With co-pilot adoption a top priority for Microsoft itself and for much of its channel partner base moving forward, MSPs are facing yet another inflection point. Either evolve the offerings and operational practices they've built to meet today's modern needs and demands of their customers. or don't do that and risk falling behind on opportunities by keeping the processes of yesterday in check. To talk through what exactly that means though for MSPs and other partners in practice, I am joined today by Peter Fedler.
Peter is both the co-founding partner and president of WCA Technologies, a New York City-based MSP. He is also the America's president for the AMCP, a nonprofit organization focused on enabling Microsoft partners through a variety of programs and content. We talk really about everything that an MSP needs to know, whether that's AI adoption and how to protect customers, dealing with those customers and the variety of technological needs they have or think they should have, and also why community, camaraderie, and sharing information is more important for the channel ecosystem now than it's maybe ever been.
It's a wide-ranging conversation with a guy who's seen some stuff. I hope you enjoy the episode and thank you as always for watching channel insider partner POV. Let's get to Peter. And I am joined now by Peter. Peter, thank you so much for taking some time and joining me today. >> No, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. Before we jump into the various talking points I know we want to hit on today. Could you just start maybe by introducing yourself a little bit more and then telling the audience about WCA technologies? >> Sure, happy to.
Peter Fidler, president and founder of WCA Technologies. We started the company back in 1988. A lot of people say, "Well, that was before I was born." Uh, so I grew up in New York City, uh, born and bred. I, uh, grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. Uh, went to business school at Bentley University, got my MBA at Form University. Uh, decided to start a business with a partner. Um, we've been doing this again for 37 years. And we're MSP and servicing mostly nonprofit, financial, legal, and some entertainment, real estate.
Uh, those are the major markets we support. Really love this industry. Just just thrilled to death to be in it. The partnership, the camaraderie, just having a lot of fun. I mean, not all the time is fun, but most of the time is fun. And that's when uh I don't want to retire. >> As long as there's still something there, right? >> That's right. >> We'll dive into that camaraderie aspect a bit later. We I guess I should say for the audience met this past summer in Buffalo, New York at an Ingram Micro Partner event.
Excited to to record this a few months later. So, we'll dive into peer groups and some of the other community work you do. But it wouldn't be a tech conversation. and it wouldn't be a channel conversation if I didn't kick off with AI. So maybe we'll start there first. I'm curious within those markets and segments that you just explained that you support so heavily. What you've seen in terms of AI demand and then how those customers are finding success and ROI within the AI that they've chosen to deploy and if you've seen that evolve at all this year.
I mean, we've definitely seen it evolve, you know, in last year and the year before trying to explain AI and the different packages that are out there. Since we're a Microsoft partner, we we lean towards co-pilot and it just making sure that AI is rolled out responsibly. Um, but there's a a whole lot of pushing and pulling with clients. they want to use claw, they want to use chat GBT, they want to use this model, that model. So, it's it's about talking to clients and just making them aware that what they're installing or what they're using in their environment is is basically opening up Pandora's box.
You know, all their data that's sort of sitting there and you have to roll it out responsibly. You know, your constituents depend on that. You don't want confidential data being, you know, put out on the internet. You know, it's like uploading all your files to the internet. Somebody will find them. So, it's a it's about using it in a responsible way. And we're doing a lot of teaching and sort of whole lot of change management with because AI really needs to be part of everybody's how they do their work.
How we got started is, you know, we're customer zero. We're using it all the time. time. We're using it for presentations. We're using it for proposals. We're using it and we're training it in such a way that it's sort of the WCA terminology, the WCA way of doing things. So, you just don't want to roll it out and have it be sanitized and just say here's sort of this generic way of rolling out AI. So, we're training at how we do things here. Particularly with with myself, I ask AI a lot of times in copilot.
I want to write an email, but please use the Peter Fidler way of of talking about this subject. And it knows what I'm talking about because it says, I'm about to adjust this for the Peter Fidler way of talking about this. So, it understands how I like to say things, what words I like to use, what words I I don't like to use. And uh I sort of equated it to um a product that was called uh uh Dragon Naturally Speaking which was sort of you would speak and it would interpret your words and type your word document or emails etc.
It needs to be trained um and same thing with with co-pilot or any AI tool. It needs to be trained and needs to be used responsibly. It needs to be verified. Um, and that's the hurdle where we are with our clients right now is just sort of controlling it. So it's not like the wild wild west where they're rolling out any tools and not really understanding where their data is situated >> within that. I know I hear a lot from MSPs and I think we might have even actually talked about this in prior conversations too, Peter. this idea that AI is really one of the first tech waves where customers in some cases got a hold of the tech and wanted to start using the tech maybe even before their MSPs had.
And so you have business leaders and employees within organizations who can come to you and go I want claude I want open AI and and they at least think that they know what what they mean when they ask for those things. How have you I don't know if handled is the right word but but how do you kind of take that into a conversation with a client and to your point help them understand the security and the governance requirements? It's it's all about education.
And some people are are open to it. And some people will say, "I don't care what you say. We want to roll this out anyway." I say, "Look, we want to make sure you understand what the risks are before you roll this out as long as you understand the risks and which way you're going and and where you're putting your data." He said, "I don't care if my data is out there." That's the same sort of attitude people had with security years ago. >> It's like, why would anybody want to hack my environment?
I'm a small guy. I don't really matter until their data gets, you know, ransomware and all of a sudden they have no access to any of their documents or accounting systems and all of a sudden becomes a priority. Unfortunately, I think that's what needs to happen with some of these clients, not my clients, but a lot of people out there, is all of a sudden their data is out on the internet and all of a sudden they'll take it a whole lot more serious than they are right now.
But right now, it's a it's a bit of a toy for a lot of people. And it's sort of like you want to rein that in, but you want to rein in in a way where you're not stopping progress because that's so important that the clients move forward, but you want to do it in a way where um you show them the responsible way of of rolling it out. So that's the conversation right now. I wouldn't say it's 100% being sort of retained or by some of the clients that are out there, but the ones that are listening are getting a whole lot more out of AI than the people who are not listening. >> How do you see?
And I mean, nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody can predict the future, but we have, you know, seen tech waves come in the channel before and you hearkened back to the security conversation 5 or 10 years ago compared to now. How do you see that maturity curve when it comes to AI adoption continuing to evolve over the next 6 to 12 months? Do you think eventually this will become a more kind of commonplace attitude to consider all of this together? >> Yes.
The minute they see what the outcomes are. So right now people are using it as their sort of personal assistant, you know, their their intern. the minute they learn how to create agents and get access to data sources that they may not have access to right now. So they can ask on a Monday morning, give me a list of my priorities for the day and just have that run each each and every day. Or you could have a financial file that sits out there and uh you could say on every Thursday of the month, please analyze this file and let me know where I need to focus my attention on.
And you could have an agent that runs out there on your data. So that's where I see the the biggest shift is going to be personal assistant to agents and how do I share that information? I'll create a prompt for myself and I'll share it out with other people on my team. But it'd be nice that if create a prompt out there and have it be able to run it for everybody. So every Monday morning everybody sort of gets a newsletter of the priorities for the week or priorities for the month or what's the latest news w I remember there used to be newswires that everybody would get. you know, you could have it sort of crawl out on the internet and say, "Hey, here are our top 30 clients.
Is there any news out there that might impact them?" Um, but you know, that's another way of of doing it. I remember there used to be services out there that would deliver this newsletter and where clients would pay tens of thousands of dollars and now you can get it by creating a simple agent that can crawl out in the internet. That leads me to another question that I know has been bubbling I think amongst MSPs. Certainly earlier in the year we had that kind of SAS apocalypse framing that seemed to hit everybody's headlines for a week and a half and everybody panicked that everyone would just replace every software app known to man with an AI agent and call it a day.
And that clearly did not come to pass at least to that degree that was being I don't want to say fear-mongered but it I don't think we were ever going to get there. But there were a lot of MSPs who said, you know, are my clients going to think that they can build agents to do some of the things that I do for them right now? Do you see that as a concern in the market or or do customers still need an MSP >> to handle a variety of things? >> The there may be some people who want to do that and you don't want to stop that.
You don't want to stop that progress. But if they're really going to leverage the experience of an MSP, the the knowhow, people will need to invest a whole a whole lot in in doing what an MSP does. But to be able to understand the information that is presented in front of you, you know, tweak it. And if you can demonstrate as an MSP the value you're you're exhibiting for that client in terms of outcomes. Look, we we're we're going to save you 10% of your time on your onboarding process.
We're going to create an automation. We're going to create a forum for you and within 15 minutes we're going to onboard a client, a new employee for your for your company. They don't know how to do that right now. But you MSPs, that's what they do. They they add employees, they remove employees, they put people into the the various groups. But you know if you can imagine you know automating that creating an agent that creates the employee automatically and all of a sudden you know we'll create onboarding video for them by piecing various aspects together as part of the training.
Here's your network. Here's some of the dos and don'ts from an HR perspective. Here are the forms. Can imagine if there's all these videos out there that you could sort of sew together and customize for, you know, new employee onboarding. I mean, that would save them a whole lot of time. So, that's an outcome. You're saving time. Your HR department, particularly with nonprofits, are overworked. They're working, you know, 7 8 9:00 at night onboarding an employee.
We have two new hires coming in on Monday morning. Can make sure they're set up. We have 10 people coming in. We're offboarding five people, you know, with layoffs or whatever. And can you imagine automating those processes? You know, the the client wants to focus on what they do well. You know, an MSP is more like an offensive lineman, you know, on a football team where you only become very aware of them when they make a mistake. And then if you if they're doing everything perfectly, they just sort of things are running really smooth and you know and the progress is being made by the client.
So that's why I think a lot a lot of clients won't do this because it's going to take an investment. It's not just something you snap your fingers and you create agents because if you don't know what you're doing, you don't have that expertise and onboarding, offboarding, and some of the things that MSPs do, you're going to uh have a lot of things to learn, so to speak. >> Well, that's interesting, too, because I know one of the other topics that I think has bubbled up across conversations I've had in the channel this summer, especially is that concept of business outcomes, right? and shifting conversations with clients away from here's the tech I do to here's why that matters for you and here's what you get out of that tech that I do.
Do you see that as an evolution for most MSPs or do you think these are really conversations that if weren't always occurring always should have been occurring? >> That is a great question. outcomes is being used a whole lot right now and I've heard some experts talk about sort of the hourly billing the project billing is going to be outcomesbased I think it's going to migrate to that for for a little while um and eventually it will it's going to be very difficult to sort of measure what that is um and measure is and price it out according accordingly.
All it takes is that one or two really bad jobs um where you spend a whole lot of time where people will be sort of a little hesitant to to invoice on that. Now, if you have something that's repeatable, you know, and that's where the MSPs can really flourish um by having something that they're doing for all their clients and becoming experts in that. Now you have something. Now you can sort of be like that the joke about the plumber who comes in, bangs on the pipe, and uh he says, "Okay, that's $1,000." And I say, "Well, you were only here for five minutes." And he says, "Well, yeah, you you know, with my experience, you need to know where to bank, and that's why you're paying for that experience." With an MSP, it would be the same thing.
It may not take the effort, but if you're you're for invoicing for outcomesbased rather than timebased, then you're getting a client to pay for your value, you know, the outcome, what you've enhanced with the environment. I'm curious from a from an operational mindset, right? As somebody who's been in the space a while, has led an MSP for a while, what will it take to shift into whether we're talking a pricing model, whether we're just talking the approach of focusing on outcomes, right?
What does it take for an MSP to pivot the way it approaches services business? I know we had the the breakix to MSP wave of a decade or so ago, right? like I'm sure this has happened before, but in your experience, what do shifts like that actually require of MSP leadership? >> So, I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a lot of trial and error >> and then you're going to have these peer groups, you know, and they're going to talk about it in the room why this worked, what didn't work, what was missing, how to improve a process.
But I think with peers sharing information, I think we'll speed up that transition. I think that will come eventually, but people are going to need to work with each other. Um, I've been part of peer groups for a long time, whether it's the uh trustax alliance, the the evolve peer group, and now I'm part of the AMCP. I'm president of America's with that group. And one of the things I'm trying to get people to do is is share their expertise and share it in a way where it benefits the community because if you find a way that can make somebody's job a little easier, you want to share that.
You want to be able to share that with your peers. And some of these people may be your competitors. It's all about relationships. It's not about just the technology and what you could do, but it's going to make more focus on the relationship, making sure that client is happy. So, it's not always about technology, but it's it's about the relationship, how things are presented. And I'm learning a whole lot about change management and and how to how do you how do you handle that in terms of, you know, piloting an application and then having people be the the focal point to to roll it out and and just understanding when to stop and start again and when things are going down a rabbit hole maybe the wrong way.
And you know, not every pilot is successful and that's why you call it a pilot. It's sort of a test scenario. It's about not being afraid to fail at something. And I think that's the most important thing. And I failed a a lot of things that we've rolled out. We've we've implemented technology and went, "Oops, this is not a good idea." Um, and then sort of roll back, but in a way where it didn't really hurt our business. is sort of a lot of wasted effort.
Um because it was sort of a pilot and it was contained, we're able to roll it back very easy. But you for change management, you need to be able to be open-minded enough to understand when things are going well and when things are not going well and when you should stop and when you should start and be able to remove your ego. And what I mean by that is you actually have to admit you failed at something and that's okay. You'll get it the next time.
So I think change management is going to be huge. And how the MSP adjusts to that is going to be more telling than anything else because you got to keep plugging away, keep trying, trying new things uh until you get it to work. few things in there I want to to dive in and and pull apart a little bit more. Let's start with the the community aspect that I know that you feel very passionately about because we've talked about it, but there are many when I talk to friends and family outside of the channel who who don't quite get what I mean when I say that MSPs tend to help each other, tend to talk to each other, and and I do think it's the best kept secret, if you will, of of the tech landscape, broadly speaking.
Could you talk a little bit more about why it is so important to you to participate in peer groups to foster that kind of information sharing and collaboration between people who might to your point technically on paper be competitors to you? Yeah, I read a book and it was part of it was given to me when I was part of what it was called HTG. Now it's called evolve, you know, groups and it was a book was called the go-giver and it was about being able to give of yourself and give information without expecting something in return because it sort of happens naturally.
And I'm a big believer in that. Although I have my son who believes I give too much and and don't re receive enough, but that's okay. And and you have to be okay with that. But I try to surround myself with people who are smarter than me. Um and or see things a little different than I do. So they may come up with a way of doing things that I wouldn't even know. Somebody taught me years ago, there's the things you know you don't know. And then there the things you don't know you don't know.
And that's last part is part of that aha moment where a peer will suggest something that you wouldn't even considered because you didn't even know it existed and you could put that into play. And that's what you get out of peer groups. You'll get nibblets of, you know, here's how I do this. This is a piece of software that I use that does that and it saves me a lot of time. I mean without peers I mean my business is is doing pretty well but I wouldn't be where I am today without without peers without talking with people and understanding you know what's out there in terms of software utilities and the you talk to people who've tried certain things and it's failed.
What did you think of this company? what do you think of this um uh application? And they said that didn't work for me, but it didn't work for me because I wasn't ready for it. So, not that it didn't work for me because the product was horrible, but you know, we weren't in the right mindset to to roll that out. We we had a lot of resistance. We put the that package on the shelf. It didn't it didn't work for us. Um so, you you learn from what other people do.
Without that, it just speeds up um the knowledge. It eliminates a lot of the errors that other people have learned before you. And that that's what I really love about this community is they're not afraid to share that information. A good friend of mine, and we're we're competitors. I mean, I just went head-to-head with a large nonprofit and lost a very, very large deal to him, and it hurt. It really did hurt. But then, and I didn't know I was going headtohead with him.
And we had a a a call afterwards. I said, "Well, what did you do? What did you do differently that I didn't do? How did you handle this? How did you handle that?" It's not to beat him the next time, but just to find out, you know, what was missing from my presentation in terms of my information gathering. Um, and he was able to share that and not in a way where it was threatening. It wasn't threatening to him or or to me or whatever, but you know, he he beat me out fair and square.
Um, he put together a better proposal than I did. Um, and I was able to learn from that. But you don't see that a lot. I mean, that's just if if you explain that to somebody else, I'll say, you know, that sounds a little weird, doesn't it? >> That is usually what I hear. >> Yeah. >> Well, I want to stay in that theme. You very subtly, I might add, dropped in the middle of of your previous answer that you are also the president of the America's MCP.
It's a long day. Acronyms start to get to me. Um let's dive in a little more if you could on what the AMCP is and and what you see in that kind of collective community. >> Okay. So the AMCP and it took me a little while to to say that it took what six years or but I I'm president of Americas and what that means is I'm responsible for all of North America which includes Canada, Central America and uh South America. It's the only partner-led organization that deals with the Microsoft technology.
And it's run by all volunteers. So we have chapters in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Orlando, Southern Cal, Northern Cal, all across the US. And then there's the international component, which is all across the globe. So there are over 3,000 partners worldwide. Um, and we have, you know, hundreds of members um in the the Americas. So it is purely focused on improving the experience with Microsoft partners and there are all sorts of partners out there.
They're partners that do CRM, accounting systems, SharePoint, AER, C-pilot, um just security and I've been using everything I've learned from all the peer groups I've ever been part of and applying to the AMCP. And I don't think the IMCP was aware of what's going to hit them in terms of the partnerships that I've created with other organizations, whether it's Channel Futures, is the Black Channel, the Women in Technology, um I believe in communities working together because we're all in it for the for the same reason to improve the partner.
So whatever will improve the partner experience, I'm up for I'm absolutely up for. So we did a cohort for AI and and co-pilot. We've had two co cohorts financed by Microsoft which was awesome. And we were very successful within I think the first co-pilot cohort. Somebody closed a deal for $70,000 within like three four weeks. And so we're teaching partners how to sell AI and it's MSPs. It's it's it's all sorts of partners out there, not just MSPs.
So, it's about partnering and learning how to partner. And we have a big P2P networking event. Uh we have great people who are running that. And we have people who are truly committed to making the partner experience with Microsoft um exceptional. Have we gotten there yet? No. Because Microsoft is a bear. It's absolutely a bear to deal with. Uh, somebody shared me an orc chart once and I was like, "Oh my god." It was like hundreds of pages, this ORC chart, and I saw it and I I probably didn't want to see it ever again because it just it was very very intimidating. >> But I learned how to be an advocate for the partner.
So, it's not all fun and games, but you need to let Microsoft know when things aren't working well for the partner community and they have listened a lot of the times. Some of the times they have not listened but because it was it went against you know what they were trying to achieve. But I finally I feel after years and years that we have a better relationship with Microsoft than we've ever had before. And that's because we have people who are part of international and Americas that are committed to a good relationship with Microsoft and not seeing Microsoft as the bad vendor because there's a whole lot of mistrust.
Microsoft wants to steal my customers. All Microsoft wants to do is take over all the things I've been selling for the last 15 years and take over and put me out of business. That's not what Microsoft's trying to do. Microsoft is expecting partners to do more than just collect money. They're expecting partners to be active. They're expecting partners to to change particularly with co-pilot and AI and and how to roll that out and Microsoft expecting outcomes.
So that's going to require retraining a lot of uh MSPs out there. >> Um because MSPs are very content just collecting a monthly check or monthly electronic funds transfer, however you see it. And this is going to be pushing the partner a little more. And some people will will will do extremely well with Microsoft. and Microsoft offering a whole lot of incentives. And that's part of what we want to do as part of the IMCP is educate the partner, let them know what's possible with Microsoft and how to use Microsoft as an as an ally, how to use it as an asset to help your client.
Whether you intended to or not, I think you perfectly segueed us back to where we started this conversation today, which is the evolution of the MSP, of a channel partner, broadly speaking. So, as we start to to wind down our conversation, I do want to touch back to that. We said at the start, WCA Technologies has been in business for over 30 years. You're a wellestablished company. You've obviously evolved with the times before. We're seeing another evolution now.
Where do you hope MSPs like yourselves continue to grow, continue to expand and and what still excites you about the opportunity that lies ahead? >> What has always excited me um and this is since the be beginning is how do I how do we make our clients more efficient? How do we make a difference with our clients? I'm going to have a lunch on Monday. It's a brand new client of ours. We just moved them from not Office 365 but another platform to Office 365.
And I'm going to sit down with them and ask them what what would make a big difference in how you're running your business? What is missing right now? How how do we take you to the next level? And it's conversations like that really excite me and have always excited me is like how do you get people access to data they don't see right now. You know how can they sort of manage their business based on the analytics? How are you doing this month compared to last month and drilling down and really having them have a better understanding.
You know, years ago, it was that one data person who sort of held on to everything and you would wait for them to run their reports once a month and everybody was like waiting for their reports, waiting for the reports, finally get the reports and it's like it's too late already. But imagine if you can give access to those types of reports on a daily basis or weekly basis or monthly basis or alert them when something is is dipping down or or spiking up and be able to hand it handle it immediately the beginning of the month rather the end of the month and make that adjustment.
That's the part that excites me. Um, and the only way to do that is really understand the business, understand your client. And as an MSP, I think what needs to happen is you need to understand those verticals that you're supporting. In some markets, that's impossible because you're you're not going to be able to survive. But in a place like New York City or any big metro area, there's so much business to be had in a city like this that you can verticalize and really have a great understanding of the business and what outcomes they're looking for in terms of whether it's productivity, number of clients seen um or some other analytic.
But really understanding the business and how you can apply those tools you have as an MSP to their business, I think is going to be transformational. It's going to take it to the next level if you embrace it. If you don't embrace it, you're just going to be selling milk, eggs, loaf of bread, very generic services. Whereas if you want to be able to you know differentiate yourself with understanding their vertical and how to make an impact on that is but you need to develop an expertise in AI.
That's the only way to do it. AI is not going away. It's what you're doing with it. um how you you really embrace something that is you can't even explain it because you don't even know and like before when I explain the things that you don't know you don't know you're going to explore and find a lot of those aha moments with your clients and not understand that wow we really shouldn't be doing this anymore we should be doing that and in order to make a decision like that, you need good information. >> Well, in many ways what MSPs have always been the best at when they're when they're operating on all cylinders, but point well taken on what we need for the future.
So, Peter, final question to you as we wrap. If anybody wants to learn more about the work you do at WCA Technologies, wants to learn more about the AMCP, where would you direct people to to find out a little bit more about the work you do? So for WCA technologies, it's our website is wcat.com. wcat.com with the IMCP. It's the imcp.org that we're a nonprofit organization and we operate as such. Um, we we have a few paid employees, but uh there's so much good content on the IMCP website if you become a member of just a whole lot of experts out there that really understand the Microsoft ecosystem.
And on WCA, we we understand, we've been doing this a long time. We understand our our markets. We understand our verticals really well. And we are truly we're in business to be our client's best partner. That's why we're in business. >> Perfect. Well, Peter, thank you. I will let you get back to that business. I know we're talking in September, just in time for that Q4 prep to probably start kicking into gear. So, I appreciate you taking some time.
And as always, you can head to channelinsider.com for the latest news and analysis from myself and my team about AI security, the Microsoft ecosystem, and so much more. But Peter, thank you again for the time. >> Thank you, Victoria. I appreciate it.
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