Timus Networks: SASE for the Channel (EP 859)

Hello, friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, reporting live from PAX 8 Beyond in Denver. And we are moving right along here with day two. I've got another guest here at the table with me.

And I did try to pronounce this ahead of time. And we're going to see if I don't butcher it here. But I've got Pinar Ormeci from Timus Networks.

Thank you, Omar. It's Pinar Ormeci, but it's very close, you know, it's close enough. So, OK, I apologize.

Our first time talking and meeting. But I have heard of Timus for quite some time. Excellent.

And actually, you're a Florida company, too. Yes, we are in Tampa. Our HQ is actually it used to be in Boston.

And then we moved the beginning of the year because Tampa is becoming quite the size of a tech hub in Florida. And we love it there because there's a lot of talent, of course, because of the University of Florida. There are a lot of MSPs that we can really go to dinner with, if you if you will, because we like to keep in touch with our MSP partners, really keep them close, get feedback.

So yeah, we love being in Tampa. OK, now, are you in downtown Tampa like some of the others, the ConnectWise, CyberFox? They're all really right there downtown. Yeah, we're we're on 10 minutes, maybe to CyberFox, we're more closer to the airport.

So I live in Miami, so I don't know that much about Tampa. But I do know that I think we're closer to the airport. So from the airport, it's very short distance to our office.

So more near the West Shore, Dale Mabry area. So I have a client there. OK, that's what I know.

All right. So Tim is here at PAX 8. Let's go ahead and get the techie stuff out of the way first. Any announcements that you guys are doing here? Yes.

So we are the only dedicated SASE vendor built for the channel, right? Just to tell what we are doing first. So we are a SASE vendor. We don't do anything else.

And we also don't sell drag. So we only sell through our MSP partners. We had a lot of partners that were asking, when are you guys going to go into PAX 8? You know, we would love to see you there.

We have partners in Australia or we have prospects in Australia. They don't want to pay in USD. So they're like, hey, we want we want you to be in PAX 8. So I'm here to tell you that we are coming to PAX 8. We have just started the onboarding process.

So sometime in the summer, hopefully we'll be in the marketplace. The second thing is this was, again, a big request from our MSP partners, especially that have solopreneurs or micro SMBs for them. Dedicated gateways that you use for SASE is sometimes a limiting factor for adoption.

So we heard you guys loud and clear. We are now deploying shared gateways for small clients starting next month as well. OK, so full disclosure, I did look at Timus a while back and went with a competitor.

And the gateway was one of the reasons. And then I had a couple of other reasons just because I've got janky customers. Yeah, but I went with that solutions.

So the shared gateway sounds pretty, pretty awesome. Yeah. And look, in the last year, we iterated so much on our solution both from a gateway perspective and the agents, you know, because network security is complex, right? Like it's not only us.

If you look onto our competitors, if you go to Reddit, like you'll see that, you know, like it's network security because like the firewalls don't allow wire guard. Sometimes they block traffic. Sometimes the IP is not trusted and so on.

So but we spent a lot of time, effort and capex to resolve a lot of the issues that you might have seen maybe late last year, beginning of this year. But we like try to give us a chance again. So and then let's see if we can bring you back.

OK, now you're relatively new to Timus. It's been two years, two and a half. Yeah. 

Yeah. Your background, you work with some pretty big companies. I have. 

Yeah, I'm an electrical engineer originally. I didn't realize I knew you were an engineer. I didn't realize electrical.

Yeah, actually, I was very like digital signal processing a lot of math, to be honest, like channel coding theory, cell phones. You know, how do you actually call someone in China? And that's like this somehow like you're able to like there's a lot of like theory and math. So how much of what you did was a part of the success of because you were at Qualcomm.

I was at Qualcomm. Yes. For a long time.

Yeah. You build it. No, I started as an engineer in corporate R&D.

Yes. I wrote code for like before 4G there were 3G like the reverse link, like the uplink. OK. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I was literally part of the standards group. Yeah. But after a couple of years of that, I realized like I also love the business side of it because there's a whole other chess game, right? Like the products obviously is very important to build it right.

But after that, getting that that into market, having happy customers and so on, so there's a whole game which I really enjoy. So basically, I haven't looked back. Like once I switched from engineering into more corporate, like that's how my real journey started, I guess, on the business side.

OK, very nice. So what was it that attracted you to Timus? So when I I'm not the founder of Timus, right? So I was. Yeah. 

So no, no, exactly. So when I talk the first time with our founder, just like any investor, you look at three things, right? You look at the product, you look at the market and you look at the team. And I just loved all of them.

Literally, it was like over two dinners. I'm like, sign me up, like, let's let's do this because the need for a solution like ours is not in the future anymore. It's now right.

Just like you cannot have laptops without antivirus in your network. You cannot have laptops like connecting your resources over public Wi-Fi without encryption. I mean, it's crazy talk, you know, so all VPNs got to go.

So there's a huge opportunity for MSPs to make money with SASE, right? It's a really low hanging fruit. Like I have like small, medium client friends. Like, you know, we don't sell direct, but I talk with my friends and they're like, this is a no brainer.

Why is this not already here? Right. Like protect me wherever I am with what on whatever device. And I don't need to think of like, oh, do I have my VPN? Am I connected? Plus VPN suck.

Everybody hates them. So, yeah. So and then the same thing about the team.

We have an amazing team. We are so engaged, like seriously, my leadership team is second to none. And it makes such a big difference, you know, in a startup, very high growth.

You really need to be a proactive go getter. You need to be a hustler. You need to wake up with Timus and go to bed with Timus, to be honest.

And we have that. All right. So some of the big features of Timus now you talked about, you know, protecting the endpoints wherever they were.

That's always obviously huge. The biggest thing that I've seen with other SASE providers is the ability or inability to analyze that traffic so that if an end user is, you know, at a coffee shop and complaining about the Internet and they're thinking it's something back at the home office and it's easy for us to say, well, it must be the coffee shop, but we can't prove it some of the time. Yeah. 

If I remember correctly, you guys are able to do that, right? Yeah. I mean, so I'm the CEO, right? So I might be bullshitting here a bit. But the thing is, the things about us is like I know that, for example, anytime you want, we have all the logs going to the cloud.

So you don't need to touch the end user. So if you have a if the like, let's say like the user is having problems and so on, so you don't need to interrupt them or you can actually really look into the network. So we have very detailed logs because our firewall is layer three, layer seven.

Like we literally see everything they are doing at the URL level, at the app level, at all times. And so you can be actually proactively seeing things before they might happen. Obviously, we have a lot of audit trails.

If the client does complain, you can immediately see what's going on without having to pay the endpoint, asking them, like, can you send me the logs? So we make it as easy as possible. I mean, our solution is not an enterprise solution that we brought down to market, right? We literally built this solution for the channel. Like from the beginning, we optimize it to be easy to use, easy to deploy, but also a solid network security like enterprise great security without the complexity.

OK, then I hear just a little thing in your throat there where you have an no altitude things that you go hiking at, you know, Estes Park. No, I think it's just me talking too much because it's the second day I'm at the booth. Yeah, the booth.

Yeah. Lots of people. Exactly. 

You know, you always got to do your bar duty after the booth duty. Your booth has been pretty busy. I did my swag run and you guys are pretty packed.

Yeah, we've been killing it. I mean, knock on wood. But obviously we're gold sponsors.

And as part of that, we actually I got to talk about Timur's 30 seconds on the stage. So there were multiple MSPs that came like, hey, we were about to make a decision. But now, like we heard about you, we definitely want to demo you.

And there were a couple like we're giving Akronis. So we are integrated into Akronis Cyber Protect Cloud. OK, so any Akronis MSP that want to use the Akronis dashboard and see the ZTNA alerts, login alerts, detailed sign in attempts.

They can do that directly from their Akronis dashboard. So now with Timur Sassi and Akronis, the MSPs can really streamline the whole operations with disaster recovery backup and now sign in attempts. So with Akronis, we're doing a passport.

So we're giving away PlayStation's. I think like today we are giving three PlayStation's through a raffle. So that really helped as well, right? Like people want to get a PlayStation.

I need to leave this table and get in there and see if I can get a hold of stuff. I think the raffle is at 1.30. OK. After lunch, that'll work.

Yeah. So let me ask this. If I were to swing by your office in Tampa one day, would you guys let me in and what can I see? Yeah, of course.

And what swag can I take? So in Tampa, we have a relatively small office, meaning our BDRs, some of our AEs and the support is there. But I won't say anything good. None of the good stuff.

I mean, you are like whenever you have salespeople, you know, you have some like you have a basketball thing, you know, some weird stuff. But I'm not. I think like you have swags, which you can also get here.

Like we have hats and t-shirts. I couldn't get the swag there. Oh, I'll get I'll I'll make sure you have it.

OK. Yeah, for sure. Do I have to be scanned? Yeah, if you're an MSP, I'll scan you.

I'm a podcaster. All right. So Pinar, we talked about stuff here outside of the Acronis integration and Pax8 stuff.

Any any, you know, nice new features besides the shared gateway that have come out? Yeah. So we have some features that just came out and MSPs love it. So I'll give you a couple of examples.

Like one is role based global policy templates that you can do in the firewall. As I mentioned, our firewall is extremely granular based on users. And so, you know, in in in your clients, maybe the C-level needs to have different profile, right? Like role profile than a tech person or a marketing or a finance person.

So you can set these profiles in a very granular way and then you can push it for all of the all of your clients. And it really helps save a lot of time, prevents mistakes. So that's one thing like this was a feature that was really asked like global policy management role based.

The second thing is so our agent allows for both WireGuard and OpenVPN. And sometimes like WireGuard is the better standard for VPN. But firewalls like in hotels, in airport lounges, they if they detect the WireGuard, like they block it.

Right. So we have a smart auto fallback now. So we start with WireGuard before, you know, in the old days, like if the WireGuard didn't work, you had to go and OK, let me try it.

Exactly. Now everything is automated. And then the third one is which is very, very important for performance because we have one gig gateway, right? And we're trying to get the clients as close to that as possible.

And and what we realized is MTU, the the packet size in UDP is like 1500, like the standard packet size is 1500. So we were always using 1500. But then there are a lot of ISPs that are using like older routers or they are doing things differently.

So if you send them a 1500 packet, they just fragment it. Right. And they stop at 1492 or whatever.

Yeah. So we came up with auto MTU selection as well. It has such a huge difference on performance.

So you can see that we are doing a lot of things. Not every competitor of ours is doing. You know, the other thing is we are using Oracle cloud infrastructure and this is not an Oracle thing, but any cloud gateway IPs are usually sometimes untrusted.

Right. So even we have a dedicated static IP and so on. What would happen sometimes is like the firewalls would not trust that IP.

So we just did a big investment into our own IP subnet so that we can give start giving really clean, trusted IPs to to our MSPs. And of course, you have domain based split tunneling and all of that. Nice. 

Very nice. You guys have your own built in MFA, right? No, so we don't have a built in MFA, but you can use any standard MFA with us. So, you know, if we have MSPs that we're using, Cisco, Meraki, Duo, like Duo, like, yeah, like that's you know, you just you can just use any standard authenticator app.

All right. What was the last thing I had? I was trying to remember what when I went and looked at you guys, what I was looking at, the dashboard was nice. Yeah. 

So we built the platform of three pillars and we actually completely updated our website, too. Yeah. So when you go to our website, you'll see like the differences.

So the three pillars that we built the platform on is one is always on ZTNA with phish free browsing. Right. We do URL based filtering with secure web gateway.

And of course, you have always zero trust network access. We have the richest set of ZTNA policies in the market, like because we're coming from the firewall background. The second pillar, though, is the very rich reporting that we have because we have a layer three, layer seven firewall.

We have so much information and deep network visibility. And we expose all of that into our MSPs to, you know, help with compliance, of course, for audit trails, to send hero reports to their customers, for their QBRs. Like you literally are able to see advanced device telemetry, like from all your inventory, ZTNA login attempts.

Like we have everything, productivity tracker, I was going to ask about that because I did have a customer that was asking the other day if they were to switch to a sassy. Could they get reports on when their users are actually working? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Because we can tell you at the user and team level what apps are being used. And we actually use AI to define productive and unproductive for each team. And we can tell you like trends over weeks and months like and you can flag them, right? You can be proactive to your client.

Hey, like your developer team, the productivity seems to be going low, you know, but yeah, so I think that's a side feature for us. That's it. You know, we are a security company, but we were like, hey, we are sitting on all this data and you can and you can, by the way, turn it off, right? So from a privacy perspective and so on, because we literally can see what tab you're looking at and what URL like you are at and for how long, right? Like if you're going on Redfin and looking for houses, we'll know that.

And that's the type of stuff my customers want to know. Yeah. I mean, especially with remote work, right? Yeah. 

You want to know. Yeah, that is huge. That is huge.

Well, thank you for stopping by the booth. We have somebody delivering a chair. I don't know why.

But thanks for having me, Marv. This was excellent. And we should definitely do another demo to you.

OK, we can do that. Yeah. And I'll swing by the booth.

Excellent. All right. All right.

Thank you, folks. Timus Networks. Give them a look.

Very, very interesting, sassy platform. And it was four years ago. So that's how long it's been.

So. Oh, my God. Like, no, no, we'll definitely you'll be amazed.

I swear to God, you'll be amazed at the solution that we have. All right. That's going to do it, folks.

We'll be back with more from PAX 8 Beyond here in Denver. We'll see you soon. Holla.