[11] – Interview with Joseph Landes, CRO at Nerdio

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact Podcasts. With your hosts, me, Chris Tim, and my co-host Rayanne Buccianico, who for today's session I'm calling Kermit the Frog.

Rayanne, would you like to introduce yourself and why I'm calling you Kermit? Hey Chris, how are you doing? So I probably sound a little froggy because I have the flu and I'm home sick today. But otherwise, I'm still happy to be here and I'm doing great. That's good.

You're a trooper, Rayanne, for being in bed and still recording this podcast. So I hope we have a lot of fun in it and I'm sure our listeners will appreciate you being on. So we're a PSA independent series with a corresponding YouTube channel and we help MSPs worldwide on all things PSA. You can get your questions answered by Rayanne and myself and learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing your profitability and increasing efficiency in your MSP. We have a phone in where folks can call us with their questions or problems and we will attempt to answer them.

You can also get in touch with us on any of the socials, so Facebook, LinkedIn groups, Twitter, and we'll put all of these links to the show notes. So today we have a very special guest with us, Joseph Landis from Nerdio. So hello Joseph, would you like to just introduce yourself? Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me.

I've heard so many great things about your podcast and it's great to finally have the opportunity to join. As you said, my name is Joseph Landis and I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Nerdio where our mission is to empower MSPs to build successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure. I came to Nerdio about 15 months ago after spending 23 years working at Microsoft. I was pretty deep in the Azure ecosystem there and when I had the chance to join Nerdio and really spend every day living and breathing Azure and really helping MSPs understand the benefits of moving to the cloud, I jumped at the opportunity and it's been a great pleasure to be here every day. That's really good.

It's good to have a legend on the call with us today, somebody from Microsoft. And to all our UK guests, let me just translate, Azure is actually Azure. So I thought I would just translate that. So I'm just kidding. Azure.

Azure, right? Exactly. So today we're going to talk about using Azure as an MSP and Joseph, I've got a few questions for you. So, you know, if I could just kick off with the first one. So a number of our listeners are using PSA tools as an on-prem solution.

So what would be the advantages of them moving into the cloud and what benefits would it give them? And how would you kind of recommend that somebody took an on-prem solution and moved it into the cloud? Well, I guess I would say everything's better in the cloud. You know, whether you're a consumer using your email in the cloud, storing files in the cloud, or you're a small business or a medium-sized business that maybe has just moved to Office 365 or Microsoft 365, or even conducting this podcast like we're doing using unified communications with Zoom, everything is just better in the cloud. And I think the biggest misnomer when you speak to MSPs is they say, you know what, the cloud is something that's coming.

In fact, the cloud's not coming, the cloud's already here for MSPs. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that more than 80% of MSPs around the world have already made the move or are starting to make the move to Office 365. Now, of course, to run a successful MSP business, one of the foundational elements is, of course, your PSA tool stack and your RMM tool stack. And we certainly at Nerdio, although we're not selling RMM or PSAs, we, of course, are operating in the MSP space where everyone has an RMM or PSA tool stack. And we certainly recommend that they migrate it to Azure.

Really, I'd say for two reasons. I think the first is that it allows you to really modernize your RMM and PSA hosting platform and reduce the risk of a single point of failure. You know, the fact that it's running in the cloud and you could have the redundancy either in-region or multi-region, it could be multi-country, it could be multi-, really almost anything with Azure, does reduce the risk of a single point of failure. And then I think also it allows you to keep up with growth. You know, one of the greatest things about the public cloud and Azure is their hyperscale capabilities.

A lot of people don't know this, but Microsoft Azure has more regions, in other words, more places where they set up data centers than AWS and Google Cloud combined. So if you're able to leverage Azure's hyperscale, you're able to satisfy the demands of your growing applications and databases and not have to worry running your business about having to continuously add resources. It's just so much simpler to do it in the cloud. So we're obviously, we're a cloud-based business. We're big fans of people running their RMM and PSA tool stack in Azure.

That's awesome. So you talk about Nerdio, you know, selling into MSP. So do you have an MSP portal and kind of how does it work when an MSP is selling your products? I mean, is it geared specifically for MSPs or are you kind of selling, you know, to enterprise companies as well or how's it working? Yeah.

So we are a channel first company at Nerdio and we actually, unbeknownst to many, we started as an MSP 15 years ago in Chicago. So our founder, Vadim Vladimirsky, bootstrapped his own MSP, ran it for 15 years. So he's super familiar with PSA, with RMM, with all the tools that your show talks about. And then he decided to take the technology that he was using to run his MSP, the technology around automation, and create a SaaS company called Nerdio to make it easier for MSPs to move to the cloud. So we started the company and we, of course, we didn't have any distribution relationships set up.

So we started by signing MSPs directly to work with us. So if you're an MSP listening to this podcast, you certainly can reach out to us. We'd be happy to work directly with you. But in addition to that, we've built up over the past year, a number of really great distribution relationships around the world. So you might be working, if you're in the U.S. with someone like Pax8, you might be working with Ingram Micro, both in the U.S. and in other countries.

If you're in Latin America listening to this, you might know of IncomeX. You might have heard of D&H Distributing, SureWeb. You can also purchase Nerdio from them as well. And really, the goal for an MSP in terms of moving to the cloud is they need three things to get started. They need an Office 365 subscription, an Azure subscription, and Nerdio for Azure.

And once they have those three things, they'll find that the path to the cloud in terms of moving their infrastructure to the cloud has gotten much easier, and they're going to see themselves literally explode as a business. So just another question then, talking about MSPs using PSA tools. So a lot of people will bail out of their PSA tools, so obviously send out invoices. So is there any kind of integration that you have that somebody can kind of, you know, any of the Azure licenses that they're selling to their customers that they can build that automatically through their PSA tool? And if not, is there any kind of API that somebody can develop with themselves?

Can you just talk around that a little bit for us? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. In fact, if I had a dollar or a pound, I guess, in your case, for every time somebody asked me that question, I certainly would be a rich man. So we definitely have explored going down the path of creating the integrations directly with the PSA companies, and it's not something that we're discounting as something we might do down the road.

But quite frankly, the best example I could give you is our integration in the United States with the cloud distributor Pax8. So Pax8 has already done a lot of great work to integrate with many, if not most, of the popular PSAs. And because we are integrated with Pax8 in their cloud marketplace, that's how we are able to sort of seamlessly integrate with multiple PSAs at once. You know, as a startup, as a SaaS company, we can kind of go and reach out to every PSA company out there, but we'd much rather leverage the relationship that we have with Pax8. They've done amazing work building these relationships already.

So if you are an MSP and you're looking to build a cloud practice in Azure and your cloud distributor is Pax8, you could rest assured that they have already done that PSA integration to be able, as you said, to manage Azure, to be able to manage Office 365 and your other cloud services. So something you mentioned there, obviously, Pax8. So probably gathered from my accent, and I'm sure most of our listeners will know that I'm based in the UK, Pax8 is not represented over here in the UK. Are you, you know, partnered with any UK distributors or is there any way that guys in the UK can purchase directly from you or, you know, any kind of integration with anybody here in the UK? Yeah, absolutely.

So we are deeply integrated with IngraMicro Cloud in the UK. So if you are listening to the podcast and you're either doing business with IngraMicro UK or would like to do business with them, you could rest assured that we have a great relationship with them and are excited to partner with them. So you could certainly go to them. Or if, you know, you prefer, you for whatever reason, you don't use Ingram as your cloud distributor, you could certainly reach directly out to us, as many MSPs have. And we would be certainly happy to help you with the process and to sell you Nerdio for Azure directly.

Can I jump in for just a minute here, Joseph? Sure. I know you mentioned that you don't integrate with the RMM tools and the PSA directly, but does your product offer a dashboard so an MSP can log in and see all of their customers that are in your product in one screen? How does that work? Talk about your dashboard.

Yeah, absolutely. So thanks, Rianne. The Nerdio admin portal is our dashboard and management is one of the key foundational elements and the key investment areas that we made in our product. We believe that once you've deployed Azure, that's when the hard work starts for an MSP. So we believe that a MSP should be able to accomplish any task they want to accomplish in Azure in three clicks or less.

So we call it simplified management. And we created our Nerdio admin portal to do just that, to allow an MSP to manage the day-to-day operations of their customers in Azure in a much more simplified form than with other tools or even using the Azure portal natively. So the Nerdio admin portal has also a rich set of alerts and notifications that can be configured to trigger automatic ticket creation in most popular PSAs. So I think that if you're an MSP and wanting to do really simplified and streamlined management, using Nerdio is a great solution for you because of our management capabilities. So just as a quick follow-up, the MSP, many MSPs, one of their pain points is that they have not had the time or the training in Azure and may therefore be a little intimidated by it.

But it sounds to me like you are going after the MSP that maybe needs a simplified solution without having to know all of the intricacies of Azure, but still be able to be successful at it. Is that true? That's exactly right, Rae-Ann. You know, we go out and we spend time with thousands of MSPs every year. And there are really four pain points that we hear.

You might call it three pain points and maybe a fourth that we hear more than not. Let me take you through those if I can. The first sort of general observation or pain point that we see and why MSPs are not moving to Azure is what I call MSP inertia, where they say, you know what, we've always done it this way on-premises and we don't want to change. As I'm sure your listeners can imagine, you know, that's not necessarily a great way to advance your business, you know, to say we're not going to change because we've always done it one way. But in addition to that, there's really three other pain points that come up a lot when speaking to MSPs around why they are not moving to Azure in the public cloud.

The first is they find it to be expensive. Not the price of Azure per se, but that imagine that you are an MSP anywhere in the world and you know you want to move to Azure, but you don't know anyone in your company that knows anything about Azure. You don't have anyone who you've trained on Azure. You have two choices. You could go hire someone from outside your company and that person will probably come with a high price tag and bring them into your company, or you could train some of your existing staff.

And most MSPs say, you know, that's going to be a lot of money for us and a big investment for us to do. The second pain point we hear is they say Azure is complicated. So the MSP will say we've tried out Azure, we've gone to the Azure portal, the Azure calculator, and it's just too hard for us. We can't figure it out. And then the other, the final pain point that we hear is they say it's risky.

Why risky? Most MSPs have lived and grown up in the on-premises world. They know how to buy a server, manage it, monitor it, and secure it. Now we're saying welcome to the world of cloud computing. Welcome to the world of consumption where you will charge your customer based on how much they consume.

So the MSP says, wow, that's risky. What if my customer over consumes? What if they, you know, they, we tell them it's going to be a thousand dollars and they consume $2,000 of resources. That is why we created Nerdio, and that's why we created our flagship product, Nerdio for Azure, exactly for the reason that you said, Rayanne, to really simplify the path of moving to Microsoft Azure. And we do that with four primary investments.

The first is deployment. So with Nerdio for Azure, you can deploy a complete IT environment in just a couple of hours without the need for an engineer. The second investment is in pricing and packaging where we've created something called the cost estimator that allows the MSP to really deeply understand in a very accurate way, the true cost of purchasing Azure from their cloud distributor or Microsoft. The third investment is what we talked about before, our management platform to make it easy management, simplified management. The tasks should just sort of be as easy to accomplish as possible.

And then finally, the fourth investment is optimization, the ability to auto scale the environment and to not have to pay for resources when you're not using them. So to scale down the resources when they're not going to be used and to scale them back up when they will be used. So we think that for an MSP that's really looking to move to the cloud, using an automation platform like Nerdio for Azure really helps them do everything they want to do in a much easier way, in a much more accurate way, which in turn leads to them having a much more profitable business. One last question, as you probably heard, one of the largest ISPs in the United States has decided to declare bankruptcy and I'm sure that some other ISP is going to come along and pick up Frontier and all of their customers. But what would you say to the MSP who's concerned about moving to the cloud and Azure because of Internet instability?

Yeah, so we certainly find and encounter MSPs who struggle with that, people in remote areas, perhaps people who are relying on technology that may not be quite as good as in a more, let's say, developed area. And a lot, I think, comes down, Ryan, to what you're looking to do, how fast you're looking to do it and what you could kind of, let's say, put up with, right? Latency is certainly an issue that is important when it comes to cloud services. And if the latency gets to be too unmanageable, people will likely move more slowly to cloud services. I'm of the belief, I've always been an optimist when it comes to technology, perhaps that's part of having worked for Microsoft.

I'm always of the belief that technology is going to continue to get better. I remember, in fact, my first day working at Microsoft, May 30th, 1995, and there were 12 of us in the new employee orientation, and our executive speaker was none other than Bill Gates. And somebody asked Bill a question. They said, Bill, what do you think technology is going to be like 10 years from now? And he said, you know, if I knew exactly what technology was going to be like 10 years from now, you know, you'd call me a prophet or something like that.

But one thing I could tell you for sure is that in 10 years, you're going to look back at the way we use technology today, and you're going to laugh. You're going to say, wow, I can't believe we use technology like that, you know, 10 years ago. And so quite frankly, I'm an optimist when it comes to that. I'm also a realist, knowing that, you know, people do have different bandwidth issues. People do have certain latency requirements that they need to meet.

But I would say, Rayan, that of 100 MSPs that I talked to, that probably comes up once or twice in the conversation. And I think it's really, again, understanding what do you want to do with Azure? Are you just doing simple backup? Are you doing cold storage? Are you running an application?

What sort of, you know, elasticity do you need that application to have? How many users will connect to it? How often? So I think it's hard to make a generalization like, hey, I live in the woods in Portland, Oregon, and it's really hard. My internet's much slower.

You kind of have to test out your scenario and see if it's something that you and your customer can live with. And if it is, I certainly think moving to Azure is the way to go. So that was a very, very interesting discussion. Thank you so much for that, Joseph, and I'm sure, Rayan, you'll agree with me that I think this is a really good podcast for our listeners. We've covered a lot of great topics that I'm sure people will find a huge amount of benefit from.

So, Joseph, if anyone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way that they can do that? Well, I always give people at least two ways to get a hold of me. So the first is if you want to get a hold of Nerdio in general and take a look at our product, ask us a question, please visit us on our website at getnerdio.com. That's getnerdio.com. And when you reach our website, I think you're going to find that it's just not like your traditional website.

You see on there, you're going to find something called the Nerdio Academy, which is an incredibly rich curated set of content for MSPs who are looking to move to Azure. You're going to find a free trial of our product. So feel free to take our product for a spin and check it out. You're also going to find the cost estimator to allow you to really test out what it costs for you to move to Azure. And you could ask any question you want using our contact us form, and we'd be happy to get right back to you.

In addition to that, if you want to reach out to me directly, my email alias is Jlandes, that's J-L-A-N-D-E-S, at getnerdio.com. I would love to chat with you and love to answer any question you have. Awesome. Great. Thanks for that.

And if anyone has any questions on anything we've spoken about, you can either get in touch with Joseph directly, or you can get in touch with us on any of our socials. So really all that's left for me to say is that PSA is the key to your MSP success. Go out and make an impact in your world today. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.

Thank you.