Video: Vandis Execs Talk How to Future-Proof and Secure Network Infrastructure

hey Channel insiders welcome back for another episode of Channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it channel to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso I am joined by two guests today from the solution provider vanis a name you may recognize from the inaugural Channel Insider hybrid solution provider list and they are CEO Andy seagull and CTO Ryan young so Andy let's start the interview off by talking about who is vanis what do you do and who are your customers what verticals do they typically touch we provide networking and Security Solutions um generally for clients with complex environments in all types of Industries we provide our customers with both networ working in security options and really helping them connect their their hybrid Cloud environment their data center environment and their Branch environments into a a scalable and manageable Global infrastructure Ryan how important is that in a world where we're seeing Hybrid Works still dominate the workforce it's incredibly important so you have you have the remote workers that are that are coming from the the the work from home aspect or home offices you have your your branches um and then you tie that into uh your your global data topology your your your network topology as well as reduce Staffing and it's really important to make sure that you're providing that same level of access that uh all of your employees were used to working from the office from home uh because if you're not able to do that you're actually losing money with employees not able to uh access web portals or Enterprise resources that they need to conduct everyday business for the organization and how has that change the way you approach cyber security it changes things quite a bit we had customers who really weren't focusing on protecting their internal applications from the external internet and one of the big shifts we saw in the work from home transition was uh a lot of web application firewalls being deployed where they weren't which is awesome we love to see customers doing that um and a lot of the security Focus sto being on uh just securing your perimeter to focusing on uh micro segmentation what does uh the role-based access look like when it extends up to the cloud do the world based access look like when it extends to uh The Sassy environment and how is the uh experience for remote users well as on Prem users and one of the things that we really focus on your bandis uh is making sure that that user experience whether you're uh in a branch office whether you're in headquarters a data center or in the cloud um that you have the same exact experience so we really try to mirror that experience for the end user while also uh securing the products through identity Based Services like uh Microsoft enter ID um and micro segmentation products like Aruba's cx10 K with the the pensando product and and VMware NSX and really just making sure that you're looking at it not just from any perimeter security aspect but along the entire process how are we securing that user and that packet from its origin to its destination and Andy back on over to you when it comes to vas's customer base is there a niche that you found yourself being able to specialize in we tend to specialize in in customers that have a need to to be nimble and that's where our strength comes in because we are focused both on security and on networking and in today's market that's unusual most solution providers are either security or their in their Network infrastructure by being able to do both we can make sure that our clients are Nimble and able to able to meet their clients needs and their workers needs and at the same time that they're secure and you speak about hosting both of those needs for your customers being able to answer both of those needs for your customers which is exactly why you were named to the inaugural HSP 250 or hybrid solution provider list on channel insider.com congratulations on that first of all a wonderful feat for vanis of course of course but going from there your customers are coming to you listing their challenges and you're listening them to them to see how can we solve this for you what is that conversation look like and how are you able to help them understand this is what we're going to do for you and this is why not just that you're trying to upsell them to the next option uh to the potentially most expensive one so Andy from a from a relationship standpoint what's important for you when it comes to that conversation with the client we have an an established procedure for for dealing with clients particularly with new clients on how we engage and our methodology is is structured so that we get to understand what the client's needs are and and they get to hear what we recommend you know Andy mentioned uh listening to our client so it's not only just our client saying like hey I want to talk about Su that it's more uh at the level of uh partnership we have with our customers where our customers are coming to us and saying this is where we want to be in five years how do we get there and sometimes the technology it's not there yet it might be like on on the edge of being ready or something something new that's coming one of the things that we're we're starting to have a lot of conversations around is you know private 5G um looking at uh distributed private Cloud across the Enterprise space I mean these are all areas that um you know yes the the technology in both of those is there today but you're not seeing a huge amount of adoption I think we're really going to see that adoption start to take shape over the next uh year or two and something I actually want to back up and ask you about would be private 5G this is something where you're right we've been talking about it for a while the technology is there but what are your clients typically missing or what's not here yet that's able to set them up for private 5G um well I think that if you went to uh you know the the large carriers they have it available today but you have to ride on their infrastructure and a lot of what our what our customers are looking for is their own infrastructure so what we're starting to see is people are looking at the private 5G space as the next step in kind of the Wi-Fi space I think the next step is really going to be availability of the hardware to the Enterprise what can your customers do to Future proof themselves thinking back Ryan to thinking about how you said sometimes the technology isn't there yet depending on what their need is I'd love to know from both of you what can your clients and your potential clients do this year to invest in their businesses to prepare their technology stack for the future from a hardware standpoint one of the things that uh I often talk about with customers is really making sure that you're buying modular equipment equipment that supports field upgradability with the uh the amount of vendor consolidation that's occurring right now um what I've really been telling customers is they really want to focus on uh standardizing on a platform I mean obviously there's still going to be and Niche uh pieces to your environment that can't be replaced by that uh larger fabric but uh moving into 2024 I you know I'm really trying to encourage our customers to focus on you know trying to standardize so that they get into a uh a simpler environment to manage another part of that is is engaging with the client in terms of life cycle management having periodic reviews in some cases quarterly and in some cases annually of what they have in place what the life cycle is um both in terms of the vendor's um you know life cycle of their product but also the life cycle of of that particular technology in the marketplace and to start preparing early so we're proactive we engage with the client on a regular basis with the specific goal of reviewing life cycle from the point of view of the vendors I you know planned obsolesence but also from the point of view of what's going on in the marketplace who are the vendors the Strategic vendor partners that are supporting you right now and what solutions would you say are really driving your portfolio we really deal with all the major vendors in our in our key segments not every client has the same need so we want to be able to match the the product to the client's needs rather than to try and shoehorn a client's needs into a vendor's product set when it comes to how you know how do we engage with our vendors we're first of all looking for vendors that that have the products that are needed to help clients achieve their goals and and then you know we also look to see can we replicate success is is this a product that we can provision and and install in in more than one segment my team is always looking for uh collaborative Partners uh that are always willing to to take our feedback back to their teams obviously uh solid documentation it's really hard for us to support our customer from the documentation is not there uh as well as you know a a stable support so I'd love to hear of an actual case study an actual use case in which we saw success between vanis and a client is there uh a success story that you could share with me about when you were able to meet a challenge over the past year for a client so we have a client that we've done business with for many years they are a multinational firm they do business in 29 or 30 separate countries um and um they are a manufacturer and their facilities are large manufacturing facilities that that have very high value so they need to run 247 without interruption we have had very good quality engagement with them for quite a while but they recently came to us and said we'd like to tighten it up a little bit we'd like to have your team your engineers and your pro project managers come in earlier at the very Inception of of our planning so that we can develop the solutions together and we started to do that and it made a real difference in our ability to deliver for the customer especially to Del to tighten up the amount of time it takes to bring value to the customer Ryan can you talk a little bit about the specifics of that yeah so uh ktie the the customer has been doing u a lot of acquisition uh and as they''re been bringing um new sites online uh in the past uh they essentially had us come in go through a scoping effort go through Discovery effort uh and then we' go into procurement and what they said to us was look you have worked on uh these sites with us you understand these sites your project manager know our team we want a essentially a list of of different services that you uh you provide from uh start to finish um and we'll just move through that process so we were doing one to three of these these forklift sites per year uh and in the new model where they leverage our our TurnKey uh project management platform and Engineering uh we were able to go in and uh do seven of the sites in in about nine months um and uh I think I got an update this morning that we got another four done uh in the month of January uh so it's it's really been um a perfect example of uh how we really value our our customer partnership and the trust that put in us um to to go in and help act as members of their team if I'm an IT buyer and I want to get in touch with vanis and speak to your team how can I do that you can start with our website which is www.andis.com um or you can you can call us um you can call and speak directly to Ryan you can call and speak directly to me um we'll get you we'll get you in touch with the right people within our our organization thanks again to my guests Andy and Ryan for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening to this episode of Channel Insider partner POV if you you want to watch more episodes we put out a new video and podcast every Thursday you can find all of them at Channel insider.com you can also like subscribe and follow along with us online check us out on YouTube at Channel Insider newws and Trends and listen to our podcasts on Apple podcast Spotify podcast YouTube podcasts and Google podcasts and if you want to connect with me you can do so on LinkedIn at Channel Insider or you can email me if you have a question or want to be on the show at partner POV Chanel insider.com I'll see you next time I'm Katie boso and thanks for watching

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