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August 12, 2024
A Platform Evolving MSPs to TSPs with TechGrid | Episode #88
As businesses increasingly adopt diverse IT systems, the demand for cohesive management solutions grows. In this episode, we explore how TechGrid is addressing these challenges by transforming the traditional MSP into a more integrated Technology Service Provider (TSP). Phillip Wegner, CEO and Founder of TechGrid, shares the company’s journey from its origins as SecureEdg…
As businesses increasingly adopt diverse IT systems, the demand for cohesive management solutions grows. In this episode, we explore how TechGrid is addressing these challenges by transforming the traditional MSP into a more integrated Technology Service Provider (TSP). Phillip Wegner, CEO and Founder of TechGrid, shares the company’s journey from its origins as SecureEdge to becoming a leading platform for IT service management. Learn about the evolution of the MSP industry, the challenges of digital connectivity, and how TechGrid’s innovative platform is helping service providers streamline their operations and improve customer satisfaction
In Episode 88 of Great Things with Great Tech, we speak with Phillip Wegner, Founder and CEO of TechGrid, to explore the evolution of managed service providers (MSPs) into the more integrated and efficient Technology Service Providers (TSPs). Phillip explains how TechGrid is revolutionizing IT service management by connecting disparate tools, automating workflows, and providing a unified platform for TSPs to better serve their customers. Discover how TechGrid is addressing the challenges of today’s fragmented IT landscape and learn about the future of IT services.
TechGrid was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
Key Topics Discussed:
- SP vs MSP: Understanding the difference and why TSPs are crucial in today’s IT environment.
- TechGrid’s Origins: Phillip shares the journey from SecureEdge to TechGrid and the vision behind creating a unified platform for IT service management.
- Challenges in IT Management: Addressing the fragmentation in the IT channel and the need for integrated tools and digital workflows.
- Evolution of IT Services: The changing landscape from traditional MSPs to modern TSPs, and how TechGrid is enabling this transition.
- Innovative Platform: How TechGrid’s marketplace, digital workflows, and embedded financial services are transforming how TSPs operate.
- Future Vision and Growth: Insights into TechGrid’s plans following their $9.2M Series A funding from Bellini Capital and how they are scaling their platform for the future.
Technology and Concepts Mentioned:
TechGrid, TSP, MSP, digital workflows, automation, marketplace, financial services, platform, IT service management, cloud, SaaS, as-a-service.
☑️ Web: https://techgrid.com
☑️ Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/techgrid
☑️ Support the Channel: https://ko-fi.com/gtwgt ☑️ Be on #GTwGT: Contact via Twitter @GTwGTPodcast or visit https://www.gtwgt.com ☑️ Subscribe to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTwGTPodcast?sub_confirmation=1 Check out the full episode on our platforms: YouTube: https://youtu.be/kmB_pjGb5Js Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2l9aZpvwhWcdmL0lErpUHC?si=x3YOQw_4Sp-vtdjyroMk3Q Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/darknet-diaries-with-jack-rhysider-episode-83/id1519439787?i=1000654665731 Follow Us: Website: https://gtwgt.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/GTwGTPodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/GTwGTPodcast ☑️ Music: https://www.bensound.com
Transcript
what exactly is a tsp and how does it differ from traditional msps or managed service providers as companies consume more and more systems and services the need for efficient management becomes critical enter the tech service provider but with business tools scattered and efficiency on the line how do you bring it all together this is where Tech grid steps in today I'm speaking with Philip Wagner founder CEO and the driving force behind Tech GD we're going to be talking about how they're reshaping automation
as a platform in it service management for the tsp turning the chaos of scattered tools into a unified streamlined operation this is episode 88 of great things with great Tech don't forget to head to YouTube at jtw JT podcast or on all good podcast platforms hit like subscribe follow forget all past episodes and now episode 88 with Philip Wagner from Tech grid all right hey Philip welcome to the show so CEO and founder of tech grid but also Chief product off officer as well so you know I I love what we're going to
talk about here I feel this is going to be a really fun episode about msps and a groundbreaking platform which I think a lot a lot of us know about the old platforms that are used in this space but Tech grid is certainly trying to sort of disrupt that old mindset so the other systems aren't platforms but that's another that's another that's it so we're already G there so there you go and we're going to dive into that as well the non platform side of it I've I've already tripped up on that but yeah
so tell tell us some on so tell us platform Tech grid What is tech grid yeah so we're a software company and we're connecting businesses that are buying technology with the service providers like msps and bars that are providing the technology to them and then we're also connecting the partners that work with the msps and bars and these are like the oems the Distributors the financial service providers and so really what we're trying to do is build this digital ecosystem uh connecting the technology channel the it Channel if you
will connecting them together to serve the business customer right so Tech doesn't necessarily necessarily replace existing tools but it's basically bringing everything together in the one platform get get that right as well basically make to make things more efficient um for for the MSP which effectively translates to the customer and the tenants as well right yeah so the funny the kind of the funny thing about the industry today is um you know that the it Channel which is where businesses consume you know technology it's been
around for 45 plus years and kind of the funny thing about it is it's been designed for 45 years to sell things like networking to the business customer uh and which is you know networking products and services but the actual infrastructure that's running the it channel is completely fragmented so things like digital connectivity to Distributors and things like digital connectivity to you know manufacturers all those types of things aren't connected and so what we're our first kind of task is how do we tile
these people to these companies together so again they can serve the business customer yeah and to a certain extent that's happened kind of not really on on purpose right it's happened because of the way that this technology has evolved the way that the internet the way that Services Cloud SAS you know um Shadow it it's caused this kind of glut of disparate Technologies and systems and applications and tool sets to be used and you know something something like Tech grid is bringing that all together
to make it easy again that that's kind of the way that I see it anyway yeah no I I agree with that and that and that's exactly correct and just to to amplify that problem is you know you've got companies like you like the one you work for v um and then you've got a thousand other companies that are like that and that's Cisco and HP and Juniper and all that and they all have kind of their own systems and quoting processes and how they operate and what that's done over time is just really fra of the market so
if I've got 1,000 different manufacturers available through a distributor like INR micro I've got all these different you know disparaging Pro or fragmented processes with all those different companies and the problem with that in in today's world is that if I'm a reseller or a VAR you know MSP I've got to somehow package all that crap together and then be able to present it to my customer with my own stuff that goes along with that and that's really the challenge that we're solving yeah
we're not just talking about front end tool sets as well we're talking about backend systems billing you know all that other stuff which I think a lot of people don't necessarily want to be doing as well and if that can be made easier as well all in the one system and platform as well then that's going to be beneficial so that's cool so we've got a little bit of an understanding about tech grid and S we're going to dive into it a little bit further but give a bit of background about yourself you know
where you came from you know where you work I think we we share sort of similar lineage in terms of working in msps and pays and whatnot so tell tell me about yourself well I actually went to school for youth ministry believe it or not and my my um but I which means you don't have a normal job so I so I ended up getting a job in uh technology sales um when I got out of school and I was working for a uh small Telco kind of company and and I had had four or five years of experience uh in different startups and then I ended up starting my
own company in 2006 and that was called secure Edge and we were a uh Network integrator um it's converted into an MSP and a VAR So when you say Network integrator so what tech we were you working or what were you offering as a service well so actually back in the day if you remember back it's really funny to think about now but in 2006 and you know 2008 like Wi-Fi was Innovative like Wi-Fi was like you know college campuses were saying hey we might offer Wi-Fi if remember that hey it's 54 Meg which
didn't mean you get 54 Meg and so we called the come secure Edge because we were going in and building out these big Wi-Fi networks and with secure network access control and switching and Wi-Fi right and we were deploying you know 500 access points or whatever on a college campus and then turning that on for them and so we like go ahead I'm sorry no that's that's awesome like that's I actually went back and thought you know you triggered a memory I love often this happens on on this show when I'm talking
to people kind of similar vintages right and we're talking about the tech that we've kind of put to the back of our mind and all of a sudden I'm thinking yeah back in 2006 2005 my laptop didn't have a Wi-Fi card didn't I Ed that ex external one and sometimes you got the aerial that's stuck up as well and that was better because that would amplify the volume and so we're you know and 54 you know we're talking about this this sort of tech that was we didn't take as for granted as what we do today it was
kind of like this is some really cool that we're going down here well what actually that's actually exactly the process happens is it was innovative you know like back then it was Innovative and what happened as that technology got you know more and more you used uh by more and more customers is it's the technology life cycle they take it for granted and it ends up being it goes from being like this amazing you know new uh Cutting Edge thing to yeah of course we need to have that so as I ran that company we started offering
managed services to go along with it and we started thinking about how could we uh provide it more like a utility and so we started trying to figure out how could we package a network and deliver it like an AWS because at the time AWS was going like this and we're were like man could we figure out how to do that with a network well the big problem with networking obviously is that you're putting it in somebody else's building right and so if I'm going to provide it as a service or or whatever I've got to actually put it out
there so we had to build a lot of tools but what we noticed over time just as uh part of the story is customers didn't really care uh what technology we were using as that kind of progressed they really just wanted it to work and so our team had gotten used to hey let me tell you about the four myo streams on the access point and all this and our customers were starting to say hey man I don't really give a about that I just want my network to work in my warehouses you know and so we noticed there was a change in how people were
consuming yeah okay so I mean obviously you know there's a there's a bit of a time Jump to when Tech rid was rebranded but I'm interested in in that per period you know between 2006 and 21 because obvious that's a lot of that's 15 years right that's a lot of lot of time to sort of decompress but you know when you were when you were seeing Amazon you were seeing a way to potentially utilize the service which a lot of us were doing back then you know like I that that period was when I started to work for a
proper infrastructure Service Company doing you know credit card transactions you know charging for resources it was kind of the obvious thing that most people had to do but we took our time actually getting to a point where it was actually really plausible and just actually part of everyday life which we kind of really settled in today so I'm interested in those early 2010s what did um secure Edge look like what was a company doing and evolving into you know how big was the company getting were you getting sales people we getting we
building out essay teams and you know what did it look like well actually um it's really funny to think about like how the timeline is now and it all just makes sense but back then what we were trying to do is we saw AWS and Azure and all these other systems and we said oh this is really awesome you can literally log into AWS press a button and deploy an instance in a data center in Virginia that's amazing and so we started looking at like what's the what's our customer experience and it sucked like you know
uh they couldn't buy anything from us they couldn't do anything from us and so we started trying to build this customer portal where the customer could log in and consume from us and on the back end we were using like traditional PSA software traditional it software traditional crms and we were trying to build this kind of customer portal on top of this old um infrastructure and we couldn't do like we tried with you know the major vendors and we tried with you know Salesforce CRM and all that and so
we just we spent like lots of money um and probably three years just trying to build software on top of this kind of old infrastructure and uh finally one of my uh one of my product managers came to me and was like hey man we're going to have to uh we're going to have to build the middleware we're g to have to build this thing in the middle and I was like I don't want to you should never say that again because that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard that's impossible it's too big there's no way we can do it and
um he was right and we we ended up doing it so yeah so obviously before that you were you were kind of almost like you had a control panel effectively speaking and you were tapping into elements of an API or maybe it wasn't even an API back then maybe it was something more more primitive back in the day so your guys were kind of struggling with monolithic type of of structures bringing it into a control panel and really all you're doing is fronting the same same problems exactly you know what I mean if I if I
can put it there you know having gone through a few having gone through a few of these iterations myself you know I understand that you know when you're looking to develop feature sets for a control panel you know yes you're you're only you're limited by what you can get out of the thing you're abstracting so for you to basically make that more efficient You' got to build something in the middle there's the Middle where and basically enhance it and I think from that perspective when you start to get I'm
kind of foreshadowing maybe a little bit but when you when you get that sort of experience you go do we really need all of that and can we do this ourselves and now the game's changed because now we're actually interfacing in a different way and we're going to talk to those guys and they're going to come to us instead of we go to them right well so it took us a lot of a lot of angst if you will to to make that decision but once we made the decision we ended up acquiring a software company uh to do it and uh it
was a company I I knew about and the core team uh that we purchased had came from a startup that was sold to Facebook for hundreds of millions of dollars and that's where we got this core team from and it was really that was really the turn point because they understood microservices they understood that's interesting how to build the infrastructure they understood how to make it secure they understood multi-sided platforms you know and we needed somebody with that expertise and so it was like kind of like this many
years of understanding the business and frustration with existing tools because I was the actually the administrator on all these different PSA software platforms and crms that we were using and uh and then when we combine this kind of business experience with the ability to build anything that's when we really started building the platform as you as we demonstrate for people today yeah so I mean back so before that acquisition it was basically you know yourself and a couple of of the people that you had in there trying to sort of
how how did it evolve how did you I'm always interested in how that um how did you go how did you find those initial you know programmers developers to be able to to build your your stuff or did they kind of accidentally fall into that a so it's really hard and and and actually we went through several iterations so we tried um hiring contractors on like up work and things like that and that didn't work very well then we tried to do like an outsourced software development team where we contracted with a development firm or
receives and they did that and that didn't work well uh now that doesn't mean that can't work because that model does work in a lot of scenarios but um yeah we ended up just being like man we need our own team uh that only works for us and we had an opportunity to acquire a company from a uh somebody that I met through a friend and we did it and um the other thing that I would just if I'll go there just for a second just to um if you're ever considering buying a company like that to build software what
we did is we put them under a uh a period of time let's say 90 days where we did like a try it buy it where we where we like hey there's one want to build can you guys build this and if you can we'll buy you you know oh yeah I like that it's a challenge it's a try it and buy it yeah because it's really a lot of software development as you probably know has a lot to do with the team members that you got on the team um and how you interact with each other and so if you're CTO you know is hard to
work with and can't you know put stories and stuff like that correctly in Jer and things like that you got a lot of like challenges so I wanted to figure out could we work together and that's really what we did that's a really interesting concept there and I'm sure it's it gets done Fair bit in you know now I think about it that's quite a good way to do it right like to make sure how do you know that these guys are going to be good and how do you know that you're going the purchase that you're making is
in a in a good way you know at the end of the time because they might actually be add to quote the words that we're using a bit of dog right they might not be very good together and might not develop and then you've wasted your money and then what do you do with these people it's it's interesting right um and I think larger companies can potentially absorb that but if you're a smaller company it's a it's a big risk and you kind of it almost like it's a make a break type of scenario um talk a
little bit about tech Grid's innovative solutions as is I know we're jumping a little bit but I I want to I want to kind of talk about MSP land and tsp land as it stands for you for you and how you say that because you've been in that but just give us a little bit of an overview of you know what is Tech grid the certain the marketplace the digital workflows the Commerce tools how does it all come together and do its thing well so um when we kind of looked at the industry and the software in the industry I'm talking about like the
existing software PSA crms itms all the things that that that typical MSP and bar is using the biggest thing that was missing that we saw first of all was connectivity how do I connect all these tools together and I you and I were talking before about how we'd used a lot of the PSA software that's been around for 20 years or whatever and a lot of those tools are are still functional and still good for the most part depending on what kind of function you're doing with them but they're really kind of
like these um dated architecture if you will like for the most part it's it's you know it's typically it's hard to connect to it it's not real f flexible and if you look at like modern systems they're API first they're connect they interconnect to everything and so the first thing that we built is this Marketplace functionality and by that we mean to connect any tool and any partner that you're working with because it's not good enough just to say yeah I can interact with a CRM I actually need to
interact with ingr micro as well I need to be able to talk to TD synx I got to tile these Partners together in one interface and so the first thing we built is that uh Marketplace functionality and then the second thing that we built was digital workflows so when we were trying to um build this internally we took all the things that we learned in the MSP and bar business and we said what's the cell process look like and it was a 10-page workflow chart it was a 40 foot whiteboard then a 10-page workflow chart and we tried to
take those steps and digitize them and I'm going to come back to that and then the the third the third thing that we built is a lot of we've embedded fin Services into the platform and we did that because we believe the whole industry is moving to an as a service you know consumption based model and so we had to like really embed Finance into the entire platform sorry for rambling there no that's not it's important to understand because I those three key components what makes you Innovative and
successful today as per the research right so and I think to go back to an earlier point about the evolution of the MSP to a tsp and so we talk about technology service provider as opposed to manage service provider right and that's interesting and T tsp probably isn't as well known as a term just yet but I feel like it's going to be what what we use moving forward so I am interested in the reasons why you built the marketplace e-commerce and the workflows you built those for a reason and I feel like you built those because
in your journey you understood what the evolution of an MSP yes was in 20 6 versus 10 years later in 2015 and what we're seeing God like we're talking about 10 years after that now 2014 right to take us through your thought process and where and how that's evolved yeah well I have really strong opinions on this because I I just kind of live through it and when when we when we started the company we were more of a VAR uh a network integrator we would go in we would install it and then after we installed it the customers would say we
go back in four years later and they never updated the OS you know they behave it doesn't work we're like well yeah you haven't updated software and you know it's just a security problem and well so we end up selling manage services and now we became then we became a manage service provider so we go in and we'd provide the infrastructure and then we may manage it after the fact and then the Evolution Past that was Hey man can we just pay a bill and can you just make this stuff work and so you end up being an
infrastructure as a service provider and in the industry it's kind of like when it started it it ended up fragmenting into vars I'm a VAR I'm a solution provider which means I'm my business is primary resell and then then the msps were kind of like yeah we're too good to resell we don't care about the technology we're just going to manage it and both approaches I think are merging uh because of what the customers are saying and and if you if you read all the supergeeks in the industry the all
the industry analysts are saying that 85% of infrastructure that gets put into a building it might be 75% of the infr has put into a building is going to be consumed in as a service type of model and that just means that those those are going to merge msps bars and all that and so we just call that you're a tech service provider and you you provide technology to businesses yeah yeah I was thinking about this I was in China a couple of weeks ago and um they were in a serviced office out there um in Beijing and I
remember I went to get a coffee out from the coffee machine and I went to work it and I couldn't the button w't work I'm like what's going on here and so I went to one of the guys local I'm saying Hey I want to get a coffee and he goes oh hold on I'll get the card so basically it's a card everything in China is digitalized right there's no there's no money at all so the card basically links to alipay alipay is linked to the coffee machine you can only make the coffee do its thing if you swipe the card as a
really tangible example of what you just talked about in a building even the coffee is basically as a service well yeah so when we started you know secure Edge in 20 2006 it was an amenity hey it's a it's Wi-Fi in a building and but think about retailers that you walk into that are walking around with a handheld device a point a sales system if the network is down there's no power in the building like it's it's the the business is dead and it's literally not able to function if the networking the
infrastructure software is is down yeah and and you know obviously we've had a few really good examples of that in the last couple of weeks right like we say this a couple weeks after crowd yeah yeah exactly I was travel I was about to get on a plane or get check through the airport in Hong Kong over to China when this was happening now funnily enough uh that was actually not impacted because of every reason that you might think is that in China they don't really use a lot of windows it's a lot of in you know re re reverse
engineered sort of systems and Linux and whatnot it didn't get impacted so I was kind of safe flying through but it really made me think about you know okay well this is it wasn't it wasn't so much a supply chain attack but then we obviously understood what happened years ago with Cay and you know I remember working on on connectwise and um my my ti with connectwise is and we'll talk about your time with connectwise as well a little bit later on my ti was that I hosted the infrastructure or I designed
and architected and built and hosted and manag infrastructure for the connectwise as a service in apj um probably in about 2010 2012 maybe 2012 period Beast of a system to to get get going like massive Services was always problematic biggest thing we worried about was you know things going down um you know bad patches going out through the system which happened even back then how does Tech grid kind of combat that as a question with that notice well so so I I still think there's a place for a lot of the the systems but I think I think
there's like two kind of approaches to solve the problem like one approach is kind of the the early uh 2000s approach which was allinone software hey I'm gonna build an allinone uh platform okay the second kind of approach is what I would say kind of the more modern approach and that's more kind of the platform approach and that's more like Shopify and and I love Shopify as a platform because what they've said is hey we're going to build this core functionality and it's it's for people
that are reselling or or Merchants that are selling to to customers and they built this platform that has core functions hey it's got an order management system it's got an e-commerce store it's got all and that's what Shopify provides that's what you buy Shopify but then there's 10,000 apps in the App Store and you can customize it however you want and what's so amazing about that is you can you know the average Shopify um store has 20 apps you know ins or at least that's what a um an
industry guy told me um that's amazing because they've made it they've made all this interoperable and that kind of like just platform thinking doesn't I believe is not existent in in the IT industry which is kind of funny because we're the industry selling technology to businesses yeah and I totally get the the faux power at the front in terms of you know correcting me on the platform because it's true right like I think of a platform as a as a bit of a platform framework but the platform there I think
like and again I've been in China recently I'm looking at we at WeChat I'm looking at alipay alipay you log into and you've got uh you've got DD the ride sharing app in you've got all these apps that you can use within the within what is the app but the app is actually the platform then the developers the companies can basically go in there and almost consume it like an operating system platform to do what they want to do out of it again Mark depending on at what level you you act so that's Tech
that's Tech Grid's kind of Mantra there right in terms of when you're looking at all the stacks that you you've got available there in the marketplace a company might use five of those and you're just basically bringing it all together into one platform to use but not just from a consumption perspective it's the afterthought of um billing and metrics and everything afterwards at the same time yeah so the our world is run by platforms I mean like if you look at technology and you know it's sold on
platforms with AWS and Azure and then if you look at like e-commerce you know obviously Amazon and and whatever and these are Big these big platforms and you say well what enables a platform well the first thing that is it's digital connectivity and so if you look at the the letter that Bezos sent out to the employees at Amazon you know I think it was 15 or 20 years ago and he basically said we're going to create digital connectivity between all of our systems and if you don't do it you're fired right and I think the industry
like you and I as as the industry you know Executives should say this is the requirement for the industry and there's this kind of inertia in the industry where the different o are saying I don't want to I'm only gonna I'm going to build my own systems I'm only going to talk to my my own thing and and that's not that's not the way of the future that's not that's not the way that it's going to happen like we have to start connecting together and why we have to start connecting together it's for the
customers if if you buy your toilet paper on Amazon you know a two-hour window when it's going to arrive at your house but if you buy technology from an MSP or a VAR you have no idea where your crap is like we've got to solve that problem that's that's really interesting good analogy I like the toilet paper and crap um coming together as well I think you did that I think you did that accidentally I didn't do that consciously May was it it worked it worked beautifully though it worked beautifully but um but yeah I guess when
I think about you know as a business and you know especially when I was running infrastructure platforms and it was all about people would buy a chunk of of resource off us they'd build a VM the VM would be for a specific purpose and they would use that VM for a specific purpose and that would be just that very siloed ways of thinking um but that's been the way that businesses have only known to run you know for forever right um but the proliferation of as a service all of a sudden now I can go out and instead of
I don't know it kind of is it's not great for the for the VM or the infrastructure company but it is what it is we're moving forward there's a reason why I got out of the business but um you know I I think now people are you know been going just go okay well that VM you know that cost me x amount dollars per month it got me this but I was only using a small chunk of it and I've got all this wastage I don't really know that I've got that wastage but I have and it's just not good then I'm just
going to go buy um bit of this and a bit of that and that's going to do it and it's going to cost me you know one1 of the cost right um but because of that we've seen a distribution of of systems and I think this is the problem that you're trying to trying to solve right is that if that's going to be the way there has to be something from a customer perspective from a business perspective that can be manag in one simple solution yes well so let's you're very technical and most of our most of
the um people probably listen to Geeks like us right um but the business customer is not a geek like they own a company they don't know like you know about data laks and you know hypervisors and they don't care um they just want it to work and what we have to do as an industry is we have to start Building Solutions based on what the customer wants so if you go to AWS and Azure and you look at the platforms they have 200 individual products and services that you can consume to replace the things that you're just talking
about and we have to take like all the things that we're selling and start selling oh this is an access point or whatever and sell a network hey I'm I'm gonna here's a network and it's 10 grand a month for your you know building or whatever and that's what customers want according to all the you know industry uh Geeks and that but the problem with doing that is I've got to buy all these things from all these different providers ERS combine them all together and then add my own stuff and package
that into the customer and that is super complicated and then if that infrastructure is in a building where I might put half a million dollars and stuff in there who's going to pay for that there's all these big problems that have to be solved that we're tackling can I can I ask you know from the point of view of who who you're because ultimately technology exists to to make us more efficient right yeah um and in in that like we're seeing with the AI boom today like a lot of worry about people's jobs going you know they
took our jobs type of thing quite South qu South Park um where where are you where do you sit because I I traditionally msps would would pay a bunch of people and people would make themselves pretty valuable within an MSP to to do what you just said yeah yeah well so um this is a probably whole podcast in of itself but but if you look at um the reason that people are doing things and what's consuming their time a lot of those individual tasks are because we do not have connectivity between systems and so you're doing manual things from
one system to another a simple example is hey if I want to go sell a million dollars in infrastructure in a building I've got to go to a system with you know HP or Cisco design the configuration and then I gotta email that to somebody and then they gotta email it around and then email me a quote like that takes time and that's you know Antiquated and dumb uh and a lot of waste in that if you can just connect stuff together and digitize that process then you can turn quotes around to the customer and then that
person that's doing quoting is not doing manual entry they're actually working on pricing and margins and things like that and so once you the it's what's really funny is everybody's talking about automation but the first step before you can do automation is you must have a digital workflow once you digitize a workflow now you can look at it and go that's why don't we just automate that why don't we automate the bill of materials creation like that would be really cool and then
you can use llms and things like that and apply it into that workflow yeah yeah absolutely because I mean you know when again back to you know working on control panels initially and what you guys would have been doing in the early days is you would have looked at the manual process to do something with with the back end you would have written it down you would have worked it out you would have worked out the API calls the P whatever it would have been in and then you would have it given it to the devs and going okay here's the the
workflow now let's take that automat and make it repeatable and you know every time it's going to be the same outcome type of thing that's that's the whole process right and I think we've just become that's just grown to normal business practice today AI is obviously brought that forward as well from the point of view of the that's that's kind of doing a lot of automation now do you trust it or not that's another story but I think fundamentally when I look at what Microsoft is doing with their co-
messaging um to me it's all about you know efficiencies yes but then back to your point what you said about making someone's life more more able to do do something more impactful and valuable to the business like how do we how do we squeeze more out of the the people to be more valuable to the business and not have them waste their time I think that's kind of I think what you said there is interesting too because you said to the business and and and so if you look at a lot of the AI models and stuff that are being built well they're
being built to write code which is cool or they're being built to automate let's say Network management which is also cool but there's not really tools being written to automate the business processes because there's no digital workflows so if you went to inside an Amazon as an example well they don't make manual orders and stuff with vendors it's all just automated it just happens they they're not creating an invoice manually every time when a customer places an order that's all
automated and so once you you tie these things together then the automation really applies and we are applying it to the business of running the company not the business of running the network yeah absolutely all right hey time's gone very quick I've got a couple more questions just before we finish off right but yeah so real really exciting and I think it kind of it's a bit it's a bit of a sort of foreshadow but also a complete Loop in terms of the the funding you secured from bini Capital now for those that don't know bini cap
was based on basically connectwise founder right who I think he what's his name again yep so founder in I think 1982 or something of connectwise holy moly that I can't believe that um and I think he sold out and had a 5year no compete clause came out bam comes in and goes I see value in Tech grid like what what was the value that he saw in Tech Rd to give you guys you know that sort of boost well kind of the crazy thing is I met Arne uh at an event where he was a speaker and um he was talking about modernizing the Tex act for the msps and
he's been talked about this since he left the industry five years ago and he was really the guy I would argue that like the grandfather we call him the Godfather of the industry because he had like one of the first msps used his knowledge and then built connectwise and said hey if I'm G to scale the business I need to build this software and then he sold that software to other msps and split it off and he still has an MSP business by the way and then he had connectwise and then sold that to Tom Bravo 2019 and so when I met him um I
assumed that he was just kind of like checked out and on a yacht somewhere because he made a lot of money everybody knows that um and he was really engaged and when I showed him the the platform he was like you know we need to do this together um and so he's our major backing so we we had essentially bootstrapped it for the most part we had a handful of you SE investors with which is ourselves um and some other CEOs and then Arie came in and and joined the board so he's uh he's awesome yeah that's that's good and what
does that enable you guys to do like what's what's the future looking like now I mean you know what what's the platform look like in in 12 months 24 you know what's the plans well we're investing heavily in in Building Products so where what are we doing with all the money we're building uh we're building and we're onboarding a lot of uh uh technology service providers and they're giving us feedback on what we're building and so it's been cool because it's our vision combine with all of our
you know our customers with the tsps so we're building for them and so uh but there's a lot of things around um automation that are coming out that we'll be able to do and so our first focus is digitizing the entire sell and fulfill process uh for the for a solution and then uh and then we're going to be doing a lot of automation on top of that and then of course the customer experience I think is something that needs to be uh fixed and if you you look at a a billion dollar uh you know mpm VAR a lot
of times it's still not very good so that's those are the problems that we're tackling yeah and and looking just to sort of put a bow on that as well the UI the user experience looks topnotch in terms of the platform and how it's design so yeah I think that's a big that's a big part of it right like understanding that to make make the ux easy that's like 9/10 of the way there can if you can crack that then you're going a long way to winning that tsp so and just very quickly like what what
what would you say to any MSP that's out there that hasn't quite gone to a tsp sort of thought process what would you say to them to basically say hey here's here's a here's a new thing for you to look at well I just think that they have to sell technology as a service I mean there you have to sell a solution everybody's saying that um in order to do that you've got to have the platform to be able to build that and obviously that's the the problem that we're trying to solve but I think if you can solve it
and go into your customer I think you have a big competitive Advantage absolutely that's awesome hey this has been great um we didn't actually talk about the fact that you you're also a CPO as well we were going to talk about you know the fact that you're you're very Hands-On guy so just just to just to finalize off yeah you know what does it mean to be a CEO and CPO in a in a minute well I think when you're sometimes you're CEO and your div vision and all that kind of stuff and and I actually carry the CPO role as
well Chief product officer as well um and I think that's really important to do what we're doing because you'd have to have really this business process knowledge to be able to you know build these kind of digital workflows but it's a very different it's a very difficult uh job uh you know um and uh but I think very very important for uh for what we're building awesome well hey thanks a lot for that I mean Tech GD seemed like a really interesting company I think you've got you got a great opportunity
capture a huge market right because the the MSP Market it's not going to change like you said it's just growing more and more we're consuming more and more products more services as a service and we need to make it simpler and more efficient that's what we're getting at business outcome is is what's important here so really looking forward to seeing what you guys are doing in the future thanks for being on great things with great Tech episode 88 thanks Anthony
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