use to access all of those devices and assets and control access to them. We looked around and found Okta. None of us knew much about Identity Access Management, but we knew what our problem was. And then we looked at Okta and we said, Okta is the product. So then we went to Okta and I talked to Okta for about a year or so.

It was a good long conversation. That’s Okta, we want to buy your product. And we can turn it into something really important for you and for us. Eventually they agreed and We started building ZeroTech, Okta for MSPs.

Rich: So tell tell us all a little bit about what ZeroTech does.

Peter: Our Otech First of all, it puts, makes it multi tenant management. So Okta is a single tenant for big Okta has all the problems that every big enterprise application has. So multi tenancy is one. You want MSPs have tens, hundreds, thousands of customers. They need to be able to all get that from your single PAME, and they need to be looking after all of those functions.

So that’s the first big as well. The next thing is that we go on beyond what MSPs are doing, and what a lot of people are doing. It’s a lifecycle manager. Now Okta Has understood that life cycle management and identity are both important. So they’ve already built a whole life cycle management piece.

So that you can do add moves and deletes, hires and terminations. You can do all that automatically. So you terminate a person. They have no access to any of their assets anymore or anything else. And [00:05:00] your sales rep come in, new sales rep comes in. He logs in and he has all these applications he’s allowed to do.

And it’s all there. So it’s a natural application for an MSP to sell because it secures. Now, you’ve secured all the individuals and the companies. And you’ve got an incredible productivity machine because you know exactly where everybody is, what they’re doing. And you can do all the traditional management functions that you do with Ethel.

You can do with it. We’ve changed the support model. So we’re, because support for MSC, now the MSP is our first level of support. So we’re the second level of support. We do training and everything else. So there’s no Okta support. The licensing, licensing with Okta is great, but they’re one year licenses and typically three year contracts.

So we said no, we don’t, we can’t do that. We have to sell consumption based prices. So that’s what we, that’s what we do.

Rich: I said, Albert,

Peter: We take a snapshot on the 60th day of the month and the MSP receives a big housing and information to deliver the monthly bill for wherever they call the service that they are providing to the customer.

So there’s not a customer buying Octo and MSP trying to get some revenue on the side. So the Octo, the MSP is selling the product. Enhanced with all of our applications. To a different product. And delivers that as a service. That service is then billed by the MSP to their customer in any way they want.

So they, and what we have, we do monthly licensing. MSP gets a bill. Uses most of them. He build, bills them out through in his billing system. We integrate with ConnectWise Manage, for example. So it’s all automated and and that’s

Rich: it. Yeah that’s the business. That’s plenty. It’s a very interesting story for folks who wanna learn more where should they go?

Where where can they learn about Xek? Go to Zero Tech zero

Peter: Z-E-R-O-T-E-K zero tech.com. And we’ll, we’re happy to have you there. We promise to get a new MSV profitable in their business in 60 days. So this is no cash out. You don’t have to buy anything. Sign up. We pay as a small fee just to support you to do that.

And then we focus with you on your customers so you’re deploying this. Once you deploy yourself and one or two customers, you are expert in identity access management. You don’t have to worry about getting a lot of certifications or anything like that. This is made so complicated by the enterprise software guys and the enterprise security guys that everything makes this complicated, like nobody can do it themselves.

No, you can do it yourself and you can make a ton of money.

Rich: So from level platforms to zero tech. Very interesting story, Peter. Great to catch up with you. Thank for joining. Thank you for joining us today.