Video: OTAVA CEO on Transition to Broadcom Partner Program

hey Channel insiders welcome back to part two of my interview with CEO of otaba TJ Housey if you haven't watched or listened to part one head on over to Channel insider.com right now to do that first today in part two TJ breaks down the experience of what it was like to be invited to join the broadcom advantage partner program and how otava is helping customers navigate this seismic shift in the channel since broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware you're able to now provide VMware licenses to customers there's been some changes there with the amount of time the licensing uh lasts for the support of some products not being there anymore there are some changes with that so how are you helping your customers navigate those changes and and how is that impacting you at the end of the day how is that impacting otava we just both got back from Channel partners and I think of every five conversations three at some point looped back to broadcom right and what's going on because it's a market disruption probably first that we've experienced of this nature in 22 years yeah um on a on a a sizable footprint relative to the you know economy itself um so yes so clearly otaba now as a partner is a part of the new broadcom Advantage Program as a premier uh what that really means um you know for us when we look at it is we can further evolve the partner ecosystem that we already had so we already have both csps so Cloud solution providers and msps managed solution providers that are in our ecosystem and some of them are even direct competitors in similar territories but still resell or white label are aforementioned products right underneath the old program so to us it's really business as usual what I like about what's happened now though is that our relationships with the I think they changed the names of them but I still call them AGG ators the shis and the ingrams of the world relative to the new program they would be obviously Premier or Pinnacle right Pinnacle Partners is that now we're participating in the white label program and so we're actually getting lead generation from those groups to say hey help us help those Partners you know be whole as it relates to really good service really good education and a trusted ecosystem where they know that they can conduct business and it's it's fair it's above board um and so I think that's where otaba can offer for a lot of value we have an ecosystem we've done really well with it over the years now it's maturing and evolving to include the new elements as it relates specifically to the broadcom program but that's not new to otava we've been doing that for a very long time uh and we have hundreds of partners that already participate both agent reseller and white label you know into that system so I'm excited for what I think that we can offer particularly to those that are smaller um and we know how hard it is to operate a cloud or a managed service provider and we know how challenging it is to find a partner that you can trust and obviously I'm biased and bullish uh on what otava can uh can provide and offer so I think it's it's really there's a lot of upside to this but I do recognize and I want to make sure I put it on record for this call that there's a lot of people that have mixed emotions about this and that's okay um I'm just a big believer that I don't get to control how I feel about it uh right like it is what it is I just the only thing I can do is how I respond to it um and so rather than react I want to respond and help customers walk through it and I believe that you can come out the other side with the right partner better than where you started as long as you keep the main thing the main thing which is the customers that you're serving for customers that are listening and may not have been able to approach you yet about where to go from here have you noticed a pattern of specific areas of disruption that they can look into and prepare for when coming to talk to you or is it mostly just kind of all over the board still yeah I think it's narrowing like people have a better understanding today than they did 30 days ago about you know you're changing from resource utilization you know measuring from you know Ram consumption to core-based in terms of the new licensing and how the pricing structure is getting organized so I think now it's more about people are coming with a okay I've got really one or two paths and I could use your wisdom uh obviously at largely in a CSP world I have sunk cost Capital that's gone into my business because it that's that's I was running my own you know footprint and I have commitments to that not only the hardware itself uh and maybe it's least real estate you know for what they're hosting and so there's really two paths right some customers are saying hey we're just looking for a new partner that we can say this is home for us and this is who we're going to work with and we trust that you're not going to negatively affect our customers you're not going to try to poach and unfortunately you have to ask those questions because it's transparent and so we're putting that confidence in place to say hey we're going to give you transparent pricing and transparent Behavior we don't do that so you're safe here um and those customers are saying great I'm going to use you and you're going to be an overlay to us and we're going to come to you for support for education for ation uh and expertise then there's the second set of customers that are coming that are actually looking to migrate workloads and we have a lot of those that are saying hey the the costs don't make sense for us to operate as we are today so we need to change the way in which we operate and I kind of liken that to covid and what I mean by that is how many restaurants do we know today that never door dashed never delivered food to their cve ever right and within 90 days adaptation made many people decide I'm going to change and evolve my business and now all of a sudden they've shut down maybe what was their retail front of their restaurant and they make more you know more money delivering food right and so I think to those customers that are going and considering that with the right partner scaled the right way you you could increase your profitability and your Effectiveness and go do that thing you're really good at which is maybe having the sales side of the conversation architecture managing the relationships but let the heaviness of engineering skill management keeping staff right all those things that go with it uh to a a larger service provider that has that expertise so I think those are the two paths that I'm regularly having conversations with and then I would say there's probably a third unrelated and it's more about Topline activity where they're just saying hey can you help educate me on how to talk about this in a in a manner that makes sense that's not overwhelming to the end customers whether that be direct or sub tenants or or the like so uh it's been a long couple of months of conversations with people on this topic so hopefully helpful the good news is is it'll continue to be so you've already figured out your plan for the next several months that's right you I think you and I are going to be having conversations with people on this one for months to come you talk about disruption I think it's really interesting that you mentioned that and related to co because truly advancement and progress happen in the wake of disruption and unfortunately that means we don't get to choose the timing or the time or the place so for sure with that said For Better or Worse TJ have you seen otava profitability or do you anticipate otava profitability to be impacted by the broadcom changes to the partner program yeah it's a great question and it's a fair one um you know for us uh we're in a favorable position um and that credit actually I just said this on our executive call today we have a weekly call and the shout out goes to our vice president over Technology and Engineering and Justin Keller and also to a strategic partner in Comm division CEO uh is Eve Sanford and his cro is Sasha and they're very good friends and we have done business with them for years and we've been able to collaborate and we partner on a lot of shared sourcing on work in this case Professional Services and education um and so between those two parties and uh what we focused on in leadership from how do we want to be proactive on this with what we know we've been able to really put ourselves at a place of even and then favorable after optimization um and that was a little concerning when we came into it because architecturally for those that are trying to figure it out you know sometimes You're Building more east west in terms of how you're solving for your workloads and infrastructure uh we certainly were naturally um and sometimes you're more dense and you're building north south we had a blend to both uh by shuffling the way in which we're going to go forward and adjusting in our data centers we were able to get ahead of it and so we come out of it in a really favorable position but it's a good question that you're asking because I think that's the biggest concern is people are like I don't really know what this is going to do to my p&l I'm I'm and I'm nervous right because not everybody has the opportunity that we do and we recognize that in terms of size and flexibility uh to be able to make the changes to adapt and be effective you know in this market um and so I would say that's a really real question and thankfully otava is in a good situation and for those that aren't in the best situation my encouragement would just be don't give up um make a make a phone call schedule 30 minutes 45 60 and even if it's just thought leadership for free um you know you just do the right thing because it's the right thing to do it'll always come around um but there's there's certainly people out there otava one uh and we're happy to help you know answer questions and give steering on how you avoid having a negative impact against your profitability so well thank you for your transparency on that and I think some really important lessons there just take a breath take a minute don't jump ship that's it yeah I think I think a lot of times right like I certainly had my initial reactions when it came out at the end of last year and yeah um you know I would I would you know not the broadcom's asking for our coaching Katie but my feedback would be probably could have communic ated this one a little bit better on how you cancel an agreement how you communicate that out to thousands and thousands and thousands of business owners um but certainly you know to each his own each person gets to make that decision that they think is best for them in their organization um but I think that the best advice that I could give to any person right now walking through this is try not to make the decisions emotional don't make them when you're uncertain you know it's okay like if you had 30 days of overrun in order to get to three years of stable strategy take the 30 days take a breath respond don't react and I promise you can come out the other side of it really good and it might just be that you have a new partner that's involved and and having that new partner involved let's say it's an otava or a Comm division or somebody else out there maybe you become more with that partner than you could have been on your own and so it's again looking for the glass half full versus the glass half empty but be real realistic in the situation the timing matters and you have to move quick um I think I think you can still find the silver lining so to speak in it so I appreciate you saying not that they need feedback but don't worry if anybody gets an email Mr Tan will reach out to me I'm sure so moving on from broadcom and VMware let's talk more about Microsoft so obviously that's an exciting area of growth in the space of AI how much growth have you seen at otava for Microsoft's hybrid Azure Services where you're involved in that aspect of the business has that been something you're seeing build up more over the last year and do you expect that to go even further in 2024 it's a great question it's actually one I'm most excited about like I really like that space um you know for otava specifically our size business I think that we've done well I would say we would love to advance that momentum more but to our our earlier conversation broadcom in this season is consuming so much from a focus and a thought leadership perspective that you know one thing has to take priority over the other and so uh we've been able to do really well on capitalizing on managed Azure and offering continued architecture discussions creating pipeline uh for customers that are interested in furthering that which has been really really good particularly you're right like Ai and specifically co-pilot adoption and customers wanting to consume those elements within Azure those conversations has have ramped up quite a bit we have some really good projects out there and particularly our partner ecosystem is bringing us a lot of interest in Azure what's funny is it still ties back to broadcom though um because a lot of that activity is some folks you know they were already in nature I think Market says about 72% of customers minimum are are consuming no less than two Cloud sources right so if you think about it most already had workloads in public cloud of some nature and now with this inflection point on the broadcom side it's forcing them to evaluate hey maybe we just want to accelerate adoption of public cloud and that furthers our goals of getting faster to leveraging you know large language models and AI you know relative to our business goals as opposed to just technical delivery of our Cloud infrastructure um so we're seeing it I think uh for otaba specifically we're in the we're kind of middle of those conversations meaning we're not too early that we're not capturing it we're not that's all we're doing we're kind of in that sweet spot where a lot of the conversations are increasing it's usually tied to broadcom still at some level of hey can we also talk to you about this and oh by the way I know you do managed Azure and you guys have grown significantly on that footprint can you help us with that too um so we see it at the top of the funnel activities right now in uh material changes on those relationships so I'd love to get back to talking about your customers TJ can you tell me a c customer success story in which otava really loves to look at that and say this is one of those crown jewels that we say this is where we worked this is everything where if something went right this is what we point to as an example can you walk me through a success story yeah for sure I'll leave I'll leave names out just uh for for benefit of the customers themselves since we haven't asked in advance right um but in terms of case studies there's two that come to mind and from a product delivery perspective one was public Cloud that is now evolved into so fullblown manage public cloud service in this case Azure that has now actually evolved into advanced licensing and conversations around AI so we're having that right um everybody would know this company um they're very sizable and they have a really great reputation and name for themselves and so they came to us to our partner ecosystem and said Hey listen like we're really struggling to figure out how we want to adopt part of data protection first is you have to have data to protect so you have to be really good at data migration and otaba is really good at that like we're really really good at helping a customer meeting them where they're at and saying based on how you're currently set up today this is what it's going to take to protect that which you value most and get it into our footprint um and so we did that and in addition we have a very specific structure Workshop structure that we take customers through to not only get knowledge so go through Discovery but provide knowledge and give insight and education as to what this is really going to look like endstate when you get into your new ecosystem um and so that went really really well so well that in first version by the time we got done with it they had already said hey we want to bring the rest of our business to you measure in the next 90 days right and um that's what we love the most is if you do it really well you're going to see great organic growth over time you don't have to be in a hurry customers want to grow with you and go with you you know in their technology Journey so that was one and that was specifically you know public Cloud uh and we love the opportunity that it represents because that's our passion is being able to bridge that Gap you know for for customers um our second one is a little bit different equally love what we're able to do to help them but hate that they had to go through it so very large customer uh unfortunately we help a lot of customers that deal with ransomware events um and in this particular situation this customer was dealing with a very ugly ransomware situation um and the ability to step in and support their staff who did an excellent job in combination with our staff including our Advanced engineering teams leadership teams to help them not only stop you know contain undo restore but then to Circle back right into the secure framework and say hey once this is done we need we need to transition right into how are we going to avoid this in the future and for this particular customer they were doing it right it's just like everybody you can only adopt so many tools so much technology and spend so much money at once um and so that certainly accelerated their hey our appetite to make other changes to harden the environment even more is going to require probably a more intense participation from otaba than you know maybe you were planning and we Rose to the occasion and I think that we do a really good job of that consistently over time and that's what I hear from our custom customers is that you know you guys are there for us and we have that relationship you understand us our business and so those two opposite ends of the spectrum right like new opportunity new excitement New Growth the other one existing long-standing customer large uh that just said hey thank you yet again for reinforcing your value proposition and why we do business with otaba at Channel Partners conference and Expo one of the biggest themes in conjunction with AI was that by the end of 2024 the majority B to be buyer will be a millennial and it really got me thinking as a millennial myself talking about that that sort of mindset when it comes to your customers and what they need every year and how their buying habits are changing are you seeing that impacting the way that your customers are coming to you yeah for sure I I think in a way that folks are underestimating which is we always talk about buyers are more educated than they've ever been I would actually go once I've heard I think buyers are more decisive than they've ever been um I've seen in past Generations folks spend a lot of time in analysis and the absence of a decision is a decision in and of itself sometimes the worst one and in Generations past it was this pretty arduous process of discover review analyze talk six meetings quotes right I I see that in the millennial generation they're very well educated very well prepared and already decisive they pretty much know in range what they want and they know price-wise what they want and so they tend to ask quicker for cost to have a better understanding if that matches their expectation for what they're forecasting not because they're Price shopping you um and so I find that if you can be quicker to get to the facts and answer those questions for them to show relevancy you have a really great opportunity and you can move a lot quicker um that's the biggest change that I see and I really respect it I think it's probably because we're all stubborn and they've told us Millennials don't work hard um but uh that being said um I I see it and I I see it as a really positive thing and uh I think it's an incredible generation and there's a lot of cool things they going to do we're going to do in the world oh how they underestimated us oh how they underestimate and with that said are you is your team kind of changing the way it goes to Market when you're approaching new customers is there anything that you're doing differently or reorganizing the way that the the deck that you bring in yeah it's a great question you know one of the things I've been very bullish on since I took this role was to say listen you need to be more educated I don't need sales people I need sales professionals and I need folks that really understand not just the products but really the business issues and the relationships between the two so that we can solve real problems and that way if you can solve for it in one meeting versus three meetings then that's what makes you more effective and in order to do that you have to hone your craft right so you have to be okay with yeah I don't need you to be the most technical person in the room but you chose to be in a sector that requires you to have continuous learning and I think every sector does whether it's medicine or law or education relevancy matters and um we've been told by many of our customers and even uh some of the larger aggregators like some of the education levels that you've achieved in the different areas of your business it's not common where can we go to find out more and get in touch with otava check us out at www.a.com um www by the way definitely tells you I'm on the border of millennial in the Next Generation Um so check us out at ota.com and then of course you can find us on YouTube uh you can also follow behind the scenes on our podcast the notice uh it's on YouTube Apple Spotify and then certainly feel free to reach out uh to our sales organization uh and just schedule time thanks again to TJ for joining me and thank you as always for watching or listening to this episode of Channel Insider partner POV you can check out all episodes on our website Channel insider.com or watch on YouTube at Channel inssider newsand Trends you can also listen to us in podcast format on your preferred podcast listening platform we put out a new video and podcast every week don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible to never miss an episode once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.