SonicWall Unplugged: MRR and No-Commit Contracts (EP 882)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. This is our Wednesday live show. It's been a couple of weeks, but I am back. 

And just to let you know, if you did not catch it earlier, this show, the live stream is brought to you exclusively by ThreatLocker. Lock down your endpoints and say goodbye to ransomware. So I want to thank them for coming on board and supporting the show. 

Some of you are probably all waiting for our guest that is sitting in the green room. She will be out shortly. And we actually have another person that we are waiting on from the SonicWall family. 

So we're going to have a nice chat there. But before we get to that, I do want to give you guys a little bit of an update on me. Some of you. 

Yeah. Let's just say some of you make comments about how much I travel and how can I do it. And it's easy, folks. 

Come on. You know how it is. Run your business good. 

You can travel. But at the same time, yeah, I was traveling a lot, doing a conference once a month, sometimes twice a month. That's a lot for me. 

Up until a couple of years ago, I was maybe traveling three times a year, four times a year. But because of the podcast and thank you to your support for making it popular enough that I've been invited to conferences. Yeah, I'm going to go, especially if they're in Florida. 

That's an easy drive for me most of the time. But I had been going so strong, so hard for the last, I don't know, 18 months or so. I said, it's time for a break. 

I took the summer off. And then, of course, some of you didn't believe me that I was taking the summer off. Yeah. 

No conferences, and I probably won't be at another conference until September. So that's what's happening. And what am I doing while I am taking that time off? I'm working in my business. 

What else would I be doing? And this is a time where I am going through a couple of trials. You heard that correctly. I am looking at my stack. 

I've had a couple of things that I've been taking note of. One of them has to do with the fact that I did a series of shows a couple of months ago, Avik versus Domotz. And I had promised to do a final show and wrap that up and talk about my experiences with both. 

Well, part of the reason that that is taking a while is because I had to finish a demo, get full access to the software of one of those products so that I could honestly myself use them and then compare them. So that trial ended just last week. So now I am putting together all of my notes and comparisons, and I will be doing that final show. 

I'm hoping to get it recorded, edited, and published this weekend. So it'll be ready for next week. But that is coming, Avik versus Domotz, my final thoughts.

Let's see. What else did I do? I did an evaluation of Cork, the insurance protection program. That's not what they call it, but that's what I'm calling it. 

And I had a law firm a couple of months ago get really serious about their cyber insurance. And so I was able to convince them to let me help them get their cyber insurance. They, of course, submitted their claim with their regular insurance person. 

I introduced them to Seedpod Cyber, and they were able to secure insurance through Seedpod Cyber for actually a lot less. When I say a lot less, we're talking, I don't know, $1,500 a year less because of what we did to prove that they were secure. And then on top of that, we evaluated Cork so that I could be able to prove to all of my clients, hey, here's what we're doing to protect you. 

Here's where you're covered, here's where you're not covered, and all of that. So I will be having some conversations with Cork and about Cork as well soon. And then, of course, if you follow me on the Facebook, some of you saw that I put a little post up that I'm doing a thing. 

And that thing is something that I'm not going to say it was considered blasphemy years ago, but I know that I'm on record somewhere of saying that I don't think I'll ever be using Ubiquiti as a product. But guess what I'm doing, folks? I am using Ubiquiti for a client. Now, my guest sitting in the green room probably is not going to like some of this, what I said, but I had a client that has sold a couple of businesses, come back, and each time he's come back, he said, Marv, you're my guy, you're taking care of me, and I'm like, yeah, okay.

Now, in this particular case, it's just him. He's doing a customized body shop deal. He's going to be the only employee. 

But he's got a space, he's got a little office, he's got a warehouse body shop area, an open space, and then another building behind it, but he wants to trick it out like it's a regular office. And when I was sitting and talking with him about all the stuff that he wants on the network, of course, he wanted not just the networking stuff, he wanted the right Wi-Fi, he wanted cameras. And I said, I could probably do that. 

And when I started talking about the pricing of putting together my network with my usual vendors, and again, each vendor is different when it comes to switches, when it comes to my Wi-Fi access points, when it comes to my cameras, when it comes to putting in a NAS, all of those things. And then he threw in that he wanted to do a doorbell system and have it on his phone. And I said, you know what, at this point, I've got to look at Ubiquiti, because Ubiquiti does all of that.

And I have heard many of you over the last year, maybe two, talk about how far Ubiquiti has come. So I went out and did a thing. I looked it up, gave him a quote, and to be honest, that is the reason that there was no show last Wednesday, because I was in the midst of working out this Ubiquiti proposal.

I was reaching out to peer group members, I was reaching out to some podcast board members that I have, people I, when I have a thought, and I'm like, hey, let me run this by some people. So I got a whole bunch of input about Ubiquiti. And they said, yeah, do this, you can do this. 

Yeah, it's easy. Once you do this, you'll never go back, blah, blah, blah. So that's what I was doing last Wednesday night. 

Sent the proposal over Thursday morning, signed, got my deposit check. And this week, got all of the product in. I put a picture of the first shipment that came in, which was the Dream Machine. 

I got a 16 port Mac switch. That picture only had one of the wireless access points, but there's actually going to be three, one for each building. And then I've got an outdoor access point that's going to go in between the buildings. 

We are putting in five of the UG6 bullet cameras. I've got the doorbell that's going in. We actually ordered extra chimes so that he could have a chime in the front area, a chime in the work area where he is, and in the back building, we're putting a chime there using the Wi-Fi chimes.

And then we also put up, he's going to put up a TV in the work area. And we got the, I think it's called the UP viewport, where we can connect the Ubiquiti cameras to his TV, and he can see all of that. And I got all of that stuff hooked up between yesterday and today.

Today, the doorbell came in, and that also shows up on the video feed cameras, shows up in the Protect app. So that's what I was doing for the last few days is getting my Ubiquiti groove on. So I will have a full review of that later, because even though I've got it set up here at the shop, of course, we've got to now go get it installed and set up and to be interesting.

So that's been my week, folks. Actually, it's been a few weeks between the ALVIC, the Cork. Oh, and then I have a personal vendor story that I want to talk about, but it's not a vendor inside of our space. 

It's a vendor for our house. And I will tell you that we went one month and three days without our working refrigerator in our main area. We did have a refrigerator in the back, so we weren't dying. 

But we spent a lot of money on a brand-name fridge, thinking it would be the bomb. Nice fridge. But the customer service story, one month, three days without a working fridge. 

I'll share that story later. What I want to do right now is because I see that our second guest has gotten into the green room, and I want to be sure to get them up here so we have enough time to chat. First, let me bring up the person on the marquee billboard. 

I called her Loco, but she is Lisa Thompson, Senior Director of Marketing at SonicWall. Loco, how are you? I am doing good, Uncle Marv. How are you? It's always good to see you.

Yes, it is. Look at you all studious with the glasses. I know. 

They have blue light blocking technology with all the monitors. It's going to protect the eyes. Yeah.

Actually, Ollie Thordson taught me all about them earlier this year, so this is my new pair with the blue light blocking technology so I don't fatigue my eyes. Okay. All right. 

And there was a late addition that you wanted to bring over here. I just know the name, Julianne Agapitos, and if I said it wrong, she did not prepare me well. So, Julianne, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. All right.

That's your chair behind you. Why don't you tell them about your role? I mean, some of you have probably seen Julianne at channel events. I mean, his beard is hard to miss.

That's how I'm recognized. You see me at the bar, you see me at the booth, you know, one of the few places with the beard. So what is your title? Like head nerd at SonicWall or something like that? Well, you know, I like to say I'm smart, but I'm not that smart. 

I do strategic account management for nationals at SonicWall. Oh, okay. So for the real clients.

Oh, I would say the SMB is the real client and, you know, all the way from one user to, you know, infinity and beyond. Okay. All right. 

So, full disclosure, I have been a SonicWall partner since 2005, just so you know, so don't think I'm just blowing smoke here. And the way that I got into SonicWall was actually, it was a backdoor way in. I had a client that had multiple offices.

And at the time I was still using that Netgear product. We were doing a VPN there. And then we had actually upgraded them to something. 

I don't remember what it was, but another MSP had come in. And the client was having issues with printing across the VPN. And the way that the VPN was set up, that's another long story.

But just say the bottom line is I knew that the issue with the printing wasn't the firewall. But this MSP actually was an IT company. They weren't called MSPs back then.

They were like, oh, you need a new firewall. Your lights are flashing too fast or something like that. It was something stupid.

And I remember them saying that, oh, yeah, we're going to bring in SonicWALL’s. I said, that's great. Great product. 

That's going to solve the issue. So they did. They brought it in. 

And two weeks later, my client fired them and said, Marvin, get in there and do whatever it is you were going to do. And it was a whole different solution. But since then, been with SonicWall and it's been a great product for me.

That's awesome. Hey, 20 years. Appreciate the business. 

That's amazing. I was going to say, Uncle Marv, we got to get you one of those awesome hockey jerseys we've been wearing on the road. Listen, just because Covello gave me a jersey, don't think you're going to, you know.

We started that first. I've already been battling Larry via text message. But he gave it to me first.

OK, but we're going to give you one. He presented me with swag. What is it? I better be careful because Michael has done some good stuff there.

I've gotten some bourbon from him. Yeah, I know exactly who that's from. All right, well, let's first start with what's been going on with SonicWall.

Now, I know I've had Michael on just recently. We did a nice little special there, but I've not had him on to talk SonicWall in quite some time. And I've talked with Michelle McBain.

Reduce McBain. Reduce McBain. Gotta give him a shout out.

We love you, Michelle. But I know that there's a lot of stuff going on. So tell me before I start asking just random questions, what are the big things that we need to know about SonicWall in the last few weeks? Gosh, there's like seriously, we have a lot going on the product side, on the on the field event side.

Right. We've kicked off our elevate on the road events. Those are going to be happening all over the all over the world, really.

So we can share the landing page for that. So you can find the areas closest to you on the product side. We have MPSS, cyber insurance, quite a few things.

I'll let Julian kind of take that. What do you think is kind of the biggest thing that we can talk about here in terms of all of the new things? So the two that would stand out would be. Well, there's three. 

Sorry, I apologize. It would be managed protection security suite. So whether you're a small MSP or, you know, you're an MSSP with your SOC 2 compliant or SOC 1 compliant, we have something where we can help be your security partner and co-manage your firewall with alongside you.

So, hey, you know, I'm going to be I'm going to be up front. You're an MSP. You're selling cybersecurity. 

You're selling firewalls. That's 25 percent of your business, right? Like where are you making your money? You're selling Office 365. You're selling other solutions that have deeper margin because there's no hardware attached.

The ability of MPSS is now that we're co-managing that firewall alongside you, you can actually take time out of, you know, you can recommit your time and you can better use that time to focus on other projects. Seems really nice. And the biggest enemy to an MSP outside of hackers is time, right? I wish I had more time in the day. 

And I know the MSPs I talk to every day, they wish they had more time to do the projects they're working on and do the deliverables. It's something SonicWall can do that's, you know, new to the market and really takes a load off. So I know that Solutions Granted was kind of doing this, but this seems like it's a 2.0 version, a little more souped up and stuff.

And SonicWall, when they started doing the, you know, firewall as a service, I guess, what was it last year? Security as a service was the original, you know, the architect of all of this. And then we moved it into something called the service provider program. And what that lets you do is, you know, you buy your hardware up front.

That's unfortunately the name of the game. And then you can amortize that and create, you know, your own firewall as a service program. But then you can license everything monthly, no term, no commits.

So one of the analogies I use, you know, one of my larger MSPs, they'll reabsorb the hardware as their customers scale. So they'll sell them a TZ370. Hey, we have 15 users today at this site.

You know, luckily the business is growing in North America. We're seeing a lot of growth in SMB. Now that they've hired on 10 more headcount and that, you know, 370 needs to be a 470.

They can reabsorb that hardware. They get one bill, which is the final bill of those services. They can sit on that hardware and reactivate it at any time without a reinstatement fee.

And, you know, sure, it's collecting dust, but it can be a new revenue engine when you replace it at a new customer site for a net new logo or, you know, just a TZ270 to a 370 upgrade. And you have that perpetual hardware cycle internally at your business. OK, now that's huge because I've already always gone through the cycle of if I had got to replace the system, it's an upgrade.

And the old, you know, SonicWall becomes useless because once you, you know, transfer the services, that becomes basically a, you know, a doorstop. It's your paperweight. So being able to do that now, can you still do you still do upgrades, you know, services with that or is it something different? So in the monthly program, every firewall is an upgrade, but you're not decommissioning the previous unit.

OK, that's the beauty of it. It's just a bare bones appliance. There's no services on it.

And you can remove the services at any time. So hypothetically, Marv, say, you know, you want to open up a Sunday shop or like a Dairy Queen, for example. You're only open from May to end of October.

You can reuse that. You can have that hardware there for those six months and then next year you can just start it over again. And there's no new hardware purchase. 

It's just you're reapplying licensing out of Sonic platform. All right. And does it matter if I buy the unit outright or is that part of the monthly? That's part. 

No, you're buying the unit outright. That's your one time cost. So that's your upfront cost. 

But the hardware in this program is already discounted beyond the traditional. So what we've been seeing at Sonico and what I've been seeing since I've been going on the road is a lot of people are valuing, you know, MRR, monthly reoccurring revenue. I hate acronyms, so I apologize for that. 

But, you know, how do you get more cash on hand? How do you get more EBITDA? You know, because I think that small mom and pop shops MSP that they're building, they want to sell it one day. And having, you know, nice cash on hand really builds the business, lets you focus on, you know how we can make more money, scale out better, buy better products to support the business. And that's just the beginning. 

And Sonico wants to be there on that part of the journey for you guys. All right. Let me quickly go to something inside of the Sonic law, because I know that over the last few years with each iteration of the OS, there's been some changes and people kind of griped when you guys went to this newer OS that's, you know, moved everything around.

So we can't find stuff where we used to find it and stuff. Now you're going to another cloud native version. Does that sound right? Yeah. 

So, you know, our partners today are living in my Sonic law. And I'm sure I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but my Sonic law wasn't really built to scale for MSPs as they grow. So what I mean for that is, Marv, you got, you know, 500, 2000 customers and you're managing them all in individual tenants. 

Bit of a headache. It's not really scaled out to do that. And that's where, you know, the business is heading. 

So what we did is we launched a new platform called Sonic platform. And Sonic platform, you know, single pane of glass. You have SSO, your password list. 

I don't have to hop on calls with partners anymore where they have 15 tabs open. They're trying to figure out their password for what's going on while we're doing their screen share. It's all in one place. 

And when I say it's all in one place, we're talking switches, access points, firewall, cloud secure edge, which is ZTNA, which is, you know, a hot item right now is ZTNA and SASE, our EDR capture client. And there's more to come. There's something that we have in there called PSA hub. 

We launched that in March 17th. And here's the killer thing about PSA hub. Whether you're using Kaseya, you're using ConnectWise, you can actually push all your billing and all your automation through those platforms into Sonic platform.

And then those accountants who don't need to go into Sonic platform anymore, they don't have those headaches of learning another CRM. We have tools to enable the MSPs, whether it's an accountant or an IT person. And the IT person is going to see Sonic platform and they're going to fall in love.

You know, when I started at Sonic Ball, and I'm sorry, I'm going on. We had GMS and GMS was not a, you know, I would hop on calls. Okay, hang on, hang on. 

Before you talk about trying to age yourself, are we talking GMS to hardware or GMS to software? I'm on both. Okay, because I had that hardware. I had it here in my office.

For over 20 years. And now we're finally moving into this, you know, true single pane of glass solution that actually works. And, you know, even as a salesperson, I don't have to say like, hey, you know, it didn't work in the past. 

This actually works. This is a tangible solution. Everything is in a single pane of glass. 

You don't have to worry about whether you're managing five clients or 50, it will scale to, you know, 1000 plus when you get there. Single pane of glass, we mean like a single pane of glass. Yeah, it's everything. 

Everything is a map. And you can see all your firewalls in North America, you can click into your tenants, you can click and see everything. And then when you click into the firewall, just take you into NSM, which is, you know, your centralized management platform to push updates, push your firmware, configuration changes. 

It's, it's all there. It's all, it's all built that we've, we've really come a long way. In the six years I've been here. 

And maybe it's funny that you've been a partner. I'm afraid to go into that platform. I'm still going to my SonicWall because Oh, I'll tell you what, we'll, we can connect offline and we'll get you a demo. 

And then you can rake me over the phone. I'm demoed out already. I'm taking the summer off.

All right. Oh no. So September 22nd, when it's the fall, you'll be falling for Sonic platform.

So hang on. So now tell me about the warranty, because here's the thing. Yeah.

A lot of people are trying to add cyber warranty stuff into their products. Now I just, you heard me at the top mentioned, I'm working with both Seedpod Cyber and Cork. There's others out there that are now adding warranty. 

My, my cyber platform has a warranty, blah, blah, blah. It's all out there. So tell me what made SonicWall decide to, first of all, think about doing a warranty and then what does that mean? So the big thing with the cyber warranty, and this is the takeaway that I say is we don't see any vendors right now in the marketplace.

And I could, you could prove me wrong now that have a firewall back with a cyber warranty. Currently that I've seen it's Sophos and it's their XDR platform. Otherwise, SonicWall has the ability and it's like buying gas.

There's going to be a lot of options. There's going to be the base option where you manage your firewall, but we have a, we have documentation, which I can send you in an email for you to proofread and, you know, share with your, with your base. With the best in, in line practices. 

And these practices don't come from SonicWall. They came from a company called Cy Assurance, who's providing this embedded warranty. So if someone else is saying, “Hey, this is what you need to do to be foolproof. 

It's pretty good. Now, if you want to step it up with us and you want us to be your security partner, you would buy our managed protection security suite. And that would bump you up from $100,000 to $200,000. 

Now the advantage to that is, Hey, you know, SonicWall publishes a CV. These things happen. We're helping patch it for you. 

We're, we're not doing a remediation, but we're doing a, an update for you. We're telling you things on your config that are wrong. We're sending you audits every month on, Hey, this is what you need to know on the traffic that's coming through.

This is what's concerning. This is what's not. Hey, we can free up, you know, we can change some policies that would make your firewall run a little bit better.

We are your partner in that. We want to be, you know, I want to be your family. I want to be your friend.

And then if you, you know, start to look at the rest of our solutions, you do our network detection and response and our endpoints, our EDR, MDR, XDR, you know, all the acronyms. We'll just, we'll just say all the R's as Michael would say. You would get $500,000 of, you know, a cyber backed warranty.

Now, if you really want the kicker and you go all in with us, you do your cloud threat analytics, you get a million. What does it take to get the million? But that's, I'm going to go all in and sell a baby. No, no. 

Here's the kicker. Now, you think this is a contract? You think this is an annual license? No, this is monthly, no term, no commits. Hey, really for everything.

Yeah. Customer has 50 users today. You know, they downsized or somebody left or a few people left. 

Now they're down to 45. You scale all those endpoints down. And then you pay one invoice at those 50 and then the following invoices will be at 45. 

It's the scale down. The big issue that I see in the community space is contracts. These small MSPs are jumping into these five-year terms because everything's flashy and pretty.

But then when they read into the five and print of what they have to do to scale within, you know, the first 16 to 24 months, it doesn't set them up for success. SonicWall wants to be that, you know, no term, no commit provider. That's going to be, you know, easy to work with. 

And sure, it's going to be a dollar more, but what's a dollar for peace of mind? Yeah, really. Well, it's the whole idea of this. Things change. 

You know, our clients change, we change. And if we, you know, listen, I'm not saying this is going to happen, but if I needed to move away from SonicWall and I'm stuck in a contract, that's going to, you know, make it a little difficult. Absolutely. 

100%. I'm not leaving, by the way. Yeah, I was like, don't leave. 

But I was like, by the way, I mean, sometimes it's inevitable, right? You know, listen. Depends on how Michael is at ASCII Cup this year. Is he going? Of course, Michael Klien will be there.

They will all be at ChannelCon, the three of us, next week. No, ChannelCon, that's in my moratorium. I'm taking that time off.

Listen, technically, I should be at ASCII Columbus tonight, where Michael is. Apparently, what Michael did was he probably called ASCII and said, hey, which ones is Marv at? I'll go to the other ones. No.

I've not seen him at an ASCII this year. Are you going to be going to ASCII Toronto? No. That's next month, right? Yeah, that's not September.

All right. All right. It's not the whole end of August, though. 

So, I mean, it kind of slid in there. We don't know. Whatever. 

Hey, listen, before we get too far along, I want to, first of all, acknowledge, thank you for those of you that are joining us live. Thank you to Keith for basically single-handedly keeping the chat alive. Yes, I was going to say, Keith, we will get you all the things that you asked for.

Well, yeah, I just wanted to say, he said, send it to me. So, I don't know what specifically he meant send, but whatever you're asking for, let them know. I'll connect with you after the podcast and make sure we get you exactly what you need.

I'm just reading the rest of his other comments to see if they're worth putting up here. You have big bucks, Uncle Marv, according to Keith. That's why I got to find another place to rent. 

So, let me see, what other questions do I have here? Lisa Loco, let me ask you this. Yeah. So, most of the time I see you out and about. 

You're just simply doing crazy stuff, walking around with your dog. You are the Senior Director of Marketing and stuff. So, tell me, what is it that you love about doing all of this? Honestly, I mean, I've been in the technology space since 2013. 

I've worked for various tech companies. I started in VoIP. But what it really comes down to is the people that stand behind the scenes, the people that are building the technology, being able to work with people who understand MSPs.

Michael Crean's a great example. He used to own an MSP. So, evolving out of that, it's been great to learn from him, more on the MDR, XDR, all the R's side of things.

And get to work with awesome people like Brian and Julian and Corey and Dane. We have a lot of really awesome people on the SonicWall side. So, getting the opportunity to work with such a diverse group of people has just been amazing.

That's a stock AI answer. No, I'm like, I just love the people. I love doing events. 

I love the channel community so much. I've been here for so long. But yeah, the people are what make it awesome.

All right. Well, that's what you love. Well, tell me about what you hate. 

And let's start with the fact that SonicWall was in the news recently for having one of those CSV exploit thingamabobbies. You know, ConnectWise has been hit with them a bunch. Pretty much everybody's going to be hit at some point in time. 

But how are you responding to that? That's a really great question. Because, yeah, it's kind of inevitable, right? When things happen, we can't prevent everything from happening. All we can do is protect to our best ability.

So, I think transparency is a really big thing in that, in being transparent about what transpired and what actions were taken after the fact. Acknowledging where, you know, the hole was and what you did to repair it. Because, again, I mean, there's new vulnerabilities and new attacks happening every day.

I mean and bless MSPs and the cyber vendors out there for staying on the pulse of that. Because, again, there's something new every day. And I learn it from people like you and Michael and our CEO, Bob Van Kirk, is really great at making sure we're all knowledgeable and that we have that clarification of what really happened.

All right. Julian, you want to give a technical side to that answer? I love chiming in on these. Sorry about my dog.

Norman! Norman's just excited to be on the podcast. So, CBEs, you know, this year, so for fun, I like reading them. So there's been a lot. 

A lot of them have been around SSL VPN. And this is a concern. So SSL VPN on the client side is becoming the new target vector for a lot of bad actors. 

And partners think just, you know, enabling MFA is one part, getting past it, patching, that's the next. No, there's been a shift in the market. And you can look at Cisco, you can look at Fortinet, you can look at Palo Alto. 

They all have SASE's ET&A solutions. SonicWall does as well. We're, you know, we just got recognized on the Gardener Magic Quadrant as a niche player. 

And, you know, next year, let's see how far we can go. I don't think we're going to be a contender. I'm aiming for top right. 

You know, that's my goal at the end of the day. And SASE is the new area because SSL is a little dated. I hate to say it.

It is, it is. And I used it for a long time. I used your global VPN client for a long time. 

And when I, here's what happened to me. So I went to go look for your mobile secure appliance. Yep.

The SMA's. And you stopped them. Yeah. 

So that's because, you know, once again, SSL VPN, it's like a borrowed architecture. It's something we all kind of bought into, I want to say 15, 16 years ago. And that's kind of run its course. 

It's like a firewall, right? For example, when we have to upgrade our firewalls and we have new hardware, a new generation coming out. The new generation is SASE or CTNA, you know, mixed together. And SonicWall has gone ahead and, you know, we acquired a company, I want to say 16 months ago, first week of January, January 7th, called Banyan. 

And then we grew that into a solution called Cloud Secure Edge. So you can get, you know, a ZTNA solution, you can get a DNS filtering solution, you can do a lot. But we have the POPs stood up globally, and we're adding POPs, you know, on a monthly basis, or, yeah, I have a data center I want to do my hosting out of, and you know, your data center is locked down, you can establish a private edge, we can take it a step further. 

And you can have your firewall, your SonicWall firewall as the connector, right? So everything would be hitting the firewall as the trusted device on the network before these employees are able to go through and start accessing their company resources, such as Salesforce or Oracle, any of those SaaS applications. Take it a step further, something that VPN never did was, you know, how do I know Uncle Marv when he's at a Starbucks? How do I know he's secure? Right? So we do trust scoring. And I think trust scoring is probably one of my favorite things, because I'm on the road. 

And frankly, sometimes I need Wi Fi to do a team's meeting, and I'm sitting in a Marriott hotel connecting to the public Wi Fi. Not the best idea. Trust scoring prevents you from making dumb decisions in the moment, such as connecting to public Wi Fi. 

And you have the ability to treat all your users as hostile, because at the end of the day, the users are the biggest threat, right? Your end customer, and their employees aren't the most tech savvy people, and you guys are the guardians. And it's how we can protect you and the SonicWall saying protect the protectors. CSC or, you know, Zero Trust Network Access, so Cloud Secure Edge, Zero Trust Network Access, sorry for the acronyms, is a way to lock down and silo those users and really secure the network.

And one step further, because my biggest pain is how many passwords I have. And everybody has different criteria for how long your password needs to be. Passwordless is the greatest thing in the world. 

It is I once every 90 days, change my password, and then I'm just logged in. And I'm like, I'm trusted every time. So it's great. 

It's makes my life easier. And it's just making client like, you know, clientless access a lot easier. Let me understand the trust going just a little bit better. 

So what you're saying is you can block people if they are not on a secure network. So if somebody is in public, you know, on a Wi Fi or a friend's hotspot or something, if they've got to get on, what are their options? So, preferably, they'd have, I lost you there for a second. We lost you. 

We're still there. Back. Yeah.

I had an outlook pop up. So apologies. Um, so, you know, that's all the trust scoring that the MSP dictates. 

And what we can do is provide them the documentation and really help them to understand what they want to put in place. So to take it a step further, say, you know, are you using Sentinel one today, you can actually have your EDR tool tie into cloud secure edge. Love Keith, he's going to get some great comments.

But you can really build the trust score on what you think is necessary. I like locking everybody down because, you know, we're the biggest threat and Sonic wall it loves me because I try to push the boundaries. So, I mean, no, I mean, locking down is not a big deal. 

But, you know, if I get that frantic call from an attorney, that's, you know, didn't tell me they were leaving the country, you know, assuming I got to be able to, you know, temporarily give them access or Yeah, for an hour or something. Well, that would all get pushed to the IT administrator who's managing this. The cool thing is like you can tether. 

So like tethering through 5g is usually my recommendation. And what I do, I'm not a big fan of public Wi Fi, that would be your workaround. Because even when you tether on 5g, there's still a password coming from your iPhone or your iPad or your 5g hub, there's still something that you need to punch in a password or token to get through on public Wi Fi, you don't know who's on there. 

That's a scary thing. Okay. All right. 

Well, before we move any further, and make sure Keith didn't throw anything else in there. Let me take a quick moment here to say thank you to our sponsors here. And of course, I want to make sure I say thank you once again to ThreatLocker. 

And for enterprise level security, that truly locks down your endpoints ThreatLocker is the gold standard. I also want to say thank you to our other sponsors, you can see them all at itbusinesspodcast.com slash sponsor and give them some love. And then of course, we have some patrons, Tom, Jared, Jason and Jason for just give me a little bit of coffee money each month. 

Thank you to everyone there. Okay, and somebody else is on a comment in there. Uncle Marv, we need to talk. 

Oh, Keith, you and I already spoke. We include scheduled travel coordination without premier clients, it is not cheap. Okay.

Yes, it sounds like you've got special internet that you, what's that commercial that they have? Travel with your internet, where they, somebody gets dropped off at a bus stop, and there's two people standing there in the middle of nowhere. I have not seen that commercial. I have completely lost cable. 

We have cable, but I love streaming platforms. Lisa, you don't watch TV? She's gone. Hey, it's just the two of us now.

Thank goodness. Let's have some real talk now. All right, hit me with it. 

Give me that right hook, give me something unexpected. All right, let's see here. So, what else is going on with Sonic One? So, Gen 6 and Gen 6.5 is phasing out, right? Yeah, we're moving to Gen 7, and you're going to see some announcement around Gen 8. So, currently we have a firewall called the TZ80.

Yes, I saw that. Here's the killer, $99, $99. Yeah, but who's that for? Soho? Soho, 1 to 10, 1 to 15 users.

Okay. Think you're selling to coffee shops, you're selling to very small businesses where it's one terminal, two terminals, or two POS systems they're using. This is perfect. 

Hey, I'm at a country club for golf. You know, perfect. Maybe it would have worked for my client that I just set up, the single man shop, but I wouldn't.

Hey, $99 and, you know, its services start at $11.21 and all the way up to $25 on the high end. All right. So, what is that? Oh, what are the new tiers? Who was it? Essential, Advanced, and? Managed.

Managed, okay. I get to be the bearer of bad news. We're phasing out Essentials in August.

And it's going to be NSM, so it's going to be Advanced Protection Security Suite, which has NSM included. Okay. And then Managed Protection Security Suite. 

So, you have your two, it's a fork in the road, you have your two flavors. APSS, if you want to manage it yourself and you can, you know, enable zero touch and push all your updates, have single pane of glass on the firewall side, or MPSS, where we become your security partner. All right.

And then you get that $200,000 flashy cyber warranty. That's nice. But here's the question, how long are you guys going to be doing the three and free promotion? Great question.

TBD, I'm pretty sure until the end of this fiscal year. I don't think it's going anywhere. All right. 

And for those of you that don't know what that is, you can get a new appliance basically for free if you purchase three years of a security package with that, which apparently they're changing, so I'm assuming the price will change as well. Nope. So three and free is already included on the Advanced Protection Security Suite, so the pricing is going to stay as is.

The one thing you will see coming down the pipe, because we are phasing out essentials, there will be a price adjustment on advanced to make it more adoptable and easy to migrate into. Okay. All right. 

And then I know you guys have got some new integrations out, specifically ConnectWise, Halo, Datto, Lumu, the camera people. Yep. What integrations are you guys having with all that? So I can't speak to the Lumu one, because I don't use it, but when it comes to your PSA and your RMM tool, we are growing that platform, and that's through PSA Hub.

So I'm going to be transparent. You guys are using PSA and RMM tools day in, day out. What if we could take the load off of really leveraging our platform, such as Sonic Platform and MySonicWall for the people who don't need to be in there? PSA Hub really pushes that for you. 

It's a vehicle for the non-technical people to go in, grab the renewal reports, grab all the automations they need to run the business. So down the road, you're going to see more integrations. We have Roost as well. 

I don't know if that was ever mentioned. We have integrations with Roost. We have integrations with LionGuard. 

Shout out Michelle Accardi and Chessie Hebert, two great humans. And Brooke Lee and Kyle. A lot of guys at LionGuard I like.

And Jeremy. Jeremy, yeah. So, you know, it's a community when you talk about MSPs and cybersecurity, because it's not one solution.

And SonicWall has done a really good job of addressing that, saying, OK, we went and spoke to all of our partners in the past two years. And, you know, all is a big number. There's, I think, over 20,000 SonicWall partners.

We talked to a lot of them and they got back to us and said what really mattered was integrating PSA and RMM tools, because that would make their operations a lot easier. And if we can save you guys time and that's going to save you money. Hey, you're going to come back to us and say, you know, I want to buy some more stuff from you guys and not the other guys.

That's what we've been doing. I haven't seen the roadmap yet for what's coming for the second half of this year and the year after for RMM and PSA integrations. But that market's growing. 

It's, you know, that I attend all the Kaseya events now, thanks to Lisa and ConnectWise as well. And, you know, sky's the limit with these guys for what they're looking to push. And we're going to be there to support it along the way.

Nice. Nice. All right. 

And just to clean up the Lumu comment. So Lumu is actually one of the camera providers that I was looking to quote to the gentleman there. And it's a little pricey. 

So a big, you know, more pricey than your typical boss or those cheapo services. And ubiquity is not cheap. But, yeah, being able to do SonicWall with Lumu cameras.

And are you still calling the access points the SonicPoints? SonicWave. SonicPoints died. I was like, now we're talking about SonicWave.

In 2020, I heard only bad things about SonicPoints. So SonicWall, you know, in 2017, 2018, got ahead of that curve and killed that name. Thank God. 

We're riding a wave, you know, wireless access wave called the SonicWave. And we're surfing along. Yeah.

They're well-priced. There's some cool stuff you can do on them, you know, security services for them. So if they're segregated off of the network.

So, for example, car dealership has them outside at the other end of the lot where all the used cars are. You still have security services kicking when you're connected. It's a really cool, really cool concept.

And it just pushes the security beyond what the firewall can do. But Sonic Waves, you know, have been a lot more robust than SonicPoints. So if you're in the market for access points and you want to revisit it, we have in your partner, we have very affordable NFR pricing on the access points.

And, hey, you can hit me up on LinkedIn if it didn't work out and I'll be your punching bag. But I have a 621. Works like a dream.

621. Is that a 4x4 or 2x2? 4x4. 4x4. 

That's what I want to hear. I don't think we've had 2x2 in a while. And then, yeah.

Most everybody has 2x2. 4x4 was like, all right, we'll move on. I'm going to vendor bash tonight.

So far. All right. So those were pretty much, you guys actually did a good job of covering stuff that I was going to ask.

So good job there. Is there anything that we did not mention that could be mentioned? Not that I can think of. I mean, I know you're not going to be at Channel Con.

I will not. I don't miss you. But for anyone out there that's coming to Channel Con, we're doing a sip and savor dinner for MSPs on Thursday night.

So if you guys want to attend that, reach out to Julian or I and we can get you the details. And we'll also be doing a sweet party with Rhythms on Tuesday evening. Come by SonicWall booth or Rhythms booth and we can get you the details for that.

Julian will be there too. All right. I'm very noticeable.

All right. A big crew coming next week will be Michael, Brian, Corey. All three in the same place? I know.

It's going to be dangerous. Julian, myself, JT Fanning, Matt Horton, Obi-Wan will be there. Yes, Keith will make sure to have a birthday cake for you.

You have to sign up for the dinner. Don't give him a full cake. Give him a cupcake.

We're moving on to Dairy Queen Blizzards now. We'll have a cake where Obi-Wan pops out. So his pet made an appearance tonight.

I did not see Obi-Wan make an appearance tonight. What happened? He's actually right here. He's been grounded for a little bit.

We've been off the road, but Obi's excited to get back on the road. Say hi, Obi, to Nashville next week. He has a special outfit prepared.

I'm sure he does. And I'm sure he doesn't like it. He loves it.

He's going to be carrying around a little Michael Crane next week. Oh, I'm so excited. I'm not there.

For our Florida Man story tonight, I have two to pick from. So you can pick either number one or number two. So which story would you like to hear? Number one.

And is it of Tony Francisco? No. I always have to ask. But I'm glad you answered as number one.

So the number two headline is 69-year-old man arrested for naked bodyboarding at New Smyrna Beach. So we don't have to think about a 69-year-old naked man. I was like, you're going to mentally scar me.

But the number one story actually has a video that goes with it. Oh, I'm so glad I picked number one now. Go ahead and go with that.

Our Florida Man story tonight begins with the fact of, first of all, most of you know I went to the Florida Man games this March. And you saw pictures that I put up of lawnmowers as part of the events. Yes, there was a race.

So Christopher Spain has proven that that stuff really happens in Florida. And you see the pictures there. Police responded to reports about 8.30 a.m. on Friday morning, July 18th.

Christopher Spain was arrested for driving under the influence and operating a riding lawnmower while impaired on the Suncoast Parkway, a busy toll road in Florida. Oh, my gosh. So we did not get any pictures of him actually driving the lawnmower.

There should have been. And, of course, this all was great because he refused to perform field sobriety tests, which in Florida means it's an automatic arrest. So he was arrested at the scene, charged with DUI, booked into the Hernando County Jail and released later that afternoon after posting a $500 bond.

Oh, my gosh. And for those of you that want to know where Hernando County is, I need you to, first of all, thank Tampa. North of Tampa, there's a county called Pasco County, which was made famous through the program Live PD.

And if you ever meet a Florida man without a shirt, chasing gators, licking doorbells at two in the morning, that is Pasco County. Hernando County is just north of that. Oh, my gosh.

We need to bring Live PD back right now. It's back under a different name. Oh, what's the name? Yes.

I need the name. There's actually different variations. So Live PD is actually rolling on the Reels streaming channel.

I think it's called On Patrol Live. And then there's a Live PD body cam that is back on A&E. Oh, all right.

I know what I'm doing tonight. I'm looking for some A&E action. Yes.

I miss those shows. It's a great show. Florida's a great place to have that On Patrol Live, I feel like.

It is. I feel like it is. I mean, we have some crazy people here in Arizona sometimes, too.

But they're not driving tractors on the freeway. Yeah. I mean, Canada's crazy too.

Julian's up in Canada. It's cold. Where are you at? Where are you at in Canada? The capital.

Good old capital. Ottawa? Yeah. People actually still live there? Oh, yeah.

I thought it was Toronto and the rest of Canada. Toronto and the rest of Canada. It's the rest of Canada and Toronto.

Okay. Okay, Julian. Okay.

I think I may need to go to ASCII Toronto then. Yeah. I can't.

My passport's expired. I have to get a new one. You better get on that, Marv.

We can expedite that. I'm sure we can. We can expedite.

All right, folks. Thank you for those of you that have tuned in either live or you're watching the video after the fact. This is our regular show.

We will be back next week. And who's my guest next week? I want to make sure I... Well, first of all, I got to make sure they recommit because I don't want to... Next week is... Oh, a Florida man is going to be in the house. Matt Mulkey, who has been on before, he's started in MSP again.

He's working for another and he's restarted his own out of Miami. So we're going to have him on. And then let's see.

The week after that, our good friend Paco LeBron from the MSP owners group. And I'm going to grill him all about that. So.

And then the week after that is a new name person to the show. And let's see how that goes. So that's going to do it.

Thank you all for joining us. Lisa Compton and Julian Agapitos, because you didn't correct me earlier. So that's how it goes.

Good job. From SonicWall, folks, you need a unified threat management system, a real firewall. And, you know, not some, you know, Netgear or Araknis or whatever.

Some router without protection. Look at SonicWall. And apparently monthly, no term, no commit.

Makes it pretty nice. We will be back, folks. Check us out.

We've got episodes being released all the time. You can check out the video on the YouTube, LinkedIn, or the Facebook. And then, of course, you can get the audio on your favorite pod catcher.

We are on all of the streaming stations there. On behalf of Lisa, Julian, and my friends, thank you for visiting. Hanging out.

We'll be back soon. And until then. Holla! Bye!