Avant's Chris Werpy: TSDs, Agents Facing 'The Next Frontier'
We've seen the security vendors start to take advantage of this distribution market.
![Avant's Chris Werpy: TSDs, Agents Facing 'The Next Frontier' Avant's Chris Werpy: TSDs, Agents Facing 'The Next Frontier'](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt6ed5f533c5178dcf/6524161f1fb1af1b0b7958c3/5-Challenge-Risk.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Channel Futures: What is happening in the channel?
Chris Werpy: We’ve taken a look at this market for last couple years. And obviously, there’s been a lot of activity, both on what was traditionally the master space – now the TSDs – and then on the trusted advisor space. When you take a look at what that does, it creates a level of excitement around, “What can we go do now?” We went through the dial tone and circuit years. There was a lot of people with really good business, and then the cloud piece came in, and all these other emerging technologies came.
It became about how you continually invest and continually pivot to take advantage of these new opportunities created by the evolution of technology. At Avant, that’s been their thing. They were really the first one to go after cloud in the early days. That’s where they found their mojo and hung their banner. I was on the vendor side working with them, and it was fun to watch. It just had a different feel to it. To be part of a company that’s always been innovative and on the edge of pushing for what’s next – that’s really exciting. We looked at VoIP, which became UCaaS. And that was something that was innovative. You were able to get the channel into that and really take advantage of that space. There was a pivot as well in contact center, which we’re now calling CX. How do we activate them? How do we get them the right resources? How do we align the right vendors and build the right infrastructure to take advantage of that?
CW: The next frontier is security. There’s no doubt if you take a look at the growth of that industry, the spend on the IT side and the challenges IT decision makers are having. That’s where I’m focusing, working with guys like [Avant senior director of security] Stephen Semmelroth to really figure out how we activate our trusted advisors to take advantage of that, because we’ve got some really smart ones. We’re at the precipice of that really exploding. I think that’s what you’re going see in the short-term: how do we go capture that spend and that mindshare? Because our TAs for years have built their businesses on having these relationships. How do we enable them to go after the IT decision makers and take advantage of that spend in security? It’s not going away. It’s only going to continue to grow. How do we take that playbook that’s worked for UCaaS and CCaaS and go activate the same motion with security?
CF: I see dramatic shift from last year’s show to focus on cybersecurity. You still see a lot of UCaaS sponsors, and there’s ongoing growth in that technology category, but cybersecurity feels like the headline at this show. To that point, [Rise Technology Advisors co-founder] Eric Ludwig was telling me that it’s a lot easier to go from being the security guy who happens to get referred to another part of the business to sell some telecom, as opposed to being the telecom person who’s attempting to upsell security.
CW: I think Eric’s dead-on, and I think he has embraced it fully. If you look at any conversation you’re having with IT decision making, there is a security component. It doesn’t matter if it’s UCaaS, or CCaaS. We’ve permuted the complexity in the last two years by sending everyone all over the earth to work. We went through the cloud movement years ago to put all the apps all over the world, wo we already permuted that side of the equation. And now we’ve done the same thing on the user side. It shifted how you think about connectivity, how you think about network access, how you think about the apps that they have to to. How do we manage identity? How do we know that we have the right level of visibility around all these third-party and SaaS apps that are critical applications – securing that workload and that workflow?
Security really is step-zero of any conversation. I was talking to a CIO I’ve known for a long time. He wasn’t joking, but what he said was, “I have a 10% surcharge on every budget request I have and, I just label it security, and no one ever asks me what that’s for. That’s always the first one to get approved. And I don’t even have to explain it.” That’s where we’re at.
This world we live in is continually changing. I’m doing a panel on WAN this afternoon, which is kind of funny, right? That’s my background, but no one uses the phrase WAN anymore. But there’s still a WAN. It’s just in a lot of different shapes, sizes and forms today. We’re going to about this 5G becoming relevant and low-Earth orbit satellites becoming part of the WAN design. You’ve got SASE. You’ve got SD-WAN and SD-WAN secure. As much as WAN feels like an old concept, the packets still have to start somewhere and end up somewhere, right? And there’s got to be some type of secure medium to do that.
CF: Adrian Tilston of Proteus Advisors [now part of Resourcive] had been talking about just how the staffing and hiring challenges contribute to the growth of the advisor channel, particularly around cybersecurity.
CW: There were stats every year that showed X number of open jobs and X number of people, and there wasn’t enough people to fill those jobs. And then you hear horror stories about how they get the right person, but they can only keep them for a year because they get a better offer later. You look at how you enhance and augment what it is you’re doing. They’ve got a security team. There’s things they do, but it’s the security and depth of motion. There’s not a silver bullet that fixes everything. There’s multiple layers of security. Some of those can be in-house; some are outsourced; some you partner with the right people.
And then the last piece, which we really see a big movement on, is the integration capabilities of these platforms. You can go stack 12 different point solutions that don’t talk to each other, and you still don’t know where the holes are. But working with the right vendors with the platforms to integrate across – it doesn’t replace it; it augments and enhances the investments you’ve already made in people and product. That’s what we’re seeing this movement go. You can’t do it all alone. What would it cost to go build a 24/7 SOC? How many people? How many hours? How much infrastructure? That’s a big lift. That’s a big SGNA hit to any enterprise company. And that’s just the plan. Then you actually have to go execute on it. You’ve got to recruit. You got to maintain those talented heads. It’s hard. So for a lot of the enterprises that we have such success selling into across the stack, this does augment/enhance what it is they’re doing.
CF: I’m interested the acceptance of this model of this trusted advisor model going up the technology stack. How willing are customers to engage with an agent? How familiar are they with that model? What about the vendors? And how does that acceptance change as we move from WAN all the way to security?
CW: I think there’s a couple phases of that evolution. Number one is the adoption of the trusted advisor model by the vendors. There’s a lot of security vendors who are starting very aggressively to try and tap into this go-to-market motion. It wasn’t a motion they were familiar with. They’d sold through MSPs and VARs, who had big security staffs and were selling hardware and building security solutions. You’ve seen some of those vendors really explode in our portfolio in the last 12 months. We’re selling a lot of big security deals, because they’ve come in and said, ‘This is a go-to-market motion, where you’ve got credibility. You’ve got that relationship with a trusted adviser.’ And they built that over time to expand the aperture of what it is they can sell in there.
If you look at it in terms of old school and new school, you’re not going to make the jump from, “I used to sell them PRIs, and now I’m selling them MDR solutions.” But for the trusted advisors who made the evolutionary path where we went from MPLS to SD-WAN to secure SD-WAN to SASE to SSE, building the toolset to support that evolution from Avant is our our primary objective here. How do we activate them to continue and keep up with that change of pace? If you take a step back and look at it from where we were to where we are, it seems like a big chasm. But what we’ve seen is all parties really coming to the middle. We’ve seen the vendor start to take advantage of this distribution market. We’ve seen the trusted advisors utilize the tools like our 6-12 report to educate themselves and build out their portfolio so that they have credibility when they go in to expand. They have the relationship; now it’s the credibility side of it.
CF: I am hearing Gartner get namedropped more in Avant presentations. When the company launched the research division, executives said they wanted to tackle a gap that Forrester and Gartner have left open, as they say Avant has the data to do more there. The folks at Opex Technologies told me they’re starting to call themselves a research firm that evaluates vendors on behalf of their customers. Where do you see the trend of research and analytics moving in terms of how the TSDs are positioning themselves?
CW: The Avant analytics part of the business has been a big part of the business for a long time, as you know. We’ve always believed in creating that level of research and making it consumable and useful for the TA. That’s a big part of what we do and the value we provide. And that’s not going to slow down. What you’ve seen is, we went from the secure SD-WAN, and suddenly, we had SASE. It still had the “A” in it, because we still had access as part of it. And then what happened? Some of the big companies said, ‘We’re never going to be in access, so we need another category.’ So then we made SSE. So we just took the access out. We’re adjusting some of the the analysts’ view of this to adapt to where in the technology companies sit, as opposed to adapting into what’s useful for the enterprise end user. And so it’s become a matter of, “Well, we’ll just categorize them more efficiently,” which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s incredibly valuable. It’s good on the surface, because, “Okay, you’re not SASE; you’re SSE.” But what does that even mean today? If you go Google SASE, you’re gonna get companies from 17 different verticals in 17 different technology disciplines. It doesn’t mean anything in and of itself when you’re talking about what category of companies it is. I think we’ve made it more complex than it needs to be.
CW: I think the analytics and research angle of what Avant seeing is, how is it useful and consumable for the TA and for the enterprise customer? It’s a subtle difference, but there is a difference. And again, I’m not anti-analyst. They do a lot of great work. There’s a lot of research, but it’s not always directed at the user base in a way in that is useful. There’s definitely buyers out there who say, “You’ve got to be in the quadrant, or I can’t take you to the board.” That happens; you know that. But how do you use that data so it’s specific and relevant to the environment that you’re in. I sat at a kickoff years ago, and one of the big analyst firms was there. They went through their report for the year. One of the customers that was in the room raised his hand and said, “If I could select the components that were relevant to me and create a personalized report, that would be ideal.” But they’ve never really gotten to that point.
That’s where the analytics on our side from stuff that TAs are doing it is specific and relevance to the target you’re going after – not broad level to the entire industry. I think there’s incredible value in both. But how do you use that data? That’s where that’s where the rubber meets the road. We’ve got all this data. Is it useful? Is it consumable?
CF: M&A is taking different shapes in the TSD market. As some partners characterize it, sometimes one TSD makes the purchase just to bring more partners in. And that can become cannibalization and share-shifting. How to TSDs go from competing over the same group of agents to building a machine that can help agents bring in new end user customers?
CW: I’ve been around a long time. You can see the gray hairs. I’ve seen a lot of consolidation and mergers and acquisitions, and they’re all all kinds of things. The reality is that you can’t ever look at two mergers and try and compare and contrast what happened. The dynamics of the organizations that are coming together are always different. The inflection point of where it makes sense is always different. Some are buying just for scale’s sake. “I’m going go buy revenue and be the biggest,” and that’s great. Others are doing it strategically to augment areas of their business where they can go acquire something that will take years to build or a high level of investment. I think people tend to just look at a high level and say, “Oh, it’s a race to scoop up as much as you can.” But that’s not a strategic motion. The strategic motion is how you augment what it is you have. You’ll hear a lot of the feedback on these is, “Oh, it’s very complimentary; it’s good,” or “It’s the same; it’s good.”
The reality is, you need both. You’re not going to go make an investment that’s strategic and accretive to your business if there’s not something new it’s bringing to the table. On the flip side, you’ve also got to have the synergy so that the cultural fit is there as well. If you don’t have both of those, that’s when you get into, “What does an integration actually look like, and how long does it take?”
Let’s take a look at the PlanetOne acquisition. We competed against Avant; we went after the market in different ways. So there was a complementary nature to the business models that fit. And then you had two high-powered, rowdy fun cultures that jived immediately. So you hit both of those when you made that move. If you don’t get both, take a look at what what you’re actually getting for that acquisition. If it doesn’t add value in a new way and also doesn’t fit from a cultural perspective, it’s a challenging integration. Man, it’s been fun. It’s been a good run the last two months.
CF: Can you unpack those last two months a little more?
CW: We hit the ground running in May with a pretty aggressive integration timeline. These were known quantities; we’ve all been in the industry a long time. I sat in a unique position because I was once a vendor for both of them and then I was an employee of one and a competitor of the other right. So my knowledge of all the parties here was was pretty deep, and the relationships were there. I think it was the natural fit, and I think it was it was the right time. Ted started PlanetOne when there was no roadmap and no competitors and no industry benchmark. The only way you knew you were doing well was that you were growing, but it wasn’t like today, right. There was no game plan. You just had to go brute-force it. It really set the stage and the foundation for what we’ve seen in the market today. For Ted to cement his legacy and get this was great. He’s a family guy, and PlanetOne was his family. So to get a home for them where they fit culturally and had the chance to expand their careers was very important in that process.
We got it done, and we announced it. We had a great day down in Scottsdale with the two teams. The Avant leadership came down, and we hit the ground running 48 hours later. I aligned with [Avant chief strategy officer] Alex Danyluk, who’s brilliant, put the integration plan in place, and we’ve been going through that. It’s been a lot of hard work. Just to integrate on any level is a lot of hard work. But the two sides found the rhythm quickly. The peers on each side that came together to help us get through this have been amazing. And we’re ready to run. It’s been rewarding. I was very proud to be a part of it. And I’m excited for what we’ve got now with the combined entity.
CF: What do you see happening in the TSD space in the next two years? What do you see happening? Where does the Avant want to be?
CW: The channel got a spotlight turned on in the last few years. It hit at all levels – the TSDs down to the trusted advisors. And so I think that was a validation for a lot of work that people had done for years. We knew how powerful this channel was, in terms of a go-to-market motion. The vendors know it. It was no secret in our world. But I think once the spotlight kind of got cast on it, it changed the dynamic a little bit. [The market said] ‘Oh, shit, this group of people – they know how to sell.’
You amped the the excitement around it. And that’s what happens in industry like this when you start to get investment money flowing in. I think that in the next few years, it’s the next frontier. It’s continuing to continuing to innovate into the next generation of products and services and building a platform that enables your trusted advisors to evolve with those changes. I think that’s the focus. And I think that has to be the focus, because security is not going to slow down. This is the next frontier. Next year, we’ll be talking about our number one through five security vendors, just like we are every year on CCaaS and UCaaS now. In the old days, it was cloud and it was WAN. You’re just shifting the categories, but the continued evolution is not going to slow down. As we’ve gotten access to more resources, and as some of these consolidations occurred, it’s continuously being on that cutting edge of technology. And I think that’s where the focus is going to be for Avant.
CW: In terms of the broader industry, there’s the next generation of TAs that are coming in to augment what I would call the legacy TAs very well. Now you’ve really got a depth of knowledge and skillset in the industry. And you watch the old guard evolve into the new stuff, and then you watch the way the next generation of agents really operate. Platform, data analytics – that’s that’s what they’re asking for every day. I think that’s where the pace has to remain. That’s where the focus has to remain.
CW: In terms of the broader industry, there’s the next generation of TAs that are coming in to augment what I would call the legacy TAs very well. Now you’ve really got a depth of knowledge and skillset in the industry. And you watch the old guard evolve into the new stuff, and then you watch the way the next generation of agents really operate. Platform, data analytics – that’s that’s what they’re asking for every day. I think that’s where the pace has to remain. That’s where the focus has to remain.
Partners are calling for more data from Avant and its rival TSDs.
So says Avant Chief Innovation Officer Chris Werpy, who spoke to Channel Futures at last week’s Avant Special Forces Summit. He said the technology advisor channel, also known as the agent channel, has proven its worth to customers and vendors. Moreover, he said the TSDs (technology services distributors) that support the agents with supplier contracts, tools and support, are working hard to lead agents deeper into next-gen technologies.
Avant’s Chris Werpy
Werpy was speaking two months after Avant announced the acquisition of PlanetOne. Werpy had previously served as PlanetOne’s president and chief operating officer. According to him, the Chicago-based and Arizona-based companies have been integrating in smooth fashion.
Werpy spoke about Avant’s ambitions around industry research. He also spoke about other acquisitions that have occurred in the channel this year and cybersecurity trends.
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