Transcript
Hi, Dave Littman Truth in IT. Welcome to today's webcast. Today we're talking about Microsoft. Microsoft 365 licensing how to do more with less and how to have trust in your solution. I'm joined by Nader Saab. Nader is director of portfolio solutions with Trusted Tech. Nader. Welcome. David, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate the, uh, the introduction. Of course. So listen, I am going to let you go tell your story. We'll come back a little questions. I may interject here or there. We're going to try to get this all squared away in like maybe 15 to 20 minutes, tops. So go ahead and take it away. Yeah. Thank you so much, David. Uh, so here, like you said, uh, director of portfolio solutions, formerly director of cloud sales. Uh, joined this organization about four years ago. Um, in, you know, just really helping Trusted Tech team, uh, become a leading Microsoft CSP. Uh, I was part of this organization when the sales staff was about maybe five individuals. Um, you know, grew the grew the team to about over 80. And now the company, over 300 employees. So I've seen all the ebbs and flows of the Microsoft environment, uh, since, you know, even Covid, which was a very hectic time, but really where Trusted Tech team has grown. And just to give a quick background as to where we sit in the industry. Um, you know, we've we've really started out on the legacy side, uh, focusing on on premise licenses. Uh, really holding all six Microsoft Solutions designations. So once again, starting from the legacy piece. Uh, what prompted the organization to become what it is today was focusing on, um, making something overly complex, simple. And I think that when you look at our old slogans, right, understanding that, um, you know, we're the ones who call when you're over licensed as opposed to, uh, everyone else calling when you're under licensed to sell more. Uh, it really translated as, you know, trust. The tech team was born in 2017, all the way to its rapid growth, uh, up until 2020, where we started our cloud program, being able to offer Microsoft 365 licensing as a result of, as you see behind me, all these solutions designations, becoming a gold partner in 2020 and then elevating to having all six uh, in 2020, uh, three. So for us, it turned into making the 365 piece simple. When you have 4000 plus SKUs and deprecation and changes in the ecosystem, it can get very complex. And when you have a lot of generalists in the industry, um, it can become very difficult to get an accurate quote. It can get very difficult to be ahead of the times when Microsoft makes changes. They've made quite a few in terms of pricing, you know, currency exchanges, um, you know, license combinations, consolidations. And so our staff is extremely, um, you know, prepared and trained and poised and able to be instinctive when it comes to Microsoft licensing. And therefore we've created a model that requires less overthinking. We can turn around quotes very quickly. And I think those are the things that people appreciate in the industry. And and being able to, um, once again simplify something that is overly complex by nature. So, uh, our cloud solutions and these are the four pillars of trust tech. It's cloud solutions, on premise professional services, which is the actual expertise and hands on keyboard work. And then there's the technical support. So to level the playing field we are not an MSP. We are considered a CSP. However we are different than your traditional Vars. There's historically been, you know, 4 or 5 different purchasing channels that are available to customers when you're buying Microsoft 365, which is the premise of this conversation, it's you can buy from Microsoft directly. I always jokingly say that's like buying an iPhone from Apple, right? It's you're walking into a store and you're paying MSRP. Great. Not really much support. Not really much of a of an account management or a proactive focus. It's just a pass through for licensing. You can buy from an MSP, get a specialized or a generalist in terms of overall IT, but not someone that's dedicated to Microsoft 365. And typically they're indirect resellers. So you're once again paying close to retail pricing. So organizations always ask where can we save money. So they look for a CSP out there, right. Someone that's directed Microsoft at the city level, someone that can get you, uh, level of discount, that's appropriate. Um, you know, depending on how much you bundle, typically because they sell everything under the sun. So when you talk about the CDD or the Dells or the eyes of the world, great companies have grown a ton and are, you know, household names, but nonetheless, uh, not Microsoft focused per se. Right? They they Dell was a hardware company, of course, hardware as well. And so, you know, they do sell softwares, but we're just detecting comes in and differentiates as they blend the two things right. They blend the Microsoft specialty. We are very niche. We are very focused on Microsoft 365 and on premise and any services related to standing up infrastructure, but we also do the volume to get the discounts that those organizations get. And the real ace in the back pocket for Trusted Tech team is because we are Microsoft focused, because we take advantage of the incentives that are out there that Microsoft literally gives out to these organizations that, you know, are kind of left neglected, is that we do the services, we act on those incentives, and we have the ability to really beat out the rest of the competition. On just Microsoft 365. Um, the biggest piece of that obviously being support. So before we continue, Dave, any questions in regards to that specific, uh, you know, introduction on uh, where trusted testing kind of fits into the industry. Um, no, I don't think so, I guess. Well, one thing I would, I would ask, uh, looks like a question came in about if a size of companies that you guys focus on, I don't know if you want to cover that later, but, you know, are you guys focused on, you know, large companies, small companies, you know, public sector, you know, school systems, health care facilities. Does it matter? Yeah. Great question. Dave, I'll start with the the generic answer. We're pretty agnostic. We work with all organizations of all sizes in all industries. Um, there is no limitation. The only um, I would say the only caveat to that would be and we work with nonprofits as well, would be tenants that are considered GCC high. We work with them on services and support, just not provisioning of licensing. So that would be the only one that I would say would fall out of that. But enterprise level, I would say even is our specialty as well. Um, one of the big things in terms of where Microsoft is heading, big industry shift is the enterprise agreement, historically known as the most prevalent model to get any type of discount, any type of attention from an account management standpoint from Microsoft, uh, as of this year and trending since 2022. Uh, the enterprise agreement has been slowly dying. Um, we've seen organization minimums from 500 users up to 1000 now 2400. And eventually what we're hearing is it's going to be 6000 and below, will not be eligible for the enterprise model. So where do those customers go? Right. They have to either find a CSP or just go to Microsoft Direct and pay MSRP. And that's a pretty big shift for a lot of organizations. If you're spending, you know, 1 million to $2 million a year on your Microsoft, you know, you're looking at almost a quarter million dollars in increases or more. So that's where an organization like us comes in, where once again, we're able to handle anything from enterprise all the way down to, you know, mom and pop, 20 user organizations. Okay, great. Thank you. Nutter. Go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so so I always and our CRO, uh, uses an age old saying that we say here it's a jokingly Walmart pricing Nordstrom services. Why would you leave if you had both. And that kind of stems into our support offering. Um, you know, we've seen historically in the industry support continue to get neglected. Um, and it's been ever since really around 2020 around Covid, where everything kind of shifted, um, towards everything, all the investment going towards AI, going towards security and pulling from the support and admin, uh, whether it's at Microsoft or even at some of these other distributors or managed partners. So, uh, when it comes to break fix support, we're not talking about, you know, the keyboard support setting up, you know, uh, end user, uh, related tasks. It's more so around who's actually helping when there's an actual fire set a ticket, who's helping with Microsoft related support, and getting to the escalation point that can actually provide you a resolution. And that's where while you also get good pricing at PTT, you're also asking, well, in the industry, I've always heard that I have to sacrifice this expertise and sacrifice support to get better pricing. Well, that's not the case here. Uh, and the numbers back it. You know, we have a 99.3 CSat. And I know that sounds great. We're presenting here with an obvious bias towards Trusted Tech team. But you can't you can't beat these numbers. You know first response time of five minutes in the US. That's not, uh, automated response. That's an actual human response. Uh, for our, uh, admin help desk, uh, 85.7% in-house resolution compared to a 40% in-house resolution across the industry, including organizations like US cloud and like the other the other competitors out there. So you know that focus on support, right? So when you have 85.7% in-house resolution. Right. Well, how do you get to that number? These are things that normally would have had to been escalated to Microsoft, or you would have had to wait and put a ticket in and go through tier one to tier two to tier three. Uh, the biggest reason we do that is because one, we have engineers that are all certified at or above what Microsoft standards are, and they're all US and UK based. Number two is that because we have such a culmination of tickets that are coming in, influx of tickets that are coming in across 7000 different customers, um, around typically the same topics? Um, we can take those experiences and apply them and have not only more tickets resolved in-house without having to escalate to Microsoft and start billing for that, but also the average. If you take a look at the bottom right there, the the Microsoft Premier support for partners, and also known as Unified Support. Average resolution time is 912 hours. Well, through TTD, because we manage escalation, we make sure that tickets get resolved and we're incentivized to resolve tickets. That drops down to 88 hours so literally ten times faster. By working with a partner like us that is dedicated to, uh, Microsoft support and Microsoft licensing, when you know the licensing and you understand how it's built and how it's set up and how it's consolidated and you know how to support it usually breeds for the expertise that our organization is looking for when they're trusting us with these large Microsoft contracts. And I think, um, one of the biggest differentiators when it comes to support to is and, you know, like I said, we're not an MSP. We we don't bill you based off your end users because those those individuals are not putting in the tickets to us. Right. It's always going to be your IT staff. What we're best for is and I can probably assume that the vast majority of listeners relate to this. Right. Uh, IT staff, you know, of individuals on a 1 to 10 ratio between, you know, it versus end user or even more than that, right, 1 to 20 1 to 50. And you you have end users putting tickets into you. And anything that needs to be escalated, break fixed. Would have to go to a partner and or to Microsoft directly. That's where we come in. But we're not going to penalize you based off the amount of users you have. And so when we design our support packages, what's different in our model versus the rest of the industry is a lot of the organizations out there, including Microsoft and Unified Support Package, will charge you based off the amount of users, a percentage based off the amount of users and the amount of spend that you have. So if you're a, say, a organization that spends $1 million a year on Microsoft 365 and Azure and on premise licensing your support bill, let's say it's 10% of that will be $100,000. Even if you put in five tickets a year, ten tickets a year, versus an organization that spends 50,000 a year but puts in 1000 tickets a year, right. That organization would actually spend less because they spend less on the Microsoft 365 that model, in our opinion, does not make sense. It should be completely based off of utilization. We take a look at case history. We take a look at what actually gets escalated, how many sub A tickets you have that are business critical to your infrastructure versus general information? We take a look at something that a lot of other companies won't do is how much do you need to offshore outsource to us. Right. In terms of do you need to go hire an engineer to do this project? Do you need to hire someone to go and vet a project versus can you just utilize someone that's already familiar with your environment? Trust tech team an example that's already providing licensing. They can do the hands on keyboard work. Do you need to set up Intune? Do you need to maybe even vet a third party? Are you looking at KnowBe4, CrowdStrike, Barracuda to take a look at it if it will fit in with your current stack? And so that's kind of where our professional services capabilities come in. They're usually built into our support programs. Um, but on top of that you're only billed for what you use. So I'll tell you this, like when we start showing some of our logos, companies like TaylorMade, um, you know, where the organization can save anywhere from 30 to 60% off of what their unified support looks like, just because we have a a la carte model as opposed to just a holistic here's what your spend is. So that's kind of what our approach has been to the industry. And by the way, you're also saving on the licensing, which is always going to be the case with us. Okay. Fantastic. Um, yeah. Let's take a couple questions. Now this one came in, um, and the question is, is all is the support all onshore? Is there some offshore? It doesn't you know, it doesn't matter. But just, you know, curious. Yep. All UK and US where we have actual presence. So yeah. United States across uh, across all of North America, um, including, uh, couple of individuals in Canada. And then in the UK, we're, uh, we're all once again, um, in-house. Um, and we're slowly expanding into the rest of Europe. Great. And how many locations in the US? Uh, we currently have two locations in the United States. Okay. All right. Yeah. And I think you said. What was it? How many employees again? Uh, we are currently approaching 300, so I don't know the exact. Okay. Yeah, that's close enough. That's great. That's great. So, um. That's fantastic. I mean, um, I guess, you know, you guys have really. I mean, there's some questions that came in about about savings and saving full time employees. I mean, I think you kind of covered it. I, you know, I don't know if you have any specific cases. I know I saw a slide that had tailor made. You had a couple others. I would love to, you know, see some of those. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Non-microsoft shops too. That's kind of interesting. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll start with. Yeah. Like you said, we'll cover all those topics. I'll start with, you know, Tailor Made is a quick example. Um, Ali got a great relationship with Ali. We worked with him from the start. This is an example of where maybe the licensing didn't make as much sense because tailor made household name, they're working with Microsoft directly at the C-suite level. And, you know, they've got their 3 to 5 year agreement set up with licensing. But this is a scenario where, you know, hey, there's a support renewal every year. And that's, you know, we're looking to cut costs somewhere, but we don't want to sacrifice our access to Microsoft. We don't want to sacrifice the level of engagement that we get, the certifications that Microsoft holds. Well, this is a great example. We're working with a company like Trusted Tech Team. There's no ultimatum where in the traditional sense. To get support elsewhere, you'd have to cut off the direct relationship with Microsoft, or you have to pay the premium to go through Microsoft. Well, with Trusted Tech team, it's essentially a three pronged approach. You get Trusted Tech team engineers in there, architects and their level of certifications and their in-house resolutions. You have your team, of course, that's still present. And not only do you get a better experience through escalation to Microsoft because we can control that. You also get faster resolutions. You get the access to Microsoft, and it's all at a cheaper price because we buy thousands and thousands of actually dozens of thousands of tickets up front. And so that subsidized rate gets passed down to you. So with Tailor Made and Ali and, you know, I think their frustration continued to be when they put tickets in, um, it would just kind of get passed around to different departments within Microsoft. And there was no one internally that knew how to work the system to get to the resolution. Enter Trust tech team. We were able to, um, you know, help them with the handful. It's really only a handful of tickets that they put in every year. But it's almost like an insurance policy. People pay these premiums because they'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. So we're able to combine both those things and provide a better experience in that regard. And those things are a lot of customers don't know that those those options are available to them. You don't have to pick one or the other. Uh, another example, I know we touched on that a little bit earlier, 1400 mobile devices and scale as they acquire new companies currently averaging about 8 to 10 acquisitions every single year. Um, you know, and this was a this was a 200 person shop that became a, you know, 1.2 thousand user shop. So, uh, as you can assume, customers come or not customers, but accounts, they were evaluating organizations that were on G suite, organizations that were part of AWS, organizations that were fully on prem. We ripped and replaced all of that infrastructure and put it into one tenant under one SharePoint, uh, and managed all the devices under one system. And as you mentioned earlier, right. Organizations typically have to figure out how do we manage and monitor all these things. Well, you have a partner like us that can set up that infrastructure. We bring those organizations in, we evaluate them with Senseki. Then we ensure that we set up the SOPs and then train the end users of the new company, not the end users, but the admin of the new company to apply to Senseki policies. Okay. All right. Now they're cool. You know, one question came in, had to do with, you know, although you guys are focusing on deploying Microsoft solutions, do you guys help deploy or help set up or integrate other technologies beside Microsoft for your clients? Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. You know, that's something that, you know, historically we didn't for a long time. We we focused on, you know, the the main driving and blinders of Microsoft 365 being the best at it, not diluting our product in terms of what our services offer. But as we grew, as we've acquired, like I mentioned, over 7000 customers in that time span in the last, you know, 4 or 5 years specifically on the cloud side, a lot of the time, what we've noticed in the products we recommend flow right into the recommendations for security enhancement, awareness and training. Backup and data recovery. So all these different things, um, ended up, you know, catching eyes and catching the attention of some of these vendors. And so when you see some of the organizations that, you know, we have listed here, KnowBe4, Barracuda, Proofpoint, um, you know, Avepoint, CrowdStrike, these are scenarios where these vendors approach us and they see what we're doing specific to Microsoft. And I understand that, you know, while we have these Microsoft logos that we are, you know, great relationships, uh, in terms of the the Microsoft enTrusted Tech team, uh, pipeline, there's also opportunity for us to work with some of these vendors, and they see it just just saying it plainly. They see it as a goldmine for them because these are the exact customers that they're looking to to work with that, you know, have products that pair directly with Microsoft, uh, Exchange and Microsoft products. So what we do essentially is we entertain those and we look to get better deals and better expertise for our customers. A lot of times, for example, like KnowBe4 and Avepoint, we won partner of the year for Same with Barracuda as well. And then, you know, what we do is we allow those organizations at the, at the high level to come in and say, well, here's how we can offer a new value to your customers outside of just what you do for Microsoft. So there's plenty of opportunity. And as we continue to grow as an organization and continue to get more exposure, we're going to have more logos come to the table and offer some of those similar deals. And so I think, I think when you focus on one thing and expand the way that we did, and that was our strategy, it led to just a whole other open door of opportunity for not just us, but our customers. There's there's tons of savings that we can pass on to, to our customers that they've been able to take advantage of. Okay. Fantastic. That's about all the time we have for today. Natas, that was a great story. I love Walmart pricing at Nordstrom service. Love it. Make sure you check out Trusted Tech . Com Natas. Thank you so much for being with us today David. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much.
