Absolute Security Joins Pax8 (EP 1039)

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Here with another episode of the IT Business podcast coming at you from Salt Lake city, home of PAX8 beyond 2026, continuing with day three coverage here from Radio Row. And it may sound a little echoey because there's not a lot of people here yet. So we're starting off early, but having a great time. It'll start to get a little busy. You'll see some people, well, you won't see them walking by because the cameras are pointing the wrong way, but you'll see me watching people and stuff. Right now I'm joined by Gene Kim. He is the Vice president of Managed service providers at Absolute Security, focused on helping MSPs deliver endpoint resilience and zero trust outcomes as a service delivery. Gene, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me, Marv. It's a pleasure.

Speaker B: All right. How have you been enjoying your time here?

Speaker A: It's been wonderful. I love Salt Lake City. In a past life, I used to come up here on a regular basis for other technology organizations.

Speaker B: Oh, I thought you're going to say to ski.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, to ski, of course. Really, the outdoor activities here are amazing and I have a number of friends that live in the area, so came up early, spent a little bit of time with them and enjoyed the outdoors and conference was an added benefit.

Speaker B: Very nice, very nice. Uh, what other conferences used to be here or are here?

Speaker A: Oh, other technology organizations that I did business with in the past. So, uh, Avanti into, uh, Landesk in the past was a major partner of ours. In a previous life, I was a reseller, Value Added Solution, uh, provider and a managed service provider as well. Okay. And so I come from the channel and know the trials and tribulations of channel partners and service providers. And so it's, uh, it's nice to come back and visit some of my old stomping grounds and be here at the PAX Aid conference.

Speaker B: Okay, So I heard that, let's see, the hotel is new, right. But the convention center is not new and they're going to start to redo it. Was this here when you were coming before?

Speaker A: You know, I always spent time down in Provo with technology companies were rarely coming into, into the city, just, you know, to the headquarters of offices that I went.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, you know, I, I always had heard of Provo and thought, oh, if I ever get there, I'll need to go there. Of course I'm here and haven't had a chance to go, go to Provo, which is also the home of. What is that comedy the dry bar comedy series. Uh, that they do. I digress.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not, I'm not familiar.

Speaker B: Okay, so Absolute Security. So first of all, we should um, recognize that the name used to be just Absolute.

Speaker A: That's correct.

Speaker B: And then you've got acquired in 2024.

Speaker A: No, we just changed our name. Changed the name, changed the name. And before even we were called Absolute, we were formerly known as Computrace.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So they are very well known. We were very well known for being The Find My PC folks, the LoJack of PCs before Find My iPhone was a thing. Right. And you know, back in the, in the early 2000s, uh, when a PC cost and a laptop cost especially a lot of money, three, four, five thousand dollars. And with Ramageddon happening right now, those prices going right back, the loss of a PC was a significant asset loss for an organization. And so our founders created a software layer that would help organizations locate those devices. Uh, but there's a serious flaw with that in that software can be removed. And so over the course of the last 30 years, we developed these relationships with the OEM PC manufacturers to be embedded within the firmware of hundreds of millions of devices. So currently we have over 600 million devices deployed globally from Dell, Lenovo, HP and 25 other PC manufacturers as standard equipment. So any business level device that's being deployed today that the MSPs have within their fleets have our technology already embedded in the firmware.

Speaker B: All right. I could have used this a while back. We just had uh, one of my clients, uh, they, they've been using remote workers, you know.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: After Covid, everybody wants to be remote, but they hired a couple of people out of state. So we had to send them equipment. And then like months later we had to get the equipment back and we just had to rely on, you know, the honesty of the person to put it in a box and send it back and stuff. So that was interesting. So I did not know that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So the ability to track and trace geofence and geolocated device has been our traditional bread and butter in the past. But because of our unique position within the hardware of these devices, our leadership saw that there was a tremendous opportunity to do a whole bunch of other things to bolster the posture of these devices both in the context of security and manageability. And so uh, because of this position in the hardware, we have this unbreakable tether into the software layer independent of the operating system. So for MSPs, what this means is the ability to make their application Stack the very tools that they're reliant on. Resilient, right. Self healing, self installing. Because at the end of the day MSPs are completely reliant on their tool

Speaker B: stack that control layer and the agent that they deployed and all of that. So this is, this is like OS embedded, bios, MDM type product.

Speaker A: Uh, our technology is in the firmware.

Speaker B: In the firmware, right.

Speaker A: And then we have a software layer that activates that firmware agent and then we tether through our agent that's now installed to support the edr.

Speaker B: I was going to say, you guys saw the endpoint protection is now a

Speaker A: part of it encryption. All the tools that MSPs are already using today, whether it be Sentinel One, whether it be Datto, whether it be BitLocker 90 applications in all, uh, we are now going to support and reduce the cost of supporting because we understand very clearly that agent drift is a major challenge for MSPs. And when those agents go offline, they're not able to meet their SLAs, the cost of service delivery goes up and ultimately they're not able to deliver services in a cost effective manner if they're having to fix agents and creating tickets and you know that uh, you know that vicious cycle. Right. And so we eliminate that entire thread of support and reduce that operational service delivery.

Speaker B: Now the efficiency I get in terms of deployment, you had mentioned that this is, you know, done at the manufacturer level. Now is this something that can actually be sent remote to users and MSPs can unlock it without having to do the remote call, give me time, give me access to your system, that sort of stuff?

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. It would almost be self defeating if we had to do that.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, so we come standard from the major manufacturers. The agent can be pushed via uh, GPO or using Intune or using their RMM M solution. So very easy to install and deploy.

Speaker B: Okay, nice. Now I understand that there's a big announcement that you guys were doing here at PAX8. Partnering within the marketplace or what's.

Speaker A: Yeah, we are launching on the PAX8 marketplace and we are currently in pilot testing now, so we should be available within two weeks.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: We're super excited about joining the PAX8 community, uh, because it really is about building trust and having a community to work towards. And PAX8 arguably has the most powerful and strongest ecosystem and partner organization, uh, from a distribution perspective. Right. And so the PAX A community is very important to us. It's built on trust, it's built on support, it's built on enablement. And uh, we're very excited about coming to market with PAX8 and reaching those organizations that are really critical to supporting the majority of the world's businesses.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You know, last year I was in Barcelona giving a presentation and did some research right around MSPS and how they're serving and the types of serving that they're doing to their end customers. And just statistically I think it's 99.7% of all businesses worldwide are small to medium sized businesses. Right. That's 500 employees or less here in the United States, 250 or less in Europe. But MSPs are their strategic business partners. And so if we want to be relevant in the managed service space, uh, we have to be a part of the msp community. And PAX8 is uh, a juggernaut in this.

Speaker B: Okay. So I was going to ask you, you know, the focus on MSPS is great, but your stuff can be used for, you know, enterprise businesses as well. Right. So it's what made you want to, you know, get into MSPS as well.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: As opposed to just going out and just going after businesses directly.

Speaker A: Yeah. So our traditional business to your point, has been in enterprise space. We're very well known in the enterprise world. 40% of the Fortune 500 have us in their stack. 80% of the top, uh, airlines in the world, 95% of every state and local government in the country have us because of our capability and technology and resilience solutions. And so coming down into the managed service provider community was important to us because again, those largest organizations, uh, the biggest healthcare organization in the world, our customer, the biggest airlines that are our customers, they are a very small segment of the market.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: As mentioned, 99 plus percent of the world's businesses are small to medium sized businesses and they are wholly served by managed service providers. And so it was strategic to absolute to enter this business and make sure that we are tapping into the partnerships and the business relationships that managed service providers already have and to be able to leverage their trust and relationship to help build their business and support their end customers.

Speaker B: And I know there's a ton of upside. There's a lot of great things that you've seen in the space here. Any hiccups that we uh, as MSPs present to you.

Speaker A: I think that if I were to say the biggest challenge is to get MSPs to think about security differently. Because traditionally MSPs have been very much focused on the preventative aspects of security. Right. It's the risk mitigation, it's the edr, it's the MDR services, it's the encryption, it's the patch and vulnerability management. Uh, but when you look at it today with AI and the tools that are available to really make any moderately skilled cyber criminal incredibly powerful, uh, in terms of the capability that they have, in terms of the scale that they have, it's really not a question of if something's going to happen to, uh, one of the. To a customer. It's about when and when that occurs. How are MSPs addressing that disruption to the business? Right. And so it's about changing the conversation around a, uh, service provider and providing IT services to being a true business partner and thinking about it holistically in the context of business continuity.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And so getting partners to think about security holistically, not just about prevention, but also about the disruption that will occur when an incident does happen. Right. Uh, and approach it from that, I think will benefit them in terms of growing their business, but also ultimately help their customer. Because at the end of the day, customers don't care about how much malware got blocked. They don't care about the email attachments that got blocked that, you know, had malware in it. Right. It's about uptime. It's about ensuring that their organizations are able to conduct business, uh, through whatever disruptive activity occurs. And that's where absolute shines and our ability to help organizations recover from an outage because of our place within the firmware.

Speaker B: Let me ask this question. Uh, I had a conversation last week with, uh, nmsp, and they are worried about all the attacks that are now happening on msp, specifically because of the data that we hold, the access that we hold, and the fact that we're, you know, with open, you know, APIs, with AI, you know, we're giving access through AI into our stack. Where does that sit? With absolute security.

Speaker A: Uh-huh.

Speaker B: Do you guys have a fear of a bad actor, you know, pretending to be an MSP and then, you know, wanting to get access and do stuff?

Speaker A: You know, that's always a major concern. And the things that have been occurring most recently, right, with the Stryker incident, and they leveraged intune, right. The very tools that a partner or corporate organization might use to manage their devices was used against them. Right. To wipe out tens of thousands of devices, literally format that down to, you know, bare metal. So these things do occur. And there are instances of RMM providers being breached and having. And I won't name names, but, uh, it does occur and it is a true risk. Because of our application resilience capability and healing capability, uh, we're able to help mitigate that by ensuring that the very, that those tool sets have integrity, right? That they are checking in and they are up to all the services are running on those devices. Inevitably if credentials are breached, right? There is very little that can be done if things such as, uh, tying access to static IP addresses, for instance. Right. But even IP addresses can be spoofed. Right? And so there are, it's a very challenging situation. But because of our ability to uh, maintain accredited heal and self install the application stack, we are able to significantly mitigate that risk for msps. In addition to that, you know, when bad things are being initiated, one of the first things a bad actor does is disable the EDR tool, right? Because that really allows for lateral movement, it allows for the exfiltration of data. And so because of our healing capabilities, even if something is manually turned off, we're going to automatically turn that back on. And so from a control layer perspective, we support the security and the manageability of MSPS through that platform. And when that does occur, inevitably systems will become unavailable because of our place in the firmware, we're able to recover that device without that operating system being available. And no one else in the market can say that we're not reliant on the operating system layer. Uh, and if you think about it, every single tool that you use today is.

Speaker B: Well, I was going to ask you because that's how we, that's how we operate. We have to install and work with Windows or Mac or whatever. If you're looking at it as a firmware embedded system, how does that work with the tools that we're accustomed to? How do we change our thinking to work with Absolute security? I mean, do we tie our tools to absolute. Does Absolute have its own suite that we can now use to offset stuff?

Speaker A: So we have a full platform and we have a lot of tools available. Many of the things that we offer do overlap with some of the tools that MSPS have today. Right? We have patch vulnerability management, configuration management, product with full workflow engine behind it, basic inventory information. Those things are all available within our platform. But our focus is here at PAX8. Uh, and for MSPS is to provide a solution that really is not being addressed by any other vendor because of our unique capabilities and relationships, uh, within the hardware. And so the approach really is to look at as white space, right? This is something that you're not addressing today. And Something that we solely are able to provide because of our unique position with uh, the PC OEM manufacturers and the relationship that we've built over time.

Speaker B: Sorry, just popped into my head as well. Can we get better inventory out of your platform than with some of the tools that we use to scrape?

Speaker A: You know, so I want to brag, but uh, because we are hardware embedded. Right. And the way that we collect inventory is slightly different.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Than others. I don't speak badly about some tools, but there are tools out there that create ghost entries, duplicate entries. Right. That appear into your database and well,

Speaker B: I mean there's a lot of generic returns in terms of, you know, yes, we'll get the OS information, we may get the Windows, you know, install key or whatever, but in terms of, you know, the video stuff, the memory stuff, you know, a lot of that, we get generic information back as well. Some tools would give us, here's the manufacturer, here's the, you know, that sort of stuff. So in terms of that, you know, how much more in depth can we give with inventory?

Speaker A: I think it's significantly more. And I'll give you an example of how one of my partners use it. So one of my partners out of Europe, they have just over 45,000 devices under management and they sell their service as part of an uh, overall asset management initiative. But their customers all have intune already in place. Right. Uh, but what they found is that intune, they use our solution as a gut check, as a reference check. And because only one device can exist within our database, because we are tied to that physical hardware, and then the depth of data that we get is so much greater, all of the asset information is populated by our platform in terms of inventory. So that's something that you get with any of our um, of our products, whether it be a just a heal or resilience application. Resilience or a rehydrate capability or any of our tools, that basic asset management inventory capability you're going to get anyway. But we have rebuilt our products to meet MSPs where they're at. Right. Because again we came to the table from corporate, large, uh, enterprise and they always want to eliminate more tools, eliminate more tools. And there's this feature sprawl, if it

Speaker B: were, we know all about that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So everyone has this feature sprawl. But when we come to the MSP community, they're like, hey, I already have a tool for this, I already have a tool for that. And so we've productized and packaged the solution to both meet The MSPS in terms of capability but also in terms of the economics. Right. So no contracts, billing in arrears on a full consumption basis. Right. Pay for what you use. Right. So very simple in terms of our go to market motion around the how it's licensed. Right. There are tiers, there's volume discounts and then everything else from uh, enablement perspective, we're going to be here to backstop PAX8 and the partners.

Speaker B: All right. What about uh, role based access? If I have co managed clients, can I give them access to just their tenant inside of that?

Speaker A: Yes, you can.

Speaker B: Nice. Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we like to think we've thought of everything, but I know we have a lot to learn. I've been in the channel for the majority of my career. Managed service providers have a special place in my heart.

Speaker B: I thought you were going to say we were special people. Some of us are.

Speaker A: Just because I used to be one. Right. And I understand the challenges, uh, and the service delivery and the cost structures. And so it's especially important to me that not only am I guiding the program, but the product and its feature and capabilities to meet MSPs on how they conduct business. And so I'll tell a short story when way back in the day, many years ago, I was up late at night, come home from a business trip and I'm watching TV and I flip on the television and it was, I think it was Saturday Night Live. But there are three commercials back to back. Right, right. And all three commercials were from our customers. Right. Uh, it was especially gratifying. But what was really gratifying was that next day I was speaking with a neighbor across the street and he was having a problem with his mortgage and he was talking about the service he was getting and the company he was using. And incidentally, it was one of my customers. Right. And so it was really great to hear about how the systems that we put in place that we support are supporting him in getting the answers that he needs, uh, to get his mortgage and you know, and that ties to his financials and everything. So I understand the impact that MSPs make to individuals like personally. And so it's really very important to me that we're supporting partners in a way that's conducive to them supporting their customers in uh, the most credible, uh, and efficient manner.

Speaker B: Okay. So from your journey now of being a part of an msp, going through this journey as a vendor, you're here launching at PAX8. I'm sure you guys have had some, you Know, some goals you put out there and everything. If we come back next year, you're here. How do you think things will look? What do you, what do you expect out of your partnership with PAX8?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that given the reception that we've gotten here at PAX8 when we articulated the value proposition, the message resonates. Right. Because these are real challenges that MSPs are facing today, both in the context of that agent drift, but also in recovery, when a system goes down not having to roll a truck or physically take possession of device to fully restore an end user. To be able to do it in minutes is better than to be able to do it in hours or days. Right. And so next year, you know, my hope is that we'll be top tier partner here and that we'll have 100 plus partners onboarded through the Paxig ecosystem and that we will be firmly integrated into the community that PAX8 has built. Right. And driving business value for partners.

Speaker B: Okay, well, uh, Jeanne was nice to meet you. Nice to hear about absolute security. Wish you luck with the launch. Hopefully it'll be no hiccups in two weeks and everybody will be able to go full force. And then, uh, look forward to seeing what happens in the next year. Seeing you in San Diego.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Did I make that trip?

Speaker A: Yes. So I'm in Southern California. Oh. It's just a drive down the freeway. Sometimes it'll take 30 minutes, sometimes it'll take two hours.

Speaker B: But kind of like me in Miami where people ask, uh, why I don't go to Miami. I said, I don't know. If it takes two hours, it ain't worth it.

Speaker A: No, I'm really excited. I love San Diego, so it's going to be a great thing. And then I will be in, uh, PAX8. Oh. As well.

Speaker B: Okay. I won't be there. I can't take off that much time. But, uh, I look forward to seeing you again. And again, thank you for being on the show here and, uh, we'll chat soon.

Speaker A: All right. Thank you for having me, sir. It's a pleasure.

Speaker B: All right, folks, that's it. We'll be back with a couple more interviews here at Patsapion in Salt Lake City. See you soon. Hola.