Video: EchoStor And Eversource: A Blueprint For IT Partnership Success

if I'm looking for someone to provide me a solution then they should have done it already before if I want someone to come in and use me as their first time I'll just do it myself hey Channel insiders I'm your host Katie boso and welcome back for part two of my interview with Echo Store Technologies and their customer eversource if you haven't watched or listen to part one head on over to channel insider.com right now to catch up in this half of the interview we dig deeper into what makes this it partnership work and what both parties would suggest to anyone out there looking for their own it solution provider to partner with Mark I really I really like to make sure that I pick your mind as the customer here because I think it's so important that what you have as far as experiences go with working with Channel Partners you can use that to share and encourage other people out there who are just dipping their toe into the channel space and going well what is a solution provider and what exactly do I need from them or what can I get when you have somebody who is saying I have never partnered with an outside solution provider before what should I look for what are some of the things that you would advise them to immediately pick up on when they're searching for a partner like that what dictates them going this is the right fit for me and this is what we should do great question tough question um right but my my personal answer to that would be I always start with experience right if I'm looking for someone to provide me a solution then they should have done it already before if I want someone to come in and use me as their first time I'll just do it myself so always looking for experience and and we very often especially in it in our personal it because we're not you know I'll say a Google or a Microsoft at bleeding edge of of certain Technologies when we're doing a project our typical response is we can't be the first ones to have done it this way right so who's done it this way before what roadblocks have they hit what was the most successful or efficient way of doing things that's the value that you get out of a solution provider 99 times out of 99 they should be coming back and saying we've done it with customers X Y and Z this is how we would do it for you and that gives you the starting point and and gives you a much better Head Start than doing things yourself and and experiencing issues that other people have come through before and you not being able to get through them as fast Nick same question to you how would you build on that coming from the opposite side being the partner here what would you say to those enduser businesses out there that are looking to be able to have what you and Mark have here and be able to have that together it's really easy to be okay at what I do you what my company does I think there's a lot of that right it's very very easy to have a relationship or you know find an opportunity and to work with that opportunity I think it's all the things around the deal I think that are so critical I mentioned before understanding the organization and what happens around it I think understanding what happens after your solution is done and you know again all the unsexy things are really really foundational and so I think people either get nervous or are in a hurry and don't ask either the tough questions or don't challenge things or don't take the time to learn all the little nuance and I mean listen the Nuance doesn't always impact something but if someone's willing to learn the Nuance of your business and willing to put in the time I think that's a really good indicator as well on top of what Mark just said yeah for sure I agree in going just off of there what's next for this relationship this partnership between eversource and Echo Store I know that we spoke a little bit about that Mark and there are some things you can't give me all the information quite yet just write it on the back of my bill when you send that to me by the way and got yeah okay uh so includ it with the coupons wink wink yeah what's next for this this partnership what are you working on next that you can speak to or what other areas of eversource's business are you planning to bring Echo Store into I'd love to expand more to kind of my my personal realm right so I worked with them with other teams with our our infrastructure our uh you know data center infrastructure backend server infrastructure backend I'd love to work with them more on the end user side of things and the Microsoft side of things so with projects that we have coming up next year we'll look for their expertise when it comes to you know Nick actually mentioned a good one right with the Drone folks eating all of our SharePoint storage how do we get them out of there in the right way let's establish the Right Storage solution for them and then the right migration solution for them so you know they'll they'll probably be heavily involved in in directing us the right way to move those files efficiently and safely securely as well as I think we touched on it in a a prior meeting you know the digital experience realm right it may be something that Echo Store doesn't have experience in today but maybe they can go off and get experience and come back and and advise me on it after that um so love to have that kind of two-way partnership where it's you know and I tend to do this with folks internal that ask because Echo Store doesn't actually ask me themselves but it's you can ask me any question you want if I don't have the answer I'll go get it for you and that's kind of the way that you know they're approaching that as well right we may not have the expertise but we'll go get it we'll understand the solution of what it is you want to do and we'll find the right way to do it for you we still have a unique size where you know I mean when Mark and I are having conversations and we can go back to the office we can still influence you know decisions across the whole company based on what we're seeing here right so again on that conversation you the digital experience it's not a place we really play it historically right so we were happy to support where we could but you know again we're big on not saying no but passing where it's not our spot but that product now is in our NPC for evaluation our new product Council so you know evaluating it and see if it's a good play and again if customers we trust trust goes two ways if customers We Trust see a big value in something we should be investing at least evaluating it and Nick you you were brought up in that where Mark was saying if you don't know something you'll go and get the answer for you and for echos store in general how does that work is that something where you will literally train up on it or do you have have a network of partners that you would trust and go to to connect him with maybe a few of them that might have an answer how does that how does that work out for you what do you foresee when it comes to that sort of situation y it's exactly that so and I actually I would have a third bucket to it so we have you know the one bucket is if it's within our realm train up be capable but be transparent like if we're training up on something like back to the we can't be 1.0 we can't make 1.0 here right but if we're going to like learn about something that's a good place to be and that's the easiest one the next easier one you know option two is we we have our partners we work a lot with right service now is a great area where we have specialized Partners do certain things and you know we work with them as part of us governing an overall strategy right that's an easy way to bring out partner the third option which is one I take a lot of pride in I think a lot of people don't do this is we have unfriendly Partners we have Partners who want to take our business but who are fantastic in certain areas and I've told people at ever Source like this company is way better at that thing you know and hopefully with trust and transparency like that partner comes in does a great job and you know hopefully they don't take our business and if they're way better than us then that's what happens you know but when when they really need something again we've made those recommendations as well and that's that's a that's a really important part of our relationship I love that I I always consider the channel to be a community as much as it is a group of competitors in a way that seems really healthy so interesting takes on that Nick and thanks for sharing them before we wrap up here Mark as somebody who is dealing with a lot of opinions and seeing a lot of tech being thrown at you and seeing a lot in the news when it comes to Tech Trends what are you implementing or avoiding and why why another great question um you know we we uh I was I was going to dive in there I was going to dive in there so top of everybody's mind right big buzz word for the past year has been gen AI right you're looking at the Chad gbts of the world co-pilots of the world Etc we're looking at implementing something right and I say something because we've got a bunch of different vendors coming our way saying we can do this we can do that we can integrate with these systems Etc right and everything costs money so we definitely I know we're weird right even energy so we we want to make sure we're spending our money in the right ways so we're doing a lot of analysis now to try and understand what the right impact would be of a geni product right is it make more sense to put something on our customer facing website that answers questions about your bills or let's you report an outage does it make sense to implement something internally that allows us to create a ticket or provide some self-service options for resolution you know issue resolution or answer employee questions about benefits right there's all these different possibilities for a gen type of solution that we're really evaluating a lot of them uh we are probably going to avoid some of the ones that we've seen in I'll say public marketing because we've done certain Pilots inside and I don't know if it's good or bad to call out products but I'll I'll abstain from doing that very good on this show you are more than welcome to call out products even even in a negative light yes okay so um I would love for any type of feedback from anyone who's done this successfully but we did run a very small pilot of co-pilot users we had again it's very small so it's not a huge use case however we saw not a lot of value out of it we saw issues with it actually doing something right meaning taking action and the feedback that I've I've given you know straight to the manufacturer is it can tell me all about my notes from a meeting right does a great job summarizing hey you know Nick said this Katie said this Mark said this and and Mark you have these three action items okay great go back and set a time on my calendar find a free time on my calendar give me 30 minutes to execute on these action items sorry I can't do that and it's like okay but you're built by the same manufacturer you're developed together right why can't you just create an appointment on my calendar something as simple as that it couldn't do it couldn't take action so good for Content creation right great for note taking and summarizing things and and offloading that to something else right incredible uh time saer there but that next step kind of brought us into that Gartner trough of disillusionment right the hype cycle kind of oh well it can't do everything we thought it could boy our expectations just nose dive so now we're looking at you know Alternatives and looking at how easy it is to hook up alternative atives to other systems including things like teams or service now like Nick was saying again what makes the most sense to invest our money where we're going to get the best impact out of it so that's one of the big big areas that we're looking at there's a lot of players in that area now it may not seem like it but you search it on on LinkedIn or look through my inbox on LinkedIn and you've got no short of 15 people coming at me saying that they can help integrate with their their bot with uh you know internal systems and everything like that so a lot of analysis to do my team won't personally be running it because now we have a dedicated AI team under security which is fantastic you know we need that drive and that dedicated mindset um as well as Personnel so that's a good thing that we have that now but we'll definitely have our our you know hands in that in that jar to make sure we're having our feedback uh heard and and making sure we have you know an impact basically on everyone from paying customers to the internal employees making it all happen behind the scenes it's kind of funny on that on like the AI side especially like when we come to you know end users right where we end up in this this space of either there's a problem let's find a solution or here's a solution let's find a problem and and neither of them is wrong because let's I mean we're looking at the art of the possible right we look at a solution what could it do but there's a lot of backwards thinking that we run into you know we're trying to figure out sometimes how to make these things work it's a it's an interesting mental exercise and you know one thing we're seeing too and you know to Mark's Point like as we're working with customers and looking at places for hey here's how we can scale this well we don't just scale good behavior we scale bad behavior too right so like I was saying before every solution creates a new problem there's a lot of things too that we're finding for like you know odd side effects of hey look we scaled this incredibly productive activity suddenly we broke something else and so you know as we're seeing this world go that's where I like the crawl walk run Theory which is you know obviously very common but like in our drone side I like where it can be a bit contained we can kind of grow into it I think that's where we're going to find the most success with anything in this area is is something we can kind of adopt you know make it our own and grow into it in a measured way 100% and great advice to those who are out there listening no matter what side of the position that they're sitting on as far as being the customer the partner or even the vendor so I thank you both so much for your transparency on that level that brings us to the end of our time today gentlemen and before we go I want to make sure that we're putting your names out there into the network so for those who would like to learn more about we'll start with Echo Store Nick where can people go to learn more about Echo Store yeah absolutely we're echoo um and it's no e at the end it's not a store like that it's e c h s o r we're obviously very active on all the different social channels and social media we have a YouTube channel now as well but our website is just a great place to kind of aggregate things you know I think you'll find if you reach out to anyone from our company you're going to have a really good response people are really excited about this I mean our energy right now is off the charts and our talent pipeline is very strong too so everyone's just really excited about how we're growing this thing so I think you'll find that excitement from anyone you reach out to so I guess the real answer is make up a name at eost store.com if you get lucky you're probably talking to a good person and the right person Corona flipflops at echo.com so I'll register that one right now we'll be ready it's going to be me and for Mark if we'd like to learn more about eversource potentially get our power from you if you're my new neighbor where can we go to learn more yeah so interested in in anything from jobs to company history to investor relations um eversource.com easily enough gentlemen thank you so much for your time today it's been such honest such a pleasure getting to talk to both of you about this really amazing partnership and thank you so much thank you ktie appreciate the time yeah thank you so much okay this was awesome and just so you know if there's ever an outage in your area we'll make sure the trucks are there first we'll get the power back on like that's obviously something that Mark and I can control and we'll make it happen for you oh no send the drones yes thanks to Mark and Nick for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on youtube.com/ Chanel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to us on your favorite podcast listening platform don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time n

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