Transcript
We are an outsourced IT company in Seattle, Washington. We started working with Acronis, who's our co-partner in the agreement. They've been amazing. I started doing a lot of technical work with them around backups and cybersecurity, and then part of my initial rollout with them was an opportunity to have what's called a team up event. Acronis does these team ups, they're unbelievable, gives us the opportunity to work with a sports team to get our advertising in stadiums, get lots of tickets to games, get to bring clients to lots of things, and we do an event once a year. We've done batting practice on the field for two years in a row, with 100 plus clients just out there taking swings. It's been a blast. Sure, I'm Jeff Higgins, I lead the technology organization here at the Mariners. Security, that's infrastructure, that's all the big screen, AV, everything that's in the stadium that could only production in my opinion, possibly. At Microsoft, you get some basic backup functionality, but very basic. Very basic, so we really were looking for a secondary option to where we could have better opportunity, more detail, better compliance stature, as well as an extra step of data loss prevention. That's really important for us here. My peers throughout MLB, that's the thing that keeps us up at night. Yeah, the cost of a breach is so high too, especially the exposure. Companies that exist only to help with what happens if something bad happens, and how do you handle that from a PR perspective even, and just to not have to deal with that is a huge bonus. There are some great companies that actually will proactively help you with, oh, if something happens, here's what you do. It's interesting, there's a whole industry around that. Outside of just general cybersecurity, it's how do you present yourself to the world as being safe? How do you present to the world that we don't have these things happening, if we do, we take care of them very quickly, and it's a benefit of having good backups and good cybersecurity. Yeah, the big thing for me right now that's keeping me up and my peers is AI security and governance, providing guardrails instead of folks to take advantage of the usefulness of these tools, guard our data and our people and our trademarks and things against. In fact, Acronis flew me out to Vegas a couple months ago to meet with other MSPs that were looking at a team up kind of opportunity, and for me to tell them how valuable it's been. And I think there's a value to having, obviously, advertisement that aligns with a major sports team like the Mariners. There's a value of having your logo on the scoreboard and on the little things around the stadium. But there's also the feeling people get when they know they've seen your name, they've seen the Mariners, they've seen Acronis, and the trust factor's there already. So you're not having to send a bunch of references and call downs and things like that. It just gives you that relevance, like, hey, if these people trust you to do this stuff, then we can trust you to do that. Aside from that, of course, I've talked about all the fun things we've been able to do, and I think that's not only us going to games, but bringing many clients to games, sending them tickets. We've actually sponsored a few events where the prize has been tickets to games, and it's great exposure. It's just been a really cool thing, and I'm so glad we did it, and I'm trying to figure out how to take it even further all the time. That's the benefit of having a product that is an Acronis-level product. Every feature is there. It's very simple. So I think we take it for granted, actually, that there are all these features in there, but you're not having to deal with them. You're not having to think about, oh, I've got to turn this thing on or go check this. I think, again, the built-in retention, the built-in easy reporting and restoring, yeah, it's hard to define one feature. I would say most organizations may think that when you're talking about third-party backup for Microsoft 365, you're thinking about email, but it's not email. It's Teams chats. It's SharePoint data. It's planner plans. It's all these things that you get used to using in an environment that is so feature-rich and complex as Microsoft to be able to back all that up and not sweat it, because users will do things. Users will delete things. Users will think, oh, I'm going to hard delete all these emails because I don't want someone to see them. And that's from the security perspective, too, right? And you have to know, like, hey, we can go back and get this stuff in case someone tried to get rid of a bunch of stuff that they didn't want us to see. I mean, that's a nice feature. Built right in. Maybe not technical, but very important from a compliance standpoint. I have been going to Mariners games since I was a very little kid, and I am from here. I grew up on Bainbridge Island, and I remember the production of coming over on the ferry and walking to a game. I'm glad I got in at a time when we're back there now. I mean, we had years of, you know, it wasn't as good as it could have been. And now we've got this, you know, we're in the playoffs, and I got to be right over there for a bunch of playoff games, and that was because of the partnership. And it was amazing, and I look forward to doing it again this year when we get back. Yeah, I think there's a misconception, you know, Mariners is a big brand, but we're a classic small-medium business, so we really rely on our partners to help us with, especially in a technology space, right? We really have to have good partners and leverage their expertise to really, just to make the engine go.
