Video: How Velosio is Powering Mid-Market Digital Transformation

it really comes down to controlling the amount of uncertainty and reducing uncertainty as much as possible hey Channel insiders welcome to channel Insider partner POV I'm your host Katie boso and today I sit down with Robbie Morrison CEO of vasio a solution provider specializing in Microsoft products Robbie and I discuss everything from both partnering with and selling to Independent software vendors to the role of it in modern horiculture and how velosio is helping mid-market businesses navigate their Cloud Journeys during a time of economic upheaval and AI Obsession hi Robbie welcome hi thanks for having me thank you so much for being here I know you're coming off of a soccer game so I really appreciate you being here on a Monday morning and being so bridey and bushy tailed yeah bridey might not be the right uh the right statement but I'm here I had a great uh event last night with my son at Atlanta United that sounds like a good time and as I said prior to the call you get lots of brownie points now with your son for be for being the best dad on this weekend so happy to hear that did they win was it good they didn't they lost Miami United uh you know we went fair amount of it to see liono Messi play and he scored a goal and one so all right so it was worth it yeah it was well thank you so much for being here again today I'm so excited to learn about vasio and I got to tell you right off the bat I've been looking at your your web page your social media Pages LinkedIn Pages immediately I go wow you folks do a lot so I want to hear right from the horse's mouth how do you describe who you are at vasio and what you do so talk to me about the kind of business that you are and the services you provide yeah basio does do a lot but really we're so focused on a company's technology Journey their digital transformation to use buzz buzzwords but we primarily focus in and around the Erp systems of our companies primarily the Dynamics 365 Cloud offerings and net Suite we help our companies to implement really robust uh Financial uh operational systems and then provide the services in and around those things like their sales automation their data and analytics really low code custom app Dev is another offering that we do but it all is centered around that office of the CFO Office of the cro type engagements so I definitely want to talk to you more about that focus on the sea level but I first want to find out who are your customers when we talk about the verticals that they touch and the typical sizes that they are talk to me about who you're typically engaging with yeah we're typically engaging with what I'd consider the for Mid Market companies maybe on the lowest side 25 million in Revenue kind of sweet spot around 50 million in Revenue going up to around two billion in Revenue um across the gamut of the North America Market we have Specialties in in proserve proserve been one of our biggest markets and really cast a wide net with that anything from architectural firms to White Collar Consulting type organizations we have really great verticalization in the Horticulture Market good uh Solutions and offerings inside of the distribution type of companies companies that are my warehousing and shipping products those are kind of our core verticals that we go after and that's core mid Market space You took the words right out of my mouth because I was actually about to ask about the horiculture the Agra business as it's labeled on your website because that isn't something I often see of course I see Manufacturing distribution other verticals that just make you know we hear them a lot but Agra business and especially referring to it as a business sector as a vertical itself is not something I often hear in the tech space because we're we're talking about plants we're talking about growing we don't often see that as Hightech so can you talk to me about that a little bit more what are they looking for those customers who specifically are in the business of growing what do they talk to you about and what do they often need from you that you help them with I I guess really where did you do you see this as a business opportunity for vasio we've been in the Horticulture space for a while I think primarily we were focused on the greenhouse Growers the people that were taking seeds and planting them and managing them through greenhouse and Greenhouse growing is normally much more high-tech than in the field where they're very closely monitoring and controlling the environment so everything from plms from Internet of Things monitoring um around their plant growing and being able to really influence the health of those plants and get the maximum output possible from the space that they have available and a few years ago we acquired a company called Silver Leaf was the product and we really went into even more of the growing space that Silver Leaf product uh can focus on that Greenhouse growing it could also focus on the especially Growers that grow out in fields like cannabis is one of them where we can manage from the seed all the way to the the reporting for the state stes for that are there's a lot of Regulation around cannabis as we all know and still some questions at the federal level but when you're growing it and and managing the uh the output so that you can fully report that's what we can provide and also in again in that traditional seed to feed typ side you can monitor the output understand the inputs that got you your maximum yields at the end and that's what our customers are talking to us about I just just think that's so cool thinking about how technology has found its way into that space to make it something that feeds all of us something easier to do at such a large scaled level so I I probably will have more questions that come back to that as we go through the interview from my own personal interest but I want to go back to what you mentioned earlier of really focusing on the sea level and we're talking about as you said those those Chief officers at the companies that you provide to why is that the Target and the reason I asked that is because I'm often speaking to Business Leaders within the channel who are speaking to more of the it leads at these companies why is it important for you to go immediately to the top rather than kind of start in the middle the it departments the cios are normally very involved because they manage the systems but the people that are benefiting the most from our type of implementations where we're managing that core data that that you both report on the health of the company and manage the health to the company is normally the CFO for the financial and the cro for the sales and marketing automation side so when you talk about you know going after those it's it's those that our return on investment our Roi speaks to we can Implement systems that return a profit to the company quickly and when a CFO can get their days to close down it's less labor or when they can better manage their cash flow it's maybe less interest they're paying when they can get their DSO down to a uh to a lower level through different automations through some of the AI offerings that are new to the collections part of the organization it takes less Manpower less labor to uh to get a great customer experience and thereby you know improve your business and see that Roi what kind of conversation do you have to go in there with having with them because you can't immediately go in starting to talk about it and Technology when it comes to speaking with you know when it comes to speaking with the chief officer so when you're having that conversation with them how do you pose it is it a business conversation it is a business conversation it's the conversation about how they're running their business and how they're optimizing the business uh expenses to get the most you know profit back to the shareholders yeah how do you manage your um you know your cloth cycle how many Mand dayss does it take to go through a quarter or a month Close Quarter close report up to your shareholders or your owners you know how the business is doing if you can get realtime data you can make better decisions uh that are decisions more quickly than your competitors are making and thereby have Market opportunities that your competitors maybe don't have thereby turning a profit more quickly so you're talking to those sea level buyers about how to improve their business about how to increase their profitabilities and when you're not coming at it from just a feature functionality you know text act type of process then you know then it resonates with them and you know when you're talking to the cro and talking about the sales automation or the marketing automation it's about you know getting a higher close rate or getting more leads into the system or being able to better inform your shareholders of of future sales through better forecasting and better um predictability of future Revenue those things all res heavily with those sea level buyers so when looking at your your vendor Partners Robbie I'm noticing that you're you're primarily a Microsoft and Oracle shop why those specific vendors and their offerings for you is it because they're so integrated into honestly the business landscape that people need help or was there another reason that you went down that road of specializing there yeah I would say that we're primarily a Microsoft shop you know 90% of our bus business is is Microsoft and we had customers asking us about netsuite in years past and we pulled netsuite into our portfolio to really satisfy those customers and give them you know what they were looking for as they migrated to the cloud we're really a cloud first organization we've got a large group of historical clients that are still on Legacy on brim Solutions but you know we're actively trying to help them migrate to modern solutions in the cloud we believe that uh Microsoft and netsuite have the best of the midmarket upper midmarket Cloud Solutions available and when you think about why do you want to go to the cloud it's about you know getting those benefits those features that's just not accessible to the midm market through on premise Solutions too expensive to run all the hardware too costly to manage the security that goes along with it and when you can utilize a cloud-based solution like you know d365 or Dynamics 365 or netw Suite you're offloading that labor that that overhead of managing a a very robust system to someone like Microsoft or Oracle and then when you're in the Cloud solution or Cloud applications you're able to get all those benefits that high computing power things like the generative AI available to you where it's not as available on premise um you also are able to get great Predictive Analytics and be able run those at a scale that's just historically not accessible to the midm market you think you know in years past the Fortune 50 Fortune 500 maybe had access to really great analytical tools and great ability to to Crunch that data and manage that environment you can get that same power from five years ago or maybe 10 years ago now in a Cloud solution and it can it's affordable it's accessible to even that lower end of the midm markets space and let me talk to you about that cloud conversation overall because I think in recent years we've kind of seen a bit of an interesting dance between the cloud on Prem public private Cloud we've seen a shift overall how do you help your customers navigate that shift to the cloud or decide what options with their applications in the cloud are right for them knowing that they're probably getting hammered with all of this various media coverage on what might be the best cloud option there's so much to see online it's got to be overwhelming so how do you help on an individual basis your customers navigate that process and decide what's right for them and that's really a conversation with the customers because as you said every customer is different every business has a something unique about it there may be you know in some of our horiculture as we previously talked about businesses are in very rural areas that that don't have as as great of an access to the bandwidth needed to run a good application and we help them to determine if that's going to fit them or do we need to look at other Solutions and and again maybe help them to understand how to get better bandwidth how to get better reliability into their connectivity to be able to go to a cloud or talk to them about something that's a hybrid between an own PRM and a Cloud solution and you know businesses where you know bandwidth connectivity is not an issue which is luckily almost everybody now we start talking to them about the unique weakness of their business how much data do they have at rest which is the data stored in the systems how much historical data do they want to move to the cloud and what does that cost look like what servers do they have on premise that maybe could be migrated in sunsetted and lower the cost of either their labor to maintain those systems their maintenance contracts to maintain those systems and then you know look at that total cost of ownership to see if it's right for each of them and you know luckily these days the usually has a TCO that's a total cost ownership that's much lower than than on PR but it's still a conversation and something that we need to help our customers to understand and to validate that it's right for them so conversation Robbie a question I think is really important for right now is how do you help your customers navigate this disruption that we're seeing not only across the the it space the technology space but really in the economy in the United States across the workforce we're seeing a lot of layoffs we're seeing a lot of political upheaval there is so much disruption not to mention we had a pandemic just 5 years ago and we all know how much disruption that caused then how are you helping your customers navigate this and especially stay resilient while still being able to pay attention to their budgets and some of the other concerns that they each have I I think that's an very good and timely question I think everybody's you know worried what are the Terra is going to do to the US economy what's the new political landscape with Europe going to you know going to create with our us customers but if we look at the pandemic as an example that was majorly disruptive very isolationism the right word there during the pandemic where we had to really look Inward and figure out how we were going to survive I think that having access to data quickly having access access to the data as it changes for your business whether that's the cost to get a part from you know from China what's the new tariff due to your to your raw materials cost being able to understand that in real time so you can react to it in real time and get ahead of any U of any issues is super important and an integrated system like we've talked about is key to that you know having realtime data maybe having that generative AI models looking at uh predictive uh the predictive landscape of the global supply chain or or what could happen to uh to your suppliers is super important really it's a economic downturn is uncertainty and and the less uncertainty you can provide because you have good uh data about how this change will affect your budget how this potential opportunity could increase uh your sales because maybe you have an offering that's not as hit by a tariff or by you know some of these other um aspects of the new political landscape I think is huge it's it really comes down to controlling the amount of uncertainty and reducing uncertainty as much as possible through great systems that are that that collect all the data that you have available to you and can provide it back in real time I'm curious to know if you've ever had a customer kind of come to you thinking that something was totally right for them based on their own research and then you were able to kind of pivot them back to a situation that was much more applicable to what they needed I guess what I'm asking do you talk to some stubborn clients are there ones out there that need some specific handholding I heard about a client in last couple of weeks months that was you know fairly um decent size a customer client that was looking to upgrade their systems move to a modern application but it decided to go with the own Prim solution so to to publish it to their own data center they owned a data center that they thought they would be better off moving it into uh we went through spec to now you know supported them in that decision went through speced amp looked at the cost of deploying it into servers and Hardware they already had compared to deploying it into Microsoft's Azure you know through the d365 offering and it became very apparent that the total cost ownership was was greatly reduced by putting it into the cloud so yeah we we have clients come to us still thinking that way and we have to go at it as with an open mind look and see is it right to do what they're thinking or should we make another off another suggestion we talk about you know we're uh you know we're advisors we need to give advice that helps their clients to to see the best return on the investment they're making and sometimes the client's right sometimes you have to have a hard conversation and and maybe there's some egos involved with the person that originally made that recommendation so it's uh sometimes hard to navigate those Waters but it's our job to make sure we do navigate those Waters and talk to them about what is Right another area of your business at vasio that I wanted to dive into that I found really interesting was your isv services your independent software vendor Services can you explain those to me how do you work with these specific vendors because often they're building their own Solutions on top of somebody else's technology so I I'm curious to know how you serve those vendors and and how you partner with them yeah and we partner with them in multiple different ways our business has uh really two unique sides to it one where we provide services to other software vendors other isvs and one where we sell directly to clients and help them implement on the the indirect side we provide licensing to other Dynamics Partners other Microsoft partners and help them to uh navigate the complexity of being a Microsoft partner and in that side of the business we also help isvs modernize their solutions for uh for cloud offering so on that side we could be helping a isv to recode their solutions to be able to to work with a modern Cloud application and then we can help them with their marketing and getting to the end customers and being able to um to find customers for that new solution and then on the direct side we'll take many of those same isbs and we'll put them into our Marketplace or our e-commmerce solution and it's available to our clients available to our partners and be able to um to recommend what you know what we found to be the best software solutions to augment and and enhance the offerings that are the you know Dynamics the netsuite solutions that are going to Market so Robbie thinking about 2025 where where you know through the first quarter just about of the year what are you focused on this year and what's your biggest goal and of course while I do mean that broadly yes we want to serve our customers yes we want to provide success or help provide success but for you is it you want to help them navigate cloud in relation to AI you want to help the midmarket become more digitized but on a more detailed level what is your focus this year when you think about what you want to do with vasio so we go through a pretty rigorous yearly planning process that's reviewed on a monthly and quarterly basis and when we were going through our yearly planning last year it was really a lot of things came out but the kind of underpinning of everything was data and analytics and and generative AI is kind of the things that everyone's looking for now and and when we talk about generative AI which is you know you can't turn on the news these days without hearing about something with chat GPT open AI or you know one of the I heard a new thing this morning on the Wall Street journal's podcast about a new model that came out in China there's just so many different offerings around generative AI that people need their data to be ready for so one of the big things this year is helping our customers to have their data ready for what's you know what is a competitive Advantage now an organizational shift um so helping those clients get their data in the right mechanisms cleaned up um you know Master data management so that they can utilize the new tools helping them understand what those tools can mean and do to their business things like agents for Automation and for better productivity of their employees you know things like generative AI in the front office for people when they're talking to clients having better access and quicker access to uh to the data they need to service those clients you know back office Automation and the fact that they can you know maybe do some things automated instead of needing to hire four new people they hire maybe two higher you know higher end type resources or you know maybe they don't even need those they're able to uh to get higher productivity out of their existing employees and and be able to their return profits back to the organization so our goals this year is to help our clients be ready and to realize the advantages of the new shift in uh you know in the landscape around Ai and around data what do you think is the biggest challenge for that goal being accomplished is it that people want to use AI to an extent that they're not ready for but they're too excited about or is it something else entirely I think it's education and helping people understand what's what's truly available now what's still you know in the future for uh you know that you're maybe hearing about is possible but maybe not quite as accessible uh as it will be in the future but to me the the second biggest is just having the data clean enough to be able to provide good answers to um to the questions being ask of it if you uh if your day is not clean you can get what they call hallucinations from the generative AI engines you can get answers back that aren't what you would want to present to a client or what you'd want to present to an employee and then the security the security around the data is a a big a big concern for a lot of companies and probably what I would consider the third most uh challenging thing to take that journey is just helping people understand both that you're not just opening your data up to everything but you know if you do it right you can have the same security that you've been used to the same access to the data that you were used to pre- opening it up to an AI engine I'm curious to ask knowing that we're talking about Ai and the way that people are now realizing data is the fuel for good AI good data clean data is the fuel for using AI in a way that it's meant to be rather than just thinking it's for a lack of a better word of saying the artificial intelligence that can just solve everything and it's it's it's sentient and it knows what's going on you've been in technology for more than 30 years and cloud is your bread and butter in a basic sense over at basio would you say that AI is as exciting as we saw when Cloud burst on the scene or is this is this even comparable to anything that we've seen in the last three decades inside of this industry I think everything's built up off itself I uh I've been in this industry a long time in in the forming of uh internet service providers in the early days and I really think that the wide area networking in in the internet was kind of stage one and then stage two was the moved to public clouds moving off of privately owned data centers into rental uh computer power that you get with public clouds and then the icing on the top now is what we might get from uh uh AI as we continue to move forward which is really a multiplication of of the Manpower that we've had in our businesses Excel when Excel or you know Lotus 123 when it came out spreadsheets came out it drastically uh improve the productivity of of many parts of the business mainly the financial parts of the business and then you know you came out with uh you know word processing and you didn't have to throw away sheets of paper to share information and do your editing and then you know all these things yeah email all these things were productivity uh Improvement but I think AI has the ability to just drastically change that I I use this analogy way too much but I believe you need to say things over and over so it it sticks I think that the move to AI de generative Ai and then own to General AI is like the Industrial Revolution the Industrial Revolution was majorly impactful to the productivity of the manual labor the manual labor no longer had to had to be as strong as uh as they did in the past because an a machine could could amplify their their output I believe that generative Ai and general AI will do the same thing to the information worker it'll allow that information worker to to have a multiplication of its output as you look at what that could do it could you know right now GDP for a country is based off of people mainly one of the main factors of GDP growth is just your population growth and AI has the ability to kind of change that Dynamic the ability to to take your gross domestic product and really allow it to uh to accelerate through efficiency gains of that information worker and I think that that's a huge thing and I think that when a company has the ability to both be able to predict better where their business is going where the economy is going by a generative AI being able to look into you know the all the news everything going on predict how that will impact your business be able to to really help to amplify the knowledge and the expertise of your employees then a lot of things get easier and and maybe you have the ability to navigate some of these you know unsure times with with more ease because you're able to uh uh to have predictable models that tell you where you're going that you can trust and I think that's a a big thing for for where we're going with AI very well put Robbie I'm curious to know and I ask everybody who comes on the show this very important question success stories I love to know what you like to hang your hat on when it comes to talking about vasio can you share a customer success story with me in which you really say this is how we shine as a business yeah that man there hopefully there's more than I can count and there are more than I can count we have a ton of of success stories and case studies on our website and we do them routinely um with our customers and we have customers come and talk to our leadership team once a month on a Wednesday uh morning which is great to hear from our customers and we bring in the ones that are happy the ones that aren't happy so that we can uh that we can learn from them and uh you know we believe that you know most of them uh we've done a wonderful job for we have a philosophy here raing fans that we want C to come out with raving fans one of those raving fans that I heard from you a little while back was really a company that had grown you know tremendously uh you know over time and it gotten to a point where they were just struggling to continue that growth because they had all these desparate systems all of these systems that were not communicating and talking to each other um and so they had all these silos of data all these silos of information and it was causing them to not be able to understand their business as well as they could have if they had have pulled it together and been able to to really look at their data as you know one set one uh one holistic view of the business and a success story that I was proud of was hearing about how we helped them to break down those silos you know set up data warehousing implemented new Erp a new uh you know customer relationship management solution that gave them a holistic view of their organization and and thereby be able to continue that growth and and when you looked at the um at the two-year trailing growth after the implementation it looked like a hockey stick you know it looked like that jump in uh in growth that was expected and you know that happened during the covid times and to me that's what we're about we're about helping our clients to be able to realize their their potential and realize what they're capable of through better systems and better better information that a you know an owner a a sea level or even a line level worker can act on and and see the the opportunity payback that we expect what about on the vendor side the vendors that you work with and in this case I know it's primarily Microsoft but even talking about the isvs are there any vendors that you would shout out and saying they're doing a great job or there's an offering that we're getting that we're offering from them right now A solution that we're building off of their offering right now that is just doing great for veloo anything that comes to mind that you would really like to shout out we have a new um product that's white labeled from a company called fordis that's called vloop pay it's really a full payment solution credit card a processing that's available in our d365 and netw Suite offerings it allows a a client to to have really one source for payment processing at an unbelievably um attractive you know rate you know that's it's cheaper than just about anything you can get out there and it allows those um those customers to have a better experience with their clients because they have a a simplified way to take payments and to automate that payment processing whether it's a reoccurring payment or a one-time payment I really am proud of that veloc op pay label solution with forist if you've got folks who are watching and saying we might need your services how do we know that we're going to be the right fit for somebody like you to work with what would you say to those viewers and listeners as far as how they can identify why they should reach out to you and then why velosio for them well why velosio I think is uh is we really do cherish our clients and the relationships with our clients so we're going to be that partner not just that vendor to you that partner that helps you with that journey and and of digitalization or modernization and I think that the clients that that we best serve again that that core midm Market let's call it 50 to uh to a couple of billion is the is the revenue spots but you know those core uh Industries previously discussed you know Professional Service Horticulture distribution you know discreete manufacturing there's many many more that we do but those are some of the key if you're looking at your digital landscape and saying how do I get that payback that I that I was promised I didn't I'm not seeing it yet I'm not seeing the return on investment for the money I've spent or the money I'm planning to spend I'm worried I won't see the return on the investment that's expected that's when we would love to talk to you we'd love to help you understand how to see that uh that return to see you don't spend money just to spend money you spend money to make more money and that's what we're here to help you do and how can they reach out to you where can they learn more yeah they can go to our website www.o.com Robbie thank you so much for your time today it's been a pleasure getting to know you and getting to know more about vasio I wish you the best of luck this year go thank you thank you so much thanks so much to Robbie 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 us on YouTube at youtube.com/ Channel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to us as a podcast wherever you listen to podcasts don't forget to like subscribe and follow to never miss an episode once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time n

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