Hi Channel Insiders. Welcome back for another episode of Channel Insider Partner POV. Today, I am talking to Mark Cuban, the CEO of Netreo. We dig into how Netreo came to be, where it's going, and what Mark sees in terms of MSP value moving forward in a differentiated world where customers expect more and everybody wants to run with less. We talk about Netreo now, the provider's AI-powered services delivery platform, plus how Netreo has built AI advisory practices enabling customers to deploy AI securely, with governance, and at the scale and speed that everybody wants to move at.
Along the way, we discuss everything from Mark's varied background and services to, like I said, what Netreo needs to be moving forward. It's a great conversation that details not just where the industry is right now, but where Mark thinks it's headed. Thanks as always for watching. Enjoy the episode. I am joined now by Mark Cuban, the CEO at Netreo. Mark, thank you so much for the time. Victoria, thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Absolutely.
I guess to maybe kick things off, introduce yourself if you don't mind to our audience. Tell me a little bit more about you and then a little bit more about Netreo. >> Sure. Mark Cuban, I'm the CEO of Netreo. I've been in the IT services space for jeez, I guess about 25 plus years. Always in the services industry and helping customers just think about better ways to use technology. I've been in various roles from infrastructure and delivery to product management, sales and marketing.
Very early on in my career, I've actually started off as a staff accountant, so I kind of knew that part of the business as well, too. Over the years, I've just really enjoyed working for different companies and helping organizations from small market to mid-size to enterprise customers, just really think about their IT investments and how to use them in a smarter and better way, and I've really enjoyed it. >> Perfect. And then tell me a little bit more about kind of how you've come to to lead Natrio and who Natrio is and who you support. >> We we have a private equity firm that's behind us.
Um they've been a great partner and a great uh investor in the organization. They made their investment in um in the Natrio organization um about 2 and 1/2 years ago now. I got introduced to them about a year and a half ago and spent a little bit of time with them kind of thinking about their investment thesis and how they wanted to think about growing the organization, um investing more uh funds in the organization. We talked a lot about what we wanted to build, the types of customers that we wanted to help, the types of services that we wanted to bring into the organization either through acquisition or growing organically.
And ultimately we kind of reached um what I would say a a go-forward kind of agreement and strategy on what we wanted to build and operate over the next handful of years. And um myself and a few other people that I've worked with in the past had joined up with the Squared team and and then joined with Natrio as well. And uh we've done a few acquisitions and have been building the organization ever since. >> Could you maybe walk us through the Natrio Now platform a little bit in terms of kind of how you developed it and what it then enables you to bring to customers? >> There's a lot of MSPs that are out there in the ecosystem, and and that's a good thing.
Um I think more and more customers are looking for service provider partners to work with. And and again, as I mentioned before, just just help them kind of tackle the day-to-day kind of issues that come up from a technology standpoint. But even more importantly, I think the MSPs that are a little bit more thoughtful, the ones that are working with their customers to talk about what should my organization look like in terms of using technology as an enablement platform 6 months from now or 12 months from now or 2 years from now, just so they don't get stuck or fall behind.
So that that's one aspect of it. The the real thing that I think will ultimately kind of differentiate, you know, one MSP from another is not only just the talent, you know, the people that are kind of working with customers day in and day out, but ultimately kind of the tool set that we bring to not only our delivery team, but then the tool set that's going to interact with our customers and kind of that experience and how efficient we are about resolving issues and solving problems for them and and just ultimately kind of making their life easier as they're trying to get their jobs done within our organization.
So one of the platforms, and it's really the main platform that we have from a delivery standpoint, is called Net Now. It's really a combination of a handful of things. It's it's our ITSM system, which is based on ServiceNow as our, you know, the underpinning of that platform. We have a number of different tools that we use for monitoring end user devices, PCs, laptops, um, mobile devices. We also get into the infrastructure where we're managing network devices, Wi-Fi ports, um, storage devices, servers.
We're monitoring our customers' public cloud environments on Azure, AWS as well, too. We're monitoring all the security, you know, platforms that our customers are managing and and trying to take care of as well. So all of the different tools that we use for helping our customers from a support standpoint, monitoring the different endpoints, uh, and devices that we have out there, you know, kind of that we're that we're supporting and managing are going into a data warehouse.
Um, we then take a number of different AI tools, and as alerts come in, as requests come in from customers, emails, phone calls, we're actually managing that information through our AI platform and helping our end users resolve those tickets in a much more efficient way. So providing them with information about how to resolve that ticket, um, efficiently, what's the path to least resistance to actually get that solution fixed, even providing some self-service support back to the end customer, help them really start to resolve those problems kind of along the way even before we get involved.
And that and that's one of the key things that we're working on, you know, with the Netreo now platform is how do we continue to introduce AI to the point where we can either, you know, without labor resources resolve tickets automatically and proactively for our end users or have the end user actually have the tool set to resolve the problem on their own if that's the most efficient way to get things done. >> No, there's a lot within that, so we'll unpack that a little more, but I am curious to your your last point just then on the kind of AI of it all, right?
The ways that AI is is unlocking new opportunities for your customers to be more efficient, for you to be more efficient. When you think about the speed at which these AI models improve, change, etc., right? How often are you from a technical standpoint looking at the platform and going, "Okay, do we need to make kind of holistic updates, changes? Do we need to tell our customers new information?" How do you as an MSP kind of think through how fast things seem to be evolving? >> Um look, it's it's very fast.
And when I say very fast, I would say even just over the past kind of 6 to 9 months as OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, obviously Copilot, they've all made what I would say exponential advancements in terms of their functionality, their availability, their ease of use, and maybe it's not any one thing, but all those things combined, people in their daily lives are using them to, you know, just solve their own problems, whether it's, you know, buying a ticket or ordering food or might be a health issue, what whatever it may be, but they're We're to actually make that leap of if I'm able to do it for my personal life, why can't I do it for my work life?
So, our consumers, our end users are demanding it, but also from a delivery standpoint, our engineers, our organizations have flipped that switch in terms of really understanding how to apply it to how we're doing work. So, our ability to analyze data much more quickly, our ability to actually ask it the right questions, create skills, and have it actually resolve problems just over the past kind of 6 months, half a year has really exponentially changed, and we're really starting to kind of insert that into our ability to have agentic AI agents really start to resolve tickets without having our staff engage at all.
We're providing governance oversight. We're seeing what those agents are doing, but we're really starting to see the impact of how an AI platform can actually start to resolve level one and starting to get in the even level two tickets. Um, and solve problems much more efficiently than we can do with just our labor staff. That never means that our labor staff is ultimately going to go away. I just think that that provides us with the ability to start pushing more complicated tasks kind of up the food chain in terms of um, the skill set and the experiences of the people that we have within the organization. >> Mark, you touched there on on something that I think is coming up increasingly as I talk to MSPs, right?
Which is we have new automation capabilities, we're doing more, but that doesn't mean actually that we're getting rid of our our human staff for the word, right? When you were kind of building the platform and then you continue to talk within Nutri itself about the ways that you're utilizing AI, did you have concerns from your own team about what that might look like for them? How did you handle that kind of internal approach to AI or or were you kind of all on the same page though? >> Victoria, I don't I don't think um, I can't say that we've had that discussion internally that people are concerned about job elimination.
And And look, I I'm not going to go into address like other organizations and companies out there that might have a very financial focus or legal focus in terms of the industry and the function that they work on. But we're in the tech space. All we think about is how do we get more efficient? How do we get smarter? I think about this organization growing, you know, threefold, fivefold from a top-line perspective over the next kind of, you know, four to, you know, six, seven years.
Maybe we don't need as much staff going forward to scale and grow because of what we've invested in AI. But that doesn't eliminate the people that we have in place today. I think it just enables them to work in a very different way and a much more smarter way. But we're also going to be creating new products and services that we're going to be bringing to market. So, somebody that maybe works in the help desk today or works as a security engineer today or supports servers and storage is going to move into a much more different function and role in terms of maybe enabling AI agents to do things that we had never thought of before in terms of either resolving issues, being much more proactive, providing a much more secure environment as well, too.
So, they'll be guiding and coding and, you know, working on engineering tasks, but in a different function than they might be doing today. And that's a good thing. I I think it it really does create more opportunities for our staff. I think it enables them to think in a very different way. I think it also allows them to start to think about the functional challenge, not just the technical challenges that our customers face, and really start to blend the technological expertise that we have and solving the functional challenge that our customers have day in and day out and bringing those two together.
And that's the real kind of ultimate goal, and that's where we provide the most amount of value for our customers. >> Sure. Well, I think that's a pretty good segue into the other half of the AI conversation I wanted to have with you, which is that I know you've also semi-recently rolled out advisory services for customers that are kind of built on that how to actually leverage AI and and get the most out of it. When you were, you know, kind of putting those services together and also just generally from the the perspective of supporting your customers every day, where are you still seeing maybe the greatest need from a customer perspective in terms of understanding AI deployments?
And and what did you really want to target moving forward? >> Yeah, and and it's changing very quickly. So, look, we're we're no smarter than the next person. We think that we're pretty good and fairly talented, but we knew we had to actually build an AI practice off of the AI work that we were already doing internally. So, at the very least, I think that we had, you know, {quote} {unquote} good bones from an AI perspective to start to think about bringing some of that talent, some of that expertise, what we've done internally to market.
But what quickly happened, and this goes back to my comment before about how quickly things have moved just within our customer base is we just started to get so many inbound requests from our customers that they've got their employees that are using personal accounts of Open AI, personal accounts of Claude and ChatGPT. They're doing work tasks, and they have zero control over what type of data they're uploading into these platforms. They're not being trained, they don't have any oversight, they're getting expense reports that, you know, for AI tools that they just don't know what they're for and don't know how people are using them.
So, the very first requests that were coming in, and when I say first, it was more like, you know, 10 and then 20 and then 30 and then 50 of them. So, they've just been coming in more and more over the course of time and and very recently is that customers wanted to understand how do I get a hold of this? How do I roll out an enterprise solution of whatever platform we want to choose, whether that's Copilot or Claude or Open AI or ChatGPT, whatever it may be.
How do we get a hold of this, roll it out to the organization, train the organization, and then put governance around it? So, how do I make sure that I understand what data is being uploaded? How do I protect that data? How do I understand what the costs are going to be and how to keep those costs under control? And then retraining the organization as well, too. So, really the first part of it started out with what's the right platform for somebody to choose?
The second piece of it is how do I roll it out and train the organization? And then the third piece is how do I put governance around that? And now after we've done that, and that's that's like a one-to-three-month type of a process, then we start to talk to our customers about, "Okay, what is the function that you're trying to solve within your organization?" And now we're getting into conversations about how do we develop agentic skills for what they're trying to solve for?
How do we develop a tool set and a process and a workflow for how to use these platforms? And then we just build a road map going forward, but it's been a good experience about very tactically and in a short amount of time trying to show progress, tangible results for the organization, and then starting to expand it, you know, further throughout the org. And now we're starting to really think about what are the very specific areas that are common through all of our customers, whether it's an HR function or a finance function or maybe within [snorts] a manufacturing plant or sales and CRM, and really starting to develop a product set and services and agents that we can now bring to our customer base to solve those very specific kind of functional problems.
And And that's where we're really kind of blending our technical expertise and our now kind of new form kind of understanding and know-how how to use these platforms and bring those to our customers. >> I'm curious to ask you too, Mark. Obviously as an MSP, building service offerings is not kind of a net new thing for you or for you, right? [clears throat] To some degree, but are there aspects of the demand for AI and customers maybe not understanding always, but need for AI, right?
Or at least supposed need for AI that changed the way that you went about building this practice in particular or did you really pull on kind of what you've always done well and just added the AI flare to it? >> To be fair, you know, we were we were developing and leveraging AI to make ourselves more efficient. And I think that there was that natural kind of tendency for a company that is very tech-focused to do that. That's I think I'm stating the obvious there.
What we didn't realize is how fast and the demand and the hunger from our customer base across a number of different industries were going to be so interested so fast in wanting to start to use AI, but use it in a very smart way. You know, the example that I went through before in terms of just trying to get it under one umbrella, trying to understand how people are using it, making sure that they're using it in a common way that is, you know, building value for the organization versus in a disparate way where people just kind of doing things on their own.
It's not so much that it's a band caught us by surprise, but it's been um it's been encouraging to see that people are wanting to adopt it so quickly. I think what that's going to change within our industry is that the value for the services that we provide today, solving a level one help desk ticket, patching a server, doing a restore from a backup, solving a security incident, the value of that's going to keep getting compressed and the demand from our customers is going to be that's table stakes.
I want to make sure that you're leveraging AI not only to make sure that you're being as efficient as possible to solve my problems faster, but helping me operate more efficiently as an organization and be a better competitor within my industry. And that's where the MSP value is really going to be, I think, driven over the next kind of 2 to 3 years. >> Does that kind of knowledge and awareness change the way that you approach kind of Netriox as a whole?
I mean, obviously we've spent a lot of time today talking about AI, but you offer a variety of security services to your point. Netriox has always >> [clears throat] >> kind of offered networking, etc. Do you have to rethink some of those kind of tried-and-true methods kind of moving forward in this new world? >> Yeah, it's it's it is not so much about the basic kind of blocking and tackling is the value of who we are, right? It's how efficient we're doing this.
And then, like you know, I mentioned before, it is not only us as an organization kind of bleeding into kind of the functional, you know, kind of aspect of what our customers do day in and day out, but also getting our employees to think about that as well, too. So, it's not just about how do I make sure that a server is operating optimally from a security and availability standpoint, but how [snorts] does that ultimately translate into my customer that is a healthcare provider, or an insurance company, or a parts manufacturer, or a nonprofit, how is that ultimately helping them work better, spend their dollars more efficiently, help them become more efficient?
That's how we need to get our employees to think is not just the tactics of fixing a problem, but how have I made that employee more efficient to help their organization become a better organization. And and that's not a very simple thing, right? In the tech world, you know, we all think, you know, within our our our lane sometimes about I'm a good engineer for a server or a storage device or a Wi-Fi device or I can solve a service desk, you know, issue fairly efficiently, but we want our employees to be very empathetic about the challenge that the end user on the other side of that call or the other side of that email is having and what they're trying to solve for themselves and for the organization and then ultimately for their partners and customers that are on the other side of that.
And that's really important to drive into into Netreo. >> Well, Mark, I want to go back to something you touched on way back in the the beginning of this conversation when you were introducing Netreo, which is that you've grown pretty extensively over the last few years both with that key partner and also through acquisition and kind of the way that you've integrated those acquisitions into one company moving forward. When you think about growth and what Netreo what you want Netreo to look like at the end of this year and and into the future, what do you think the MSP of tomorrow, quote unquote, needs to look like?
And I know you've touched on that from a a technical and a services standpoint here, but how do you think about scaling what Netreo can bring to address those needs? >> Well, there was two questions in there about scale and then what it, you know, so you asked me one question, um, which is what do I think the MSP of tomorrow will look like? Look, I I'll go as far as to say in a perfect world, agentic AI agents are doing 70 80% of the work effort that we're doing today.
That's a really good thing. Um, and again, I mentioned before, it's going to allow us to focus on the things that become much more valuable, much more important to our organizations in terms of how they leverage technology and how technology enables them to be, again, a more competitive organization, allows them to think think different products and services that they can bring to market. Um it allows them to maybe think about M&A as well, too, in terms of integrating organizations into their platform.
It allows them to think about maybe expanding into different markets. You know, financially speaking, it just allows them to be a better, smarter organization that helps them expand their own margins and invest back into the organization. As we get more and more away from the very tactical things that we do today that are becoming less valuable because of the impact of AI, we're going to get more and more into how do we help customers think functionally, how to get smarter and more efficient by leveraging AI.
And that's a combination of, again, using technology to help our customers become better operators. And I think that's going to be the MSP of the future. It's It's not going to be the ones that are [snorts] able to answer the phone call faster and solve a help desk ticket, you know, uh as soon as possible or optimize a Wi-Fi device that is that is not running optimally. Those are all things that we're going to get an alert on, and an Ajanity AI agent is going to pick up and solve right away.
We're going to be focused on the more complex issues. We're going to be focused on helping customers think about IT strategy and how that fits into their organizational strategy. And I think that that's going to be ultimately how MSPs are going to separate themselves over the next 2 to 3 years. >> What excites you about the kind of position that Trio is in now to to scale and continue to be that MSP that your customers need? >> There's a few different things that I think about there.
One, the first and foremost, I think it's our talent. You know, it's the people that we have in the organization that have already started to not only think 2 to 2 and 1/2 years ago when we were starting to introduce kind of AI solutions into the Ajanity Now platform, but the ones that have just stepped up over the past kind of three to four months in getting certified on various AI platforms. So, you know, I think we've got 50 to 60 people of our, you know, close to 400 people in the organization that are becoming certified on different AI platforms.
That's great to see and we want to encourage as many people as possible within the organization to pick up those skill sets as well, too, and start to think about how do they translate their current work effort and tasks that they're doing and leveraging AI platforms to make themselves more efficient. Almost just becoming kind of their own entrepreneur within side of the group that they work in today and kind of feed that into their various kind of tasks and skill sets and then pass that back into the organization.
I would say if you look back over the course of my career and the different companies that I've worked for, from an M&A standpoint, a lot of organizations just think about picking up additional scale like we can acquire five more MSPs that look and do the same things that we do today from a service desk standpoint or a public cloud standpoint, security. That's all good, you know, it's great to have a little bit more scale. You bring on more employees, they have more experiences, they might work in different industries, and that's nice, but that's not the main driver anymore.
One of the things that I think is key for us to kind of consider is when we're looking at acquisitions or looking at acquiring new customers what industry do they work in? You know, so we have a little bit more of a concentration in terms of the industries that we serve because when you're smaller, I think it's important to be a little bit more of a generalist because you just want to pick up more customers and grow regardless of the focus. But as we've reached a certain level of scale and we've got a lot of concentration in financial services and health care, uh manufacturing, uh non-for-profits, um quick service retail as well, too.
We can start to really think about how do we build a product and a service for a specific industry which brings a lot more value to, I think, the market and the customers that we serve if we can really start to think about getting more uh specific about how those products solve needs of a certain industry. Um and I think we're going to be a little bit more smarter about, as we think about growing the organization from a skill set standpoint, a talent standpoint, subject matter experts, bringing in um individuals that can service very specific industries, also looking for acquisitions that are in specific industries, and then tailoring what we develop and the products and services that we bring to market for those.
Um and I I think that'll actually help us create more value. There's a huge market within any specific industry that we that we could serve. If we narrow that down to maybe four to five different industries, I think that'll help the organization grow a little bit more quickly over time. >> Well, Mark, I want to thank you again so much for joining me. If people have listened to this and and you've struck inspiration in their minds or they're simply curious, where can they go to learn more about Netriosity and the work you do? >> They can always reach out to me.
Just Google my name, and that's always great. They can go to, you know, netriosity.com. Um we hope that we're doing a great job in terms of um exposing the brand, and and people are starting to learn a little bit more about us. We've got a lot of great things to offer. Um I think even more even more importantly, we've got a lot of great people in the organization that really want to help our customers, and that's ultimately uh what it comes down to in this industry, and um we're looking to do really great things going forward.
So, Victoria, thanks for having me. Uh it was nice meeting you, and um I was glad I was able to uh join the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you'd like to learn more about Netriosity from our prior reporting or learn more about the MSP industry in general, of course you can head to channelinsider.com. >>
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