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Choosing an IT partner is not a decision to be taken lightly. And with so many options to choose from, it can be an overwhelming decision. People’s knowledge and technical capabilities vary greatly, so the best partner probably will not be the same for each organization.
So, what should you expect as a customer? How long does it take for a vendor to fully onboard an IT solution? Paul Van Lierop, Cato Networks’ Channel Sales Engineer, will share his secret sauce to help you choose the right vendor to cover all your needs.
Convergence by Cato Networks is a show for IT professionals made by IT professionals. We'll talk about the most burning questions, hear bolder opinions and mostly learn about what is happening in the IT world today
We are here to uncover the good, the
bad and the ugly of the It industry.
My name is Robin Johns, and
this is Convergence by Cato Networks.
Choosing an It partner is not a decision to
be taken lightly, and with so many options to
choose from, it can be an overwhelming decision.
People's knowledge and technical capabilities vary greatly,
so the best partner probably will not
be the same for each organization.
So what should you expect as a customer?
How long does it take for a
vendor to fully onboard an It solution?
Paul VanLierop, Cato Networks Channel Sales Engineer, will
share his secret souce to help you choose
the right vendor to cover all your needs.
Stay tuned.
This will be a good one.
Hi there, Paul.
Thank you for joining me today. Thanks, Robin.
Yes, good to join you.
Before we get into the meat and the
bones or the apple and the leather of
the situation, tell me a bit about yourself.
How did you get to where you are today?
Great question.
I've been in some form of technology about well over
25 years at this point, not to date myself, but
I started as a help desk consultant in the early
days, where I was switching floppy to install programs for
people and explaining what a mouse was.
I got into networking very early on in my career and really
liked it, and I kind of just grew in that space.
I worked for Microsoft for ten
years, building very large networks overall.
I actually built the initial networks for Azure
when it was known as Red Dog.
And then I moved into the more customer focused.
Sales oriented role when I joined Cisco.
Where I worked there for ten years and covered some
big customers like Amazon and Oracle and ended up covering
sewing in the space until I ended up a Cato.
Wanting to go back to my roots
where I started in the.com era.
And get back close to things and be
a part of something new and something that
I saw that was changing the industry.
So it's been a long journey that I didn't plan to be
where I'm at, but here I am and I couldn't be happier.
Generally, you have no idea where you'll end
up in life and you just take those
junctions and journeys as you go.
You think, yes, I'll do this, I'll do that.
But yeah, your vision always changes, and
having vision change as you move along
a path is something that people find
very difficult, especially when dealing with vendors.
Quite often you would reach out to one specific
vendor or a distributor and say, hi, distributor, I
would like to buy this product, please.
And they come out with a whole myriad
of solutions, a smorgasbord or grazing table of
different types of solutions and vendors.
But I'm going to step back one step, just
a little step, and tell me, Paul, what is
the difference between a vendor and a partner?
Yeah, good question.
I get asked this a lot about the space,
especially the people that don't live in the environment.
But a vendor would be something like
Cato Networks or Cisco, or name a
firewall solution provider, cybersecurity person.
That is the vendor space, right?
So they're the ones that are providing that technology.
When you look at the partner side of things,
at least in North America, the way that the
partner community works is there is a collection of
people that could be in several spaces.
We have what we call managed service providers or MSPs.
They're focused on delivering a whole
solution to their end customer.
So they come in, maybe
they'll even manage their workstations.
They'll build everything to do with their
environment, take their help, desk calls, et
cetera, provide cohesive solutions for them.
But then we also have the concept of
agents and master agents, or increasingly they're moving
towards the terminology like technology solutions broker or
TSB to replace the problematic master agent title.
But really what they are is they are a
clearinghouse, if you will, for smaller partners who want
to provide solutions to their end customers.
But maybe they don't have direct relationships with
all of those vendors, right, because some of
those vendors are huge and they have requirements
for doing business with them.
They're not very nimble in that space.
So you can leverage that TSB or master agent
as a sub agent or trusted advisors, other terminology
they get to use to be able to provide
these solutions to your end customers.
So if you as a customer want to do
business and technology, maybe you don't understand it.
Maybe especially if you look at,
say, cybersecurity is a good example.
It's a crowded market, there's a
lot of acronyms floating around.
Maybe you'll go to your trusted advisor to help
you figure out and boil that down overall.
So in a nutshell, it still
seems quite confusing from my perspective.
Okay, we got resellers distributors, value added,
resellers of sub agents, master agents.
There's a lot of terminology out there.
Could you simplify each one into a single bullet point?
Why should I know about it and why should I care? Sure.
Okay, so as far as the channel is concerned
and all of those different levels of agents, master
agents, resellers, it all depends upon the customer, and
maybe their size is a good example, right?
So if work at a dental clinic and
I want to deploy a solution, I'm probably working with
a sub agent or a trusted adviser to help me
in that space, and they'll recommend a solution, and a
vendor would provide that for me, right?
Because I don't necessarily need a full It stack
and customer that wants to take advantage of them,
and I need somebody to help me do that.
If I'm a larger organization, then I'll probably
be working with maybe an MSP, maybe a
service provider of some sort, maybe that value
added reseller and those terms are pretty fluid.
I will say that because it depends
where you live on that spectrum.
If I'm an MSP versus a bar is
really the amount of add on and control
that I provide to that end customer, right.
So if I want to get in there and take their
tier one or take their phone calls when they've got trouble,
I'm going to be more on the MSB space. Right.
If I'm a bar, maybe I'm taking advantage of
a vendor that will provide that for me and
then I'm reselling it to my end customer.
So there's a lot of gray areas.
As with everything as far as where they
live in that space, it doesn't help in
the overall grand scheme of things.
But what it really is is finding that group
of people that you trust that you know and
that you've identified as competent in that space.
And that's kind of, frankly, where it
starts for a lot of our customers.
I know looking at the global landscape, it's
not just about where you sit in the
partner ecosystem, but where you sit geographically.
Now, if you are in the Bay Area in lovely
sunny San Francisco, chances are you're going to have a
lot of people close with very stringent vendor relationships.
However, if you're in Indonesia, where generally the tech giants
do not reside, then you're going to have to start
relying a bit more on a partner ecosystem.
So presume I am sat somewhere where there
aren't tech giants close and I'm having to
rely on the partner, a distributor or reseller
ecosystem to deliver technological solutions.
What should I expect as a customer?
Good question.
In all cases, what you should expect and what
you should look for is a partner that's listening,
that can do discovery and doesn't ever come in
and lead a particular product out of the gate.
This is one that I hear a lot, where if
you've got somebody who's come in and is approaching you
with a product that without understanding your symptoms or the
business problems that you're trying to solve and that's more
of a red flag in this space. Right.
That the types of things I would be
looking for and maybe shy away from. Right.
You want somebody that's going to be, you know,
that term trusted advisor I think is a good
one because that's exactly what they should be.
They should be the type of person in the
organization that you can come in and trust to
be a third party to recommend the right solution
for your overall problem and technology space.
That's a great thought, actually.
So if you're relying on the partner, the distributor,
to sell you the best in breed solution, what
if the best in breed solution or the best
solution out there isn't offered by this partner?
Say if they have relationships with the
biggest vendors and a smaller vendor appears
and they revolutionize the industry.
And I'm not going to focus on
anything just a generic, technological highly theoretical.
Highly theoretical, yeah, no, I get it.
That's a great question.
And in fact, believe it or not, this does happen.
And you as an end customer, you
have the power in the relationship.
It doesn't mean it's a blind
acceptance of a solution, necessarily. Right.
And the fact that you as a human being
that understands things and have heard things in the
market, you have the right to ask those questions.
Just as if you were to head to a doctor's
office and you're getting some kind of diagnosis for something.
You have the right to question why a recommended course
of healing would be the right way to go.
The same with your technology stack.
So understanding that environment and saying, look, I've heard about
this vendor, let's just call them vendor y or vendor
C in the space, that might be a good solution
for this overall, bring it up to them. Right.
Because that happens more and the opportunities
are out there and there isn't exactly
one solution for everybody in the space.
And it's foolish to think that the only way that
you're going to get a solution to a problem is
by going with the biggest guys in the industry.
Frankly, when I'm looking at restaurants or I'm
looking at people, I want to use this
locally for my own use case.
Am I always going to go to Applebee's
or McDonald's or whatever the use case is?
No, because am I going to get
the best bang for my buck?
Am I going to get something new and exciting and
something that delivers something that I wasn't looking for?
Probably not with those big corporations. Indeed.
So I've been in a situation in a previous life,
working with partners, working with resellers, and they have the
very much of a Henry Ford style of approach.
You can have the car in any color
you want as long as it's black.
And they were doing that because they were incentivized by
one type of vendor and having crazy profit margins.
So they were always pushing that agenda.
So what are some other red flags, some warning
signs when dealing with partners that you should maybe
they don't have your best interests at heart.
That's a good one.
And it's kind of what I alluded to a little earlier.
When they're leading with one solution out of the
gate, that's the easiest of all of them, right?
Suddenly what's going on?
Somebody must have a pretty big spiff.
And spoiler alert, spiff is an incentive
that vendors will often provide for partners
to sell their product, right?
So they're going to get a bonus on top of things if
they position that product and they get you to buy it.
Right.
So that's great.
It's great and all to have these environments and you
want these agents to do well as their trusted partner.
And so you want them to get
paid, of course, but those red flags
are where they're not actually doing discovery.
They haven't understood your business.
They're not listening to you.
That listening is another big one. Right.
So if there is not a true relationship in
this one, this is when you start looking elsewhere.
So if I'm a partner, I'm doing active
listing, I'm doing discovery, I'm identifying the pain
points for my customers, and I really want
to be seen as a trusted advisor.
However, I don't have any products in
my portfolio that honors their need.
How does a partner select the right
vendor, taking it the other way?
What steps would you recommend?
It depends on what level of partner they're at.
If they live in that community, and they are old terminology
sub agent or an agent in the community, and they have
a master agent or a Tsp that they call on.
They all have an engineering team that
they can draw on that will come
in and provide recommendations for them.
They're there for that partner community, especially
the smaller ones who don't understand things.
So they can rely on that team to kind
of give them a good view of things.
And me, as a vendor channel SD in this space,
I work with these TSPs to make sure that they
understand that they're up to speed, and then they can
provide that to the end agents because it's impossible for
them to be abreast of all of the changes in
the industry and things that are going on.
They've got individual areas of focus, and so
having that relationship for them is key. Right.
But as you get bigger, if you're
more in that bar MSP space, they're
building their own practices in that space.
They're onboarding technology and
understanding and diving deep.
And it's key to have a vendor such as
us to be able to provide and give those
enablement sessions and education and things of that nature.
And that's where I focus most of my time.
Onboarding is a challenge for the entire tech industry.
That is always a challenge because every vendor has
an onramp phase and any technology you want to
learn, whether it be the iPhone in your pocket,
a ring doorbell, or a crazy UAC, as a
service deployment, they all have a learning time.
So how long should it take for a
partner or a service provider to really on
board with an SDWAN or Sassy vendor?
Yeah, so this is one.
If you would ask me two years ago, I
would give you a very different answer than I
do today because the time frame for onboarding most
anything would probably be a year to 18 months. Right.
That was a typical cycle for onboarding some kind
of new product in the space because of the
complexities building the tooling, training your people, integrating with
your ordering system, all aspects of those things.
It takes a long time in that space because
understanding that technology is key and getting your people
trained up on there was the hard part.
I will say candidly, if your Sassy or
SDWAN vendor is not something that could be
on boarded in months or even weeks as
pushed, then I would start investigating other solutions.
Right?
Because the part and parcel of a
solution, Sassy SDWAN is really simplifying things
and converging the networking and security together.
That's really the focus of that solution,
to make things easier to do.
And if they are not easier, if there's a lot
of window dressing on top of complicated things underneath, then
I would say look elsewhere because there are solutions in
that space that absolutely can approach it that way and
can help you build a practice in weeks and months.
That's great.
I was talking with a European reseller last
week and they mentioned that they offer KASB
solutions, they resell a Kasby vendor, but they
don't offer anything in the world of SDM.
So they were saying that their customers
have to work with multiple partners to
actually deliver both networking and security together.
Is this something that commonly happens
in the US as well?
It is.
What happens a lot of times is sometimes these partners, as
much as they want to be in the technology space, maybe
they focus on a particular area because they were comfortable with
it and not some other elements of it.
And that happens very frequently with people that are
more networking focused and don't really have a security
practice overall or maybe technical resources that understand security
so they shied away from it.
But that's changing.
I see that changing daily.
And as a partner, there's a lot out there to
help you in that space that make you feel confident.
And Sassy as a model really
is taking and simplifying things.
And again, just as I was saying, if
they're not making it simple to understand, to
train your sales team to help your customers
understand what they're doing, then look elsewhere because
there are solutions that absolutely will do that.
So there's ways that you can provide those services
and you don't have to provide them all at
the same time, but you can take those aspects
of things and say deliver SD, Wayne and KASB. Right?
And then maybe I want to do things just
throwing acronyms out there like intrusion prevention systems or
anti malware or the other aspects of a solution.
And if I can easily both those on without
having to go to nine other vendors to do
that, then you're in the right headspace, right?
And this is a growing market.
I just saw a report that in the
past 80% of sales were networking focus.
This is five years ago and today 60%
of It is a larger solution set overall
that includes elements of networking, but includes things
like security and more It resources, et cetera.
So that things are changing in the partner landscape and
it's certainly something that the partners can take advantage of
those numbers make sense to me really, because over the
past five years, the internet has become less of a
luxury and more of necessity covered.
19 struck, people started working from home.
The use of internet rose substantially.
Now you have applications like TikTok that
is dominating the throughput charts everywhere.
The internet has become something that is
not just for social or business anymore.
It's become a core part of your everyday heck to the point
where if I want to go on a London tube, I can
just pull my phone out and tap it on the reader.
And NFC through the Internet allows
to make a debit card purchase.
So the internet used has gone up.
We've also seen a substantial rise
in the cost of cybersecurity insurance.
As the average cost of a breach is going
up, ransomware is becoming more prevalent and the world
is becoming more focused on retaining the digital and
intellectual property that we call tech.
So if I'm a partner that has been selling networking
for the past 15 years and I love my CLI
and I love walking around with a console cable because
it makes me feel cool, security is very scary.
What recommendations would you have for partners
to start standing into that security space?
Right, well, that's a good question.
And I see this happening all the time
where we've got those partners that have been
focused on the command line interface.
They're comfortable with it.
I've spent tens of years myself in that space and the
end customer is not looking for that as a solution.
What they're looking for is problem
solving for their business outcomes, right?
So they're increasingly worried about compliance.
They're increasingly worried about things like breaches that
we hear about minute by minute these days. Right?
So keen on some of those terminology that your
end customer is thinking about is something that you
can start just moving into the security space to
say, you know what, I'm worried about a breach.
I'm worried about ransomware.
How would I approach that?
I'm investigating cybersecurity insurance, but increasingly in fact,
I think it's probably going to be required
in the coming year where to even qualify
for cyber security insurance, you're going to need
to have some implementations of securities of service,
firewalling, anti malware, IPS protection, et cetera.
So your customers are going to be looking in the space.
So you need to start thinking about how you
can change the conversation to say, okay, let's look
at getting into that cyber security insurance.
And by the way, they're going to ask
you how are you protecting your environment today?
And do you have visibility into
these things that are going on?
And being able to provide that with a solution like a
Sassy solution is going to be a great way forward.
And you'll find that most of the vendors
in this space should have a wealth of
education resources to help you and again, if
they don't, look elsewhere, right, because they should
absolutely be enabling you in that space.
And again, reach out to your TSPs, your
master agents, et cetera, to help you.
So I know there's going to be a lot
of partners that are listening to this thinking, oh,
I can't keep reselling this firewall that I've been
sold selling for the past ten years.
This seems a bit shaky.
So what piece of advice would you give the future
partners of the world for selecting the right vendor?
I would say this, right?
And when you were looking at a solution, if
it is not something that you could get your
hands on, try out and understand within a few
weeks time frame, then look elsewhere, right?
So if it's something that you feel like you have
to have a tech staff that's certified in an endless
supply of vendor certifications to understand and come along side
of it, there are better solutions out there for you
in the space and really the management of those devices.
You're not back to the days of hiring a
DBA that understood specific aspects of a database query
and that's all they lived in, or a guy
that focused entirely on router programming and CLI and
other aspects of that environment.
There are solutions out there absolutely that you can
understand as a human being, that you can come
alongside, you can configure and you can provide your
own customers and they focus on that entirely. Right?
So that's another thing that I would say too.
There is room for a space where a vendor can
provide that solution to you in a very specialized fashion
and not say, pick from 90 different products and try
and figure out what ten, as we used to say
in the old days, back the truck up and start
selling things off the bat, right?
That's some real good advice.
So in your career, you've gone from being a code
monkey to a network junkie and now you're empowering and
making people happy and connecting the dots and creating these
trusted advisors, which is a great route.
But in this career path you've
gone through, you've learned a lot.
So what is something you know now you wish
you knew at the start of your career?
As I started my career very early on, I came
along in some organizations and I always kind of felt
a little less than in the space, right.
The ever growing divide of what I knew and what
I didn't know, especially as the technology world has grown
considerably since when I started, I always felt like I
didn't know enough, that I couldn't possibly be an expert
in enough in a particular area.
And what I came to find is that being somebody
who has more of a growth mindset and being flexible,
understanding different aspects of technology and being able to pivot
that is so much more valuable than being somebody that
knew every bit and bite related to a particular technology
and focus in that area.
So don't shy away from the fact that you can be deep where
you need to be deep, but you can be wide as well.
And for me, that's always spurred my curiosity and things
and kept me going and that I didn't get so
focused on an area that I just burnt out entirely.
And I have a lot of former coworkers and
friends that spent so much time doing individual things
in space, the last thing they want to do
is anything related with technology going forward.
Fantastic words of advice.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Paul.
It's been very insightful. Thank you. Thank you.
Great talking to you today.
That was all for our episode today.
I hope you've come away feeling
a little more educated and empowered.
In case you've forgotten, I'm Robin Johns and
you've been listening to Convergence by Cato Networks.
Don't forget to hit subscribe and
I'll see you next time. Bye.