Mike Reed: The Field CISO’s Partner Playbook

[00:00:00] MIke Reed: So if I've got a tranche of managed services partners or professional services partners, what are the tool sets they're using to do the rest of the things I don't? And that exposes opportunities for me to find new tech partnerships to say, Hey, this MSSP operational software has an API. If we would write if we would write an integration there, we'd make it easier for this MSSP to provide a dashboard to their customers around what they're doing for AI security versus that customer going somewhere else and now there's a churn risk and the rest of it.

[00:00:37] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering Chip Rodgers here, and so excited to be joined by Mike Reed. Mike. Mike, welcome first of all.

[00:00:48] MIke Reed: Thanks, Chip. It's it's nice to be virtually here.

[00:00:51] Chip Rodgers: That's right. So Mike dialing in from from Austin, Texas, and your home down there, gosh, I, your background [00:01:00] is, you've been in just about every big technology company, Microsoft, Apple AWS and then, both from an ISV standpoint and quite a bit of. Background in security.

[00:01:11] Chip Rodgers: Of course, Fortra big in, in security, and you were managing at AWS, you were managing a lot of the security ISVs and just, great experience there. Along those lines of security, though, I wanna mention that Mike, you also have been, you were a part-time, paramedic for 12 years and also in police work you were police chief in, in the Austin area. So a lot of really good background for security.

[00:01:41] MIke Reed: Yeah it's been an interesting trajectory. My, my tech career really started with things that are new launching new products, being a part of of things that are changing the tech industry. Did some consulting work with Visa when payment cards, chip cards were first being being tested out.

[00:01:56] MIke Reed: Actually have some some chip cards from the nineties from the [00:02:00] Atlanta Olympics that are a commemorative set. And then really jumped in with Microsoft as part of the launch of Exchange and Active Directory and changing how companies manage their directory infrastructure. So I'm either gladly or apologetically responsible for about a half million seats of exchange and active directory being deployed in the late nineties, early two thousands.

[00:02:20] MIke Reed: Either you're welcome or I'm sorry.

[00:02:22] Chip Rodgers: There's a lot.

[00:02:24] MIke Reed: Proceeded through a lot of different startups in the dot com era. Hey let's go launch this product. Let's go launch that product. One of the first email SaaS solutions that was out there. Self-hosted or cloud-hosted exchange servers Banyan Vines.

[00:02:36] MIke Reed: I've touched a little bit of everything. And then got burned out and have a family history in public safety. Went into public safety for a while. Paramedic, police work, tactical medicine found out real quick. I enjoyed being on the ambulance more than in the police car because people were generally more happy when I showed up.

[00:02:53] MIke Reed: They might not be happy, but I had the chance to make them happier versus making their day worse. But. Looked [00:03:00] at the technology being deployed in public sector and a realized two things. One, the people putting in the technology got paid more than the people using it. And then the the technology itself was very wide open and security was gonna become an issue.

[00:03:13] MIke Reed: The more things you touched and then got back into tech with the launch of the iPhone and grew into mobile security from mobile security to cloud security. My career has been defined by being on the edge of what's new in the technology world and relating that back to where we're at now.

[00:03:31] Chip Rodgers: That's awesome. That's fantastic. So today for Fortra, you're managing the technology and Cloud partnerships for the US. If I've got that, if I've got that right. But Mike, you tell us a little bit more about about your current role at Fortra.

[00:03:47] MIke Reed: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun. So I came to Fortra to own our cloud alliances overall worldwide. We're a company building security for for the cloud but for the cloud, the way that [00:04:00] users use it, not just cloud only. Cloud integrated security is probably the way to describe it.

[00:04:05] MIke Reed: So if you're on-prem and using things in the cloud, that's one, one approach. If you're in the cloud and trying to figure out, I'm a hundred percent board in the cloud, there's that if you're multi-cloud or hybrid, there are those options. And so that was a lot of figuring out, hey, what is Fortra's relationship with each of the each of the major cloud providers?

[00:04:24] MIke Reed: And then who are the technology partners that. We're going to run into because customers are using them alongside us to secure something in their environment. That quickly developed into a role around being a field ciso, because I was having and leading those discussions more and more, and not just with partners, but with partners.

[00:04:44] MIke Reed: Their customers or with our customers looking for the right partners coming into that mix. We're actually making a change in terms of our technology partnerships now and carving those out to give them focus in our SOC and our operations team. Because we recognize that those [00:05:00] technology partners are primarily data integrations for us.

[00:05:03] MIke Reed: There are things that either we use to make security decisions or that we expose to customers together with that technology partner to give them more context about. Some potential threat or warning or even validation of steady state in their environment. So in, in my role as field CISO I'm driving the conversations around cloud security, which now necessitates AI and back to my roots in terms of, hey, what's new and how do we solve whatever the security problem is together and where do we tell customers Practice means more than product.

[00:05:41] Chip Rodgers: So that's really interesting, and I'm curious, Mike, about the, again, your role, what's interesting is, as when you were with AWS you were managing a lot of technology partners that are in the security space, and now you're with Fortra and then [00:06:00] the, on the other side of that, what's that transition been like?

[00:06:03] Chip Rodgers: I know it's been a year and a half now, but what was that like and how, and what have you brought from that role at AWS working with a lot of different vendors into your current role?

[00:06:13] MIke Reed: Yeah that's a great question. And so I came from an ISV into AWS I was working at at a, at another ISV everybody has access to my LinkedIn. I was working at SecureWorks and so I managed the AWS relationship for SecureWorks as they built out the TA XDR platform on AWS and launched.

[00:06:33] MIke Reed: MDR and XDR. So a lot of a lot of deep integration there with technology partnership. Know Carbon Black for EDR at the time, CrowdStrike for EDR and watching Platformization become a thing. Palo Fortinet, CrowdStrike going from a group of applications to to, to a platform.

[00:06:52] MIke Reed: I also started to get involved with organizations that helped. People like me at ISVs [00:07:00] develop their skills around cloud partnerships. So today I'm part of the advisory board for PCAN, the Partner Cloud Alliance Network. I'm also one of the first five certified Master Partner Alliance leaders and I'm one of the, one of the trainers.

[00:07:14] MIke Reed: And we've developed that in our company. At one time for had three of the first five Master pals. We still got two, but I started to recognize the value of learning how to be a partner with the hyperscalers versus their traditional either reseller or service delivery partners who were all still important.

[00:07:31] MIke Reed: You had to build those out and had the opportunity at AWS to go essentially build out two different segments. I started. In AWS Marketplace, and I owned all of the network security partnerships, so helping network security partners figure out how to sell to cloud customers and what those unique challenges were and grow that business and saw real success there.

[00:07:51] MIke Reed: And then was asked to to take over the managed security ISV segment in a PM. Looked at the top managed security ISVs [00:08:00] and. How to help them not only grow their business with AWS, to be more integrated with AWS and to leverage more of the native heavy lift tools that AWS provided to, to do something else, but how to talk with customers about.

[00:08:16] MIke Reed: What was different about securing things in AWS and what wasn't? I spent a lot of time in the shared security model. I can draw that slide by hand now. I can probably do it in watercolor if I had to. But really, learning to understand what those ISV partners were. And then Fortra has grown by acquisition.

[00:08:37] MIke Reed: Fortra acquired several of the partners that fell into that managed security segment. And was undergoing a platformization initiative at Fortra. I'd seen that work. I'd been a part of that. I knew what success looked like. In terms of market growth and in terms of embracing a platform to deliver an outcome versus a catalog of solutions.

[00:08:58] MIke Reed: And so for the last 18 [00:09:00] months, I've been the owner of the partner side of our cloud relationships at Fortra, as well as building out our story, and then most recently our, leading the charge around what is AI security from a, for perspective.

[00:09:14] Chip Rodgers: You've touched on a lot of topics, all that are really interesting and would love to dive into. But let's talk a little bit about working with cloud providers, you guys. Fortra work a lot with AWS, with Microsoft maybe some with Google I'm trying to remember now. But talk about that, how important that is.

[00:09:33] Chip Rodgers: 'cause it's critical, right? Both from go to market, but then also getting connected to the co-selling, getting connected to the field and and making sure that your solution, your capabilities are well known in the field.

[00:09:47] MIke Reed: Yeah I think something you said there is probably the most critical piece getting connected to the field. This is not just a challenge for customers. It's a challenge for partners and partner sellers. Sellers are used to [00:10:00] selling their bag of goods, and so as our downstream partners, whether they're resellers or they're managed service providers providing services to customers based on our software as our customer demand is changing, as they're moving more and more data either into or out of a cloud provider. As they're leveraging a mix of on-prem and cloud technologies that seller at a partner needs someone that can help them understand what's happening in their customers and the right questions to ask.

[00:10:30] MIke Reed: As an ISV, I need sellers that are in touch with their customers because they're going to tell that partner, the customer, their, their challenge. Before they tell me when they tell me they're worried, I'm gonna sell 'em a used car. Oh, I have a skew for you. I can fix that. But they'll actually talk to their partner about, Hey, what is it you're trying to secure?

[00:10:49] MIke Reed: Oh I had this 16 petabyte HR database that I've gotta get off my. 30-year-old mainframe or whatever it happens to be. So getting connected in the field is key. And then mapping that back [00:11:00] to what each of the cloud providers wants. 'cause each has a different trajectory and their partner program and their relationship with us as a customer is different based on their goals.

[00:11:09] MIke Reed: So I'll give you a high level overview. AWS. AWS is a builder's culture. If you're interested in building something new. Having all of the Legos that you need to do it available, AWS is probably where you're gonna end up. And, they make building new things easy to the point that, prototyping and testing and everything else.

[00:11:29] MIke Reed: But if you look at AWS can't go to AWS and buy a native directory service. I can't buy a modern workplace email teams office experience from AWS. I can buy that from Microsoft. And the integrations at the cloud provider level become important. And then when I look at Microsoft, Microsoft is focused on, still focused on the end user.

[00:11:52] MIke Reed: What is the end user going to do? They're gonna interact with an application, they're gonna use office, they're gonna, they're gonna have data in email, they're gonna have an [00:12:00] identity. That, that core identity in modern workplace is more Microsoft and to a degree Google with Google WorkSpace. And then they're looking at, okay, what are the rest of the things that worker uses?

[00:12:11] MIke Reed: And how do we get those into Azure? What do we do to incent customers to move existing net workloads into hosted net services? And then Google. Google is really looking at how can I be the most cost efficient choice to start and then provide a ramp to grow based on I've seen savings.

[00:12:31] MIke Reed: How do I do more? But, going back with their acquisitions, with Chronicle, with things they're doing, they're looking at if I can get someone early and get them attached early and build just enough to let them do more. They're that hybrid between I need you to build and I'm gonna offer you services to replace things you already have.

[00:12:51] MIke Reed: Understanding those relationships as an ISV partner gives me the right approach to know how to talk about what Fortraria is delivering in terms of [00:13:00] differentiated, protected outcomes for customers with each. I'm not gonna go to Microsoft. Matter of fact, I'm probably gonna compete with Microsoft in terms of sentinel.

[00:13:07] MIke Reed: Unless that customer is already using Sentinel and needs us to integrate in another great example is threat intelligence. Microsoft is definitely the leader in terms of partners interacting to help provide and augment threat intelligence, whereas there aren't as many public programs for that with AWS.

[00:13:26] MIke Reed: So each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly, customers are using each one differently.

[00:13:33] Chip Rodgers: Really interesting. And but of course once you make a big bet, then you're going in that direction.

[00:13:42] MIke Reed: Depending on what that big bet is. Yes. If it's just an application. If it's just code and that code is portable, especially if that code has roots in open source I can more easily either move that from cloud to cloud or I can do things like run it in containers and run those [00:14:00] containers across all three clouds and pick one as an orchestration platform.

[00:14:03] MIke Reed: But if I'm moving my data and this is where AI starts to become different, if I need fast local access to data. Where the processing is happening. You're exactly right. I'm making a commit to either build it myself in my own data center and keep my data local or move my data to one of those cloud providers, and all of them are the same in terms of it's free to get in, you pay to get it out.

[00:14:27] Chip Rodgers: Yeah.

[00:14:30] Chip Rodgers: So let's talk a little bit about, we talked about the cloud providers, but I think while we're on that thread, let's talk about marketplace and how, important that is and to what extent are you Fortra and, some of your partners working with with marketplace.

[00:14:50] Chip Rodgers: You know again, AWS, Microsoft, Google. What are your thoughts there, Mike?

[00:14:55] MIke Reed: We're primarily in AWS marketplace and that's because we've seen it as the largest, most developed. [00:15:00] Cloud marketplace outside of potentially what some distributor partners are doing. Folks like like Caresoft Ingram Micro, you're starting to see distributors also find value in e-procurement.

[00:15:11] MIke Reed: And being able to tie benefits together. But a s definitely has the lead in terms of not just customer access to the things they need to run software, but for partners. The kinds of incentive programs we need to help drive customers to make. Faster choices. The joke around AWS marketplace when AWS marketplace started was, I can spin up an EC2 instance in five minutes, but it still takes procurement five months to get me the software license.

[00:15:36] MIke Reed: That was the original problem that that marketplace would solve. We're also in Azure Marketplace. We see a little bit of different customer behavior there. The, it's more tuned around leveraging ISVs to increase the adoption of Microsoft products where AWS is more about, come provide something that has a solution.

[00:15:56] MIke Reed: But you saw the change this year and AWS is posture [00:16:00] with their ISVs around AWS marketplace. They, they now have the deployed on AWS program. So as an ISV, I had to make a choice around. Where my products were built and how I validated that architecture with AWS to be able to continue to qualify for some of the partner benefits that marketplace offered.

[00:16:18] MIke Reed: And for customers to be able to get the customer benefits that AWS offered to customers. So if it wasn't deployed on AWS, customers could see some of their marketplace benefits. Things like credit towards different spend plans and things like that under contract change whether or not it was deployed on AWS.

[00:16:36] MIke Reed: The majority of our of our control plane is built on actually all of our control plane is built on AWS and then the applications extend out, on-prem, in the cloud, everywhere else that, that required us doing work to match up. But it was worth doing the work because in terms of online marketplaces, we see customers asking us to transact through marketplace more than any of the other [00:17:00] two. And we're seeing that demand increase. The more we make it easy for customers to identify what we have and what they need their procurement and legal teams are already conditioned to marketplace first.

[00:17:11] MIke Reed: And that's an easy yes for us.

[00:17:15] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, it seems that, that'll, that will make Matt Y happy to hear you say that

[00:17:19] MIke Reed: I've got my I've got my button somewhere. We were one of the first CRM integration partners so I've got my iLink button but that's a good example of a difference in AWS and Microsoft AWS has done significant engineering work. To make marketplace easier for partners to transact in and for partners to transact in.

[00:17:40] MIke Reed: So things like CPPO being able to do a channel partner, private offer and give a partner their price, their margin, whatever the structure I have in my partner program for them, and then let them own the sales relationship with the customer. But we all get paid. My finance team doesn't have to cut a check to the partner.

[00:17:56] MIke Reed: The numbers just magically work out. [00:18:00] Taxation. Local currency. AWS is doing the work to make marketplace a viable a viable service, not just a feature.

[00:18:07] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty amazing the, some of the announcement that's, that announcements that they made last last reinvent with all of the things you're talking about. Just making it very easy for ISVs to be able to transact globally.

[00:18:21] MIke Reed: Well a great example, we just signed our first dsor agreement this week. Fortra launched it, relaunched our partner program. We've grown by acquisition a acquired more than 20 companies in the past 40 months. And with those companies came partner segments and partner programs and SKUs really spent a lot of time consolidating that at the first of the year so that we have a for cybersecurity.

[00:18:40] MIke Reed: Offering and then relaunched Fortra Protect in June to start to align our channel partners around that same, Hey, you're not just an MDR partner, you're now a cybersecurity partner. And how do we grow that and how do we train and validate and, what else can we offer you that you can provide to your customers as more of a [00:19:00] one-stop shop?

[00:19:00] MIke Reed: And we break that across. Attack chain, are you helping customers with recon, they're defensive offensive where that falls in. But AWS has made it easy for us to do things like dsor light up distributors, have those distributors manage partner relationships, so their partner program works like mine does and that reduces friction.

[00:19:23] Chip Rodgers: That's terrific. Terrific. Mike, one of the things that you've, you have done recently is gone, you're, while we're talking about, transactions and margins and distributors, you've gone to a guaranteed margin model. Talk a little bit about that. What was behind that? What's the value for partners and and how are, how is it helping you guys?

[00:19:45] MIke Reed: Yeah. If we wanna be brutally honest cybersecurity is filled with widgets. If you have a problem, I can sell you a widget to address that problem. Whether or not that widget is integrated with any of your other 400 [00:20:00] widgets I don't know. And it's to the point that CISOs actually have people on staff, full salaried people in cybersecurity.

[00:20:08] MIke Reed: That their entire job is to write python scripts to stitch widgets together in, in their company. That's absurd. That that's not value add. That's keeping your head above water. And so that ties back to the whole idea of platformization and solutions. But from from a partner perspective, we're trying to look at this across the market and say the process of selling widgets means discounting until you get a yes.

[00:20:34] MIke Reed: And that, that doesn't do anyone any good. If the technical sale is one and the rest of the sale is okay how much can my procurement team win back by, by discounting things down. You're not selling on value, you're selling on price. And that's what happens when you're selling a widget versus a solution.

[00:20:49] MIke Reed: So we're trying to leverage our catalog to say, look. If you can establish the value and if you can tie that value to things that you know, an organization is already doing. And I [00:21:00] wanna circle back to AI on this and tie it in there. Then what we should be doing with partners is saying, instead of me giving you X points, and if, if I'm gonna make up numbers.

[00:21:10] MIke Reed: These are not Fortra's numbers. I give you 30 points and you have to discount 29 to win, you make 1%. You're not excited about that, and I'm not excited about that because that means I don't show up in your top five partner list by margin or by revenue or by anything else. And you probably lose money on that 1% because it costs you more to do all the rest of the things you need to do as a partner to finish out that sale there.

[00:21:33] MIke Reed: So we've gone to a structure with our partners and. I'm gonna be very clear. We have a partner agreement that, that partner agreement goes into all the details. I am talking in broad brush strokes, but where we can go to a partner and say, Hey look, we're gonna guarantee you margin regardless of the price with within a window.

[00:21:51] MIke Reed: So again, I'm gonna make up numbers. Let's say that we're gonna guarantee 10, 10% and I give you a price window. Whether you sell it at a hundred [00:22:00] dollars or $90, you get 10% of that savings. It's up to you. Are you gonna make $10? Are you gonna make $9? But it puts some of the skin back in the game on us as an ISV with that partner to justify the value.

[00:22:11] MIke Reed: Because if the value's not there the discounting starts to hurt both sides. And so that, the shared pain, but really the shared experience and changing that conversation so that we can go in and say, Hey Fortra, our mission is if you have. 400 security products in use today in your organization.

[00:22:29] MIke Reed: We'd love to help you get to 40. I'm not gonna be your one, I'm not gonna ever do everything, but if I can get you from 400 to 40, there's value there. And then we look at the rest of our tech partnerships to say, and here's the other things you have that we plug into that you can extend and get additional leverage out of.

[00:22:46] MIke Reed: And then for a partner the conversation around price is less punitive than it could be in a market where there could be price pressure. I'm more afraid of the startup who's willing to give large discounts than I am the large [00:23:00] competitor who's got an established pricing window. But it gives safety to partners and it demonstrates that we are willing to have skin in the game.

[00:23:07] MIke Reed: In terms of in terms of if. If we win, you win. And if we win less if you win less, we win less. It's not just the entire risk of the pricing decision doesn't fall onto the partner and their ability to sell it in a margin, tructure.

[00:23:21] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, so it's valuable for them too because then they're they know where they're gonna be. They're not the discount isn't just like race to the bottom,

[00:23:29] MIke Reed: Exactly. Yeah. We wanna avoid the race to the bottom and. You are seeing a change in security partners, especially in resellers that the default response to an opportunity is not a quote. The re default response to the default response to an opportunity is a conversation. So instead of, Hey, I want to buy X number of this.

[00:23:50] MIke Reed: Okay, here's a quote. It's, Hey, I wanna buy X number of this. Great. What are you doing with that? Is that really what you need? Is this gonna solve the problem [00:24:00] you think it was? And again, we go back to a message around the attack chain. Hey, where does this plug in for you? Are you using this here?

[00:24:06] MIke Reed: Are you using it here? What else do you have? So that we can identify both tech partners and then service or managed services partners to say, Hey, did you know we integrate here? Or they, they support this or. Great example AI and data security right now. The number one request we're getting across the board is, can you help me identify what data I have, where it's at, and what's in it?

[00:24:29] MIke Reed: So classification, identification, and classification is the number one hurdle for a CISO to be able to say yes to an AI project, whether it's initial build or deployment. And there's all kinds of wild statistics floating around. 60% of AI projects never see the light of day. 90% are over budget.

[00:24:47] MIke Reed: You know what? Whatever it is, the number one blocker to start is, I don't know where my data is or what's in it, and I can't afford a breach. Whether that's, I can't afford it from a regulatory perspective, or I don't want to go to [00:25:00] prison. That's the extreme example. I don't wanna get fired.

[00:25:02] MIke Reed: I wanna get my bonus, whatever it is. I wanna protect the data in my organization. Identification and classification. That leads to us looking at our partner based to say which of our partners are most directly involved in data security? What comes before us and what comes after us?

[00:25:19] MIke Reed: Where do we play in? What part of that story are we? So I'll give it off the cuff example. We have a great partnership with Rapid Scale. Rapid Scale is spectacular in terms of DLP, data security, data science. But they're one of several, partners that we have, whether it be Mission Cloud, aeo, I'm just picking names outta the air here.

[00:25:39] MIke Reed: We're looking for those partners who do something we don't, but can use us to do it faster, better or in a more integrated fashion. And that's where a lot of that plays in. And AI is driving a lot of those conversations back because the default answer from a lot of a lot of ISVs is, oh yeah, I have a tool.

[00:25:57] MIke Reed: Add another tool to your environment for ai. This, oh, [00:26:00] you're doing that. Add another tool for AI there. Add this, add that. Where really fundamentally, AI is data. Being exposed in an application, being protected at the edge to the customer and being continuously monitored to make sure it's doing what we expect it to do in a safe and rational way.

[00:26:18] MIke Reed: That's security in a nutshell.

[00:26:23] Chip Rodgers: So interesting. Yeah, I wanted to talk with you about ai and we just wound up there. Probably a natural thing, right?

[00:26:30] MIke Reed: It is. It's where a lot of the conversations are going. But so many of them are going there in a rush to identify a problem, to scare somebody into buying something or in, in, in a rush to market. I actually think AWS does a really good job talking about AI security in terms of their security scoping matrix.

[00:26:48] MIke Reed: And if you haven't seen this maybe I throw you a link afterwards and we send it out. But they look at AI application usage on a scale of essentially one to five, the first two are I'm [00:27:00] going to use a prebuilt AI service and interact with it. This could be, Amazon Q, could be ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot.

[00:27:08] MIke Reed: I'm gonna do something with a prebuilt service. I probably don't need to build my own security for that service. There's probably a tool that plugs into the APIs that service uses, and you can tell me, Hey, what am I, what am I doing? What am I sharing? What data's being accessed? I can use all my native DLP and application and endpoint security tools to secure that, but as I go up the stack and start exposing more and more of my internal data directly with that service.

[00:27:35] MIke Reed: Instead of sharing it on a per query basis, now I'm building a knowledge base with a preexisting service, or I'm starting to build my own app using tools all the way through. I'm gonna build everything from the ground up, all of my ML infrastructure, all of my AI infrastructure, all of my queries, my data science.

[00:27:54] MIke Reed: I'm gonna do everything in-house. At that point, you probably need to leverage the native tools [00:28:00] with whatever AI stack you're using, and then figure out how to integrate those tools back into your existing security solutions. So on the short end, I probably don't need a tool. I probably just need to make sure that my existing, EDR network security, things like that are watching.

[00:28:15] MIke Reed: Watching for keywords and, watching for data access, that if I'm using SaaS, providers, I've got some sort of A-C-A-S-B zero trust infrastructure in place to, to secure it. But the more I customize it and more importantly, the more I give it direct access to my data, and then the more I give it direct access to regulated data or.

[00:28:37] MIke Reed: Had it start generating responses and data for me, as I get from ML to ai to generative ai I'm probably gonna have to leverage native tools because the ISVs won't typically be there yet. And if they are though, there is a point solution, not something integrated. So I'm better off using a native tool.

[00:28:55] MIke Reed: Great example on a WSI can use, bedrock and bedrock guardrails. Tie that [00:29:00] into config, tie config into Security Hub, and then almost every. AWS ISV security provider integrates with security help. So that, that's where I start to to get that overlap. But it also comes to what are partners using.

[00:29:14] MIke Reed: So if I've got a tranche of managed services partners or professional services partners, what are the tool sets they're using to do the rest of the things I don't? And that exposes opportunities for me to find new tech partnerships to say, Hey, this MSSP operational software has an API. If we would write if we would write an integration there, we'd make it easier for this MSSP to provide a dashboard to their customers around what they're doing for AI security versus that customer going somewhere else and now there's a churn risk and the rest of it.

[00:29:48] MIke Reed: I look at it from a, from that security scoping matrix. When should I use existing tools and when should I build? And that grows along with you. Again, Fortra [00:30:00] Ultra we sell the tools you need to do it. We're not driving from a professional services perspective, building out the process.

[00:30:07] MIke Reed: You need to map to that. And it's a much longer discussion. I actually think HR is probably the the hero in a lot of AI discussions and people are gonna go, what? Hr, how does that play out? If you think about it, especially in terms of ag agentic, ai. It's a digital employee who knows how to scope a role.

[00:30:25] MIke Reed: Make sure that something fits the scope. Hire it, onboard it. Assign it a training plan, assign it a mentor, build in 30, 60, 90 day check-ins. Build in ongoing training. That's hrs Fortrae. HR probably has physical processes for flesh and blood employees that can be remapped to digital employees. And so you start to see parts of the organization that never considered themselves part of technology.

[00:30:54] MIke Reed: More and more important. We talked about procurement with marketplace, legal, with marketplace, now we've got [00:31:00] hr with ai you've got legal. With ai you're going to see shifts in organizations to match to, to take the existing skills they have that aren't tech skills and map those to processes.

[00:31:13] MIke Reed: And for me, as an ISV, that's important in terms of the partners I'm working with. Can they identify. Who their champions are in the organization and bring the right people to the table to get past that. 60% of projects never launch problem,

[00:31:31] Chip Rodgers: Mike, this has been fantastic. Yeah, we could keep going forever. I can't believe we're already at 35 minutes here and I feel like we just barely scratched the surface.

[00:31:41] MIke Reed: Chip, if I could say anything. I know you and your focus on partners and your background both to customers and to ISVs, your partners matter. Whether it's because they are experts at selling your thing, they're the best at threat assessment software or [00:32:00] offensive security software, or you have the best red team in the market who you partner with matters.

[00:32:06] MIke Reed: For an ISV and for a customer, don't just look at the tool, look at the ecosystem that tool lives in, and what partners are there to support it

[00:32:15] MIke Reed: And how that partner is gonna be able to map to what you need it to do, not what it does.

[00:32:23] Chip Rodgers: It's so true because not only are you maybe looking for some other capabilities that surround. This one piece of technology, but there are also existing tech stacks and, solutions that are already in place and you wanna be able to integrate and make it work smoothly and not write, not be writing a bunch of Python code.

[00:32:45] MIke Reed: And either a customer team or a partner team that knows the history, they know where the COBOL is buried.

[00:32:52] Chip Rodgers: Ouch. Mike, this has been fantastic. I really [00:33:00] appreciate you taking the time and sharing everything. Not everything, but just, we just, again, we just fairly touched on a few topics, but really interesting topics and I really appreciate you sharing everything.

[00:33:11] MIke Reed: Absolutely. And if you don't mind, I'm gonna make a quick plug here at the end. If you haven't checked out, PCAN, the partner Cloud Alliance Network, it's pcan.cloud. If you are an ISV who is trying to understand how to partner with cloud providers or how to build that expertise. PCAN's a good starting point to get your people the knowledge they need to do that and then, turn to people like inside partnering for, how do I build that at scale,

[00:33:38] Chip Rodgers: Brett's gonna be very happy with you. I will make sure to tag him on.

[00:33:42] MIke Reed: right?

[00:33:43] Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. Mike, thank you for for joining and to all of you watching and listening. Thank you all for joining and we will see you next time. Mike. Thank you.

[00:33:54] MIke Reed: Absolutely. Thanks Chip.

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