84. Why are licensing, security, and infrastructure so critical for Microsoft? with Founder and Chairman of Managed Solution- Sean Ferrel

Subscribe to the Next Level BizTech podcast, so you don’t miss an episode!
Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Join today as we dive deep into the world of Microsoft with Sean Ferrel of Managed Solution. We talk licensing, Azure, desktop, Azure CoPilot, and more. Sean does a great job breaking down where partners can help, common misconceptions, and how some accounts just continue to grow with all the different products Microsoft has available and Managed Solution has expertise in!

Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is next level BizTech.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode. Today we’re talking about cloud, we’re talking about Microsoft. We’re talking licensing, security, infrastructure. As much as we can possibly pack into 30 minutes to do this today though, we have on Sean Ferrell, founder and chairman of Managed Solution, who you may know in the Telarus portfolio.

Sean, welcome on man.

Sean Ferrel: Oh, Josh, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. I’m excited to give any advice. I can

Josh Lupresto: love it. Let’s, let’s talk about, let’s talk about you first. I want to hear about your journey. Did you always start out in tech? How did you found this company? How did we get from, from nothing to to here.

Sean Ferrel: God, 20 years. We’ll just start there. It’s, it’s, I’m getting old. I wouldn’t say the [00:01:00] company’s getting old. I’m getting old. But I was, I came to San Diego and yeah, I love tech, but I actually love the business side of running a services organization first. So it was outta school. I mean, I started at, you know, grassroots, living in a dorm, to be honest.

And so 20 years later I’ll, I’ll call it a lot of different evolutions of the company, you know, in, in short kind of hitch star wagon, as if you will. I had to look at what was happening in the world with, with the big guys, Microsoft, with what was happening with the consumer, with Amazon and what was happening with search with Google.

And in the end, when it came to tech, we sort of said, we feel like Microsoft’s doing a great job. So fast forward, you know, 2023, you know, we’re what’s called a highly specialized Microsoft partner. They kind of did away with this concept of gold and. You know, we have to carry thousands of certified people, or I should say certifications within engineering.

And and it’s been a fun journey. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we’re kind of tag lining this thing. Like we want technology to have a positive social impact. ’cause a lot of it doesn’t. And so whatever that might be, [00:02:00] if it’s gonna help a human being, you know, we’re here to help him. Love it.

Josh Lupresto: Love it. So, so break it down for, for, for anybody that is not familiar with Managed solution. Talk about what you’re doing, what your focus is, and we’ll get into to some of the weeds here in a minute. But, but break it down at a high level first.

Sean Ferrel: Yeah. I mean, so there’s, there, just think about it. Simply put, you’ve got two businesses within one organization or across the country.

So we own a US based help desk, a true 24 hour a day. Level one, level two, level three, very technical help desk. We can work directly with suppliers or, or I guess manufacturers like Microsoft and Amazon and some of our partners. But it’s, that’s, that’s one thing we do. And we do it for a lot of companies.

Typically, you know, mid-market, a hundred employees and more. But we have a lot of s m B accounts that we deal with, and we do it within the channel. The other side of that is, you know, for better, you know, sake of consulting, we work with Microsoft directly, so there’s 500,000 Microsoft partners in the world, Josh, and in that we’re in the top 132 I think this year.

So it’s pretty [00:03:00] special. So you combine those two things and really, you know, we’re here in a point companies in the right direction, you know, technically using Microsoft Solutions and we have some others. Get them where they wanna go with their digital landscape, if you will, and then, you know, support it potentially.

But sometimes it’s, you know, we do both. Sometimes we do one. And then on top of that, we’re one of the only providers who can sell with Microsoft their licensing directly. And we’re what’s called a Tier 1 CSP. There’s not a lot of those out there either. There’s a lot of ones that do distribution through a, like a big partner, like a, you know, a, a Synnex or a Ingram Micro.

But we’re direct with Microsoft and we try to bring that to the channel. I

Josh Lupresto: love it. Love it. Great stuff. Great explanation too. Maybe let’s kick this off here. Before we get into licensing, let’s talk a little bit about you know, remote workforce managed desktop. Right? Are, what are you seeing out there from the customers, right?

Is there a huge ask from the managed desktop environments? Just this idea of the virtual desktop going forward? What, what’s your opinion there?

Sean Ferrel: Yeah, so the remote workforce is, [00:04:00] Definitely something’s going on. I mean, I don’t think it’s going away. I think that companies are gonna, you know, try to figure out how to manage people and culture and all that stuff remotely, but in that you have to have something that you work through.

So whether it’s a virtual desktop or remote desktop you know, there’s, there’s a lot of concept around this idea of workspace or workplaces. So like Microsoft has their own product called Microsoft Workplaces or. Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows Virtual Desktop. Let’s not get too confused here today, but there are a lot of options to create that virtual instance or, or maybe another word, desktop as a service using the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.

I.

Josh Lupresto: Yeah, it, it, it, it seems like there was a lot of different flavors out there. Some people use Citrix, some people use this. And then Azure virtual desktop comes into the play and it seems to be one of the simplistic kind of go forward standards. So thankfully you guys are right in the middle of, of, of supporting that, and it’s just a Oh, yeah, yeah.

We know that we can help with that. So that’s a, that’s a huge plus.

Sean Ferrel: Yeah, sometimes, and that I will say, you know, it’s, well, we can get to it, but I will tell you that it’s interesting because one of the things for IT [00:05:00] people is whether we’re dealing with a virtual desktop environment, it’s super important that we understand.

That not only are you supporting the V D I instance, but really the security and deployment of apps or publishing of apps and all that stuff from, you know, from the top down, from the cloud to the virtual instance all the way down to the user. So having more control over that versus having multiple vendors.

It helps us out a lot when we support companies. Yeah.

Josh Lupresto: Let’s, let’s dive in here a little bit from a licensing perspective for a minute. So, so you mentioned, obviously tier one CSP, top a hundred plus partners. That’s a huge deal, right? First of all, kudos to you guys for getting to, to where you’re at.

There’s a lot of partners in that space, so it’d be distinguished. I think that that means a lot. Because that’s, that, that saves us and that saves the partners a lot of work of having to explain, lemme tell you why these guys are important. No, you can, you can speak for it yourself. And I think the accolades speak for it.

So, so, so let’s talk licensing for, for a minute here. What do you see about, you know, some of the misconceptions? I mean, one, it seems like it changes, right? And there’s a lot of [00:06:00] different options and I know you guys have a great matrix for it. But, but talk to me about some of these benefits, misconceptions, how you guys handle licensing and the whole M 365 thing.

Yeah,

Sean Ferrel: so first step, you gotta understand who your partner is. So yes, we get, we’re lucky, I mean, we spend a lot of time doing this. We get to deal directly with Microsoft and bring that to the partner channel. So reselling it with Microsoft. So there’s tier one, two, tier, tier one, tier two. And so we’re direct and what we, what we can and can’t do.

So, Microsoft has enterprise agreements, which are sold through major vendors. We call ’em LSPs, licensed server providers. Unfortunately, we can’t be one of those. And then they have a couple of other agreement types, M P S A, we don’t have to go into that today, but Microsoft products and services. Then there’s CSP, kind of the pay as you Go model that I think came after one.

We saw, you know, Microsoft Sify itself, you could buy what you needed in the cloud and you could buy Office 365 at the time, or prior to that was called B Os. Mm-hmm. But evolution wise, what is [00:07:00] confusing, I think, to the channel is we went from traditional, what was called Office 365. I think where Microsoft started to realize they were short was when they started looking at, we’re building security platforms, we’re building an operating system that’s not consumed in Office 365.

We’re building, you know, pieces of Azure that people aren’t using. So then they kind of changed up the naming convention and created M 365 or Microsoft 365 and both still coexist. So when I look at the difference and I talk to partners, the simple way I put it is, Office 365, whatever the SKU is, there’s a couple of SKUs from basic to, I guess more business.

Those are really your productivity tools, office outlook, you know, teams, all that good stuff. When I think about M 365, I think about the advanced stuff, security with Microsoft Defender, I think about Microsoft, you know, team’s voice again, which can be always added on. So that’s where a lot of that goes.

Including your Windows operating system. Windows 10. Windows 11. So for [00:08:00] lack of a better way of putting it, it’s a full bundle of Microsoft products.

Josh Lupresto: And, and the reality in that is that to, to kind of sum up what you said, as long as the customer isn’t required to do an ea right? Meaning this giant enterprise agreement, you guys can help with any of these licensing anything that a customer needs, correct?

Yeah.

Sean Ferrel: What, yes, and what I think is unique is even if a customer has an ea, a lot of customers are just trying to, we call it rationalize what they have, you know, how much of each, what they’re using. There is a difference in what’s called active. Purchase licensing. So sometimes customers aren’t using subsets of product within a license.

So frankly, to help them, why not turn some of those things down or help them, you know not even purchase the, the license or the correct license. ’cause in today’s Microsoft SKUs, I think there’s over a thousand SKUs now under the CSP platform. It’s a lot to unravel. So, We have a full strategic procurement team.

They’re human beings. They take a lot of calls. It’s easy to send in a quotes at Office 365 email, [00:09:00] and they’ll go through it to really help the customer rationalize what it is they need, and it is a process, and we go directly into the Microsoft portal for that customer. To really help them understand, you know, how to best optimize the licensing that they’re required.

Josh Lupresto: So, so if we I, I usually save the, what’s your favorite questions for partners to ask part of this at the end, but if we pause here for a second and say, all right, if I’m a partner and I’m listening to this and I, I’ve, I’ve now come across to you guys and I can expose you to my customers and help ’em with licensing, what, what would you recommend or what would you wanna see a partner bring to the table?

Or, or, or how would they go to their customers now that they know that they can

Sean Ferrel: help with this? Yeah, so I mean, in simple form, we’re asking partners to, you know, just ask the customer about their Microsoft overall approach. You know, what are you doing from a licensing perspective? Oftentimes, and they’ll know if they’re more of an enterprise customer, they may say We’re involved in an ea.

If they say, you know, we’re buying it through a provider, a supplier, a distributor, whatever it might be, it’s worth taking a look at. I would tell you that the most important question to ask is what are you leveraging from Microsoft, [00:10:00] from a, whether it be Office 365, SharePoint teams. We can talk about Veeva and the new culture platforms and learning management, but what are you leveraging?

And when they start talking about, well, we’re thinking about Microsoft security, for example, or Azure. That’s where the conversation gets Interesting. Interesting. And that’s where oftentimes we get ahold of what they’re currently buying, licensing wise. There’s a lot of tools sitting in there they’re just not using.

So it’s an exciting conversation for the customer to say, well, I’m paying for all these other things. Why not take advantage of something I may already have? Or it’s a simple upgrade to another SKU to, you know, get what I have and rip and replace something else. Yeah. Let’s,

Josh Lupresto: That’s good. Let’s, let’s talk about that for a second.

Let’s talk about Azure. So you know, we see a lot of people that, that, that made the move into Azure and now they’re, they’re deciding, do we keep managing it? Are we optimized? Do we go multi-cloud? What do we do? And obviously there’s the, the concerns around utilization that wasn’t expected, right?

Runaway it, all that good stuff. Can you walk me through how you help the customer, whether it’s [00:11:00] design optimization right sizing when they’re either already in an Azure environment or considering moving heavier into an Azure environment? Yeah,

Sean Ferrel: sure. And I think the, the industry as a whole, we all went wrong in the beginning ’cause a lot of companies came in and said, Here’s my data center, here’s what I have today.

Servers, you know, hypervisors, whatever it might be, gimme a quote to go to the cloud. Wrong way to do it. So there’s this whole adoption framework that we use and we actually go through some steps with customers to do a lot of data rationalization. ’cause as data grows, like you said, Josh, that cost that utility, it’s like running the AC in your, in your home, right.

It increases. So the name of the game now is looking at the data, understanding the workloads, whether it’s a hybrid cloud or it’s fully, let’s say, ingested into Azure, understanding what should and shouldn’t exist in Azure. And then when you look at data optimization, what I mean by that is, you know, where do I actually need the data to live?

Is it actually on a hypervisor? Could it live potentially back in like a SharePoint or Teams or [00:12:00] Aveva where I don’t have those data sets going into a file server in the cloud or a. A backup in the cloud. There’s just a lot to be said about how you make that migration happen and ultimately optimize costs in the end.

And Microsoft and us, you know, we have a product called Azure Assure. It’s a managed services product offering that does cost optimization, and we’re using. A lot of the Azure tools you guys have probably heard of Azure, lighthouse and Azure Monitor. And, and, and don’t get me wrong, Microsoft doesn’t wanna lose customers, so they wanna help if they can optimize your Azure spend.

And so we layer on top of that to make sure we’re optimizing what customers are doing and give them kind of a full spectrum of cloud management.

Josh Lupresto: So in, in, in an extension of that, what about when they get down to the level, let’s say we, we’ve figured out the licensing, we’ve right sized, we’ve designed what they need.

Where does the depth stop for managed solution? Right. Are you getting all the way into those migration of the apps, the services? Are you relying on the customer to do Dev and PowerShell and all that good stuff? Or tell us is [00:13:00] is there a line of dmar there anywhere?

Sean Ferrel: Good question, because I always tell people Azure is, is the next e or cloud.

You know, is the next evolution of services within. So, I mean, you think, you know, we hear about ai, machine learning, DevOps, you know, bi data intelligence, analytics. So for managed solution, it’s if you think about old school ways of thinking, so it’s infrastructure at first. So you have to move and figure out the right infrastructure, whether it’s for the third party app, the core app, the customers developing, all those things.

We do all of that, get ’em there, optimize, continue to manage it if the customer needs that. And then we get into more of the automation and a lot of the, what I would consider app app containers, moving apps between the clouds. But where we don’t go in that line of demarcation is really into app development.

So either the third party that we’re dealing with who’s developing the app, we work with their teams. But. A lot of the customizations for apps is kind of where we draw the line on the other side. You know, we get into a lot of the, the, the cool stuff with what’s called [00:14:00] power platform for Microsoft, which kind of sits on the Azure Cloud.

So if your business could think I. An idea around how to automate some process. And then once that process is automated and there’s all this data being shown and you want BI out of it, power bi, we can do that for you. And a lot of that sits inside of Azure. So you think about it in simple form, data goes into the cloud, the machine learns, the AI learns it, spits it out in bi.

We can help in those areas, but I can’t help you on the custom development stuff. Yeah.

Josh Lupresto: Perfect. No, it makes, makes total sense. And you know, I’ve, I think a lot of people are familiar with the power. Obviously we’ve heard of power bi, but the whole power of geez, power of power of power automate and, and, and all the automation that can happen there.

Right. I love, I I think you bring up a great question, right? I always want people to be able to take back what’s a question I can give to my customers? Right? What things are you doing right now manually and power automate and a lot of those things. So many areas [00:15:00] that you can help with that. I’m sure you’ve seen tons of examples there.

Sean Ferrel: Yeah, I mean, the truth is, is that application development, I mean, it’s truly creating something from scratch these days. You don’t necessarily have to do that anymore. There are a lot of, for lack of a better word, widgets automation tools. If you go into your Office 365 platform and you click on the three little doodads down on the left hand side, you’ll find apps right there that’ll automate processes between, I don’t know, Google or, or Dropbox or other applications that you can plug right in.

But they’re, they’re all based on Power Automate and some of the automation tools within the Microsoft platform.

Josh Lupresto: Love it too. And you guys are all obviously uniquely positioned too with Microsoft’s big investment into open AI and ChatGPT. Mm-hmm. That just adds a whole, that that’s gonna be its own separate podcast.

But yeah, lots of, lots of great stuff that’s gonna come out of that here Coming soon, I’m sure. Yeah,

Sean Ferrel: we’re excited. The all about it right now. Working a lot with them on the ChatGPT stuff, trying to help companies understand what really is the security behind it. How does it work, how [00:16:00] are, you know, how is my data mingled with ChatGPT or Open ai.

But I think, and we’ll save it for another time, I think it’s gonna play a role in, in, in automating a lot of things for our businesses and it’s gonna help us. So we gotta embrace it. I also think we gotta look at the things that it may, you know, create some problems for, like, I don’t want my son at school having ChatGPT write his essay.

So, We’ll, we’ll figure it out, but I’m deep in it right

Josh Lupresto: now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Co-pilot’s gonna take over the world. I think it’s gonna be great. Yes.

Sean Ferrel: Alright,

Josh Lupresto: let’s let’s talk a little bit about you know, you bring up security, right? I mean, we’ve talked of the traditional Microsoft stack, we’ve talked about Azure, we’ve talked about migration, we’ve talked about the power apps.

What about security? If I’m moving that and I’m, I’m, I’m leveraging Azure platform, how do you help from a security perspective, what are the tools, what’s the expertise like from the managed solution side there? Yeah,

Sean Ferrel: so I would keep it simple and, and let the audience, like Microsoft Defender is a full security platform.

All the [00:17:00] way up through what we call Azure Sentinel or Microsoft Sentinel, which is really the seam in the sock behind Microsoft. So managed solution takes it from soup to nuts from the device and the user, essentially all the way up through the cloud, and using Microsoft Security Center with Azure Sentinel to manage Microsoft security.

And I will tell you, There’s a lot of tools and now always start with, you know, in security, it’s like people have to drive the process and the process has to drive the technology. So there’s a lot of tools that are out there from Microsoft and Defender from MFAs to EDR solutions, MDR solutions, endpoint detection, threat response, you know, tools.

But it’s all about the process. And the reason we’re so set on Microsoft a lot of the time is because our people can control the, the narrative when it comes to security, but. Anything you could think of. Compliance, setting up doing ongoing compliance management for companies. Hipaa, NIST, you know, G D P R.

It’s all built within that tool set and it’s just a matter of work walking the [00:18:00] client through what I consider the, the security framework for Microsoft. Beautiful.

Josh Lupresto: Let’s, let’s pivot back to one of the things that you mentioned in the other in the beginning, right? We’re talking about finding people is hard.

So, so talk to us a little bit about the other side of the business, the, the staffing, how you’re solving for that and, and what some of the ways that partners can leverage that.

Sean Ferrel: Yeah. We have full-time recruiters. I’ll be the first to tell you. Every employee of managed solution is truly a full-time employee, and it’s been a it’s been a long road over the years.

I mean, you know, with Covid hit, it was obviously a challenge, but it also created some opportunity for us to really expand like we did. A much larger national presence, but what we do and knowing there’s a lack of workforce out there in what we do, it’s a highly specialized environment to find people who have really dove into that public Azure cloud and done it in multiple environments.

Really hard to find. To find engineers who really understand the bits and bys of Microsoft Defender and the, what we call the, the very various policies [00:19:00] that happen within a security suite, and then be able to take that back up top to the business side and explain how this is gonna meet the business requirements or the, let’s say, auditor compliance requirements.

Very, very hard to do. So I would say to you what we’re trying to do with a lot of companies is we do have a staffing arm. We do identify people that maybe, you know, we’re not ready to hire at the time, you know, specialists and, you know, bi as we talked about, or automation or you know, have had some Azure experience.

And if we can help a customer source, somebody, we’re happy to do that.

Josh Lupresto: Love it. Yeah, that’s, that’s huge. I, I think there, there’s a perfect storm too, especially over the last few years, as, as, as companies have made layoffs, all of that good stuff. The reality is the businesses that are there need to keep going.

And they’re now this person that was running it is being asked to do more with less resources. And so how do we augment that? So I’d love that you guys, you have that as an option for

Sean Ferrel: partners. That’s killer. I’ll make a, I mean, a comment on that, and that’s a really good point, is there is [00:20:00] definitely, I think a couple things happened.

Remote workforces, the internal IT person, I won’t say you know, him or her, but you know, they weren’t able to support the companies like they were when they were all running down to their desks and helping ’em. So that meant helping desk became big. Companies internalized a lot of help desks, and they were finding that those people grew really quick in their environment and turned over and left because JU wasn’t a path past the help desk.

So we’re finding that outsourcing, especially on the managed services side, has been great. We’re also finding that just like anybody, everybody’s struggling to find resources, but they also don’t necessarily want these project resources on their internal staff full-time. So it makes a lot of sense to bring it to companies like ours and.

It’s a rare thing. I will say this, when you have a lot of engineers who can see the big picture with Microsoft. ’cause there’s a lot of moving pieces with all the technologies for all versus trying to internalize things and having one or two people who are trying to figure out this global architecture.

So there’s a lot to it and it’s a, it’s a difficult thing to solve for. [00:21:00]

Josh Lupresto: I love that. Yeah. It’s good points. And you know, before I get to. It’s kind of the last question here. We look forward to the future. Some, some, some great questions for partners. Is there an example that you can call on and, and, and what I like to talk about in this part, and I like to, to draw out is.

An environment that you got pulled into, we were told, you know, the partner said, or the customer said this was the problem that they had. And, you know, we got brought in and, and inevitably we found all these things that we could help with. Or, or maybe it wasn’t exactly like we thought it was gonna be or what the problem was, and we can leave, you know, customer names and stuff like that out.

But, but is there a good example you can, you can give us of where you walked in, what the experience was like, and kind of what the end result was?

Sean Ferrel: Yeah, yeah. We you know, we, we wanna. A million and a half dollar deal actually. The, the end result was we’re working now in the Veeva Connections platform from Microsoft with them.

But the original ask that we were brought was, we have a customer interested in moving to Office 365 from on-premise. Essentially SharePoint to the cloud, [00:22:00] you know, email and all that. And we thought, oh, this is a pretty straightforward migration. We’ve done a million of them. And so next thing you know, we started talking about how we do SharePoint.

We realized that, you know, for those of out that, dunno what active directory is, their identity platform was kind of a mess. We got called in to help them with cleaning that up because that governs, you know, permissions and things like SharePoint and teams. Then we started to talk with their marketing departments and I know their C X O level came in at a certain point and SharePoint and said, you know, we’re remote now.

This happened all during Covid, so we need to figure out digitalizing our culture, how to make a digital culture and, and Veeva Connections that just launched and it latches right under SharePoint. So it grew and it grew and it grew. And we’re still in process of working with them on a learning management system, which is enviva.

So the customers can, you know, publish more material because they’re remote all over the world.

Josh Lupresto: I love it. I mean, if that’s not the, if that’s not the staple or the example of go forward, what companies are gonna have to [00:23:00] deal with if they haven’t dealt with it yet. I mean, that’s, that’s perfect. It’s what I hope partners pull out of that is I know you have a lot of prospects and a lot of customers out there that are gonna go through and struggle with this.

So as we wrap this up, If, if now I’m a partner that’s listened and, and here we are towards the end of this and I go, oh my gosh, yes. I wanna go talk to my customers, my prospects about this. What are the questions that you give a cus a partner to talk to the customers or what’s the conversation track that you would ask them to go down?

Sean Ferrel: Yeah, I mean, at a high level, I think there’s, I kind of, I, I identify business problems that technology can solve in the world. I think we do have remote workforces, so that can create challenges with culture. Can Microsoft like teams and Veeva and all those products solve for some of those digital cultures that we’re trying to create?

So ask those business questions like you know, what are you doing from a compliance perspective? You know, have you looked at your cyber insurance and what are they saying that you have to do? Kind of take that down a notch to, you know, how are you leveraging Microsoft from that perspective? Are you leveraging it?

Do [00:24:00] you have other tools? Oftentimes we start with, you know, the licensing conversation. ’cause I think partners find that there’s a lot of untapped resources in those licenses and then that conversation spins itself back up into, you know, you’re sitting on, you know, Microsoft teams for collab communication.

You’re sitting on Veeva for more collaboration. You can solve for remote workforce automation with. A product called Windows autopilot. So I would start with the business things. Customers want bi, they want intelligence to make better decisions because they don’t work together in the office. They want remote workforce solutions, employee lifecycle management, like ask ’em those kind of questions and then ask ’em, is Microsoft, you know, in their technologies, are they something you guys are leveraging for this?

Josh Lupresto: Beautiful. All right. Final question here. As I get to use sound effects and we look out to the future what do you see changing in this? And, and, and maybe it’s copilot, maybe it’s more than that. Maybe that is it, but, but if we just look, let’s look out, I dunno, 12 months or so. Any of the advice [00:25:00] that you gave, you think that still applies 12 months from now?

Would you ask anybody to be aware or just kind of watch for different things? What’s your final thoughts on that, Sean?

Sean Ferrel: I think OpenAI and the ChatGPT investment is gonna be a big deal. Co-pilot, it’s coming out. You’re gonna see it where it’s publicly released, and you’re gonna see a lot of what you’re already seeing.

If you use Microsoft Bing, by chance, the artificial intelligence, helping tell the story, whether it’s embedded in Office 365 and you have a PowerPoint template, excuse me, a PowerPoint template, you’re using ChatGPT will come in there and help you create a sales presentation. Automate some of your emails out of Outlook, back to, you know, a partner, a customer, a, a co-employee you know, automate things that are happening in the cloud that it sees, like auto-scaling, cloud servers.

I mean, it’s just really gonna help enable and automate processes within the business. So I would expect that to be the biggest change we see over the next 12 months.

Josh Lupresto: Love it. Fun stuff, man. Always makes it interesting to be in this space. Sean that wraps us up, man. I appreciate you coming on. [00:26:00] Thanks thanks so much for doing this.

Yeah, thank you so much. Alright, everybody that wraps us up. Sean Ferrell, founder and chairman of Managed Solution. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is next Level Biz Tech. Till next time.

Sean Ferrel: Next level BizTech has been a production of Telarus

Josh Lupresto: Studio 19.

Sean Ferrel: Please visit Telarus.com for more information.