.png)
The IT Masters
An IT podcast unlike any other, where technology’s top leaders share their winning strategies.
The IT Masters
Hybrid IT & Cyber Resilience: Revenue‑Growth Strategies with Dante Orsini
How do you cut through the noise of endless technology options to build systems that actually move your business forward?
Join host Robert DeVita as we explore this question with Dante Orsini who shares real insights from major cloud migrations, merger integrations, and cybersecurity transformations.
You'll discover how to evaluate cloud investments that deliver measurable ROI, why successful cybersecurity starts with organizational culture, and the real cost of integration mistakes in M&A scenarios.
Dante brings the unvarnished truth about what really happens when organizations transform their technology landscape - the unexpected challenges, the surprising wins, and the leadership decisions that make or break these critical initiatives.
Welcome to the IT Masters podcast, where technology leaders share their strategies shaping the future of IT. No sales pitches, no fluff, just thought-provoking discussions with the masters of IT. Subscribe now and join the conversation. The IT Masters Podcast, where the best in IT share their journey.
SPEAKER_03:Today's guest has been at the forefront of cloud connectivity and cyber resilience for over two decades. quadrant for disaster recovery as a service from 2016 through 2019. Dante is known for his ability to translate complex infrastructure challenges into strategic opportunities. He's a trusted advisor to major vendors sitting on the VMware Service Provider Advisory Council, as well as the HPE, Veeam, and Zerto partner advisory boards. Based in Dallas, Dante brings a wealth of experience and insight into the evolving landscape of IT infrastructure. In this episode, We'll dive into Dante's journey from building startups to leading strategy at global scale, discuss the future of hybrid IT, and explore how to drive executive buy-in for infrastructure modernization. Let's get into it. Dante, when you first stepped into IT and infrastructure, what was it about the space that grabbed your attention? Good
SPEAKER_02:question. For me, this was a long time ago. I sold software for a long period of time, and then I started to see opportunities in that side of the business. I got pulled into a startup with a former chief scientist of MCI, and we were boiling the ocean, Rob. We were basically going after this massive opportunity, and had we focused on just one portion of what we were trying to do. We'd probably have been wildly successful, but we failed miserably. Well, you ended up being successful
SPEAKER_03:anyway, so it sort of worked out in the end. That was probably a really good experience.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, definitely a good experience. I think at the time, this was more around, this is the precursor to cloud, and this guy was very focused on a supercomputing type of model. I'll never forget it. The acronym was HADFA, Highly Adaptive Distributed Dataflow Architecture, where basically the data would control what you're doing as far as providing resource to the platform. So not a marketing guy because no one would ever buy that. Bingo. You got it. But for me, that was pretty interesting. And that's where off the back of that failure, because that was literally a startup where we were trying to, there was a handful of us in a lab trying to build the product, do it all. My wife was like, you need to go find a real job. And a buddy of mine was actually working at iLanta And he's like, oh, you got to meet our guys. They're going to be in Dallas, blah, blah, blah. And I was swinging for the fence with the startup. I'm like, well, what are they doing? And they're like, well, they're working with VMware. I'm like, yeah, so what? So I had to kind of come down to earth a little bit, realized that swinging for the fence wasn't going to happen. And when I had an opportunity to meet with Scott and Brian, who you obviously know really well, they kind of explained what they were trying to do because they were transitioning that business at that point. And I was already knee deep into a lot of stuff like that, but we were trying to build it from the ground up, all proprietary, not using best of breed software
SPEAKER_03:like VMware. Yeah, you mentioned the Island folks. So I've known, you know, those guys were my first customer when I first moved down here in Dallas, right? They were one of the first data center deals that I did. And it was funny, you know, they were selling, they were reselling XO services, right? They were selling, you know, cabinets and slinging bandwidth. Talk to me about sort of that evolution from going to, you know, a telecom reseller to like the large just DRAS player in the country.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it was interesting because I was brought in, like, so I landed six months after our CTO, Justin Jardina, right? Another good paisan. And Justin was basically brought in to stand up and transition that business out of just straight colo into a managed hosting business focused on VMware, right? Like an enterprise class hosting business. And for me, that was really cool because those are the kinds of things that I was already interested in. I didn't know anything about colo. I mean, if you remember Lindsay, she taught me the colo business, like 208 versus 110, like no clue, had no idea, right? And I think my first day that I started, I flew down to Houston and Scott handed me a list. He's like, hey, here's a list of 25 accounts and they're all with us in level three colo and we're going to triple their rates or you're going to migrate them into our new colo in Dallas at a great rate. rate, or you're going to help them understand this VMware stuff. That was the opportunity. Again, not knowing anything about Colo, I'm calling everybody up, hey, this is going to be great, blah, blah, blah. They're like, you're going to do what? I've got to move all my IPs and blah, blah, blah. Obviously, it worked out really well because I think the business was obviously in a different... The market, we were very early. I think that at the time, you mentioned DR. At the time, we were very focused on how do you host business critical production applications at scale, right? So it's pretty simple. You've got to have a great platform, but you've got to have things like backup, DR, security, network. And the idea was, how do we build all that into a single platform? And eventually, we were very focused on the IP side of it, as in the intellectual property side of it, right? Like, what are we going to do to differentiate and build a platform? And if you think about that time, it's like circa 2008, right? Well, what happened in 2008? Financial markets took a nosedive. So we went to market indirectly a lot, right? So we worked with a lot of partners and it was interesting. A lot of the folks that were helping people virtualize at the time, traditionally VARs, right? Because the financial markets, it was like, hey, we're working with XYZ company. They've got this for backup, this for storage. This is what the network looks like. We're virtualizing them, but they ran out of capital budget. What can you do to protect them? So we started to take what we had already built for our existing customers and started to offer that up as like an ancillary bolt-on. So, okay, we can protect what you have on-prem by replicating it to us. So, virtualization changed that game big time.
SPEAKER_03:How much of that sort of shift came from security coming into play, right? Because we hear all the time that you can have a great security posture, but the most important thing is that you have to have a good backup. Something's going to happen to your organization and you're only as good as your backup.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, I think recently, right? So I think that's always been part of like best practice, right? Multiple copies of your data, some of which is, you know, offsite, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think the security conversation has made backup cool again, right? Especially now with all the cyber things. I mean, back then we used to talk a lot about the highest probability of needing, you know, some type of recovery was more human error than anything, right? Sure. Sure, natural disaster would catch the headlines. Whoever thought Superstorm Sandy would hit New York and people up there that didn't worry about that kind of stuff all of a sudden had to worry about it. So natural disaster. But I think even the analysts back then, I mean, mid-2010-ish, they started to really try to get people to pivot away from the term disaster recovery. And they were trying to get people to focus on the term resiliency. Because when people heard disaster, they thought natural disaster. Yep. But at the time, it was cool to see what the analysts were tracking as far as like human error versus natural disaster versus cyber. It was starting to creep in like 10 years ago because what they realized was that if you were impacted by a cyber event, the amount of time it would take to recover was just astronomical. So the impact of business could be so much higher. And obviously, fast forward, we know where we are today. Everybody cares about cyber. And if you think about traditional replication, hey, I'm going to replicate from point A to point B so So if something happens in point A, I can bring it up on point B. Well, with cyber, it doesn't really help you, because if I took something that's bad in point A and I just moved it to point B, I'm kind of SOL, right? So it really came back to, what are we doing from a backup perspective? Because some of these replication technologies, I think Zerto has been extremely disruptive, right? We started work with them in 2012. We integrated them in 2013. And the whole market's been trying to catch them for years and really hasn't done it. But think of it like a DVR, as something's written to the primary, it's just getting zipped across the WAN and written to the secondary. So when you're storing that much data, because it's like in milliseconds, you're not going to invest to protect that data until the end of time, right? You're only going to hold onto it for so long, right? So if something's been sitting resident in your environment and all of a sudden you become compromised and you're trying to rewind time beyond 30 days, 90 days, whatever, you have to look at your backups, right? So what we've seen is that as time has went on, obviously now you can store things immutable, but again, it's right back to your backups. Whether we're talking about all these modern data protection vendors, they all have ways of doing it, but we're looking at ways that we can save customers money also by storing a copy of that stuff immutable in object storage.
SPEAKER_03:How many acquisitions has 11.11 done? Give me an idea, because it's a lot, right?
SPEAKER_02:It's a lot, yeah. For us, when we went to market, as I They always tell you the front of the process, keep your options open, because we were going out to just raise capital. We were self-funded, right? And ultimately, we ended up selling to 1111. They had acquired another company similar to iLand as far as product set, difference being is they only sold through wholesale markets, right? It's through MSPs. That company's called Green Cloud Defense. They acquired them the beginning of December of 21. They acquired us the end of December of 21, right? And then we subsequently, in the next 11 months, we had done a total of eight. That's crazy. Yeah, it was nuts. I think one of the largest following us was we acquired the cloud and managed services business as well as the recovery services business for North America for SunGuard. Yep. We did a quick private cloud company last year. And I think you're going to continue to see a lot of consolidation in the space, especially with what's going on with Broadcom.
SPEAKER_03:So where I'm sort of going with this is that, you know, what are the odds with all these acquisitions that you and Justin end up being, you know, part of the senior leadership team here, you know, coming from Ireland, which I knew as like two guys out of Houston and a dream, right? You know, it speaks to the testament of the company that those guys built that, you know, the two of you are now leaders of this, you know, global company. So, you know, what were you guys able to take? Were you specifically from your time in I-Land that sort of translated here from a leadership perspective?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, good question. So when we started, at least when Justin and I entered the I-Land business, there were probably 10 of us, right? And by the time we had exited that business, there were over 300 of us. We were already operating in North America, EMEA, and APAC. So actually, that became the global platform for 11.11. And from there, we just continued to build it out. But I think that... you know, a lot's changed. Let me give you an example. If you look at the founders of 11.11, our CEO is awesome. I don't know if you've met Brett, but he's great. He's sharp, you know, has a really strong background on the M&A stuff, but he came from the connectivity space, right? So if you look at his background, it was very focused on, you know, you may have heard of Hudson Fiber Networks. If you needed the lowest latency fiber routes, you were riding on them, right? So they exited that business in 2018, right? But the PEs were all over him, like, hey, what do you want to do next? So when they looked at the market, it was like, okay, we don't want to go build physical fiber networks anymore. You know, there's plenty of fiber out there. Let's move further up the stack. So his vision was, we want to acquire platform businesses specifically focused on cloud connectivity and security. Okay, so when I look at coming from a smaller company where you're, you know, constantly trying to punch above your weight, right? It takes really good, you know, engineering. And we've got to really sharp on who we align ourselves with. And I don't think that's changed based on the size, scale, and scope we are. Now, it's changed in the sense that if I look at SunGuard, SunGuard's a 40-year-old, very enterprise-focused company. So that means that their approach, being very customer-centric like we were, is understand the customer's requirements and then build whatever they need and then layer in management where you can. I think it was different. We're going to go curate what we believe is the best-of-breed tech assemble it into a single platform. And Rob, you can have whatever you want as long as it's in the platform. So that's different. So that's a big scale play. So the challenge is how do you bring the two together where you can still have a bespoke nature to what you're doing and also have a platform that scales. So that's really what we've been focused on. And I think that if I can ride in Justin's coattails the rest of my career, I'm going to do it.
SPEAKER_03:He's a smart dude. Yeah, exactly. How do you guys, I mean, when you look at from the outside, right? How do you guys shift the mentality of the folks in that organization? Because the backgrounds are totally different, right? You've got to merge these companies with the other acquisitions. How do you do it from a cultural perspective?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's a big challenge. I think the first thing we did is we made sure that we were working with those teams and everybody's focused on the go forward, right? You go through a of product rationalization across the entire organization. They're solving massive challenges for enterprises and providing a ton of value. So the first thing we did is we took sides of the business that SunGuard had domain expertise, IP, what we believe should be the focus of that business, and we centered everything around that. We took a look at the consulting organization and really transitioned that all the way to rather than just spending a bunch of time billing out very large enterprise customers where they're practically an extension of the team. We also looked at what can we do to take that expertise and look at it from a pre-sales perspective and look at smaller assessments that can actually help drive more opportunity and squarely focus that on what we thought was most relevant, which right now is cyber. So bringing that scope in and being a little bit more focused and then taking the best processes and technologies they had to layer it on top of our platform, I think that's been super successful. So I'll give an example. One of the things that they do that's unique is they'll provide, you talk about recovery, right? They'll do managed recovery all the way up to the application layer, where most people, where we came from in the island space, was very focused on the infrastructure, right? I don't want to touch the application. That's it. That's it. And it's just the opposite, right? So that's where the value is, and that's why we tend to work, we'll even work alongside GSIs there, because they're very much application-centric, right? So I also think that every enterprise is going to constantly be in this state of evolution. So having the experience to work with them and help them through that transition, whether they're landing on our platform or whether we're having to help them in their journey where it doesn't even touch our infrastructure, that's the unique piece because we can layer this value on top of anything. Could be the customer's environment, could be public cloud for them, could be leveraging our platform. And I think that's where we've been really focused.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. So when I was at Collogix, we did a lot of acquisitions there, a lot of acquisitions. And the first thing that I sort of learned from the team there and the executive team there was fabulous about acquiring and then, you know, blending it into the business is that you've got to have a solid foundation, right? And then you can put the building blocks of each one of the acquisitions inside of the foundation. So how has that, you know, been for 1111, right? With all the acquisitions, when did you realize, hey, we've got a lot of foundations here, which one do we pick and which one do we start building
SPEAKER_02:on? Great question. And I would say that we went through some tough spots in the very beginning, right? And we had developed an internal integration management and project management team. So literally that team is designed to help us through these acquisitions. And I think that the key was getting that back end system piece to be that foundation, right? So what are we using? Forget about what's customer facing first, second? What are we using for ticketing for finance, you know, all that good stuff. And it took us a couple cycles to get there. But these last couple acquisitions have been much easier, because that's what we have. And we now have a whole methodology and how we go in, you know, what's attractive to us from an acquisition perspective, and how we integrate not just the people, but also all the back end technology.
SPEAKER_03:You've got emerging technologies that you're trying to roll products out on, and they need money also. How do you make those the I've got a certain amount of money, right? But everyone's asking for it for different reasons. When you're sitting at the table with the rest of the executive team, how are you scorecarding out where do the funds go?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, great question. So obviously we're looking at what is the long-term viability of the portfolio. I'll give you a perfect example. We're not afraid to walk away from revenue if it's not core to what we do.
SPEAKER_03:Which is unique. Right. Because we see it all the time with vendors. They want to put a square peg into a round hole. Yeah. Like, hey, guys, this is not what you really do. Yep. Like, I know you can do it, but it's not what you do. And that's where we try to differentiate solutions for customers. Like, is this what they do or can they do it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it. I mean, yeah, I'll give an example. If I look at some of the services that were in the portfolio before, you could have been highly outsourced to somebody else at a very low margin. margin, where we're providing little to no value. So why, right? So we very quickly get in there, we rationalize that stuff on the portfolio side, you know, and we do what we have to do there. And then I think we're doubling and tripling our investments in the things that we believe are strategic, both from what we hear from our customers as well as what we hear from our partners.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. So you see a lot of complex deals coming, right? And, you know, you're at the top of the food chain now from a sales perspective. Give us a couple of the top things that CIOs and CTOs are struggling with when they're trying to make decisions now. I think it's
SPEAKER_02:much like the scenario you just provided back to me, right? There's so much going on with everybody's business that they're struggling to keep up. And let's face it, it's not getting any easier because the operating environment's constantly changing. It's more complex now than it's ever been. When we talk to these folks half the time we're trying to make sure that you know we're aligning with what their strategic objectives are not kind of trying to help them skate to where the puck needs to be and you can't believe all the hype right there's so much hype in the market about technology but at the end of the day people are still trying to block and tackle and do regular things and in understanding like their business and where they're trying to go is half the battle but I think that some of the problems that people are trying to solve for now are much more complex than they were right as an example it's no longer about building out a data center and managing the application of that data center. Those days are long gone. People are trying to figure out how they optimize, where they're deploying things, adopting SaaS wherever the business can afford to do it, or how quickly they can do it. Some CIOs we talk to, that's their number one objective, to be out of the data center business, to adopt SaaS everywhere they can. And then people have a bump in the road along that process, and they start to think about, well, is this the right move? Just like you hear people talking about repatriation right now. Five years ago, people were being cloud washed. How many C-level executives did you see lose their job because they came in and said, we're going all in with XYZ Hyperscaler, and the project fails? I mean, I've seen a lot of that. But I think the other compelling thing that we see, too, is right now, to protect the data, the business, that continues to be a massive problem as that operating environment gets completely distributed. There's a big gap there, and we're helping people solve for that.
SPEAKER_03:People have had data for years. They've always had some type of backup. They've had all this data. What we're seeing now is that they're finally figuring out how the tools of how do I mine this data and make it useful inside of an organization. How are you seeing different customers try to either re-monetize that or use that as intelligence going forward to make better decisions or how do I make more money off of the data that I've had sitting there which has been literally just sitting there either on a tape or in an array someplace and they couldn't do anything with it they just they had to have it there yep I mean it's
SPEAKER_02:we're not really playing there but but I see some unique things are happening there where people are trying to anonymize the data you know farm it for AI purposes and all that good stuff I'd say a lot of organizations are struggling there um I'll give you an example. If I look at some of the things that we were doing internally, we were writing some of our own algorithms. I'm going to stay away from AI per se, but we were writing some of our own things just to understand if we've got all these different data sources, what can we do to get a better handle on what the customer CSAT is based on all these indicators we're getting from different systems that we have? Because everything we run feeds into a backend globally distributed data warehouse. So being able to understand understand that data and make sense of it is something that we've always been focused on, right? Well, add eight acquisitions, right? So now all of a sudden, you've got all these different disparate systems. And what can you do to make sure that you're not only digging into the data, but making sure that you're pulling from the right data sources? Like what's the single source of truth, right? And I think that we've done a few things on our own, where we were playing around with, you know, different AI tools to stand up our own stacks, our own And then I start to look at the market. Right. And I've seen I'm going to name names, but I've seen a lot of folks like pushing us to get into that business of providing an AI solution to a customer. Right. And I mean, there are some heavily, heavily funded folks out there that are delivering like GPU as a service and things of that nature. And you've got all the OEMs are trying to push. How do I deliver a private AI environment to a customer when most customers are raising their hand saying, hey, I just need to answer to my board. what our AI strategy is,
SPEAKER_03:right? That's funny that you mentioned that, right? Because we had a guy in here a couple weeks ago, a guy named Sean Mills from Pisteo, and his business model is, hey, you've gone and made this investment in Copilot, or you've made it in Gemini, or you've made it in ChatGPT. Like, all right, that was the first check of the box. I went and bought it. The second check is, how do I get people to actually use this and not use it as Google? Yeah. So he comes in and he does AI enablement. Like, hey, you've got all these tools now how do we make it change the way that you you know do business every day yeah and he's built a whole great growing business off of showing people how to block and tackle using AI
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_03:because it's just it's another check in the box right you know the street wants know are you enabling AI I see any prices also every press release that comes out something is AI enabled and you're like yeah no no it's not like your fiber is not AI enabled yeah you know but it's a big buzz in the industry right now across different verticals. It's been very lucrative for us, especially on teaching people what they can use it for. We'll go into these enablement sessions and just showing people how to prompt. You see light bulbs go off and go, hey, can I use this for this business process? Or can I use it for this? And you're like, yeah, you can. We just got to go out and build that AI-based application to take some of this work off your plate or to you know get rid of the mundane you know everyday stuff that you're doing so yeah it's a huge huge you know opportunity that we're seeing in the market just on the enablement side
SPEAKER_02:yeah for sure 100% I mean I also think like just the efficiency into your point right like helping department by department to understand like what level of efficiency they can gain out of the right tooling I mean you know we were kind of in this build versus buy state and you know we we were standing up our own stuff. And then we quickly realized, like, look, there's companies that have already built in data connectors already. So if you can go think of a data source, like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Confluence, like Teams, you know, Slack. think of all the stuff there, right? And, you know, one of the use cases we were looking at was, with all the acquisitions, how do we ensure that our solution architects have got the right single source of truth on every solution that we deliver, right? And that's just one tiny, tiny use case. Yep. And, and I think that while we were building our own things, it just became clear, like, okay, we can spend time continuing to build this, or we can just go subscribe to a service, man. So have you heard of a out. So that's who we're leveraging. And it's amazing because you're able to basically take all these different data sources where they've already built the connectors and you can make sure that all that data is private, right? And you can either run it in-house yourself, you can subscribe to a SaaS service or a combination of two. And the speed at which we're able to start innovating on that front in a compliant fashion, massive.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. The other thing we've seen a couple of vendors come to the market with is, you know, one LLM does not fit the entire organization, right? You could have, you know, marketing might need one thing, your programmers may need another LLM. So we saw a vendor come in with, you know, just a, you know, GUI interface, looks just like ChatGPT or Copilot's interface. You throw your question in there, drop down menu on which LLM you want to use. It's one license across the organization with 14 different LLMs. You know, I think Stuff like that is going to become more relevant and asked for more and more because, again, not one LLM is needed inside of an organization. Not all the information needs to be shared in your learning engine, right? So how do you specialize the LLM to what a business function needs to do?
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the other thing, too, is you're seeing the impact this is having on a certain portion of the job market, right? Because now you're seeing how it's changing that dynamic in such a way where people aren't really writing code as much as they were. Now they're more like analyzing the code. It's like an assembly line now.
SPEAKER_03:We had the Enablement folks go in and talk to an older commercial flooring company. And an older woman is in this meeting and she's like, is this going to replace my job? And you're like, no, but it'll add five years to your career if you start to embrace this. And she was like, all right, I'm in. It's all how you look at it, right? Your job may not be the same, but you're still needed, right, if you have the right tool sets. We don't see a lot of jobs going away. And I think I said this before. AI will take your C player and make them a B player, your B player an A player, and your A player an all-star if they can use the tools that are presented to them in front of them.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, even before the gen AI craze, right? We made an investment a couple years ago on the sales enablement side of it where we invested in a platform called MindTickle. You ever heard of them? No. Sounds cool. Yeah, it's kind of a neat name, right? But yeah, I'm sure there's other people that do this too, but what was interesting was think of it like before Copilot came out, right? It'll crawl your email, your calendar right and it'll measure like level of engagement and all sorts of stuff right so what's interesting is like when we first rolled this out it's measuring like if you look at a video player right you've got the progress bar across the bottom yep so if if I sent you an invite and this note taker pops up right now when I look at that call recording every person that was on there it'll show a timeline so if you're my customer my prospect I can see just visually immediately where you spoke and I can just click and listen to you. But if I'm a manager coming over the top, it's going to show me, you know, what was the tone of the call? What's level engagement back and forth? I mean, it's just a different way of looking at analytics. Yep. But then you start to plug that into what's happening on the back end with Salesforce. Now, all of a sudden, you've got another layer of data that's trying to help you understand, you know, based on what we've seen in this particular opportunity, what the actual potential to close it is.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. And And that's sort of what I was talking about before, right? You may have had these call recordings, but you couldn't get anything really analytical or useful out of it. And now we've got layers of applications that are coming on board, which allow you to be more scientific in how you go into the art of selling.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_03:Some ways that we use it, right? If we're talking to a company that's publicly traded,
SPEAKER_01:right?
SPEAKER_03:If you're not running their 10K or their annual report through our custom GPT to find out what their biggest technology initiative is are, shame on you. It's not like I've got to send an intern or an analyst to do two weeks of work. It takes two minutes. And that's what we ask our vendors to do now. If you're going to get in front of one of our large customers, you sure as hell should have done your homework. But your homework takes two minutes now. It's table stakes to come in with an idea of what their initiatives are and how does your solution fit with their initiatives. It's how you get to the table now. You You can't come without this stuff anymore.
SPEAKER_02:That's right. Yeah. Table stakes, right? And I think that there's going to be so much output of a lot of these tools that while people are concerned about what AI is going to replace, I think this is not going to get replaced ever.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. Yeah, because you can't get the seat of that table unless you've had a conversation with somebody at some level. That's right. So put your buyer's hat on now, right? Because I've got to assume you get probably just as many clients If not more from people wanting you to buy sales enablement tools or anything that sort of touches the sales world, how does someone in a sales position grab your attention to say, hey, you know what? You've got a thousand things going on. Ninety percent of your job is getting revenue in, but in order to help that, I might need to buy or procure something. How does somebody on the sales side get your attention and pique your interest that you want to have a call with them? I think it's absolutely impossible.
SPEAKER_02:Here's why I say that, right? And this is coming from somebody that, you know, my first job out of college is I was a retail stockbroker for like four years, you know, living and dying on the phone, right? And do you answer your phone today? Never. Unless
SPEAKER_03:you know
SPEAKER_02:who
SPEAKER_03:calls? If it's not in my inbox, if it's not on my, the name doesn't pop up, straight to voicemail. And my voicemail says, do not leave me a voicemail. I don't check voicemails. Bingo. And I just deleted my voicemails today. There There were 47 of them in the last three weeks.
SPEAKER_02:There you go. It's crazy. Same. Absolute same, right? I think my voicemail says, due to travel, please send me an email. Yeah. Right? So phone's out, right? Second one is email. You get spammed all day, every day. Do you ever look? No. Yep. Never, right? So again, it's right back to this. Who do you know, right? And who do you listen to? And who do you respect, right? So I think a lot of this is inbound, believe it or not. So if I've got a need and I'm asking my peers or, you know, we're doing some investigation, like we're still hunting. And what I mean by hunting is like investigating, doing a lot of that research online, right? Now that whole world is upside down right now because of AI. So I think that people have to be a lot more strategic now about how they're going to, you know, relationships are everything and you're only as good as, you know, what you've been able to accomplish, right? So I I think my point is working together to understand where a customer's needs are, that's the only way you're going to get into a position to actually have a conversation to see if you can actually provide value. And that's the other half of the coin that you said earlier. You've got to be very, very clear on where you're strong and where you're not, or you're just wasting people's time.
SPEAKER_03:So you've got a rational view of sales, right? How have you changed the focus of maybe some of... the more tenured people that you have in your sales organization say, hey, we've got to sell differently now, right? Than how you sold 10 or 15 years ago, right? It can't just be, you know, cold calling. You've got to go out there and nurture these relationships. How do you change that culture with your more tenured people?
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Great question. I think that's, you know, I think anybody that is successful is recognized that change is the only constant and they're going to have to change their ways, right? And I think that people that Business moves too fast, right? So what you did last year or last week may not be the way today. And sooner or later, you're going to get sidelined, right? And I think that that's just unfortunate, but it's true. And I think part of that's keeping an open mind, right? I don't have all the answers either, right? There's some really sharp people that work for us that are always pushing us to change.
SPEAKER_03:Let's talk about what's coming ahead here. What do you think is the next big disruptive technology out there? You can't use AI.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:that's fair.
SPEAKER_03:That's
SPEAKER_02:fair. So I think that what I'm seeing is what are some of these applications that people are designing to actually make use of that? But you're right, you can't say AI. It's a tough one, man. I want to see what the impact is going to be on the security space because of it. Right? Like, the bad guys are innovating way quicker than the good guys. Yep. Right? And, you know, even if you take AI out of it. But that's the part that I think is kind of interesting. You know, all the preventative risk controls. So think of all the... How big is the moat around the castle as far as security services? Right? There's thousands of vendors trying to keep people out. Right? And then... You've got very low-tech ways of social engineering your way into a network. Here's a perfect example, man. I was on a flight coming back. I don't know where the hell I was at, right? But it was this one opportunity where I rarely get upgraded. I got upgraded. So the guy sitting next to me had a Microsoft jersey on. So we're shooting the breeze, getting ready to take off. And it turns out that he was a penetration testing guy. So he was on his way to go try to get into one of his largest clients, like physically get in. So I'm talking like, how the hell do you do that? He's like, well, I bring a spotting scope. I'm staying at a hotel across the street. I'm trying to see through windows, see if I can get anybody's credentials. This is some
SPEAKER_03:creepy stuff, but it's got to be done,
SPEAKER_02:I guess. It's got to be done, right? So anyways, we keep talking. I'm thinking that's kind of odd, right? I think just somebody could talk their way in, right? But I'm like, help me understand the quickest way you got in. So he said the quickest way I ever got in, this is a large global client of his, Global Enterprise. He said that he started a into their global help desk, right? And posing as a cold caller. And he was doing it at the end of the day or the beginning of the day, depending on the help desk he was calling at. So trying to catch people kind of off their game, right? So we call in acting like a cold caller and, you know, no one full well, nobody want to talk to him. So we get somebody on the phone. I think this was like in Ireland, right? The guy's like, you know, we're not interested in blah, blah, blah. He's like, listen, mate, I got 50 people behind me. They're just going to keep calling. So why don't you just tell me who the hell you guys use, and I'll just notate the account, they'll stop calling. He's like, all right, fine, we use Rapid7. He's like, all right, thanks. He takes that little tidbit that he got on the phone call, he calls into like a director of marketing somewhere in the States, like, hey, so-and-so, I'm Jim Bob from Rapid7's global cyber response team, you've been compromised, I need you to log onto this site, drop what you're doing, walk out of whatever meeting you are right now, because we have to stop this. And then boom, sends you a URL, guy's on the network. Two phone calls.
SPEAKER_03:Amazing. Yeah. So with That story, right? Two questions. First one is, how long do you think cyber insurance is going to be around and that companies are going to be able to get cyber insurance? How much longer is this insurable?
SPEAKER_02:I think the question is a good one because you're already seeing it's almost untenable from a cost perspective. We do a lot of work with some of those folks because when they bring them through underwriting, it's kind of like Progressive. Progressive's clever because they'll send you their site And all they're going to do is pre-qualify you to see if they want to give you a, you know, before they show you other rates, it just gives them an opportunity to say, all right, we're going to crank our rate up because we don't want the risk, right? So the same thing happens like when underwriting looks at some of these companies, when they see gaps, you know, they'll send them to us to help fill some of the gaps. But again, I don't know. The feedback I get is just the expense just continues to climb no matter how much people are doing. Now, we've actually, we invested in some tooling on the consulting side where we'll go in, we'll run an assessment, and just based on the company, their name, what their revenue is, and what segment of the market they're in, that'll give us inherent risk. So if I'm an underwriter, that's a financial number that I know immediately. And then we can go look at every single tool that they've deployed from a security perspective, and you just watch the number come down. And it's great because it gives you this overall very comprehensive list of how you're going to assess the risk, right? Someone's giving them a credit score. Basically. But it's very specific. It's almost vendor specific. So I've deployed this for XDR, this for NDR, or whatever, right? But I think when you look at a list of all the different things you could be doing, that alone looks insane. Because the expense to fill every single gap in the way that you can look at the whole spectrum is astronomical,
SPEAKER_03:right? Death by$3 a user
SPEAKER_02:bingo yeah across a thousand different things right so so the point is being able to measure that and understand like okay well i'm not doing these three things today but if i did plug that hole what's the actual impact on the financial risk right so it helps people kind of make a decision but to me when i just look at how exhaustive that is it's almost like the cloud security lines came out years ago right so in the early days if somebody wanted to send you a security audit form they'd have like an excel doc that they created or maybe they pulled from some kind of consortium. Well, now that list is so exhaustive. I think that company did a great job or that consortium did a great job because people like us, if we're a part of it, we have to go basically certify our results and make it public. So if somebody slides a weak audit form to us, we'll just point them to that because it's exhaustive. Same kind of concept. If you look at the investment you'd have to make there, it's crazy. So I hear a lot of people speculating that it's not going to be around in the next five years.
SPEAKER_03:I think the other thing that's so It was interesting. I believe there was a court decision that did not limit Cloudflare's exposure from their outage. I think it was either Delta or United was coming after those guys. How does that, as a service provider, how does that weigh on you guys going forward when you're contracting? Because it used to be you were capped at your contract level or contract times two, and now it's essentially, if this Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Got it. I mean, think of the impact of that, right? Now, all of a sudden, if you're buying something from me for a dollar today, right, you're going to be spending$1,000 on that tomorrow if it was unlimited liability. Nobody is going to buy into that.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. So just some closing things to chat with. If you were to describe your leadership style, you've got a pretty big organization right now. So give me an idea of what people can expect once they walk into Dante's org? I think from
SPEAKER_02:my perspective, I'm very big on being straight to the point and transparent and making sure that we are also very wide open to consensus. I don't believe that one person should be the end-all, be-all. I think you've got to really invest in your people and make sure you hire the right people, but I think you've got to be very clear on what our objective is as a business, right, as an organization. And, you know, from my perspective, I want to have a lot of fun. But, you know, it's simple. You know, at 1111, we all work a half a day, man. You pick your 12 hours, right? I mean, so we expect a lot, you know. But I think that we can have fun doing it. And, you know, it's kind of a no BS type of environment, right? You should shoot everybody straight, good or bad or indifferent.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. When you look at some of those larger enterprise deals that you guys work, is there a sales process or methodology that you guys have adopted?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yep. I think, and this actually stems from the Island days when we were, you know, going from that small company to a much larger company. Yeah. I think the, the medic framework, as far as a, are you familiar with medic? We just rolled it out.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. This is what I was hoping you were saying. And this isn't on any of the cards.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's super important, right? Because I think, you know, we're so far along our career. Like we, we've been through a whole bunch of different things, right? Strategic selling, power-based selling, like selling to Vito, like all that stuff back in the day. I think one of the most unique things I learned like early in my career is I worked for an IBM bar and we were selling loss and software and they pushed us into like a personality-based selling course. Typical, right? You go in, you take your own, like at the time it was the disc thing, you know, high D, high I, right? So, and you quickly learn as a salesperson that you're probably more interpersonal, maybe more decision minded, you know, get it out to the point where if you're selling technology, you're probably selling to somebody that's way more security and conscientious. So if I'm trying to get to understand you and know you and be personally, I'm probably scaring the crap out of you. Yep. Right. So, but I think medic is when I look at medic, when you're trying to sell a complex solution, it's, it's super, super important. And it's a guideline that should not only be followed by, you know, your, your frontline seller, But, man, if you don't live that as a manager or a leader, then you literally have no idea where you are.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I think when we sort of looked at adopting it, it was, hey, we know that these are the steps, right? Yeah. But when we miss one, we miss it and it's big.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Right? So, hey, how do we get into a methodology where this is documented, right? And we've gone ahead and we've integrated it into our CRM for certain deal size. We've got to be able to go in there and check boxes and go through a deal review. And then also, it allows us to walk away much faster. If it's not a deal or it doesn't meet the criteria for a deal, then we've got to go spend our time on opportunities or going out and finding opportunities that meet the criteria of, hey, I'm going to get a deal done without three birthdays on it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, it's funny you say that. Where I learned a lot of this stuff, again, was way back then, early in my career, because I you talk about a transition man going from you know getting to no and yes every day as a broker to trying to play chess for 12 to 18 months like the deal sizes were so large that you literally got very very good at qualifying out because you couldn't spend a day longer in an account so a lot of that at the time was very focused on initially like can I compete can I win so in other words if I'm able to validate the requirements across all these different you know folks in an organization because this was ERP software it touches everybody And that's big money. you know, you were constantly balancing, you know, the requirements versus your ability to execute. And I think that that's, you know, one thing that's critical, you know, critically important, like in the beginning of the sales cycle, all the way through to keep validating that. But on the on the medic piece, you know, that whole framework came out of people that were like at PTC, I don't remember parametric technology, right. But again, hard nosed, complex sales process. And, you know, when I was going through this stuff, back at the law days, you did an account review. There were 16 questions. There was no if, ands, or buts. At the time, it was very much focused on that rigid process where you couldn't forecast a deal unless you had met the CFO and you had assigned mutually agreed upon sequence of events to closure. Right?
SPEAKER_03:The go live document. Can't call it the contract signing document anymore. It's the go live document.
SPEAKER_01:That's
SPEAKER_03:it. That's it. That's funny. When we talk to the team, I'm like, The hard part is getting through the medic stuff, right? The fun part is crafting the deal. That's where the fun, the creative aspects come into the sales process that at least I think are fun, right? How do I go and figure out what the levers are of our customer and what the levers are of the vendor, right? And matching those together, that is exciting, right? That I'm able to get a solution delivered for a customer that's going to help them, you Yeah, that's it. I mean,
SPEAKER_02:that's it. How am I going to impact your revenue or save you money or reduce your risk? Those are three reasons, right? And you guys are in such a cool spot because you can come in and you can do all the hard work. And the hard work is helping them understand what's truly important. Because then you've got all the expertise to go matchmake that on the other side and hold people accountable, right? Like, it puts you in such a cool spot because you're a non-threatening person. threatening, trusted, valuable partner that can come in and really help sift through all the garbage, help them prioritize, right? And then, you know, save them so much time in putting the right people in front of them.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and it's, you know, when we're working deals with companies that also run Medic, it's funny because we're going to have different deal sheets, right? Yeah. Because we may have different contacts in there and it's much easier for, you know, us to work a deal with someone who's running the same methodology because we speak the same language and we can compare notes more easily on hey how do we at the end of the day get the customer what they want
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_03:based upon the three people that we're talking to the one of the four people that you're talking to you know we want to be able to to get a win-win for everybody but everyone isn't just the customer right there's five wins that have to go on inside of there that's right um in order to get a yes and the more information that we have because we're running a common framework um the easier it is for us to create a solution to get those five people their wins.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's it. And it's neat as you get further along, like how you're working with that client to understand what's truly important to them, right? And then map that into the presentation, right? So you're arming your champion with all the right data that makes it super simple to help drive that consensus.
SPEAKER_03:It's funny you bring that up. We went through that sales enablement AI training for ChatGPT we're talking about, and we had a large deal that we were working And the VP was going into the CFO for approval. So we went in and built a custom GPT and said, hey, here's the deal parameters that we have here. Here's the LinkedIn profile of the VP. Here's the LinkedIn profile of the CFO. And here's their company URL. What questions is a CFO going to ask to give an approval on this type of deal? And it shot out like two slides worth of things. We put it together, packaged it up, put a bow on it gave it to the VP he's like yeah this covered a lot of the stuff that was in this meeting he's like you know I think that's how we are changing our value to our customers right and we're just using the tools that we have like we're not the smartest guys in the room like we just know where the smart things are and like how to turn them on
SPEAKER_02:that's it that's it but you're but in doing that you're saving your client so much time yep right and at the end of the day you're also doing right by the vendors side because you're going to take this massive market and just slice it and dice it down, right? And, you know, again, you're only going to present the folks that can actually deliver.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, because I'm sure you're tired of, you know, it's always nice when a customer calls in, but if what they want isn't a fit for what you do, like, you just wasted somebody's cycles qualifying something like this. Yeah. When, like, it's our job to bring you qualified deals that fit what you do. And the more qualified deals that we bring to vendors, the better relationships we have because, again, I don't want my time wasted. You don't want your time wasted. And sure as hell, the customer doesn't want their time wasted. Yeah, that's it. So the smarter we get on what is a good fit for everybody, the squeaky wheel sort of goes away.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's it. And I think the key is to help qualify out some of that stuff up front because you may encounter some of these opportunities where the needs are so unique that somebody could probably do 90% of it. And then it becomes a case of like, all right, well, how important is that 10%? If I can't find somebody that can fulfill the 10%, maybe I'd help reset expectations.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. If it doesn't exist, then that 10% is sort of null and void, right? Then who's best for the 90? Then how do we custom ours to fill that 10% gap? Yeah.
UNKNOWN:That's it.
SPEAKER_03:Well, good stuff, Dante. I appreciate you being here. This was great catching up with you. And thanks for being on the IT Masters. Hey, man. Thanks for having me, Rob. Always good seeing you.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for tuning into the IT Masters podcast, where technology's top leaders share their winning strategies. Subscribe now and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of IT. Until next time, keep innovating and leading the way.