Host: Phil Howard
Guests: Clinton Devereaux (Director of Solutions Engineering), Jeffrey Armstrong (Sales/Account Management)

Phil Howard: All right, so welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds, which is there’s a big secret. There’s this big secret thing going on right now. I can’t tell anyone until September or something. People are under NDA. All that type of stuff. It’s going to be so much cooler than dissecting popular IT nerds for years. We are just dissecting. All I can say is for years we were just dissecting the name of the show. Dissecting popularity nerds is, of course, a ridiculously long domain name. What’s your email, Phil? At dissecting popularity nerds? Com everyone laughs at it. It’s a joke. But the whole reason that we the whole way that we became this podcast is because one day we just decided, hey, why don’t we talk to the people that really matter? The IT people, who are they? Well, they’re kind of nerdy back in the day. They’re really cool. They knew a lot of stuff. So okay, but they’re popular now because they sit at the C-suite and okay, so they’re like popular. They’re it they’re nerds. What are we going. We got to figure out how they got popular and how they weren’t lame anymore. We got to dissect them. So okay, this week we’re going to do a show called Dissecting Popular IT nerds. And everyone liked that. And now we’re at 360 episodes. So we are going to be migrating away from we’re no longer dissecting. We now know we are being right. We’re being now. And it’s going to be really exciting. It’s a big, exciting reveal. I’m just letting you guys know that because it’s pretty awesome. And today we have our first not allowed in the community, but can present to the community vendor. And I really hope some other people jump on so that they can ask like try and stump the vendor type of thing. But Airespring and my, my two favorite people at Airespring are on are on the live. The live whatever. We don’t want to call it call podcast right now. Mr. Jeffrey Armstrong in Clinton. Miss. Devereaux. Devereaux. Devereaux. I gotta do that. Right. That’s me. And. Yeah, but he’s like, from one of the coolest places in the in the world, which is Boston or Cambridge or something like that. A wicked mother’s. mothers. Yeah. From Boston. Yeah. Guy you were talking about something about like. Bell. Bell. Bell Biv DeVoe or something? Back in the day when I wasn’t cool. But they’re all from, like, your hometown. Boston, right? Tom and crew. Right. Brad Delp. Remember them? More than a feeling, right? Boston has a great. Yeah. Absolutely. Man. We have a lot of fun talking about the the old days. The old days? Yeah. So you guys aren’t the new kids on the block? Absolutely not. Marky Mark, my brother was like. I gave him a ride in the helicopter once. My brother’s a fire chief in town, so he had to give Marky Mark a helicopter ride or something, I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was his show. When you talk about guys like, you know, like, like Mark Wahlberg and a lot of those guys like that, you know, Ben Affleck, those all Boston guys, man. And and the Wahlberg. I actually went to school. I went to high school with those guys. At the center. And. And I remember those guys, you know, they they weren’t the nicest people, but you losers now, you just all popular on TV. Yeah. I can’t imagine they weren’t that nice. I don’t care about. I care about Funky Bunch anyways. I could care less. He was just another boy, man. Well, can I tell you, I think you’re echoing a little bit. I don’t know if you can get a little bit closer to the microphone just so that everyone can really experience the beauty of you. Let me try this. Here we go. Let me try this. Oh, yes. Much better, much better. Oh probably. They’re probably going to edit out all that other part anyways. This is too much fun. You and I should just do a show every day. This is how every this is how every vendor sales call should go for. You guys. Just bring me in and we’ll do it this way. Like, hey guys, you can come, you can buy from us, but only if you’re on Phil Howard’s podcast.

Okay, so today we’re supposed to be talking about rethinking ISP strategy, what smart IT leaders are doing differently, which leaves the rest of them dumb IT leaders. And we don’t want anyone that’s listening to this to be a dumb IT leader. And we’re really not saying that we’re not insulting anyone. But what we’re saying is, is there is a better way to manage your internet service providers. And the way that I’ve put it over the years is I’ve back when I worked in corporate America, most of the companies differentiated themselves as we’re better because we suck less. And I don’t think that that’s really acceptable, that that the only reason why I chose Comcast over AT&T or AT&T over Comcast, I’m not making any judgments at all here is that Comcast sucked last year AT&T sucked last reach out and touch someone. I’m not saying any of that. What we want to do is what is the better way to actually manage this if you have, I don’t know, even one location, but let’s say you’ve got 100 locations, you’ve got all these internet circuits out there. You’ve got different firewalls, you’ve got different contract dates with every one of them. I don’t think that the best way to continue to manage your internet providers in a world of mediocrity, where internet falls on the top, it falls in the top five worst industries as far as customer service, and I believe it comes in third. So I don’t know what the top two are. Maybe it’s like insurance or something, I don’t know, but I know that internet comes down in the top third. So what this is what we’re talking about today. consolidating outcomes, using an aggregator, which is what you guys are. I don’t know if you turn yourselves in aggregator, but I’ll let you guys basically explain what the heck is an aggregator and why should everyone be using an aggregator, even if you had one location?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Yeah, I don’t know, Jeff. You want to take that? Yeah. Well, Phil, you know, we’re excited to be on here with you today. there’s, I think a couple of ways to look at it, you know, one, I think for every IT leader that we talk to that has multiple locations, the pain points are, multiple carriers to manage, multiple account managers to call, multiple bills to review. And, typically, when you have multiple carriers, you essentially, in our experience, have a reactive, environment from a management perspective. Right. So your circuit goes down, you’re calling into the carrier, you’re telling the carrier, hey, look, my circuits down, I want to open a ticket. So what we see from an aggregation perspective is to eliminate all those pain points, right? So we can manage the last mile carriers. so, regardless of where you are, whether it’s, nationally or globally, we can consolidate all those carriers and then we can manage them through one point of contact and then consolidate all that billing into, you know, one, one invoice.

Phil Howard: I can already tell that Jeff’s going to be the more political, the more political player on this call. Can we make this politically incorrect really quick? Can we can we can we make this more fun? You’re not allowed to answer anymore. Okay. Sorry. You’re done. No. I’m joking, I love you. But what basically what Jeff’s saying is, is like, right now most of you are calling one 800 go pound sand. You’re calling one 800 AT&T press one, press two, press three. Hey, our circuits down. Didn’t you know? Oh, we didn’t know our circuits. Now can you do a trace route. Yeah. We. Yeah it’s. Oh oh it’s hopping. Oh the circuits hopping. Oh okay. Like, can we just be like a cool internet service provider and like Clinton translate for him. Translate what? Translate the non political.

Clinton Devereaux: I’ve got to represent Airespring correctly here. Answer. And then hopefully you don’t get fired. Well, I mean you know, it is you know, the the name aggregator really is self-explanatory, right? It’s like we’re an entity that takes many things and puts them together. Right? For the sake of elegance. Right. And, and ease of of management, you know, you go through a single aggregator and you get access to hundreds of underlying providers, right? So you’ve got you’ve got this economy of scale that you can work with via the relationships with aggregator. They’ve already got the relationships with all these connectivity providers. And we, we put everything together, co-mingle everything together into a single contract and an invoice, and you’ve got all of the, the, the, the personnel, the professional personnel on the back end, with that company to help assist you with that, with that migration. So it’s like, you know, it’s one back to pat, one throat to choke, you know. One throat to slice. and that really is, you know, the, the the the crux of what it is to be an aggregator. We’re still we’re still dealing with all these individual entities out there. Right? But we’ve taken away the hard work from our agents of having to deal with all of that. Right.

Phil Howard: And just so everyone kind of understands, like who we’re talking with. So I put together for people inside the community and for CTO, CIOs, VP’s. My thing has always been about special teams. It’s not really always like, hey, who’s the best company, who’s whatever. It’s who you know, on the inside and who can help you. So Jeff has been a superstar for us from the standpoint of he’ll do all the hard work for you, you’ve got a crap ton of bills and stuff that we need to sift and sort through, and we need to price out different things. And I’ve got 100 locations spread out across the United States. Maybe I’m a logistics firm, maybe I’m a retail some something in the retail space. Maybe it’s healthcare, maybe it’s rural healthcare. Multi locations across rural healthcare. And you’ve got to deal with the spin number and you’ve got to deal with different grant process and all that type of stuff. Jeff will help you and work with your team and work with the ER spring team to take all of that information, find out what the best delivery method is for a fiber circuit, an internet circuit, a coax circuit, a tertiary, satellite. What do we call this thing again? That’s called a Starlink. Thank you. Starlight, whatever it is. And or or LTE backup, secondary backup, whatever it is, take all of that, cut it up, slice it up, tell you every which way that this can be delivered. And the beauty of Airespring is they buy the circuits wholesale and run it across their own network so they can manage and monitor it for you. Well, and I think that’s kind of what we talked about. That is because if your circuit goes down, it shouldn’t be you shouldn’t be calling the provider to let them know their circuits down. You should be getting a notification from, say, the aggregator Airespring in this case saying, hey, we noticed your circuits down. We opened up a ticket for you. Here’s the number of that ticket. We’re on it, right? Right.

Clinton Devereaux: I think I think to, you know, Airespring as well, the way we bundle in, different solutions within the just the, you know, the delivery of internet because you know, everything. You know, the cloud. I like to say no connectivity, no cloud. Right. You got to get there. You got to get to the destination. So you can utilize those resources and connectivity. So, you know, the cloud basically rides on the back of a of the beast of a of a connectivity elephant. Right. Because if you can’t get there you can’t use the resources. And so the great thing, the thing I love about Airespring, and in my position as Director of Solutions Engineering, is that I get to talk to customers, agents, you folks like you and talk to them about building a better network, building a better Wan, not just not just the cost of getting connectivity up to the, you know, connecting to the internet, but how to stay connected, right. You know, using disparate connectivity technologies like, you know, like Starlink and, and some of the other, wireline and wireless connectivity options and using them in concert, right, to maintain connectivity to that precious cloud that everybody’s trying to reach. And I think that that’s really the that’s really the thing that when I approach, agents and I approach end users is that’s what I like to talk about. Anybody can sell an internet connection, can sell you one gig, ten gig, 40 gig, whatever you want. Right. But how are you going to stay connected? I mean, everybody’s talking about path protection. link aggregation and all these other technologies, that work in concert with just simply getting connected to the internet. But how do you stay connected? Right. That’s the thing. Building that better network. And so that’s what I think my my team brings to the table in concert with Jeff’s thought leadership is that we come in and we say, well, look, okay, great. That’s what you that’s what you’re asking us to price out. But what is your end goal? What are you really trying to accomplish? as a vertical. And what’s important to you is, is just simply connecting to the internet fast, or is it connecting to the internet fast and staying connected? And usually the answer for me is we want to stay connected, right?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Yeah. Yeah. And then yeah. And I think also, you know, with every opportunity that Clinton is on with me for, for, for my business, you know, talking about the right now need and then the long term strategy plan, right where you need to be today and where you need to where are you going down the road tomorrow. Right. And we do a really good job at really locking in with with our clients, long term with that. Right. And, Phil, sometimes we are chastised about the amount of information that we ask for because, you know, thought leadership is just not a, you know, something that people throw around. Right. But businesses are really looking for their, you know, their partners, their vendor partners to provide them with thought leadership. I mean, you know, if you fell down before walking through this particular, place that we’re about to go through, can you tell us where the hole is? Right. I mean, maybe there’s some things that you’re aware of that we can help, that you can help us avoid. And that’s really what thought leadership is, right? We we’ve already made the mistakes or by experience. We’ve made the mistakes. And we can tell you how not to make those same mistakes and what and give you information about what we’ve learned as we’ve journeyed through those same, through those same things. And, and that’s what thought leadership is to me, helping customers understand how not to make mistakes, even when, when even when they seem to think they know where they’re going. Right? Or they do know where they’re going, they may not have encountered this particular issue that they’re heading for. And again, thought leadership for me is to warn the client, you know, what what they’re about to get into, and then give them the factual evidence as to why and then try to steer them around that, to help make a better decision about their.

Phil Howard: Let’s have a little deeper, maybe like nerdier conversation. let’s just talk a little bit more about some of the benefits that you would get from an aggregator that you might not get if you’re managing every single provider by yourself, or if you’ve got a procurement department buying in this type of stuff, obviously they get you Clinton. Maybe you have an advanced or, you know, Visio drawings, things that you can put together or cloud orchestration, highways to Azure, Google cloud, AWS. What are some of the benefits of working specifically with Airespring. When it comes to Multicarrier orchestration, cloud terminus contracts would be beautiful consolidated billing or billing that comes in in a code codec that matches the CFO spreadsheet. I mean, there’s a lot of benefits there. I don’t take pick one.

Clinton Devereaux: And we’re definitely we’re definitely willing to, work with our, our customers and our agents to make sure that there’s parity, in how they’re used to, absorbing information, and so if they have specific, site codes and things like that, if they have a requirement for consolidated billing, those are again, those are the conversations that we have with these folks upfront to make sure that we give them what they need in the back end. But you know, all of those things, right? I mean, it’s just so much easier for a company like Airespring, who has spent the past 22 years developing the systems, the processes, the personnel, the culture, to help make agents lives so much easier. Right? We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we really do think that we have the secret sauce, to help agents become, you know, become successful and to alleviate and to to take a lot of the stuff off of their plate. Right. that they, you know, that that helps that that mitigates their ability to be successful.

Phil Howard: Just so, you know, like the group that you’re speaking to, the group that you’re speaking to right now, too, that’s in this community is about 120 CTOs and CIOs. So it’s all people that are at companies that are 200 to say, 10,000 users, which I think is a perfect fit for you guys.

Clinton Devereaux: Yes, absolutely. We we take them all sizes, right? I mean, you know, there’s no enough there’s no need to be greedy. We have enough to feed the needy, right? We we we deal with small businesses, and even enterprises too. And that’s the beauty of it. We don’t a lot of folks focus on particular verticals and particular size businesses. But, we we feel like this technology and the ability of businesses to, to show the the most value that they can to their customers is our ultimate goal. It doesn’t matter how small or how big they are. Right.

Phil Howard: Can we talk a little bit about managing the network and maybe what are some of the things that you’ve done that are considerably helpful to a network administrator or CTO managing a pretty massive network with, say, 50 to 100 locations and various different on ramps to the cloud. Maybe they’re worried about, or maybe they’re worried about any number of things. Where do you come in?

Clinton Devereaux: Well, we again, as a network aggregator, we come in in many different ways. Right. Again, the network is the, you know, the, the, the piece that gets folks, you know, again, to these resources in a secure manner. Right. So a lot of customers that we, that we encounter encountered don’t even have viable network infrastructures in place currently. Right. And the ones that do, any example, any examples use cases would be great. they may have a bunch of IPsec VPNs that they’re using to as they’re wearing technology. Right. Great. What else? They don’t necessarily have the vision. They don’t have the vision into the applications and the traffic behavior. you know, they they connected their locations together, but they don’t have the forensics insight right into how the applications are behaving across this network to modify it, to make it better, to shore it up. it’s just up. It’s running and deal with the latency, ping hairpins and everything else. because you don’t know forensically that this stuff is happening. The solutions that Airespring brings to the table all have, the, the administrative, the views. Right? The gooeys, the, the former managers, the I mean, you can even talk about the, the Airespring, ITSM, air control that, that, that pull that information, right, that forensics information from the network and how it’s performing and presenting it in a in, quote unquote, single pane of glass for folks of all different levels of technological understanding to be able to use and make salient decisions about how to augment or to scale back even certain sections of the network, and that that’s the that’s the thing, the, the forensics, the information that gives the customer right. And airespring the ability to make make good decisions about where to go next, to make a decision about what it is that they, we, we think they may need without that forensics data. it’s really hard outside of, you know, end users complaining about things not working well. Right. To determine where, where the next shore up is required. You know, what applications are actually, having issues, you know, your routing infrastructure, right? Your in your routing period. Right. Maybe that’s kludgy. and so all those forensics give you vision into that? so that you can, you know, Airespring and the customer can make good decisions, together and, you know, as a partner, right? For for making things, for helping these businesses move and engage their digital transformation. Right. All these different things that they’re looking to accomplish.

Phil Howard: So, I mean, I know it sounds expensive. Okay. It sounds expensive. And I’m sure a lot of people out there listening are thinking, this sounds like this could be expensive, but, you know, what’s expensive is old networks. Like, if we go to, like, say, Trinity, like what we did with Trinity Healthcare right there on an old antiquated single threaded Mpls. Oh yeah. Some kind of hub hub and spoke back to a headquarters. It was worse than that. Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, it was I think we did we migrate from did they migrate from? We went we took them from Meraki to, we went Meraki to Fortinet or something like that. Fortinet. Right. And gave them a full. Yeah. Gave gave them a fully connected and resilient SD-Wan overlay infrastructure. that that gets their people to and from their the resources that they need to do their jobs and also gives them, you know, path resiliency, link redundancy and all these other benefits that SD-Wan brings to the table. so, yeah, it’s just amazing, like pretty happy campers. I think we like ten x or 100 X there through network speeds, fully meshed their network. Yeah, completely forklifted the entire to an entire Fortinet hybrid management. Right. So that, you know, if you do want to manage your entire Fortinet network, go ahead. I mean, I know you guys will let them do that, but if you want an extra little bit of extra help, don’t you guys have like one of the largest Fortinet benches of certification people or something like that.

Clinton Devereaux: Matter of fact, we do. Yeah. In order for us to get our, the status that we have with Fortinet, we had to. I think you have to have 50 plus engineers that are certified NSA, you know, NSC three, four, and above, I believe in order to get that, that sort of a status with Fortinet. And we do we have well over 60 engineers that all have, you know, that are all certified, with Fortinet, NSC three, NSC four, various levels of NSC certifications. and so, yeah, we do have that. So we have a depth of bench, on the back end that really understands this technology. we, I have I’m looking at my little lab right over here. I’ve got, I got a couple of 60 configured in. Ha. I’ve got some Florida switches I play around with for the link. I’m in the 40 OS and I’m making changes, you know, for, for my own local network. And so that gives me, a place to practice, right? And to absorb more and more and more about this information. So as new things come out, I can test, I can prove them. And again, it just only makes me a better thought leader when it comes to this technology.

Phil Howard: You might top Fortinet Guru on YouTube. You might even be. I don’t think so. I actually use that guy. He’s pretty good. Guru. Shout out to Fortinet guru Greg. Make sure we tag Fortinet Guru on this when we release it. Okay? Yeah. Absolutely guys. Shout out to Fortinet guru. Yeah. Go buy your stuff from though. Buy your Fortinet stuff here. No, no. Well, if you’re if you’re going to buy Fortinet stuff, you can buy direct through Fortinet, right? You could you could go pay cash and you will get sent a box. But here’s the beauty of what we did. Back to kind of here’s the thing. So here’s the here’s the executive speak. Here’s the executive roundtable speak for everyone out there listening. We forklifted an entire network, like, got them off an old Mpls, which that’s not hard. That’s kind of like we kind of hope for like, if you’re on Mpls, still call us today. We’ll save you. Only MPL Mpls is still a viable it’s still a great it’s not dead. I mean everything that the general the general massive networks are still running on Mpls. But if you’re like, I don’t know how to say this in a simple fashion, a small to medium sized business running Mpls, like with like, you know, point to point VPNs, like you don’t need that, right? You don’t need to be paying like $600 for a three Meg circuit Mpls. Like I think that’s what the like really what it came down to. I was like, okay, rather than that, why not forklift SD-Wan? leverage Fortinet, have 100 Meg fiber circuit coming into every location and do all this. And I think we saved them 60. What did we say? Quite a bit of money. It was like $1.63 million or something ridiculous. Plus gave them an entire network upgrade. increased internet speed and gave them an entire company to manage and monitor. And actually, I think eventually they’ll be on coterminous contracts at some point. but to me, that’s that’s the big sell, right? with an aggregator, why not get so much more, lower the same or less price?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Better. Now they’re adding. They’re adding, replacement for their, Oh, yes. pots. Replacement.

Phil Howard: Boy, let’s translate on that. What does that mean for all you IT guys out there that have never been in telecom, plain old telecom lines, you’ve got some bills coming in from AT&T or Verizon or something. And they’re like $75 for one copper line that sits in an elevator, an elevator somewhere. You don’t need to do that.

Clinton Devereaux: Well, well, when the FCC, made a lot of their decisions, they, they gave a lot of power, to the, the incumbents that are still delivering copper. And they they basically are. They basically said, hey, look, we get how expensive this infrastructure is to maintain for you guys, right? I mean, circuit switching is it is a thing of the past. We really need to go to a packet based, you know, network solution for, you know, for, for data networks as well as voice networks. And this stuff is really just keeping us from, surfing the envelope, right, and getting on the edge or getting the edge of technologies because people are going to buy this stuff as long as it’s available and it’s basically it’s clogging up, the networks, it’s it’s, you know, it’s two different things to manage. It’s this, you know, this aging copper infrastructure that is, you know, that that’s impacted by, you know, things like force majeure and other things. Right? And copper really isn’t that great. I mean, it rusts. And so you got this, this infrastructure out there that’s just like falling apart. And the carriers and the FCC said, hey, you guys can charge what you want, for this infrastructure now, right? Because we understand how difficult it is for you guys to maintain. contrary to the, the, the fiber optic and, you know, the, the networks that are built on light. and so what’s happening is that these, you know, these pots lines are now going up ridiculously in value. There are some places in California, Phil, where pots line costs $300 for a ds0. Right. For a pots line. Exactly. And it’s because the A11. Yeah. Because the FCC said, hey, you can charge what you want because we get it. And so that’s really the impetus. And a lot of these businesses now are starting to see those bills increasing and going whoa. Right. How do we get out of this mess? You know, almost a day late and a dollar short because the FCC has been telling everybody, hey, you know, you might want to do something about this now. You know, 2 or 3 years ago. But we understand how businesses move. Right. They’re like these. The brontosauruses. Right? It’s really hard for them to turn around, right. And change direction. And it’s not just because of the businesses sizes. It’s also because of the personnel that are within those. Not everybody is an innovator. Right. You may be an IT person, you know, working for, you know, working in the IT department of a business. But that doesn’t make you an innovator, right? And that also doesn’t doesn’t also interesting doesn’t mean you have time to go to the the CFO or the HR department and say, hey, can you give me all the bills and the pots lines and you have a whole two days to sit down and go through, 20 pages for one phone line on each phone line and correlate it with something else, and then know how to call up again, one 800 go pound sand and do all that.

Phil Howard: Whereas which brings me to Jeff. I’ve called you numerous times after 5:00 at I don’t know, is it your son’s baseball game or wherever you’re at? And I’m very sorry for doing that. But the point is, is we have a really great team and maybe, maybe speak just for a few seconds because, I mean, obviously Clinton has the brains of the technical end and everything, but what about just what about just bird dogging installations? And what about just operations? And every day, just everyday general support?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Yeah. You know, I can add to that. I think if I wanted to go back real quick to the benefits and then that can lead into the support from, you know, day zero, day one, day two, which we really focus a lot of our efforts on. But, you know, you said CIOs and CTOs and the ones that I speak to, whether they’re nationwide multi, multi multi-location business, whether it’s global multi-location businesses, it almost always starts with what is what is my inventory. Right. What do I have at these locations? very often, we don’t know. Right. when are they out of contract or are they coming out of contract? Are they going month to month when they auto renew? Are they going 12 months? Are those carriers sharing with you? any new, lesser price points, or they just auto renewing for the same. Or they they are they gouging you and increasing the the circuit rates or whatever the the product rates is. So our team initially with this type of pain point for, these leaders, is to come in and help them, understand what their environment is or what their inventory is, when they’re coming out of contract. And we’ll do that for customers. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll assign, you know, team, team members on the op side to, to work with the underlying carriers to build those contract end dates. So, you can create a phased rollout plan. but a lot of times like this, day to day minutia, IT leaders just don’t have the time for it because they’re just nailed down with so many other initiatives. They just can’t get to that. So we see a lot of that, where we can come in and we can really just help clean up, and be a part of that team. Right, right out of the gate. it’s the same for the for for billing. You know, a lot of times I’ve had literally customers on call say, I don’t even know what I’m paying for anymore. And I just I just cut the check. Right. So we really help understand what their spend is. if they’re getting gouged with hair or makeup fees. and really try to get, you know, standardized billing across all locations for them to make it easy to, to stay on top of and manage. but, you know, for me, you know, one of the main reasons why I came to, airespring is because of the operational teams, and leadership that we have in place. You know, for many years, I was a director of operations for a big carrier in Boston. And, you know, so I’m an ops guy by heart, so I tend to wear my operations hat. And I really wanted to vet airespring, on the operations side, because a lot of carriers can have that inconsistency, whether it’s inexperienced reps or inexperienced leaders. it just creates a bad experience. for, for the customer. So for me, I was able to really dig in with our leadership, really led by Russ Shipley, our COO, who was TP CEO for years. very knowledgeable guy, very deep critical thinker and very hands on. he really created the day zero, day one, day two support. to really help with these IT leaders and their team offload all of that day to day stuff work when it comes from strategy and design or deployment and implementation. to, to really, help offload a lot of the, the time, people and resources it takes for, for these IT teams.

Phil Howard: Let’s just go through a couple scenarios, though. Let’s say what’s the typical scenario that any IT leader is going to deal with on a daily basis, that the internet’s down at a certain location or there’s packet loss or things are slowing down, or I’m on vacation and we need to make a change to XYZ firewalls. I’m just trying to think, or we or here’s even the bigger one we need to we need to roll out these three new locations or there’s new construction here. There’s no address here. Just I know you guys have like, probably like the number one, like, wholesale relationship with AT&T or something. Maybe you just kind of break down how you guys actually do better and how you would deal with those. So circuits down, you know what I mean? Like, how are you guys going to help any anyone else over say they’re with Comcast or with anyone else? What’s the differentiator?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Big benefit you get from coming from us. And what is one location where you get an account manager assigned to your account? The first big benefit you get is you go from a reactive environment going direct with, you know, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, whoever it is. Right. you’re not going to if you’re a single location business or you’re a small, medium sized business. very rarely are the big carriers going to give you an account manager. You can call and do a queue, like you’re going to know your circuits down because you’re down. You’re calling into the big carrier. You’re getting pushed around from Q to Q to Q, you know, you don’t know who you’re talking to. you know, it’s 45 minutes, I think, for the average, you know, SMB person to to get something resolved, from a first call to the big carrier with us, you get away from the big carrier and you have a managed router with us. You’ve now created a proactive, management environment, right? So your circuit goes down are not nodes that we immediately open a ticket. We whether you tell us, you predetermine with us how you want to be notified is through an email distribution list. Is it, calls typically it’s email distribution. We’ll send it. We’ll say, hey, circuits down at location X in Texas. we’ve opened a ticket. We’re working with the underlying carrier. and then through our portal, you know, we’ve got a lot of back and forth between us and the carrier. so you can essentially, as a customer, See the the communication going on between us and the and the underlying carrier? so that’s the first big pain point we take away from any size, customer going from reactive environment to a proactive environment. But I don’t know if you want to add anything to that before we before we keep talking about it.

Clinton Devereaux: Yeah. I mean, and that’s what I always say, if you’ve got pain points that you’re aware of, you always want to add them into the conversation so that they can be discussed and, and possibly addressed, if the technology allows. My thing is always build a better network. Don’t complain about, contingencies not being there, right? I got no failover. I got that build it. Right. I mean, you know, get get, you know, get get the people involved, like an air spring. and, and make that make that an initiative, right? Make it an initiative for for for your business. to resolve those things. Because there are, again, there are people out there like airespring with the thought leadership to help alleviate those issues. A lot of times what happens is it’s about budget. Or again, when I was talking about, you know, it leadership, not necessarily interested in breaking things. Right. Just to to make things better. Right. sometimes it’s easier. The monster, you know, is better than the one you don’t know. And then, you know, there may be some, you know, some concern about not understanding the technology, I I’ve had to explain SD-Wan, software defined wide area networking and how it sits in the pillar of, as one of the many pillars of of sassy and explain to them exactly what that means. and so it doesn’t necessarily just because somebody in the IT field doesn’t mean they understand this stuff or even where to go, but that’s actually a good point. That is what we are here for. Just reach out. Save yourself the embarrassment or whatever, because we don’t hold anything against anybody. And we we are here to help you resolve your problems. And again, just the mindset should be of just build, build it better. If it’s what you need, then build it.

Phil Howard: We have a lot of different challenges, Phil, with regards to budgets and prices and sizes and and cultures. How about security? I want to talk about security. How much scaling security because you mentioned SD-Wan and there’s a lot of different ways to there’s a lot of different SD-Wan providers. There’s obviously the the Broadcom the Broadcom of the world, which is which is a. Well yeah. Broadcom actually your Velocloud was sold to Arista. Okay. So oh well okay then. Okay. So then but either way we’ve got Cato Networks. We’ve got the we’ve got the Fortinet stuff. What kind of from how can you help people scale, more securely or how can you help them with security and from the SD-Wan standpoint, there might be just a few really important bullet points that, for example, getting around the Chinese firewall, like, I know you guys have a partnership with Cato, correct?

Clinton Devereaux: Yes we do. We do have a partnership with Cato, and we use Cato in many different in many, interesting ways. Yeah. I mean, they’ve been one of the best for getting around the Chinese firewall. So you’ve got something on my you’ve got manufacturing mainland China or Hong Kong and throughout Thailand and stuff. they’ve been very, very good at, basically helping your VPN connections not go down, but from just like a if you were to go in with a and you’re just to ask someone, hey, what’s your security strategy from, from what standpoint can can airespring help out? from the networking perspective? there’s security, runs the gamut, right? I mean, every single thing, on the wire. Right? Even even things that are communicating with the wire wirelessly are a part of the, the footprint, right? They’re a part of that fabric that can be compromised. So, there there are businesses, there are verticals, and there are businesses that work with the actual client device. Right? they secure the actual device itself. Right. Airespring is a is a again, as a network aggregator, we provide network security, right? We can get you to your resources and we can get you to your destination, securely. Right. But but once you get there. Now what? Right. And so we leverage our technologies like Cato, which is Cato is an amazing, they’re an amazing vendors out there. And we do we do partner with them. and, they have a great single vendor, SaaS solution that is just, taking the the technology world by storm. They’re they the latest Gartner, shows them in the Magic Quadrant, right? As a leader, and they continue to progress in that manner because they really do have a fantastic, solution that protects, endpoint protection, the actual devices themselves, to, to the destinations. Right. And, and how those devices and the people behind them can interact once they reach those locations. So as far as, like security is, is a is a big deal. Right. And and it goes simply beyond the areas that Airespring provides security again, which is network security. It’s networking security. if you know, you’re looking to, secure devices and endpoint protection, we also offer that as well, through Cato, but again. It’s it’s a very broad, very broad, area of things to secure and not we’re not asking you to come in and go pen testing. We’re not having to do pen testing or anything like that. And not all companies can do all things right. So, you know, this this idea that there is actually one place to go for absolutely everything is incorrect. and so, you know, depending on what it is that you’re trying to achieve as a business in terms of your security, you might have to leverage multiple vendors in order to make that happen, because there really is no single vendor that addresses all aspects of a business’s security requirements. They just don’t exist.

Phil Howard: I’m leaving this up to you guys. Now. We can you guys can take this away with whatever you guys want to talk about. Next. I mean, it’s been it’s been a pleasure having you on. It’s been a lot of fun. What do you guys want to talk about? Is there anything that we haven’t hit on that that people must know? are we giving away anything free for anyone listening on the show today? Jeff, what can we give away for free?

Jeffrey Armstrong: We get an Amazon gift card for 100 bucks. Okay. For what? What do we do? What do we get for 100 $100 Amazon gift card? That’s pretty good. What are we doing? that’s a good question. So we’ll give it to whoever joined first for whoever wants. How about this? Whoever wants to sit down and have a and have, a Jeff, review all your bills and your, your security payment and basically give you price out all your internet circuits, whether it’s 50 to 1000 locations. We will do that for you. And, you’ll get $100 Amazon gift card. And it’s kind of like a first come, first serve. So in reference, in reference this podcast, you have to reference this podcast you must reference Phil Howard. Jeff, what’s your email? You must reference Phil. You must say I heard about you from Phil Howard. And Jeff’s email is can we give out your email? Are we allowed to do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jeff John Armstrong at Airespring comm. Jeff j e f a r m s t r o n g arm like the arm bar and then strong like strong arm you. So the strong arm, it’s like it works that backwards. Armstrong. Jeff Armstrong at Airespring. That’s a I r e correct. Right. Spring. Spring

Phil Howard: I want to I want to black awesome golf shirt like Clinton’s wearing. There you go. We got one. I thought you were going to say you need a black awesome guy. But you know. There’s somebody out there listening right now that needs that too. So. So for a $50 Amazon gift card. Yeah. Even cheaper. We just got air. Can you cut the. This episode is not approved. anything else we got anything else? Guys, is there anything that we have not covered? I mean, we’ve done we’ve done a lot of good things with you guys. Trinity was one. We saved a ton of money with those guys. We’ve done a bunch of little three, a bunch of little, like whether you got three locations, five locations, and you want to you want to upgrade your. Here’s the thing about the firewall. This is the one thing we forgot about the Fortinet upgrades. If you are looking at Fortinet right now, just let Airespring be your second set of eyes. I’m not saying you have to use them. I’m not saying you do that. Just let them be your second set of eyes, because most likely you’re staring down a pretty big CapEx charge. Okay. And this is where you can sound really good in front of the CFO. Like, hey, let’s look at an opex. Let’s look at OpEx as well. And by the way, we also saved money. We also saved and EBITDA. We got to keep EBITDA. And you gotta you gotta throw EBITDA out there every now and then throw EBITDA, CapEx, opex. Let’s throw in some, I don’t know, gross margins somewhere and operating costs and flow through to the bottom line. Just start talking like that in front of the CFO, but make it make sense and will help you make it make sense. And look, I got to say this to Phil, if I can add that, you know, for Fortinet, the Fortinet ecosystem is not easy to navigate, right? Fortinet has a very broad, they have a very broad, field of different products and services that that all. I mean, it’s it’s a pretty broad portfolio. It’s like Microsoft, like, you can’t expect yourself to know every Microsoft SKU either. And what we’ve seen, what we’ve seen and what I’ve experienced is that folks are, well, I can go out and get this one. You know, I can get this firewall for $50 less and we go, okay. And then they do that and they realize that there’s a lot more to a firewall than just simply buying it. Right. Configuration turn up test, turn up, sending it out, managing and monitoring it, all of that stuff. Which wouldn’t you love? Air springs. Bunch of how many people, how many people do we have benched bench over over 60 people. And and not only that to what do you what do you play forward guard right bench on the Fortinet bench. What do you play? Quarterback.

Clinton Devereaux: So it ends up costing a lot more than just the cost of the firewall, right? It ends up costing you, you know, in terms of your security posture, penalties for, you know, not passing penetration tests and all kinds of other things too, because you have to harden these things based on your vertical. not not all compliance is for everybody. And you really have to understand, you know, what elements of the firewall you need to lock down, to meet compliance for your particular vertical. And so, you know, those are all things. That guy. Yeah. You’re the hardcore guy.

Phil Howard: Listen, here’s here’s the point, though. Here’s the point. Er, spring might be able to save you enough money on the internet circuit side because you’ve been ignoring the pots, lines and all that crap that you’re getting charged for for years. You probably haven’t looked at it in years because the circuits just keep coming up and auto renewing. Well, we’ll take a look at all the circuits. Just your second set of eyes. Not asking anything. Just let them be your second set of eyes. They’ll price it all out. And then there may be enough savings there that’s actually going to pay for your your Fortinet upgrade because they can do the Fortinet on a zero CapEx, zero CapEx methodology, whereas maybe you were looking at purchasing that firewall where the the money that they just saved you on the circuit, they just layer in the Fortinet on for, I don’t know, 15, 20 bucks a month, whatever model it is they’re there that in on a no CapEx. Then if you ever spill a cup of coffee on it, don’t tell them you did that. They’re going to send another one out for you. If it just breaks or something like that, they’re going to send another one out. Right. Exactly. So you need ha you might need high availability. So get another throw that in there on top of it as well. And then guess what? You never have to worry about end of life. Because when stuff comes end of life, there’s just going to be the new Fortinet model and you’re already paying for it in the. And guess what? You’ve already made that initial sale to your executive management board, whatever however you need to do it anyways. So you’ve gone from something that’s going to depreciate to something that’s always going to be hopefully, what’s the word for it? Not best of breed. We’ve said that before. Top of whatever. The most up to date, I don’t know. You’re not going to. The other thing is you’re not going to have to pay licensing fees. How about relevant? How about licensing fees? Do you avoid licensing fees because you guys are taking care of that? What about the for demand? Absolutely. What about that? You guys are going to post all the administrative. Yep. All the administrative components. The the for the manager for the portal. for the analyzer. Those are all things that you would have to either adopt via for the cloud, or you have to purchase them yourself and then pay somebody with the proper certifications to administrate them. We should have started. We take care of all that stuff. And Phil, we we are adopting the Florida Sassy. We’re adopting Florida Sassy. We’ve already got, SD branch, Florida Wi-Fi, you know, with firewall switches and access points. We configure, you know, we we deliver, we configure, and we manage that stuff. And we’re also expanding our Fortinet offerings to also include Florida Sassy as well. So, stay tuned. In the next few months, we’re going to be offering the full Fall for the sassy, portfolio. that to me is that to me is a huge. That to me is the big benefit. Now, obviously some of you guys don’t want you might have be I don’t know, what do we call it? I’m not high maintenance. You might be control freaks. Control freaks? We all have the control freaks. That’s okay. If you want to be control freak, that’s fine. Be a control freak. You don’t have to let Airespring be your hybrid Fortinet manager. Just be a control freak. But why not let them? Just. Why not do a zero CapEx and then there’s nothing to sell to the executive management. Then it’s just a presentation. It’s not like you’re going to ask them for $1 million. Then it’s like, hey, all you’re doing is a presentation at that point, hey, you just want to let you guys know we, are upgrading all of our internet speeds. We saved a ton of money. And guess what? We get, free. The firewalls are included all in on a zero CapEx. However, you word that. But it’s like we’re not spending any more money. We’re basically kind of, I don’t know, just reconfiguring the budget and getting a bunch of new stuff, and you don’t have to go past performance. Yeah, it works if I do it every day, all day. Jeff sees it all day, every day, every single day. It’s just a better way to buy your network, your firewalls, and I guess pot signs also, which we just figured out again, that’s it’s not Phil over the top. My friends call me pot. That’s my nickname Phil over the top. They think I go over the top with everything. I’m like, what are you? What do you mean? What do you mean? I’m over the top? It’s plain old telephone line is really what pot stands for. It’s been a ton of fun having you guys on any, words of wisdom or anything. for for anyone out there listening.

Clinton Devereaux: Words of wisdom. be prepared. even even as a even as a buyer. Right. Even as a buyer, there’s a certain level of, of preparation that you have to have, when you’re engaging a seller. Right? You got to have information about your network, right? Vlan speeds, those kinds of things. I don’t know how many times I come to the table. and I get called to the table to have these discussions, and none of that information is available. during that time. So you got to come prepared to. There’s a little bit of work, that we all have to. Well, there’s a little bit of work some of us have to do outside a lot of the work that most of us have to do, but there’s always a little bit of work that we all have to do, to resolve these issues. So I say come prepared to these meetings.

Phil Howard: Don’t waste. Clinton’s time is basically what he’s saying. He’s like, don’t waste my time. I come up like, hey, so how many locations? I don’t know. Yeah. What do you guys got? Who goes? No, no, we just want to hear about Airespring. Yeah, okay. Here, listen to this podcast with Phil Howard. We just solved all those all those meetings for you. So my last comment would just be that, you know, customers that I deal with say that we’re easy to work with. I think that’s the biggest compliment, right? People want people want that. Right? So, you know, this is how we talk to our our prospective IT leaders through a casual conversation, so that’s all we could ever ask for, right?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Appreciate, guys. It’s been a lot of fun having you on.

Phil Howard: Same here. Always a pleasure.