Transcript
Today, I'm joined by David Kosman. Dave, you want to introduce yourself? It was, thank you for, for introducing me or for, for inviting me, I should say to this, this session. This is my first Unscripted, so really excited about it. So David Kosman and I, I run our global managed services business. So if you think about the strategy, the programs, managing the teams, you know, those are all organizations that, that, that I lead. And of course we have a lot of, you know, supporting organizations, which are a big, big part of our business as well. So I, I own the strategy and the delivery of the strategy. David, it's an honor to working alongside with you at a high level. What is your strategy for MSP? What is my strategy? That is a very, very important question. Yeah. So when I think about what is the future vision of our MSP business, right? At the core has to be the MSP, right? And, and when I say that, it's about selecting the right organizations that we believe we can be successful in, in one, creating the right services, right? Aligning from a, a strategic perspective. Are we in the, going the same direction? And then ultimately delivering that value to our customers, right? That is our North star. We have customers, all of us, and those customers that I want to introduce to an MSP. I wanted to make sure that it's the right MSP that we know with confidence has the ability to actually properly manage and operate our customer's environment. So a big part of our strategy has to be at the center, focusing on the right organizations. Other parts of our strategy, and I don't know what topic specifically you want to go into today, but other parts of our strategy are things like creating the right commercial constructs for MSPs, right? So thinking about, you know, we announced PAYGO, which is something that we announced, you know, several quarters ago, and that program is essentially a commit model, but it's a monthly commit on an annual term. And it allows you to actually start at a zero commit level. And you can move up certainly in tiers, but the idea is that you're growing and you're committing as you're growing to the business. But by the way, if you're happy with your discounts, you don't ever have to increase your commitment either, right? So we're really trying to right-size the business and grow alongside of our partners. So a big part of that strategy has to be around making sure that there's a very, very fair commercial construct that we know our MSPs can be successful. And then there's other elements of our strategy, enabling our partners, right? Enablement has to be at the core. If we're going to identify and work with the right MSPs, let's make sure we're giving them the skills and the tools to ultimately be successful in managing our joint customers. So within the strategy, you talked about PAYGO, zero dollar commit. When you hit on enablement, what is your enablement strategy, right? I think my vision for enablement, I think is multifaceted, right? I mean, I think the first thing is on ensuring that the, you know, there's obviously training component of enablement, right? And part of that has to be training the various functions within our MSPs, right? So the organizations operating and managing the platform, they have to be experts in that domain. They have to understand how to properly manage and leverage our tools to deliver the right outcome for our customers. And obviously there's enabling the sales organization, the support organization, you know, our teams on, on the value of the MSP and the services that together we've built, right? So enablement to me is kind of an umbrella term, but I think the one area that I'm really interested in investing in is enabling the development of a practice. And when I think about that, there's a couple of things. One is what are the services that you can use our technology for and our product for that allows us to create tangible and profitable services for, for MSPs that they can deliver that positive outcome for customers. So things like identity, right? Identity is broadly unprotected. I think the industry is saying that upwards of 90 plus percent of customers don't protect, you know, their, their, their identity, you know, programs, right, or models, right? And so, you know, things like Entra ID and those kinds of things are coming unprotected, right? And so there's a huge need. If you really want to be able to recover quickly, you need to start with recovery of that identity or even things like, you know, cyber resilience. How do I protect that in a sovereign protected siloed environment, right? How would it develop a practice and service offerings that align with the capabilities of the platform, right? And so we're putting a lot of investment actually in something that we're calling Practice Builder to really help our MSPs create a profitable and tangible practice with our, with our partners. You bring up a very good point. You know, Rubrik is a leader when it comes to identity and cyber resilience. When we talk about Practice Builder, we see a lot of MSPs with great technology, strong technical teams, but some seem to struggle when it comes to repeatable service. Why do you think that happens? You know, I think different partners do things differently, right? And so when I talk about Practice Builder, first of all, it's really around orienting the strategic business plan, right? Making sure that at a leadership level, we're aligned on what markets we're going after, you know, what verticals, you know, you know, what, what are the roadmap of services that ultimately we want to build and productize together, right? So there's that whole element of ensuring that at a business plan level, we have the right focus, right? We have the right investments. We understand what our goals are, right? And none of this, by the way, is rocket science, right? This is just, you know, us in a room with the smart people for MMSPs and really running through a format, if you will, to, to really develop what that business plan looks like. Once we've identified the roadmap of services, we start to prioritize them and we identify, okay, what is the very first one that we want to build, right? And so let's assume for a second sovereign or whatever it might be. Then it's really starting to conceive of what is the best delivery of that service? So there's going to be services that honestly are going to be fully custom and bespoke, right? If you think about a sovereign solution, yeah, we can productize it, but to a large extent, it's going to be dependent on, are you protecting, you know, the electrical grid for a country, right? Because that's, you know, a target for, for ransomware and, and sovereign really needs to, you know, let's say a country, Germany really needs to protect their grid, their power grid, right? They can't have an attack to actually bring down all their power or things like government or police or military or healthcare or whatever, every one of those is going to be different, right? So then the question is, are there services that potentially are more of that flywheel, you know, quick sale type of thing, and those services, if you think about the concept of a cellular phone plan, we all know that when we go sign up for a new cellular plan, you have a base, right? And that base is price a certain way to limit the functionality, but then the next price is just a little bit higher, but it unlocks a ton more. And so the idea for that particular use case is we need a really low entry point, but then we need the ability to actually upgrade somebody to a better, right, a more professional type of tier. And then at some point, maybe it becomes a, you know, a, a power user tier unlimited, everything, you know, no roaming costs, whatever it might be support. So there's different ways to, to identify and think about how to actually structure the service. So our customers understand the value, but are also motivated to consume it. Right. And every service is very different. Yeah.
