5 Takeaways from Avant's Special Forces Summit
Avant offered thoughts on cybersecurity, partner opportunities and more at its Special Forces Summit.
![Avant's Drew Lydecker at Special Forces Summit 2019 Avant's Drew Lydecker at Special Forces Summit 2019](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt4b98b32d11f73e96/65245aed07590c5fab77eac3/Avant-Drew-Lydecker-Special-Forces-2019-2.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
While at the Special Forces Summit, Channel Futures sat down with the company president and co-founder Drew Lydecker.
The indefatigable Lydecker, we observed, was everywhere at the event: he oversaw keynote presentations, moderated breakout sessions, huddled with partners and vendors alike in closed-door meetings, and hung out with his rapidly growing team.
Avant has tripled in size recently, Lydecker told Channel Futures. It has also laid the foundation to build one of the industry’s truly great companies, he insisted — one that will have influence well beyond the software services distribution market.
Among other things, Lydecker is certain that his new Pathfinder platform (né BattleApp) and analytics platform will not only revolutionize how channel partners bundle and deliver digital services for customers, but also redefine how business intelligence is shared with the market. Lydecker says the company is poised to disrupt the businesses of research houses such as Gartner and Forrester.
With new alliances in the works and new capabilities planned, Avant clearly wants to do more than lead the market segment in which it already plays; it wants to disrupt other tech sectors where third-party trusted advisers compete.
About those trusted advisers: Like Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola, Lydecker insists we have entered the “Golden Age of the trusted adviser.”
For proof, he points to the recent “State of Disruption” study that his company recently completed. In a survey of some 300 IT leaders at enterprise companies, Avant found that 82% work with trusted advisers to “manage disruption.” That’s a big percentage that look to third-parties for more than simply supplying and maintaining products. Trusted partners, the study found, are actively helping customers with digital transformation.
The influence channel partners have with small business customers is even greater, Lydecker says. There’s no better place to be than being a third-party trusted adviser, he insisted.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Lydecker said.
The numbers, he added, prove it. Avant’s UCaaS, SD-WAN and security sales are all accelerating in growth. And like Voccola, Lydecker said there is no other mechanism that can help small business acquire, manage, monitor, secure and maintain technology purchases as efficiently and consistently as the independent channel.
Recently, Lydecker met with the CIO of a Fortune 500 company based in the Chicago area. While the two men didn’t know one another, they hit it off immediately when they started talking about security and other fast-changing areas of technology.
To the delight of Avant, which has made deep bets on up-and-coming tech companies including AlertLogic, Trustwave, TPx and others, the CIO told him that his employer has invested in more than 60 new tech suppliers within the last year — in security, especially. The reason, the CIO told Lydecker, was simple: Existing tech companies and entrenched stalwarts are not innovating at the pace that nimble startups are.
“To me, this validated our view that you have to operate at the cutting edge to stay ahead in critical areas; security, in particular,” Lydecker said.
Customers are looking for those that can anticipate new threats, help customers understand new attack surfaces and mitigate risk above and beyond, he added.
For all the attention paid to security and compliance these days, customers are astonishingly unprepared for attacks, Avant found in its State of Disruption report. To wit, Avant found that the vast majority of enterprises say they’re unprepared for a cyberattack. This is despite the fact that most decisionmakers believe an attack would likely cost them their jobs.
Why the disparity? Lydecker blames “small-mindedness.”
He recently met with the CEO of an old-line steel industry company in the Northern Indiana-region outside of Gary. The CEO said to Lydecker, “Why would anyone want to come after our little steel operation?”
Dumbfounded, Lydecker thought of the industrial knowledge and capabilities that the plucky little company possessed.
“There are probably Chinese hackers dry-humping your servers as we speak,” he told the CEO.
Little wonder, thus, that “fewer than half of the technology decision makers said they are “extremely” prepared to handle a cyberattack and mitigate the fallout,” Avant’s report concluded.
On the second afternoon of the two-day Special Forces Summit, book author and former U.S. Navy Seal Robert O’Neill took the mainstage and delivered a keynote that drew a standing ovation at its conclusion.
O’Neill shared a number of chilling and hilarious anecdotes from his military past. (When trying to secretly capture a known Al Qaeda terrorist, his superior officer accidently leaned against the doorbell of the house Seal Team 6 was storming. Whoops!)
Beyond his captivating stories, however, O’Neill provided a number of practical tips for business professionals — none perhaps as instructive as his advice for handing stress and guilt.
Prepare meticulously, but anticipate the unexpected, he said.
“We all make mistakes. They are gonna happen — always,” O’Neill said. “The important thing is not how to avoid them, but how to deal with them in the moment.”
The U.S. Navy, he told Special Forces Summit attendees, spends an extraordinary amount of time training its top personnel to handle stressful situations. O’Neill joked that he spent nearly as much time on a psychologist’s couch in the Navy as he did learning to tie knots, shoot weapons and climb ropes.
Two things the Navy tries to teach its Seal Team operatives is that stress and guilt do you no good. Nor does grousing.
“How you got somewhere doesn’t matter. Put it behind you and move on,” he said.
Same with guilt, doubt, uncertainty and stress, especially.
“They don’t serve you,” he said.
Fear, on the other hand, is unavoidable because it is innate in all of us.
“If you have ever watched a scary movie alone at home and afterward heard noises around your house, that’s fear that has heightened your senses,” O’Neill said.
Put that extra bit of sensitivity to work for you and you can immediately improve your chances of success, he added.
On the second afternoon of the two-day Special Forces Summit, book author and former U.S. Navy Seal Robert O’Neill took the mainstage and delivered a keynote that drew a standing ovation at its conclusion.
O’Neill shared a number of chilling and hilarious anecdotes from his military past. (When trying to secretly capture a known Al Qaeda terrorist, his superior officer accidently leaned against the doorbell of the house Seal Team 6 was storming. Whoops!)
Beyond his captivating stories, however, O’Neill provided a number of practical tips for business professionals — none perhaps as instructive as his advice for handing stress and guilt.
Prepare meticulously, but anticipate the unexpected, he said.
“We all make mistakes. They are gonna happen — always,” O’Neill said. “The important thing is not how to avoid them, but how to deal with them in the moment.”
The U.S. Navy, he told Special Forces Summit attendees, spends an extraordinary amount of time training its top personnel to handle stressful situations. O’Neill joked that he spent nearly as much time on a psychologist’s couch in the Navy as he did learning to tie knots, shoot weapons and climb ropes.
Two things the Navy tries to teach its Seal Team operatives is that stress and guilt do you no good. Nor does grousing.
“How you got somewhere doesn’t matter. Put it behind you and move on,” he said.
Same with guilt, doubt, uncertainty and stress, especially.
“They don’t serve you,” he said.
Fear, on the other hand, is unavoidable because it is innate in all of us.
“If you have ever watched a scary movie alone at home and afterward heard noises around your house, that’s fear that has heightened your senses,” O’Neill said.
Put that extra bit of sensitivity to work for you and you can immediately improve your chances of success, he added.
Avant Communications just wrapped its Special Forces Summit in Chicago, where the master agent celebrated its 10th anniversary and hosted 900 tech industry professionals.
Avant made two important announcements at the Special Forces Summit. First, the company renamed its BattleApp platform to “Pathfinder.” Second, Avant unveiled Avant Analytics, which is a new company initiative designed to help channel partners help customers make more informed technology purchasing decisions. Avant Analytics combines knowledge gleaned from tens of thousands of business engagements with primary research and analysis culled from firsthand interactions and third-party sources.
Scroll through our slideshow above for five takeaways gleaned from the Special Forces Summit.
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