MSP Chat Episode 05: Navigating the Managed Services Landscape in the Cloud Age

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In this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, hosts Rich, Erick, and guest Antoine Jabara, co-founder and general manager of MSP products at JumpCloud, discuss the cloud age and how MSPs can make the best use of it. The conversation begins with a review of the Kaseya DattoCon event and segues into a focus on Kaseys’s new AI platform – Cooper Bots. Erick then shares strategic success tips for modern MSP service delivery, drawing from his presentation at DattoCon. Other points include a discussion on the implementation of cloud-based systems. Issues that MSPs consolidate identity and device management. They also address the topic of co-managed IT relationships.

And then, one last thing: the rise of emotional support animals in workplaces.

Discussed in this episode:

Kaseya’s AI strategy: don’t “eff things up”

Kaseya Introduces AI-Based Managed Service Automation

From JumpCloud: Tool Sprawl, External Threats, and Security Are Top Concerns for IT Admins

Wally the emotional support alligator went to see the Phillies. Then he went viral

Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one, blast off! Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads talking to you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big in managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I am Chief Content Officer at Channel Mastered.

The organization responsible for this podcast and I’m joined as I am every week on this show by your other cohost, Erick Simpson, our chief strategy officer, my friend, my colleague for many years, Erick, how goes it?

Erick: I think if I were to encapsulate how I feel right now, rich, I would say. In one word relieved that we are both back at home base after a whirlwind week and even before that, right?

So why don’t you let everybody know what we’ve been up to last week.

Rich: It’s so funny. You talk about the whirlwind because that is the word that is in my mind as well to describe this past week, we were both in attendance at. DattoCon, officially it is now known as Kaseya DattoCon for oddwist reasons.

Giant conference in Miami took place this week, a total whirlwind start to finish, amazing event. And in fact, folks, welcome to our DattoCon episode, as it turns out. Cause we’re gonna be talking here, our top story is gonna be related to news from Kaseya out of the DattoCon event. Erick’s tip of the week has to do with or derives from a session that he did at DattoCon.

Our interview guest is Antoine Jabara. He is the co founder and also in charge of the MSP business at JumpCloud, a cloud management and security vendor. We’ve just got nothing but DattoCon for you and it’s all really great stuff.

Erick: Awesome. Let’s kick it off, Rich.

Rich: Let’s do it. Let’s dive right in here with our story of the week.

 

transcript:

And I’m going to start in one place and move it into slightly a different one, Erick. Now, Kaseya announced a number of different things at the show this week that were interesting. I would say the most interesting thing they announced is something that they are calling Cooper Bots. Now, Cooper is Fred Vokola’s dog.

Fred Vokola is the CEO of Kaseya. He has a dog named Cooper, who has become a sort of mascot and a namesake at Kaseya for a number of different things, including their A. I. platform. About two years ago, Kaseya introduced something that they called the Cooper Intelligence Engine. And essentially, it was using artificial intelligence to look across The Kaseya product said if you’re a Kaseya partner, the Cooper Intelligence Engine is looking at how you are using the Kaseya products you subscribe to.

If it sees functionality that you’re not taking advantage of, you’ll get a little message from Cooper saying, Hey, here’s something you might get some value from. And they’re always very careful at Kaseya to say, this is not clippy. It’s not intrusive. Just a little way for us to help nudge you a little bit in the direction of getting more value from what you’re doing.

Cougar bots, which they announced this week and which start rolling out any day now, they’ll roll out in phases through the end of the year here. This is a very different thing and it really takes their AI story to the next level. Cooper bots are basically autonomous AI assistants. It’s bots, plural.

There are going to be a whole bunch of different ones. They’re creating ones for their two RMM systems. They’re two PSAs for the Kaseya one partner portal for backup security, et cetera. They’re going to be a lot of these different little bots. And if you authorize this, if you opt in and we’ll get to that in a moment, they can actually do a lot of the really rote, simple stuff for you and free up your time, free up technician time for other activities.

So in, in regards to the RMMs, think about password rotations, think about new user onboarding tasks that are relatively simple. If you opt in. Cooper can automate that for you and make it a whole lot more productive. So we’ll see, are these things are going to start arriving soon?

We’ll see how well they work and how powerful they are. The other piece of the story that’s interesting to me, and I wrote about this in my latest channel Hall at post, which went live just a few hours ago, is that Kaseya made a point in my interviews with them of explaining why It’s been two years since there’s been a big AI related announcement there.

Why call it 10 months after the introduction of check GPT? This is really the first that you’re hearing about something big AI related out of Kaseya. They are taking an approach that they described at various times, depending who I was speaking with, as conservative, as cautious. As thoughtful I will paraphrase something that Fred Ricola said to me in my interview with him, which is that AI is a powerful tool, but [00:05:00] it is also really capable of effing things up.

And they are very concerned about not effing things up for their partners or in any, they don’t want to break laws. They don’t want to create Security issues. They obviously have a history. They know exactly how painful it can be when you stumble into a security problem. And so they are being very careful about how they move forward with AI.

And this reminded me very much of ConnectWise. They too are really trying to balance speed and taking advantage of AI and using it to empower and enable their partners and not moving too fast at the same time. Both of these very major companies, I think. From my perspective, and I’ll be interested to get yours Erick, I think they’re navigating the right course here, which is they want to move, but not move too quickly and break things, is basically their story on AI.

Erick: Yeah and I think, it’s comforting to know that, they’re taking such care. And taking, you the perspective of experience, right? They’ve, all of these organizations have had their security issues and have watched other organizations and what has happened. And we see startups that are just, a hundred miles an hour down the AI road and not taking the care and quality assurance and the governance.

Oversight and getting into tons and tons of situations that nobody would want to be in. So it’s, like I say, it’s heartening to hear this and it should inspire confidence in their partners. That even though, the part, and this might even be keeping the partners out of trouble, right? Because as everyone rich is trying to take advantage of AI, we’ve talked, on this program about how we’re using it at channel mastered and how each of us uses it in different ways.

To get. Get things, like you said, the kind of rote, the time consuming, repetitive things like research that we do and putting things together. That same approach that allows an organization to have a very careful approach and allowing the other component of the story, rich that is, is really cool is, the partners have to opt in.

And they have to opt in as to what level they want the way I understand it. So this isn’t something that is just being lit up, like you’re getting the next update and it’s there for you. They’re putting the decision making power in the hands of their partners themselves and allowing them to understand all of the ramifications and how it all works, rather than having a platform that automatically now all of a sudden, like some of the platforms that we use. Rich have a, I, the next update, it’s just in there and it’s like begging for you to use it. So I think there’s a lot of good with this measured approach and it’s a mature vision for handling something that has such power and capability, but can also go sideways.

So very quickly

Rich: mature is a great word. This is sound judgment that they’re exercising and you’re exactly right. In fact, the way. Fred vocola described that opt in process on the cooper bots to me as he said, it’s you’re in word and you’re trying to delete a really important document and You say delete and it asks are you sure and then maybe it asks again It’s not even just click the box and opt in they are really gonna what he said was we’re over communicating to the nth degree We’re gonna make really sure that you understand what you’re doing and that you really want to do it And Precisely because if you stumble into it, or if they just enabled it by default, that could really f things up, and they really don’t want to do that.

The other quick thing I’ll point out before we move on here is Ranjan Singh, their chief product officer, said something very interesting to me that I thought was really smart, which is just we never want at Caseya to take an approach to AI. That basically says we’re going to just look for places to put this.

What we want to do is look for problems that need to be solved, where we’ve concluded AI is the best solution, but you don’t start with, what do we do with AI? You start with what do our partners need? What are their customers need? And where are the situations where the. The best answer to that is going to be AI.

And then we’ll go ahead and use it there. So again, I think they’re taking a really good approach to this. A mature approach. We’ll watch that evolve. Now, Cooper bots, Erick, we’re talking about. Something that potentially can be very useful from a service delivery standpoint, but it’s certainly not the only way to streamline or address service delivery issues.

That happens to be the topic that you spoke about at DattoCon this week. And it also

Erick: is related to your tip of the week. Absolutely. Rich, great segue as always. And yes, my [00:10:00] session I moderated a panel. At auto task community live, which, was launched and this year again, brought back and it was a pre day.

So I moderated a panel of experts on the employee, what do we, what can we do? To be more welcoming and friendly and get more out of our existing teams and making hiring decisions better and how do we, train and just basically love on the staff that we have in order to, make it a special place for them to want to stay.

Cause I think that, some of the challenges that we have. And this, the technology gap that we have, the labor gap, the, whatever you want to call it, resource gap that we have is not only is it hard to hire new staff, but we’re also churning out staff. So the panel was all about people.

Great. And we had some really great panelists there. And then I had a session that I delivered directly to the attendees. It was all about today’s modern MSP service delivery challenges, and I was asked to break it down into kind of, the three, what, the three challenges. And I thought there’s a lot more than three that I would like to talk about.

So I broke it down into three different sections, but, in general, the first thing that we, that we understand after. Coming out of post COVID, and I know this is a big topic that everybody talks about. It almost seems like it’s getting tired, but it really, the pandemic and what we had to do as an industry, um, to change, to adapt to the changing needs of businesses.

Vendors had to adapt, MSPs had to adapt, businesses had to adapt to support these hybrid workforces to migrate to the cloud faster, to enforce stronger cyber security and all these things. It has changed the way that MSPs deliver services moving forward. And so some of these new challenges that MSPs face, Rich, include things like staying ahead of these, sometimes you think of it as like constantly changing customer expectations, right?

And a lot of it’s being driven by cybersecurity threats and, moving more quickly toward the cloud and the hybrid workforce. So there’s a lot of changing customer expectations. The way we delivered services way different today than we did three years ago. The other things that, that MSPs are challenged with are maximizing their service efficiency.

So how do we get more from what we have when it’s so tough to hire? More folks. And because the cost of that labor is so great, how do we get more out of the staff that we have and become more efficient in doing that while maintaining a high level of morale and appreciation for the team, managing escalating costs.

We talked a lot, rich about, sprawl technology, sprawl solution, sprawl vendor, sprawl. It seems there’s so many great services and solutions that are out there. MSPs to choose from to include into their portfolios and deliver to their clients. But all of that increases the cost of service delivery.

So I had a couple of insights on that which I’ll talk about a little bit. How do we manage those escalating costs? Increasing service profits is another challenge of modern MSPs. And I already talked about hiring and retaining skilled personnel. And then the last one that I threw in Rich was increasing the value of the organization.

Now in my session, I was told there were over 300 people in the room. So it was a very heavily attended pre day event. All of the all of the agenda for our task community live happened in this big room. And I think I heard it was like 330 people. It was a large group, a representative group of MSPs.

And I asked the attendees, Rich, raise your hands. How many of you are MSP business owners? And I was surprised, I wasn’t counting all the hands, but it looked like the majority to me were owners in that room, in that pre day. And so the, the theme of increasing the value of the organization for a future exit, or even growth through acquisition, I think was very appropriate.

So I broke down three key service strategies to, address some of those efficiency and cost related issues. So the first thing that I recommended was to restructure service dispatch and incident management processes. And just one takeaway from that part of the discussion was.

Stop sending tickets to level one that level one or tier [00:15:00] one cannot solve, cannot close within your SLA. Just that one simple, nugget, like why send something to someone they work on it until they have to escalate it out and then someone else has to work on it. So just that one. Efficiently tiering, staffing, and capacity planning for your service desk.

The realization, one nugget from that part of the discussion, Rich, was what percentage of your tickets are level one tickets? It’s the majority of tickets. How are you tiering your staff? Sometimes what we see, Rich, level two, level three engineers closing level one tickets because the tiering and the structure of the service desk isn’t.

Aligned with where the work comes in. So shift that if you have 90 percent of your tickets going to level one, three or 4%, going up to level two, and then the rest going up to level three, you wouldn’t imagine that the majority of your technicians should be at level one. And then the third one the third tip that I gave for a key service strategy, I previously was eliminating project and scope creep scope creep and seep for good.

And this is all about. Establishing the rules of engagement with a client. When you have that kickoff meeting, agreeing to the schedule, agreeing to the resources that are going to be participating in the project on all sides, the MSP side, their vendor side, the client side, their internal staff side, maybe their vendors as well.

And to establish the rules for change management and to establish that the outcome. Of the project should not be based. This might scare a few people, rich, not be based around the cost or the timeframe for the project. And, we can get into that on another podcast, but when you’re talking about delivering an objective, that is free from, we’re trying to deliver the project within our budgeted price and timeframe.

But we don’t control everything and things come up rich all the time. And the mistake in what, where I’ve seen MSPs make and delivering projects is they assume that they have to deliver the project within that timeframe and for that budget. And so they’re not delivering proper change management to the client to say, Hey, this is something that we have to adjust around something happened.

We need more time for this and get them to approve that. Now, if we’re all in sync on the objective, being a business objective or a technology objective rather than a timeline and a budget, then it’s easier for us to create a relationship with a client where they understand that the most important role that they can play rich is to approve change quickly, whether it costs money or not.

And so we would do phase reviews. So each phase has its objective we’re trying to hit. Again, it’s a technology outcome or a business outcome. We check in with the client and they say, yes, you’ve achieved that objective. We may have three or four change orders, right? To deliver that outcome because of things that we weren’t expecting of, because of no fault of our own.

But at the end of the project, let’s say that the project went over 10 percent on budget and it went over by two weeks, but we hit every objective that we agreed to along the way, and the client approved every phase by saying we did meet that objective. So at the end of that project, we meet, we met the objective and we used change management and communication management to deliver that outcome.

And because we’re doing it that way, we’re managing scope, creep, and seep. We’re getting paid for things that fall outside of the expectation. And the client is also very happy because we are delivering exactly what we said we were delivering and we are managing that process exactly the way we said we would manage it to overcome things that we can’t predict in the future.

And so that’s been a really successful strategy for managing projects that I work with MSPs on. A couple of operational strategies, Rich. This is a long tip of the week here, but we’re going to get some value to our listeners here. Reviewing and updating your service and product portfolio bundles and pricing.

Sometimes MSPs just products and solutions in their stack. When it’s time to change them out to meet the changing requirements of today’s clients that they’re serving, right? Or they haven’t, really evaluated the cost of that service. Now you’re giving your staff raises, and bonuses and things like that over, you’ve got a client that’s on a three year agreement and in three years you’re paying your staff a lot more money. Are your bundles and pricing aligned with that increased cost when you sell to new clients? Something to think about. The second one is truing up legacy client [00:20:00] pricing, Rich.

I asked a lot of questions during my session and folks were raising their hands. I said, Hey, how many of you have clients that you’ve had for years that are paying less than the client you’re going to sign up next week? A majority of hands went up, so we’ve got to find a way to true up our clients on a regular basis.

And then the last tip I gave on the operational side, Rich, was firing your C customers. We’ve talked about that before on the show as well. And regularly, again, if you’ve got these legacy clients where your margin, for those folks is, double digits less than what a new client can pay you.

And they are not going to move and they’re not growing and they won’t pay anymore. Then guess what? They’re taxing your existing staff and giving you a capacity problem now. Now you have to go out and hire new technicians and engineers because you need to serve these new clients that are paying you more.

Guess what? Do the math the other way and say, Hey, let me make room for new clients with my existing staff by exiting some of my C customers that are paying me a lot less. Last area, Rich, that I gave some tips on is key talent strategies, really leading your team, right? There’s a difference between managing a team and leading the team.

And our job as leaders in an organization, Rich, is to build other leaders. So empower our teams, reward them, give them incentives. And I had this one I am looking at the slide right now and the original way it was written was this bullet point was getting your staff performance reviews, right?

And I struck out performance reviews and I replaced it with coaching, getting your staff coaching, right? Have more quarter, more performance reviews more often. And I know that listeners are probably going, Holy cow. What are you talking about? It takes me. Weeks to get my performance reviews done the way it is right now.

Guess what? If you look at it as a coaching opportunity, you’re spending less time. I recommend quarterly performance reviews, it’s coaching, setting very specific goals every quarter and working with your staff to help clear the noise out of their way and allowing them to hit those milestones and to grow within the organization.

How many times rich have we heard. Employees grumbling after a performance review saying things like if they were to just told me, they wanted me to do something different or do it a different way or do this or that I probably would have got a better, pay increase, or salary bump or whatever it is. I, a yearly review, it’s too late, right? It’s already in the past. So get in front of it, get your staff coaching, and then interview your team. I recommend asking three questions of team members. Number one is what is it that the organization is doing that you feel we should stop doing and why you’ll get plenty of feedback.

The second question is, What is the organization not doing that we should be doing and why you can have these questions during these, coaching opportunities or just in general. And the third question is a fit question. Sometimes an an employee, joins the organization and they get put into a role, but they really would like to try something different.

So the third question is all about, Hey what would you like to be doing here in the organization? You’re not doing and get some of that feedback. So again, it was a great session, lot of interaction, a lot of, hand raising and things like that. And it was all about, meeting the needs of today’s modern MSP service delivery unit.

So it encompassed all of these.

Rich: And awesome stuff as usual, Erick. And it, yeah, it listening to it on the podcast is no substitute for being there because you don’t have the opportunity for interaction. You’ve got a pretty close second to that by listening to MSP chat. And so this is a great reason to keep listening.

We’re going to have to move on in just a moment here, but I do want to share one quick observation before we do that kind of struck me as I was listening to this, because. One of the issues that you set up, one of the problems that you discussed at the beginning, there was around hiring and retention, which everyone knows it’s a huge issue, but a lot of the other issues you were talking about make hiring and retention harder, right?

Constantly changing requirements, for example, that can be stressful for the people who are working for you. And that’s not going to make hiring and retention easier. The need to drive efficiency. If you’re pushing your techs to do more with less kind of a thing, that can make the job harder, can make retention more difficult.

So there’s a lot going on for the MSP today that can actually complicate this particular hiring and retention challenge. But then you moved [00:25:00] on to the solutions you were talking about and a lot of them Actually work in favor of making hiring retention a little bit easier, to the degree that you’re not for example, Sending level two issues to a level one person who doesn’t know how to use them You’re making that job, easier more appropriate less stressful for that and there were some for that person and there were various other examples like that.

I was like, oh, okay so We’re both. Doing something good for the business that also happens to be good for the employees and therefore makes the retention problem less of a problem. And it’s always nice when those two things happen simultaneously and they didn’t a lot of the advice that you were offering there.

So great stuff. Now we we’re going to have to move on to our spotlight interview segment here, folks. This as we said, was recorded at DattoCon earlier this week. So when we come back after the break, you’re going to see Erick and me in a different setting, seated side by side with Antoine Jabbar.

He is the co founder of JumpCloud, also runs their MSP business over there. I initially invited him to come on the show to talk about a research study Junkod published recently, and we do get into that, but we actually get into a whole bunch of other stuff with him. It’s a really interesting conversation for anyone who still feels like they’re wrapping their brain around.

The business opportunity for an MSP in cloud computing. It’s all coming your way after the break. Stick around. We’ll be right back.

All right. Welcome back folks for our spotlight interview segment. We are here live at DanoCon 2023. We are joined by Antoine Jabara who is a co founder and also runs the MSP products. At JumpCloud Antoine, thank you so much for joining. Silver, pleasure. Tell folks a little bit for people who are new to you, and particularly if they’re new to JumpCloud, what you do and what JumpCloud

Antoine: does.

So I’m, as you mentioned, I’m one of the co founders of JumpCloud, and I’m in charge of our global LST business, and JumpCloud is a unified identity access and device management platform that can be used by MSPs to provide seamless access for their clients to different types of resources. Passwords, devices, network appliances.

And it’s usually used to centralize identities into one hub, which allows MSTs to efficiently and securely manage these identities and connect these identities to the different. Services that companies did now achieve.

Rich: I learned recently that you were associated with the company. I wrote about a little bit.

I was introduced to it by the folks at Ingram Micro some years back. But Mike Key, you were part of that. What

Antoine: was that company about? Yeah, so Mike Key was a password management and MFA company specifically tailored around managed service providers. At the time, we had noticed that a lot of MSKs were struggling with password management and the rollout of MFA, and we set up to build a solution that would help them do that.

So you can the way that it, what it looked like was, it was a general password manager for end clients to use to log in to different types of applications and cloud services. It was also a password manager for the MSK2s internally, and it was all managed from one multi tenant porno. We had a partner program that enabled MSKs to be successful.

A lot of the challenges that we used to see on the MSK side when it comes to password management still persist, because passwords are still constantly an important role in our current tech stack. We haven’t been able to get rid of them, even though we’re making a lot of progress to get there, as an industry in general.

And this is why I’m very excited to be part of JumpCloud now, because at JumpCloud, we do the end to end. We can take any client environment of an MSP from a password based world to a fully passwordless world, and then layer on top additional layers of security. So that completes the story. And it’s one seamless experience, rather than it being.

A solution that’s made out of point solutions that need to be put together, that, which creates like operational issues, increases the cost of management, and reintroduces some security concerns because of the complexity.

Rich: I would be remiss if I didn’t take advantage of my access to you. It is, as we’re recording this, a day or two past JumpCloud announcing an alliance agreement with a company I’m relatively new to called Electric.

Tell folks a little bit about what you and Electric have agreed to do together and why that’s significant for your your users and partners. So

Antoine: Electric

Rich: is one of

Antoine: the more, most sophisticated MSKs currently on the market. They’ve built a solution that has a SaaS offering aspect to it, where a lot of companies can self serve a lot of the requests that they need on a day to day basis.

And the way you can look at it is [00:30:00] that electric is a very sophisticated MST, basically, that’s able to scale to tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of users very easily because of the approach that they’ve picked. And so this platform that they’ve built used to rely on different port solutions for device management across different types of operating systems and also had some components around identity and access management.

And what electric and jumped out agreed to do was. Consolidate electric staff by having them join our partner program and use JumpCloud as the backbone of their offering. They’re currently building their next generation of solutions. They’re going to start ruling out hopefully towards the end of this year.

They’re going to supercharge the way small businesses, small and medium sized businesses look at IT from an identity access device management perspective and from an overall IT management perspective. So the way that it’s positioned is that it’s giving. SMEs access to enterprise grade security without the overhead, without any of the cost like the large cost, which is going to help them compete with the bigger players.

So we’re very excited about this partnership and I think that we’re just at the start of what we can do together.

Erick: Antoine, you’re specifically in charge of MSP products at JumpCloud. What are those products or MSPs? And how do you message the value proposition for MSP

Antoine: partners? Yeah, I’m currently in charge of our MSP business, which includes overseeing the products, but also the go to market on break.

And as you the product is at the core of what JobTel does, right? Because we’ve grown over the years by adopting a product growth model, where you get into the product, you use the product, and then the product convinces you that it’s something that you need to do. JumpCloud for MSKeys, which is our MSKey focused product offering, is a multi tenant platform that allows MSKeys to deploy JumpCloud to multiple clients in parallel and have a single pane of glass to manage all of the deployments on JumpCloud.

So when you look at JumpCloud, the core offering, it’s identity, access, and device management in one unified platform. That authentication, password management, Bye bye. Conditional access policies, Cloud Radius, Cloud LDAP, but also device management capabilities across Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Imagine all of that in one tenant, but then with an umbrella account over it that allows MSP to manage all of that from one unified experience. That’s what jumped out for MSP.

Erick: That’s a powerful value proposition because, as one of the biggest challenges that MSPs are facing today is technology sprawl, vendor sprawl, dashboard sprawl.

So it sounds like JumpCloud can replace maybe multiple different technologies or products or even vendor relationships for an MSP, making it easier for them to manage, deploy and

Antoine: respond to known incidents. Is that right? Absolutely. That vendor sprawl is a big issue, right? Because it leads to, it comes, if we look at the reason why we got to here, It has a lot to do with how we’ve transitioned to the cloud, right?

When we were on the premise, we had devices that were the center of the world. You give the user access to their device, to the network services, appliances that they need to have access to, and that was most of it. And then cloud services started appearing that were very appealing because they allow for increase in productivity, improvement in security, and they opened new frontiers, they opened new frontiers to business.

But the directory as it was at the time was not equipped. To give users access to those different types of services. A bunch of point solutions got created to try to streamline that. Single sign on, multi factor authentication, password managers to help manage all of that. And then, the user identity became the center of the stack.

It shifted, we went to an identity transformation, going from device based identity to a digital identity. And there was, by default, there’s no single source of truth. Every service that you use has its own identity, right? You’re using a Salesforce route, your identity, their stock, same thing. Wi Fi, VPN, different identities, your device, different identities.

So it became very hard for companies to manage and they started Reinforcing that cloud by connecting all of the different components together. So if you look at a Nameskys stack today, or at an SMB stack today, it’s a bunch of point solutions and Nebula point solutions, credible to connect it together.

And they’re hard to manage. It’s expensive to own and maintain and introduces security issues. So as you mentioned, JumpCloud helps with that because we consolidate a lot of the core requirements, which are identity access and device management onto one And that allows you to either rebuild your base.

With the core JumpCloud components, introduce it within your stack and have it run your identity access and device management. Or it could be used to complement your [00:35:00] existing stack. Because a lot of MSKs, as we know, have relationships with different vendors and are locked into multi year contracts, unfortunately.

So even though there’s a desire to move fully to JumpCloud, that move sometimes takes a year or two to happen. So the way JumpCloud works is that you connect it to your stack. And it basically connects to the different sources of identity. If you have AD in place, Azure AD in place, Google Workspace for some of your customers, if you have Mac, Windows, Linux devices, 30 different types of SaaS applications, JumpCloud will connect into all of that.

And it can condense all of these identities into one identity that’s easily manageable and auditable. Then over time, you can decide to stop using some of these components and replace them with the internal jack component. Or you can from day one, extend your stack with different capabilities. Like you need a password manager, , you need access to wifi or VKN and a streamlined weight.

All of that can be that with one identity. And the real beauty of it is the user experience, because that’s what it all boils down to, right? Everything that NMS key does is geared ideally towards what users want and what users want is. Reducing their calls, improving security, and they want IT to get out of the way, which is something that we tend to forget when we work in that space.

And the best way to get IT out of the way is to offer a seamless access experience, not only to cloud applications, but to any type of resource that you need. And that’s what JumpCloud delivers on day one of being deployed into a stack.

Erick: Now you mentioned how The universe used to be all about these point devices that we had, in the workplace and we’ve seen an acceleration toward the cloud.

I think, influenced by, the pandemic and remote workforce and heightened security and things like that with this move toward the cloud. What’s your perspective on the opportunity for MSPs to take advantage of it? Because being a. Recovery to NSP myself, I know sometimes we, we have trouble letting go of things that, that we have, direct and complete control of, and now moving toward the cloud, there’s a, there’s risk, but there’s also revenue to be had.

So how do you see the evolution that an MSP must go through in order to take advantage of where we’re going and where their customers want to go?

Antoine: The benefits of the cloud are not here. It’s, it would be, a few years ago, you still had to convince a lot of people that a move from on prem to the cloud was the right thing.

But today, the broad majority of stakeholders understand the value of the cloud, and have either already flung to the cloud, or are in the process of moving to the cloud. Some of them have not yet, but they will be in the coming years. And they’re It stops by legacy systems that need to be in place that are hard to, to offset.

So that’s clearly something that small and medium sized businesses want. They want to move to the cloud to take to benefit from all of the innovations that exist and the productivity boost that the cloud gives you in general. As you mentioned, it can be a scary thing for an NSP that has a certain way of operating and has built a successful business do operating that certain way.

And that risk, in my opinion, can be heavily mitigated by doing it one step at a time. And the way to look at it, in my opinion, is to say, okay, today this is all we do. This is how much revenue we generate. This is what our margins look like. This is what our clients are saying when we survey them or ask them.

Where do we want to be in two or three years? Ideally, putting aside the stack, our operating model, our geography, the type of clients that we have, et cetera, where do we want to be? Once you have a vision on that, then you look back to the to me, will the cloud help me in that journey? The likely answer is yes.

Then when you establish that, it’s that, what do we need to do to get there? Rip and replacing my entire stack is not an option. It’s risky, it’s expensive. The risk is just too huge. So what is the first step that I need to do? And what will we. So what I would advise partners to do in general is that they need to establish a strong identity and access platform foundation, because this is where it all sits.

As we discussed a few minutes ago, it’s now all about digital identities. We’ve gone through that identity transformation now. So once you have a single source of truth for identities and a platform that’s open, so you try, in my opinion, to avoid vendor lock. Going into a vertically integrated system where you have to use every single component of the platform to be successful.

So here you’re adopting an open philosophy to your cloud directory, to the source of identities. Then attaching things onto it becomes easy. [00:40:00] You can connect your on prem infrastructure. That’s the first step. It’s still functional, but now you’ve connected it to the cloud. And then over time, you do migrations.

And the way to do migrations, or like to upgrade these different systems to a cloud native approach, is to identify the low hanging fruit, so that your customer is. Who are the clients of mine that really want that transformation, that are willing to go through that migration and learn with me that process of actually migrating them fully to the cloud and benefiting from that opportunity, which is going to allow me to reduce my operational and vendor cost, going to allow me to increase my margins, and it’s going to improve security for everyone.

You identify these clients, start with them, and you build your confidence. And you’ll notice that a few months and we’ll be moving guides way faster to the new. Yeah,

Erick: I agree with that approach and I would even go further to say that there will come a point in time as the MSPs, go all in on cloud and begin to evaluate their client relationships.

The customers that, aren’t moving in that direction, aren’t strategically seeing the value, are creating an additional cost. To that NSB, so these will be probably the customers on the shortlist to be exited as they, Get all of their clients moving in the same direction and allows them to scale much more broadly with the resources that they have at hand.

Antoine: Absolutely. And if you’re doing a good job, even the harder clients to convince will eventually turn around because it’s not just you trying to incest. The industry is trying to go with it in that direction in general. And I think MST or North Star is to have exceptional client experience and exceptional client experience.

But also as a business you need to increase your revenues, reduce your costs, and improve security, because security can be a killer to an NSP. As long as you have that more star that you’re going towards, then you have conviction on what you’re trying to do, right? That needs to happen. What do we need to do it?

We don’t want to do all of it today because it’s a scary thing. We have a lot to learn, et cetera. How do we plan to have 25 percent of our clients by the end of 2024? In that new mode of operation and then go beyond that the week after. That’s the question. It’s very scary to think about it, but once you start doing it, there’s nothing scary about it because you’re taking measured steps.

And there’s partners to help you, right? That when you think about the vendor ecosystem, I think that the ecosystem has been tainted by a lot of vendors that have not acted as, partners and have acted more as vendors. Trying to lock into multi year deals is very transactional. The value of the partnering program gets eroded.

Let’s sell you more licenses at any point in life. But I think that successful RSTs will, are, one of the traits that successful RSTs have is identifying the right companies to partner with. Because a good partner will enable you from a technical perspective, also from a go to market perspective. But they’ll also be here if you’re facing any challenges and will help you make decisions that are usually tough and give you that confidence.

I think that’s also an important thing for partners to have.

Rich: There is almost nothing I love more than a great research study and data to pour over and you guys published a good one just a few weeks ago, mid September. You went out to, and it’s worth specifying, you went out to SMBs, but it was SMBs, not so much the MSPs serving those SMBs.

But I want to run through some statistical highlights from it that I thought were interesting and just get your thoughts. So one of the things that you turned up was 77 percent of the people surveyed said that if they could, it had. A single tool with which to manage that entire cloud experience or basically to do their job.

They would do that, but they can’t. And is the issue there what you were talking about before essentially that they’re stuck in this point solution kind of world right now and getting from where they are to that nirvana of a single tool is just very

Antoine: difficult. Yeah, absolutely. So the companies that have gone through the cloud transformation are suffering from.

Point solutions because that’s what was available at the time of the transition to the cloud. Newer companies that are digital native, what we’re seeing is that when you start off a business, you’re not an IT expert, right? So you’re going to set up an email solution as a first thing, and then you’re going to need different components.

So you just go search on different social networks or like search engines for specific point solutions. And then you end up in the same situation. So it’s absolutely that a lot of them cannot move because they’re, they think that they cannot move because they’re stuck into a point solution ecosystem that they’ve invested a lot of time and effort in setting up, but they’re also currently investing a lot of time and effort in maintaining.

So having that aha moment that shows them, okay, there are platforms that exist that actually help you move. to a unified approach. [00:45:00] Finding that aha moment is, I think, what’s between every SMB and them moving to a unified platform.

Rich: You were talking about passwordless authentication being the future.

And I think pretty universally at this point, people agree that we’re heading towards a passwordless future. From my perspective as somebody who’s not immersed in that field, it’s, it feels like we are still relatively early in that journey. And yet there were some statistics in the report that surprised me.

Look, they might not surprise you. I’ll be curious to see, but in the report, 55 percent of SMBs worldwide, you guys surveyed 69 percent in the U S require biometrics for authentication. And I would totally have guessed by, three years from now, maybe we would see numbers like that for 69 percent of SMEs in the U.

S. to be requiring, to some degree, biometrics for authentication now, surprise me. What are your thoughts about that statistic in particular?

Antoine: I think that it makes a lot of sense because a lot of the devices that have been shipped over the last five years have, are equipped with biometrics and the enrollment into the biometric engines on these devices, it’s pretty straightforward.

It’s straightforward. So unlocking your computer with a fingerprint is now very easy. Also, unlocking your password manager or single sign on solution or MFA solution with biometrics is also built in because a lot of the vendors of these tools have adopted these technologies, Touch ID for Mac, Windows Hadoop for Windows devices.

So I think that happened way faster than we were expecting it. Now, A lot of that authentication is still backed by a password sometimes, right? You’re unlocking your computer with a biometric, but you still need a password to unlock it after you restart it fully. You’re unlocking your password manager with a biometric.

But there’s still an underlying password that’s being injected in the page. And I think that’s the motion that’s going to take a little bit longer to get rid of fully. But we’re still seeing a lot of progress now with passkeys on the consumer end for sure. With all major companies, all the major companies and the big vendors, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, that have adopted this technology natively within their stack and are heavily investing in that.

And a lot of enterprise platforms as well including JumpCloud that are at the forefront of that for the enterprises as well. Like moving from a password based world to a passwordless world. And it’s easier for us to do because as a single sign on vendor and as an access management vendor, you already have only one password to take care of.

So replace that password with a passwordless approach for investigation, then you effectively replace all of the stack from having a password based model to passwordless one.

Rich: Can you

Antoine: speak

Rich: just a little bit about your vision for passwordless and, where you’re at now and where you are going specifically with your product?

Antoine: So I think that the way we’re heading is that passwordless has clearly a lot of benefits from a usability perspective and type satisfaction perspective from a security perspective. The benefits are clear and then you can layer on additional layers of security if needed. So you can have a very hardened setup or a very light setup.

But for the end users, the experience is seamless. For us, our vision is to is what we call devices as a gateway. But when you’re using a device that’s managed by JumpCloud, and you authenticate to that device in a passwordless way or in a password based way, then JumpCloud takes care of the rest after that.

JumpCloud will authenticate you into Cloud’s source as a SaaS services through our single sign on integration. It will automatically use our password manager to inject passwords when passwords are still required. And I also dropped certificates on the device. It allows you to access Wi Fi, VPN, on premise NAS, the rest of the things that you need to have access to.

So a device is a gateway, where a user doesn’t have to worry about the different methodologies of trying to log in to different things and having the need to use different passwords and that MFA in this case, but not MFA in this case, and if I’m in this location, then the process changes fully. And this unified seamless user experience Is that the core this is what we have, this is our North Star, when we were trying to think about what we’re going to build.

And our device is the Gateway Vision, is the way to get there. And we’re, we’ve made a lot of progress this year. And if you were to try the Jumpstart platform today, you’d realize that the experience is absolutely seamless for end users. We can tie the device shipment to the user, to the point where the user access any type of back end issue.

So they get a device out of, they get it out of the wrapper, Jumpstart is already there, because we’re an MDM vendor, a major platform. And the user authenticates to their JumpCloud credential, with their JumpCloud credentials, which is the only credentials their RAM need. And then, JumpCloud will fully manage the device, drop all of the certificates and the keys that you need to authenticate to different types of services, and you automatically log into Wi Fi, VPN, SaaS applications, password based applications.

The experience is really seamless. And then, when the life of the user was in, whether [00:50:00] the company comes to an end, they part ways, And it’s extremely easy for the admin to deactivate the access for that user. Not only will it deactivate the device, it will also deactivate every single resource that the user had access to all the time.

Erick: And there were a couple of statistics in in your study in the, in, in the survey itself that kind of jumped out at me and I’ve got ’em here. So one of them was a little under two thirds of the 63% of admins that were polled use Active Directory or Azure active directory. But a little under two thirds of them said.

That they would replace Active Directory or Azure Active Directory if they could. That was

Antoine: surprising to me. How do you read that statistic? That goes back to the vendor locking conversation. Microsoft’s strategy in general is About the vertical integration, it offers security, productivity, identity, access, device arrangement, and you within one stack.

And the central of Microsoft is to sell you more of the components. So they build price, their pricing and packaging around that. That can be a source of friction when what we hear from SMEs is freedom of choice. This is what we want. We want to be able to use stack over Microsoft Teams. You want to be able to use Google Workspace over Office, or at least for a subset of our users within the organization.

You want to use Mat, you want to use iOS devices. Companies today want freedom of choice, they want to use the best tools to help them focus on their mission to be successful. And that, I think, creates friction with the way Microsoft looks at things. Where you have to be on Microsoft top to the bottom for it to make sense.

And then because of the way Microsoft historically Approach software, the complexity of Azure AD, definitely AD and end to end is extremely high. So there’s very high barriers to entry for IT administrators that need to manage all of that. It results in a degraded experience for end users that face different types of issues.

And to go back to the pricing and packaging point, they’re paying a premium to have access to that technology. So I think that this is definitely something that we’re seeing. It’s a trend that is clear. We’re going towards an open approach. To identity access device management, to be able to pick best and breed solutions.

And I think that companies that are focused on enabling SMEs and MSPs as a result to do that are going to be the ones that were true.

Erick: That makes a lot of sense, where it’s more about freedom and the ability to choose and not be locked into, a monolithic. Licensing structure now that you think about it.

So I appreciate that response. All right, Antoine, here’s my second statistic that jumped out at me from the study and it indicated that 90 percent of the SMB respondents said that they currently outsource their IT work to MSPs or are considering outsourcing that work to MSPs. But here in the U.

S. only about 42% Of SMBs are outsourcing that work, and I can look at it from two angles. One says Hades internal I. T. departments aren’t ready to relinquish full control to an MSP, but then I also see the other side that says, holy cow, that seems like a higher percentage than we probably were tracking from before the pandemic.

Are internal IT organizations now trusting MSPs more to do some of that internal work? And what does that bode for MSPs in terms of selling more co managed IT moving forward, do you think? That’s

Antoine: a trend that we’re definitely seeing increase. The pandemic helped with that a lot, right? A lot of businesses had to move from on prem to the cloud and enable remote workers extremely fast.

And they were not equipped to do so they had to onboard MSKs. And a lot of them saw the value of keeping these MSK relationships in place in a co managed setup. Putting this aside, if we go back to the conversation around it being way more complex than it was five, 10 years ago, it’s security threats becoming more and more sophisticated any day, every day.

Companies are at a disadvantage by design. More medium sized businesses, and it’s more and more apparent that these companies need external help and it’s help that’s being requested from the IT managers themselves, within the organizations ’cause they feel that they’re not equipped. Keep these companies protected and set them up for the next stage of growth by simplifying the infrastructure that they have in place and making it more scalable.

So I think that increase that we’re seeing is a function of two things. The [00:55:00] first one being what we just discussed. The need to leverage external support with the IT stack, the core IT stack, and with security concerned. But the second one is the fact that more and more companies are outsourcing their IT to an MSP.

They have to, because what a lot of SMDs are worried about is increases in license costs. They’re in, they’re worried about increase in staff complexity in general, and they’re also in worried about cybersecurity. And these are three things that an MSP can directly support an SNU. So that number went way up over the last 10 years.

Now more companies than ever before have shown interest, are already working with an MSK. And a subset of that is co managed setups that have either started as co managed or have grown to become co managed over time as the company grew internally, had the need to hire in house people, but wanted to keep the relationship with an MS.

So I think that we’ve reached that level of maturity within space. And there’s a lot of opportunities for MS Keys now to leverage these co managed relationships. To improve the efficiency of their own business, increase their margins, help the security be maintained at any point in time and just make them more successful as MSPs.

Okay.

Rich: Antoine really interesting conversation. I so thank you for taking some time away from DattoCon and joining us, joining our audience for folks out there who would like to get in touch with you, learn more about JumpCloud, where

Antoine: would you suggest they go? I’d start on JumpCloud’s website, jumpcloud.

com. But also feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, if you’d like to discuss anything that was covered today, or want to dive more into Jumped Out, I’ll connect you to the right people within our organization, or my email is Antoine at JumpedOut. com.

Rich: All right fantastic. Thanks again very much.

Folks, we’re going to take a break. We’ll be right back on the other side, final segment of the show. Wrap things up, maybe have a little bit of fun. Stick around. We’re going to be right back.

All right. And welcome back to the final segment, the MSP chat podcast. I I I set the expectations higher going into that interview, I said, this is going to be good stuff and I think we delivered.

Erick: I was very impressed with Antoine’s grasp of cloud is the cloud business. MSPs, what their challenges are and what the opportunities are for MSPs to grow their business.

I thought a really interesting part of our conversation revolved around, at the end there when I was asking him about, the co managed IT opportunity and the way he saw that. And it was a little bit different than, what the way that I was thinking about it.

So he was. Very perceptive. He had a grasp of the vision of where jump cloud is going, what it is, and the opportunity for MSPs in the cloud. Which I thought was very educational, informative for me and our audience and quite impressive.

Rich: And the thing, there were a lot of things I loved about the conversation, but one particular thing that I really appreciated.

Was when he was talking about the journey into the cloud as being a gradual one. And this, they built this idea right into the junk cloud product. It dovetails with their product strategy for a reason. But the idea that just leaping all the way in isn’t necessarily going an easy or a smart thing for someone to do and stepping your way in can be more successful.

And as he’s discussing the way the JumpCloud product actually can enable that, I was thinking, boy, that’s, it’s both a smart strategy for getting into the cloud and a smart strategy for JumpCloud to to enable that. So I just very interesting conversation. I can’t recall if we said this on the air or off the air, but we both agree we need to have Anfon back on the show at some point in the future, and we will definitely do that.

Now that leaves us with time for just one last thing, folks, here, and I gotta set this up just a little bit. This is not the first podcast Erick and I have done together, the MSP Chat Show. When I was at Channel Pro once upon a time, He and I co hosted a program called the Channel Pro 5 Minute Roundup, and we had this running theme going on that show where we would talk about stories in the news about service animals on airplanes for example, and the sort of scams people would try to pull to get their, their service dog or cat or ostrich or something weird on the plane with them.

And it came to mind When I saw this in the news, it actually went viral. So I’m guessing a lot of people in the audience saw this too. Has to do with Wally, the emotional support alligator. Erick, there is such a thing as an emotional support alligator. Now it turns out what Wally Wally and his owner showed up at the the Philadelphia [01:00:00] Phillies ballpark.

To go into the clubhouse no less and talk to the players and hang out and gosh, wouldn’t you know? There’s a policy at the stadium there against animals including very much alligators coming in. They were not allowed to come in but as I read about this I discovered Wally’s not just some random emotional support alligator, Erick, like some random, support ostrich on a Delta flight somewhere.

He’s actually a kind of a mini celebrity in Philadelphia. People know him, people love him. And therefore, it was not all that surprising that he was invited. The Wally and Wally’s human companion were actually invited by the ballplayers to come in and hang out with them a little bit because everybody in Philadelphia, I gather, loves Wally the support alligator.

This is what made it surprising that he didn’t get in. So this, it puts a different twist, Erick, on a story that a category that we’ve explored many times before in our podcasting history.

Erick: And I’ll I will predict Rach that This won’t be the last time that we cover an emotional support animal story on the show.

Gotta love Wally Gator. That’s that’s a new one. So it’s it’s very unique. And the twist on the story again is not trying to get them on a plane, but, and, but they were invited by the team to show up and they still couldn’t get that VIP pass for Wally.

Rich: Not trying to sneak him on a plane.

They were just trying to get him into a party he’d been invited to. I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to make it up to and answer the disappointed players who didn’t get to meet him in person. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the MSP Chat Podcast. We’re gonna be back with you next week with a whole additional new episode for you.

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