Pax8 Roadshow Special - Gene Kim

SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we dive deep into mysteries and secrets of partnerships on the channel. I'm coming at you from PacSite Beyond, and I'm happy to sit down with Gene Kim from Absolute Security. Gene, how are you today? SPEAKER_01: I'm very well, thank you.

SPEAKER_00: Amazing. Well, this is going to be a bit of a short form podcast. We get to the meat very quickly. First of all, could you give us a quick introduction about yourself and your background?

SPEAKER_01: Sure. My name is Gene Kim, Vice President of the Managed Service Provider Program at Absolute Security. I spent most of my career working in the channel, helping partners develop go-to-market strategies and driving value for their end customers. And I really love the channel and have uh a special relationship because of my background as a service provider and a reseller in a previous life.

And so I intimately know the struggles and the trials that partners go through and like to say that I'm able to apply many of those learnings into the program that we've developed and our go-to-market motion. I think that MSP sit in a strategic area of the business, uh, at the intersection of technology and trying to drive business outcomes for their customers. And so it's incredibly important to me that they're armed with the appropriate capabilities and absolute security. We think we're bringing that with our focus on resilience, not just typical cybersecurity, but the ability for MSPs to ensure that they are helping their customers meet the overall objectives in terms of delivering services, which is ultimately business continuity and business outcomes.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense. And I think I hear some very interesting things here. Like on the one hand, obviously you're talking about having the solution that fits what outcome these companies are trying to achieve. But on the other hand, you you've seen both sides of the coin.

So you can actually immerse yourself into what they're looking for. So I think that's a really a big value add. Um, talking about Absolutes MSP motion, you're basically building it from the ground up, which sounds like a pretty fascinating endeavor. Um, what would you identify as your biggest challenges and your biggest wins in this process so far?

SPEAKER_01: I think that it certainly is exciting to be able to build a program from the ground up. We have a long-standing background in enterprise technology. Uh, and so we're very well known in the largest enterprises in the world. Uh, 40% of the Fortune 500 use us, um, 80% of the top airlines, almost 100% of the largest state and local governments in the country use us.

And that's for a very good reason because if our technology is proven at an enterprise class strength, and we're bringing this capability into the managed service provider community. The biggest challenge to your point is the lack of awareness and the and the knowledge of our capabilities in this market. And so we've uh embarked on uh many initiatives to raise that high level of awareness uh in terms of capability and the business value that we drive. And then that coupled with uh the go-to-market motion, the street level engagement that we have, I think uh is significantly increasing that visibility that we have and understanding of our value proposition.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Well, I I thought I find it so fascinating because um you talk about awareness and visibility, even though uh your software is on hundreds of millions of devices, but obviously mostly mostly enterprise. So, what's the trick to then, besides the visibility area, move into that MSP uh motion at scale? SPEAKER_01: Well, you're absolutely correct in that Absolute over the last 30 years has worked with strategic OEM partners to be embedded in the BIOS and the firmware over 600 million devices that are already deployed in the world.

So all the devices that MSPs are currently deploying in their fleets from Dell, Lenovo, HP, and 25 other manufacturers have our technology built in as a standard component, right? And it's just about activating that and utilizing that to its potential that it's all about. So for us, you know, that awareness uh is absolutely key in the knowledge uh of the capabilities that we have around how we can enhance the value of their go-to-market motion, most, but most importantly, drive down their service delivery costs and ultimately protect their customers in a way that they haven't thought of before, which is that that outcome oriented toward business continuity, because it's not a question of if something's gonna happen eventually, right?

Because cybersecurity is all about prevention and risk mitigation. Uh, but I think we've all seen with the acceleration of AI adoption and especially with that actors, uh, and what they're doing with it, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when, and when that does occur, and customers don't ask how much malware has been draw uh you know blocked or how many email attachments were you know flagged. It's all about what they're going to do to get that business back up and running as soon as possible, right?

It's the when will you have me back up and operational? And that's the question that MSP sub partner with Absolute can answer succinctly and directly. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's a great question to be able to answer. And I think uh uh like dovetailing from that, um, you've mentioned that Absolute has some unique capabilities in the in the AI era.

Can you speak to that a little bit? What are you doing with AI and against AI in that sense? Sure. SPEAKER_01: So with AI, the the notion of automation and orchestration and being able to use that chat layer to uh interface across a variety of different tools is dependent on the notion that those tools are up and available.

Because we are tethered within the hardware and we make applications resilient at a scale that hasn't existed previously, i.e., we're gonna make the tools that MSPs use day in, day out, their RMM, their EDR, their encryption, their backup services, all resilient. So automated self-healing, automated reinstallation, because we know and we're not guessing that agent drift happens.

Right. And when those tools aren't available for managed service providers to use uh at scale with it utilizing their AI strategy as that chat layer, it the entire framework breaks, right? And so we see ourselves as a foundational component of any MSP's AI strategy because we're the enabler of the capabilities of the tools that they're gonna leverage as they implement AI within their businesses and in their customers' businesses. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that that answer fits in so well in the whole managed intelligence provider concept that obviously, you know, PAX8 has been pushing hard and it makes a lot of sense.

Um, so when you look at what you offer and the evolution of MSPs to managed intelligence providers, um, how do you envision MIPs in an ideal world and what do you need to do to get there? SPEAKER_01: I think that first uh the evolution is the likely next stage of delivering managed services into being uh managed intelligence providers, right? MIPs ultimately are going to take all the information and focus on the business outcomes and focus on the automation, orchestration, and really the self-running of these systems so that MSPs can deliver a higher level of service in other value-added areas.

And so it's essential that that core foundational layer of technologies that they're using are always up and running and are resilient. And that's what Absolute brings to the table, not just in the context of ensuring the tools are available, but also that in a downtime scenario, in some sort of cyber incident or, you know, God forbid what happened a few years ago with a crowd strike incident, that organizations can recover very quickly and they have that capability within their tool set to see across your entire stack, right?

And this goes to the MIP orientation, right? So the intelligent to see what's broken or what's not, ideally, it's all fixed automatically, yeah, right. And then to be able to deliver the services around that. So for me, it's about understanding the data governance, you know, what systems are being affected and having all of that information tied into an intelligence platform that service providers can leverage to amplify the value that they're driving and lower their overall service delivery costs.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And the one challenge I see there is that for MSPs, it also means almost a step change in thinking and propositioning, right? Because if you're talking about business continuity and end customer outcomes, there's a different narrative around this than normal MSP solutions, right? So how do you empower MSPs to drive that message home as opposed to just talking about features and functions all the time?

SPEAKER_01: I I think ultimately it comes down to this business discussion that MSPs aren't typically having with their end customers. Um what I'll cite as an example is what is the end effect to a customer when there is an outage on a particular device or set of devices? What's the impact to the business? And then they'd be able to quantify that in pure dollar terms, right?

And so for many organizations, an outage might mean going out of business. It's certainly an existential threat for many organizations if there is an outage, especially in the small to medium business size category. But for those organizations that want to position themselves, understanding the downstream impacts of an outage and how you can help be a true business partner to ensure that those outcomes are on a positive basis, um, is the way that organizations, as far as I believe, MSPs will differentiate themselves and capture much more mind share in business for those security-minded organizations.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And I I think it's actually a really interesting hook for MSPs as well. I mean, I I come from the process industry, and all the discussions I had were about downtime. It was, hey, how much is our solution going to save you if you're down for an hour?

What does that cost you? It cost me$2 million on a chemical facility, right? To be down in an hour. And a solution that pulls that down to 30 minutes or 10 minutes or five minutes or whatever using these AI tools can make a massive difference, not just in business continuity, but also just in money gained.

Exactly. Um, and I think that's just a fascinating proposition. Um, Jean, do you have any final thoughts or comments that you want to share with the audience today at PEX IBS? SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that uh the orientation around cybersecurity will not be changing, right?

That is an essential component of the stack and the service offerings that that MSBs are providing. But if you add on the story around or resilience and the capabilities and value associated with that, I think that that uptake level within their customer base and the ability for them to differentiate their organization and capture new business will be vastly accelerated. Right. And so focusing on both sides of both prevention and recovery and resilience is a winning formula for them.

Uh at absolute, the partner program is very geared toward service providers. We've learned a lot over the last year as we put this program together uh with no contracts, with consumption-based billing. Uh, we've designed it so that it maps to the economics of the uh of MSPs and how they go to market. I think we have an amazing program and looking forward to engaging with everyone here at CACSA.

SPEAKER_00: Fantastic. Gene Kim, Absolute Security. Thank you so much for being here. And uh yeah, looking forward to what you get up to next.

SPEAKER_01: All right, thank you for having me. Awesome. Thank you.