MSP Initiative Live with Jim Jessup of CyberQP

[00:00:00] MSP Initiative, MSP Talk. One more day and we're officially done July for 2026. So the summer is two thirds over if you're on this side of the world. So hopefully you're getting your vacation time in, but for everyone else, we're still working. All right. MSPinitiative.com. This is where this session is recorded as well as YouTube and the podcatcher and any format that we hopefully make

[00:00:27] it convenient for you. Make sure to like, download, subscribe, forward, all that good stuff. This will be posted there under sessions in case you are looking for it. So some housekeeping that we'd like to get done at the beginning of this, and then we'll get into the topics of the day. Again, thank you if you came out to the MSP and IT community block parties that we've done on the front end of the year. Special thanks go out to Zero Trust World and the theme of Threat Locker, Enable and their Empower

[00:00:56] event, Kaseya, Connect Global and Connect Europe, Roost with the Flow Conference. It's been a busy front end of the year and we love seeing all of you guys in person. Not going to lie. I love the virtual stuff. Two bald guys here, but sometimes, you know, a beer and a conversation is worth all of it. So thank you if you're able to make it out to that. We are pivoting into the second half of the year agenda for MSP Initiative, which if you were hanging out with us last year, we launched the

[00:01:23] Channel Sports Tour. And yes, it is NFL season. All NFL teams are now officially in training camp. I know it's early this year because we're still in July, but it is true. Every single one of them have reported. So we are doing a Channel Sports Tour. I'm going to rattle these off, but they'll be listed on MSPinitiative.com. Here are the MSP channel events that we're doing at NFL games around the world

[00:01:48] this upcoming season. We're going to Australia. First NFL game in Australia, Rams 49ers in Melbourne. Then we're going Cowboys Giants in New Jersey, Steelers Patriots in New England, Vikings Buccaneers in Tampa, Eagles Bears in Chicago, Cowboys Texans in Houston, Eagles Jags in London. So we're making sure covering all these regions. We've got one in London, one in Australia. And then Steelers Bucs again

[00:02:16] in Florida, Chargers Rams at SoFi Stadium. That's where the Super Bowl is, if you didn't know. And by the way, the Super Bowl is on Valentine's Day this upcoming season. Plan ahead. And lastly, 49ers at Cowboys in Texas. So that is 10 games, eight domestically here in the U.S. to, you know, one in London, one in Australia internationally. There they all are. I know I rapid fired them. So if you're

[00:02:41] listening to them, do not stop to take notes. They'll all be online at MSPinitiative.com. This was so good last year, we decided to double down, bring it again this year. So definitely put your name on the wait list. And we have a lot of vendors that were interested in coming back and working with us this year on this project. Nothing beats the NFL. I know that's my opinion, and I'm sure you could argue it, but the NFL is king. They make more than the rest of the sports combined,

[00:03:10] except for FIFA, which, you know, obviously doesn't run every year, let's be honest. But great job North America on FIFA, by the way. I mean, I had eight matches here in Philadelphia, absolutely spotless. I think Philadelphia did a great job on their FIFA games. Anyway, there's all of my banter. You see all that online. Now we bring back a person that is no stranger to the pod, Jim Jessup from CyberQP. Jim, how are you doing today, buddy? Good. How are you doing,

[00:03:39] George? I'm excited. It's like football came back so early this year. I usually think about August for NFL, but July, I'm all in, man. Well, it looks like you're sporting the green today of the Philadelphia Eagles versus, you know, the Super Bowl championship because unfortunately it was the Seahawks that won this year. That's okay. Well, what birds flock together, right? Exactly.

[00:04:05] Right. You know, just watch out for those other birds that we don't like, like the Falcons or something like that. Yeah. And the Ravens and the Cardinals. There are a lot of birds out there, at least, you know, no offense to if your team is like, you know, like pirates, you know, like, I don't know what that's all about or what's exactly a Titan. I'm not, not exactly sure, but hey, yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's from Games of Thrones, somebody with a sword.

[00:04:29] Yeah, that could be, that could be. It's been, it's been a while, Jim, since we last talked to you. I know like that's eight, that's like dinosaur times in IT and MSP world. Cause like things are moving pretty quickly. I like to talk a little per current events and then we'll learn a little bit about what's happening over at CyberQP. So I can't help, but bring it up literally on every pod. So if you're a constant listener, I'm sorry, but I love to hear everybody's point of view,

[00:04:59] which hopefully will tell you what's actually going on. So the data center wars, which are underneath of the AI wars are clearly underway. I'm not a huge stock market guy, but I like to look at the stock market to find out what's going on, like with some of the vendors that we use on a

[00:05:21] regular. Right. And so when I start to see crazy fluctuations, it's like an indicator of what I think could be happening. Like as me on the ground, buying services from people. So like, for example, you know, Microsoft just came out to quarterly report. Hey, they're ahead. They're, they're, they're ahead of expects expectation stocks going up. Cool. But you want to know why they're probably ahead of their, you know, their, their expectations. Cause they just raised all their

[00:05:47] prices this month. Right. Again, for Microsoft 365, I feel like so now all of a sudden money looks good, but you just raised the price on everybody another 20% or whatever. So, um, okay, cool. Um, all of the data center companies out there and the chip companies and like all of the kind of sub entities that make data centers happen, right? Like Nvidia and the memory companies and the storage companies and all these guys, apparently like the Chinese derivative of these companies have all hit.

[00:06:17] And now they took a little bit of a hit recently. Right. So like there's this supply demand wars, right. Happening. But let me, let me fast forward, which is underneath of what I said at the end of the, the, the road here, which is the AI companies. Now I know that there's three main AI companies that we all talk about. Just like if we just go back 10 years, there's like three main cloud companies, right. Azure, Amazon, Google. Okay. I don't care about Alibaba and those guys. I know

[00:06:45] internationally they're big, but I'm just talking about here domestically North America. All right. So the AI companies we all hear about are open AI and Anthropic. And we hear about, um, Grok slash X slash space X all now. Yeah. Whatever he's up to today. So, so, uh, I know there's another company called Palantir, but that's not really for public consumption. I feel like they're very, you know, military government focused. So like, I don't really put them on the top three mountain.

[00:07:15] So those three companies, if we just talk about those ones, public space X, open AI and Anthropic creator of clock, um, are, will be public before the end of this year. So that means all the chips are in now, right? Everybody's now going to be publicly traded. And let me like land this plane. If you're publicly traded, you're going to have to show earnings. If you're going to show earnings,

[00:07:43] you're going to have to start showing that you're making money. And if you're going to start showing that you're making money, likely your price like Microsoft is going up because they got to show profit. What do you think about all that? Well, it's a lot to digest. There's obviously a lot going on and it's changing very rapidly, but similar to they got to show that they're making money. They also have to show if they're losing money, right? Which is a big thing. I mean,

[00:08:08] the way that I look at it is that there's a lot of hype. There's a lot of, uh, what the finance guys call dry powder, you know, in the market, right. Where they're trying to pump all these companies full of all the money they got on the sidelines that they were holding onto for a number of years. And obviously it's setting those valuations super high, but yeah, I mean, there's already a problem

[00:08:35] with, uh, the token consumption, right. With a lot of these frontier models and that, you know, is already making prices go up for, you know, extended usage. And obviously that's just going to continue to go up if they have to start making a profit, because, you know, if you've seen any of the financials from open AI, they're, they're, they're losing billions of dollars every month, every quarter. So, you know, somebody is funding that and sooner or later, somebody is going to

[00:09:02] want to have a return on their investment. Right. So I can't see that even though some pricing is a bit reasonable now that that's going to continue for the foreseeable future. However, that does bring me to another point, which is that there is a bit of a movement now for companies to, you know, become a little bit more niche and context aware of what they're doing so that they can optimize

[00:09:29] the number of tokens that they're using. Because right now, you know, the frontier models are just so general use, they can do everything that can support billions of parameters. But what does that mean? I need more GPUs, I need more tokens, and it's going to cost more money, right? Yeah, it's very interesting that bringing all this down to like the sub industry or the MSP sandbox that

[00:09:53] we we live in. I've seen a lot of false starts, Jim, I've seen a lot of people go crazy, you know, and build stuff with all these AI tools. And then it didn't work. And they're on their second and third try, right? And like, they just keep swiping the credit card, seamlessly ending, endless, right? I hope until the credit card limit gets it. But I've also seen mixed results with, you know, stuff that

[00:10:22] was working in the beginning, and then stopped working. And then like, they got to spend more time trying to get it back to working. And then in the middle of all this is like the customer who's just trying to like, keep doing what they're expecting, right? Like, hey, I got my own job to do, I just need you to do your part. And so everybody seems like rebuilding the car as we're driving it almost. And some people are crashing. Some people are in traffic. Some people say that they're on the

[00:10:51] easy pass lane with nothing in front of them. But I'm not hearing a lot of that. What are you hearing? Well, what I'm seeing a lot of is, you know, a lot of companies did these mass layoffs, right? Because I thought, you know, you know, AI is going to take over everybody's job, it's gonna, you know, replace 30% of the workforce, etc. Right. But what's been happening, especially if you think about engineers, because a lot of engineers at whatever company have been laid off over the last

[00:11:20] year and a half or so. And coincidentally, a lot of those engineers are getting their jobs back, or getting hired at other companies. Because the reality of it, and we've experienced a bit of this as well, too, is that when you're using tools like plot code, they're great at, you know, helping you be more efficient, right? But they make mistakes. And plot code needs to be reviewed by

[00:11:48] somebody who knows what they're doing. The other thing is that a lot of, you know, let's say, junior engineers were then using plot code to pretend that they were a senior engineer, right? Because, hey, I've got this tool that can do everything, I'm just gonna, you know, make me look like a senior engineer, but then they can't even check the work that they're doing. So then guess what happens, you know, garbage in, garbage out, right? So what companies are realizing is that,

[00:12:14] hey, AI is great, it's a great tool, but it's not there yet to just replace humans, it needs not only guardrails, but it needs people to verify its work, right? So you can't just, you know, suddenly fire half the workforce, right? Hmm. That's very intriguing, because I have not been to a channel event in recent memory, let's just, how about we just say January for, you know, like last seven months, right?

[00:12:42] Where I haven't heard, like, actually, let me rephrase. Every event I've been to since January, MSP event. All I've heard consistently at every one of these events is the end of the frontline, L1, you're not gonna need it, it's all gonna be automated, chat this, bot that, voice this, no need to talk to human intervention at all. And you can either displace those people,

[00:13:10] move them into a different position, make them T2, two or three guys or girls. Um, I gotta be honest. Even though that's been the consistent message, Jim, I ain't seeing that. I ain't seeing that reality. I'm hearing the opposite. What do you hear? Well, there's definitely a lot of solutions out there that are trying to make that a reality to get rid of the people. But I don't know what your experience is dealing with other companies where,

[00:13:37] you know, let's just pick, you know, the telecommunications company, your cell phone provider, you know, AT&T or whoever, right? You want to upgrade your phone or change your plan. And you're like, you call them up and you're like, Oh, shit, I'm just talking to AI here. Oh, I got to go to the chat bot. Oh, the chat bot doesn't have the script to handle the situation that I'm dealing with. Okay, well, now it took me, I don't know, four hours to deal with my problem.

[00:14:03] I get it done, then they still have to have somebody call me back and verify my identity and make sure that the order that I put through is actually valid, right? So it's like, you know, two steps forward, one steps back kind of scenario. But, you know, we obviously have to innovate, right? I mean, there's definitely the need to do that and to be better. There's a massive acceleration of that. And so I think, you know, the adoption and the acceleration kind of has to meet

[00:14:31] in the middle, right? And compromise on something that works ultimately, right? Like you just can't simply wipe complete departments out entirely and just expect the robots to run the world. It's, I think it's, you know, it's a vision, but it hasn't yet really come to reality yet. Okay. All right. I'm with you. And I agree with you, by the way. Um, you know, I, I, for forever, I feel like I was talking on these podcasts about failed AI

[00:15:01] implementations, right? And I always go to the fast food guys, because everybody has done the fast food thing at some point, right? And so, you know, people are on their, you know, like McDonald's was one of the very first ones to roll out the AI, you know, to a pie, you know, group of like 90 or 100 stores and not go well. They ripped it out. And now they're coming back again with something called Archie and they're trying for 2.0, right? They're going to give it another try. And I'm like, Hey, why? Like you guys try and reinvent this thing over and over again,

[00:15:31] but hasn't the drive-through experience been perfected? Like Chick-fil-A has it down. They, they got it to the most efficient I've ever had in my experience. And I've ordered a lot of fast food in my day. So like, why aren't we working backwards from the best picture rather than you trying to Xerox something else? I don't understand. Yeah. I mean, it's a, we're all trying to make money,

[00:15:58] right? So we're all trying to come up with solutions that allows us to increase our profits, make more money. But sometimes we move too fast and we lose sight of what's really important, right? Because ultimately we're all trying to deliver, you know, great solutions and experiences for our customers as opposed to going, well, I don't really care what your experience is. This is what you're going to get now because I'm going to make a couple more dollars, right?

[00:16:24] Yeah. I guess that sentence really matters on how big you are, I guess, right? Like we talked about Microsoft already in this call. I don't, if you're at work at Microsoft, this isn't personal, right? I'm not sure the company cares as a whole about what my experience is, is the guy buying your services. Like you're the a hundred pound gorilla in the room. It is what it is. And we just got a

[00:16:48] deal that doesn't work for everybody. Like there's only so many of you and I, there's a lot more of everybody else that has to like work hard to keep their customer happy. Yeah. I think a lot of, um, you know, the way to look at it is if you have a company where people have no choice, but to use your service or there's only one option, you know, then you can afford to be a little bit, you know, standoffish like that. Right. But for the rest of us who rely on, you know,

[00:17:17] happy customers and there are other choices, right? Unfortunately that, that tactic doesn't really work for you all. Yeah. A hundred percent. All right. Well back to MSP land, right? The, uh, the landscape is never static. It's always moving. Um, I, I want to go into our specific marketplace, right? There's still the big boys that we all know who they are. They're still all there.

[00:17:47] There's the guys out there that are like, yeah, I'm going to just build my own solution and leave the big boys. I don't know how well that's going. Um, there's the, Hey, you know, I want to be profitable as the MSP. Now, do I need all of the same things that I did two, three, four, five years ago today? Um, so a lot of that conversation is always happening. And, and in my experience, Jim,

[00:18:18] at least I hope, hopefully it's more, but at least twice a year, somebody looks at the credit card bill or the bank statement at the IT services company or manage IT services company and says, what are we paying for? And what are we actually using? Like at some point that math has to be calculated. And so it just seems like today it may be a little bit more rapid because there's this, you know, you know,

[00:18:43] adjacent question of, Hey, do I still need this tool or can I build the AI version of it and not, and like leave my vendor? Now I follow the boards. Like I'm sure everybody else does if nothing other than for just awareness, right? The Reddit's discourse, the Slack's LinkedIn, the Facebook's, whatever. Um, I'm seeing some people who are, should never be thinking about building their way out of

[00:19:12] their own tool. Like that was never the intention. Like they did it and it was a recreational thing that probably turned into something that it shouldn't have. In my, my opinion, my opinion, there's the guys in the middle who are like, Hey, I'm going to build my own platform. I'm a big boy. I can afford to do it, but, uh, plane hasn't really landed yet. And then there's everyone else who's like, Hey, I don't want to be on the front end of this wave. I just want to negotiate the best deal possible

[00:19:39] so that I can look at my bank statement at the end of the month and show that I'm profitable. So with all of that being said, um, think back 2025 to 2026, right? A year ago, has the picture, the blueprint from the MSP's view changed that much or not at all? Well, um, that's definitely a loaded question. I mean, it's definitely changed, uh, quite a bit.

[00:20:05] I would say that the biggest thing is, uh, the geopolitical issues that we have going on affecting the economy and people's pocketbooks and their customers and the customers perhaps leaving, which in any type of event like that, whether it was the financial crisis of 2008 or, you know, insert whatever other thing, everybody then is triggered to then look at their own balance sheet and go, Hey, I'm not making as much money. I need to go look at my expenses and make sure that I'm not

[00:20:34] paying or overpaying for too many tools. Right. Now, inevitably there is a movement of consolidation, not only with the vendors, but also with tools, right? And a lot of MSPs are looking for, you know, vendor consolidation. They don't want to deal with as many vendors. They don't want to deal with as many tools. Uh, maybe they want to build their own tools. Right. And you can

[00:20:58] definitely argue for and against that, but I mean, so definitely the biggest thing is the vendor consolidation. So, and it's really driven by the economy really. Right. I mean, yes, there's AI, but you know, economic conditions, which will always present themselves, whether 30 years ago or today will always drive people to, you know, look at what their expenses are and look at ways to be more

[00:21:24] efficient. Right. When everything's going good, right. Nobody's looking at their credit card statement. Everybody's happy. Everybody's making money. Suddenly you start losing customers, come, you know, companies go out of business. Then you start looking a little hard at, uh, you know, what you're paying. Right. So definitely a lot of vendor consolidation in terms of the, um, building your own tools, not building your own tools. I mean, you know, it's the same as before,

[00:21:52] but there's just different capabilities, right? Like before you could write your own script, you know, you could leverage APIs to build your own tools, you know, but now you have AI that can do that. Right. But it still comes back to the same thing. What is your focus? Is your focus on running your business and being an MSP and making, you know, obviously satisfying your customers or is it, you know, building your own tools and making sure that it works and maintaining it and making sure that

[00:22:20] you're addressing all their security vulnerabilities, all that kind of stuff. Um, and to be honest, as a vendor, that's the hardest thing. It's the, you know, the, the pen testing, the secure coding, the making sure that you're managing your vulnerabilities, your compliance, et cetera, all the things that when you're dealing with larger customers are, are table stakes, right? If you're a small MSP dealing with small businesses where maybe they don't care about those things,

[00:22:48] maybe not a big deal. And if you're not growing a lot and that's an opportunity for you to make more money by building your own tool, I mean, have at it. Right. But, you know, as you become a more mature company, you start needing to get all these different things and you're like, Hey, do you have the bandwidth to do that versus just delegating that to the vendor? Right. Yeah. Like basically you're not a software company. So what does good look like when you basically become your own software company?

[00:23:16] Um, that's for sure. I mean, it's a different story. If you want to go build your own thing and then become a vendor, right? That's a fully different ballgame, right? A hundred percent. And some of the best vendors in the sandbox came that way, right? They were an MSP. They realized there was a gap. They couldn't find a solution that really fit it. And so they're like, let's build something. And then ultimately they separated that into whatever it is. Right. And so that's great.

[00:23:44] I, you know, I don't know if that's what's happening right now. I think they're kind of like using things internally, uh, in a lot of cases, but I, you know, we'll let the, let the timeline kind of, you know, expand a little bit and see, see where everything wins. So tell us, Jim, what's happening at CyberQP. Um, it's been, you know, about a year since we talked to you last, I know you guys have been, you know, working on something in the back lab somewhere. Uh, so, uh, what, what's, what's been baking.

[00:24:14] Jim O'Shaughnessy- We have been working for quite a while, uh, uh, behind the scenes since, uh, last summer on, uh, launching a new platform, um, that is, uh, coincidentally AI native, but also it is a, uh, a new vision of all the tools that we have in privilege access management delivered in a new package that we are launching, uh, next month. And it's called, uh, Panthera, which is Spanish for Panther.

[00:24:44] Hmm. Okay. All right. So what is the, I mean, AI native, right? I feel like that's like everything now it's like five years ago, three years ago was like cyber, right? Like everybody was a security company. Now everybody's AI. So what, what are, what are like the, the big things people would expect to get from this new Panther edition versus what you guys have been running for a while?

[00:25:13] Yeah, good question. So one of the things that we did deliberately here is that rather than us just, you know, making an MCP server that can access our tools that you could just use with the frontier models. We took a different approach and, uh, we took a, our, an open weight model and we designed, custom built it, designed our own harness, tied in the new tools that we rebuilt directly into it

[00:25:41] with all the checks and balances that you would want for a privilege access management tool. Now you might ask, well, why did you do that? Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you just use the frontier models? Well, you kind of just have to look at the news. That's what's happened in the last week or so with, uh, what was it? Hugging face and open AI with that sort of rogue agent, uh, to really

[00:26:06] get the reasons why you would want to do that. And so what we're doing is really advocating for, you know, not using a frontier model for things like identity management and privilege access management and managing your credentials and making sure that there's a clear and managed separation between what the AI can do and making sure that not only the vendor as in us, as well as the AI does not have

[00:26:33] any access to those credentials through a zero knowledge setup with that. Okay. That's interesting. So I just want to be super clear because, um, you know, I'm learning all the terms like everybody else is. Right. Um, when I think open weight, two things come to mind from my feed. Okay. Open weight, the CEO of NVIDIA coming out saying, Hey, we're just giving you stuff,

[00:27:00] you know, free of charge, run with it. You know, like you can host this on your own and have at it. And then I hear open weight, the China stuff that they're just flooding the market with because it's a fraction of the cost of the big three we talked about earlier. Um, of course on one side, I'm like, all right, cool. Like I'm going to not pay somebody to run this on their servers. I'm going back to,

[00:27:27] I'm almost going back to full circle. Right. Got to put this on my own server somewhere and start to, you know, self-host stuff. And then on the other side, I'm like, I'm not interested in running any of my data through China, anything, no offense, but I mean, I just don't trust it. So, yeah. So, I mean, great point. And obviously it starts with, if you're going to go open weight, well, where are you getting that open weight model from? Right. Are you getting it from a, you know,

[00:27:54] North American company, European company, or are you getting it from, from China? Right. So I would obviously, you know, say that perhaps the latter is the risky, riskier version of that. And then the second thing is, well, what are you doing with that? Right. So running an open weight model doesn't mean that you just take it as is and go, okay, well, I'm just running what I could have gotten out of open AI or Anthropic, and I'm putting it over here on my own systems,

[00:28:19] whether I'm hosting it in the cloud or in server or wherever, but more so that you can actually customize it to be context aware for the tools that you want it to be used with. And that's a really important point because the reason why, as I was kind of alluding to before, that a lot of the frontier models can be very expensive is because they're, they have to support doing everything under the sun

[00:28:45] from telling you what recipe you should make for dinner to solving cybersecurity problems to doing, you know, X, Y, Z, right. And in order to do that, you have to have all the GPUs and all the parameters behind the scenes, you know, sucking all the energy and ultimately, you know, digging away at all those tokens to be able to do that. So when you take an open weight model, you customize it, you build a

[00:29:10] harness that is context aware for purpose built for what you're using it for, then it means that it uses less tokens, less GPUs, because you've essentially taken all these billion billions of parameters and you've reduced it to a more finite subset so that it just means you need less energy, less GPUs to run it. And ultimately what you can do, which is what we're seeing in the industry

[00:29:38] is that from a pricing standpoint, you can move away from having to charge tokens and you can have the services available within your regular, you know, per seat pricing model, right. So rather than saying, well, you're going to have to pay this much per user for endpoint, et cetera. And then, oh, we'll give you, you know, this many tokens, but then, Hey, you go over it, you know, the meters running, right.

[00:30:04] You can actually say, well, no, everything's actually included in this, but the only way that makes that possible is actually customizing an open weight model. Right. It's almost like the cell phone company back in the day, right. Before everything was unlimited. Then they went to, Hey, your plan already has so many text messages or so much data. And if you go over then, you know, and then there used to be like a wrinkle to that nights and weekends were included, but

[00:30:30] then, and then, then they went back to unlimited again, right? Like that whole thing. So it kind of sounds very similar to that. Well, it doesn't in an overall sense. And I'm old enough to know, like you rate the 1990s, when he first got a cell phone, right. They stole from your parents, right. And they were whining at you because, uh, you talked to your girlfriend for three hours overnight, long distance, and they got the bill back and it was a thousand dollars. Right. Um, you know,

[00:30:58] and then they came out with 5g and while you only, you know, instead of it being, it was unlimited LTE and 5g is old. Now you only get five gigs because we had to pay all this extra money for 5g, right. So definitely some similarities there, but in a sense, it's just making it so that, you know, like I look at the frontier models is, you know, they are the, you know, the cutting edge, right. They're the bleeding edge of showing us what is possible. Right. But just because you can do

[00:31:27] something doesn't mean that you should do it in terms of actually applying something to your business for specific, very, very highly sensitive needs. Right. You know, uh, an important lesson, right? Like we talked about like current events and the industry a little bit now specific to what you guys are rolling out next month. I take away a very, I would say this lesson has been over and over again throughout history, but it's like,

[00:31:54] Hey, what is it going to cost me? And what am I getting for that cost? Right. And I feel like there's a lot of George's words, reckless spending with not clear outcomes, right? Like we're just, we're in the toy store playing with everything, but we don't really know what we're going to get in the end and what it's going to cost to keep it going.

[00:32:19] For sure. I mean, it, this all goes down to, you know, how you run your business, right? I mean, if you think of all the peer groups that are out there that are advocating for, Hey, you know, review your stack every year, make sure that, you know, just like we were talking about before that, you know, you're not, you don't have too many tools, too many vendors that you're actually, you know, getting the value out of the tools and those tools are related to the outcomes that

[00:32:44] you're looking for, right. As a process of becoming more mature. Right. But as you all know, for anybody like myself early on, when you started an MSP and you're a small company, right. You're just, you know, drinking from the fire hose, seeing all these new tools and just thinking, I need everything. And then after you buy a whole bunch of the tools, you're like, well, geez, what do I do with this? Do I have time to implement it? Right. And it ultimately comes back to, you know,

[00:33:11] how are you setting up your business for your business processes? Right. You know, do I need this to run my business? How am I designing the solution I'm delivering to my customers that then ties into these tools that I'm buying? Right. That's fair. So are you going to take all of the people who are currently on the current cyber QP model platform and move them immediately next month to the Panther

[00:33:39] edition or are they going to have to opt in or is there a cost difference? Like, I'm just curious, like if I'm an existing customer, what am I getting on the other side of this? Great question. Well, one of the things that we needed to do with this new platform was we had to build it from the ground up because we had to refresh our tech stack. Now that incorporates a couple of challenges, right? We will have a new platform that is available that will be running in parallel to our

[00:34:07] current platform. We will continue to support the current platform, you know, indefinitely. What we will be doing is we will be doing for the first batch of customers that do want to move over to the new platform that are current partners, we'll be doing like more of a white glove transfer migration over to that. And then ultimately we'll be offering more of a self-serve solution that allow them to move over when they're ready to do so. But essentially what we've done is we've not only

[00:34:37] offered the AI part of it is that all the same tools that we have in the old platform will be available in the new, they're just better and more efficient. So... Okay. Now, is there, is the cost going to be the same if they decide to move or is there like new pricing scheme?

[00:34:53] Well, for, as I mentioned before with in terms of like the tokens and stuff is that we are not going to be charging tokens for, you know, usage on the AI part of it. So there'll be a very similar like per endpoint model that we have in the new, in the new system. For any partners that we move over though, we won't be changing their pricing at all from the current scheme just to make sure that, you know, they're still happy with that. And it's really not about us. And it's really not about us. And it's really not about us. And it's really not about us.

[00:35:23] Making more money from current partners. It's about delivering more value to them. And also being able to offer a, you know, very similar pricing model than we do currently, but just more optimized. So, you know, the people that are coming in new that aren't our current partner, you know, we'll have, you know, our new endpoint pricing that's there that isn't really that much different than what we currently have. It's just a slight tweak in terms of how we calculate license consumption.

[00:35:51] We will have the differences though, that we do have both a free tier and a paid tier for all of our licenses, which essentially means that they can add in all the technicians they want. They can add in all the, what we call endpoint clients instead of the agents as they want all the connectors to get in the system.

[00:36:10] But not until they actually start using features that are of value, do they actually start consuming licenses. So, you know, we didn't want to make it so that, you know, the moment you come in the door, boom, you're dinged with, hey, here's an extra bill. It's the, hey, get in the door, get set up, get to value. And then you start paying for obviously what you're actually getting value out of. So.

[00:36:34] Got it. Okay. All right. So we're, we're, we're on, when we say next month, there's only one more day left in July and it'd be August. Would it be fair to say by September 1st, this will be generally available? Yes. That is the current schedule of September 1st. We're doing our sort of official launch announcement at exchange in Washington DC from August the 9th to the 11th.

[00:37:03] And then we're starting to do demos with, you know, new, new partners that are, that are interested as well as existing in August with the intention to be GA in September. Awesome. So we're here. We're right at the doorstep. This is great timing.

[00:37:20] I assume that as you plan what happens after this big flash, right? This new version of the platform, you got some other, you know, new functions coming outside of just the AI version of things behind it. Correct. And so one of the things that we wanted to do with the new platform is have more of a complete PAM solution.

[00:37:44] So if you've looked at some of the other vendors in the industry, they're, they're just doing elevation or, you know, just some time access, right? And so on, as opposed to putting it all together. And so one of the biggest modules that we've added is our new discovery module for both human and non-human identities. So the intention is, is that all the connectors that you add into our system, it's an ingestion point for all your identities, both human and non-human.

[00:38:14] And when I say non-human, that's not just your, you know, enterprise apps and Entra, but it's also the AI identities that are using service principles in Entra. So the intention of the platform as well is to make it easier to track all the identities that are used by the people, the administrators, as well as the AI identities, which are exponentially growing as we know it, right?

[00:38:41] And you need a system to be able to not only govern, but know, hey, did somebody just install some, you know, shadow AI that somebody gave global admin privileges to, right? And Entra, do I really want that? Or maybe should I disable it and revoke those permissions? So that's definitely a brand new tool that's available in the new module that is built directly in with our zero knowledge vault.

[00:39:07] And we still have our just in time access, our rotations, our elevation and our app control as well. Wow. I, I, I gotta be honest. This is the very first time that somebody's turned the concept of, you know, like application whitelisting has been out for some time, right? A lot of people have, you know, have been putting that out there, but like AI whitelisting, that's a whole new flavor. For sure.

[00:39:33] And so there's, you know, out of the box, there's, you know, obviously a lot of AI functionality that works with the tools that we have. The intention is also to just add in more features to make it easier as we go along to help set up and configure the product as well as an assistant, right?

[00:39:53] So that was another objective of ours was just to take that time to value down as much as possible to make it so that you could get set up and ready in minutes instead of perhaps hours. And then continue to leverage the AI module to be able to help you get set up even quicker over time. Not replacing technicians, but just making them more efficient, right?

[00:40:16] No, hey, listen, for all you guys who think that you became software companies overnight, on top of the maintenance and security and all the other things that you heard earlier in this call pod, there's the how long does it take to get to working? It's largely overlooked until you realize how much time's involved to get from zero to the cars running. But that, that one topic right there, I know that will become more popular over time.

[00:40:44] We're starting to see like these, you know, assistants and chat bots and stuff built into tools. But hey, you know, adoption is a huge word, right? And, you know, in the software world, it's right next to growth and right next to churn. And it's in the middle of both of those words, because if the adoption is poor, it's going to go to churn. And if it's great, it's going to go to growth. So it's right in the middle of that sandwich. Oh, 100%.

[00:41:13] I mean, really, at the end of the day, if you don't get the adoption, don't have a good product, eventually people will catch on and they'll leave, right? The worst words in SaaS are CNC, churn and contraction, right? Nobody likes to see those words. But at the end of the day, right, you know, if it doesn't work, then why am I paying for it, right? Take that as a lesson, MSP guys and girls out there.

[00:41:40] If your customer leaves because they had a bad experience, which I don't think we need to even use the word software, but we'll use it in today's world, 2026. But hey, if they had a bad interaction with your human being or they just were having a bad day and their problem didn't get solved and you caught them at the worst time, you know, that's how you lose customers usually, right? I mean, problem is it's not as easy to replace your customer than to keep them, right?

[00:42:09] Like that's just generally rule of business. So take that as a lesson for any business, right? Your goal is to get adoption and you want the experience to be good, which usually leads to better adoption. And the faster you can accomplish that, the better off you usually are. 100%. Wise words. Yeah. I think we've lived it both as customers and as suppliers, right? I mean, it's just the reality. I always use airlines as an example of that.

[00:42:38] If it's not fast food, it's airlines. I was in Toronto for a channel event and it was supposed to be an in and out, right? Come in in the morning, do the event, go back home at night. Didn't even book a hotel room, right? Easy flight, direct, hour and a half, easy peasy. Got in, no problem. Awesome. Thanks, Air Canada. But did not get out. Somehow, and I love this, right? Oh, weather. And I'm like, cool.

[00:43:06] I was like, there were four flights scheduled to go from Toronto to the airport I was coming back to in Northeast here. And three went. Three left and landed. But mine was canceled. Not exactly sure I followed the math there, but okay. So I remember getting to the airport. I'm like, what should I do? Have you ever had this one, Jim? They sent me to the end of the hallway where you normally drop your bag off and check in.

[00:43:34] To a bank of white telephones. Like corded telephones like you'd find on your kitchen wall from back in the day. I had to like call in to customer service and try and figure out if I could get another flight. Have you ever had this before? Well, a similar experience. I mean, of course, if you don't have, if you don't regularly fly with the airline and you're not, you know, don't have status, right? They're like, here's the phone, right? Great. That's. And then right next to that is apply for our loyalty program.

[00:44:06] Yeah. Well, let me fast forward that story for you. So I ended up booking my own hotel room that I never got comps for, by the way. And then I showed up at the airport the next morning real early, like five o'clock early because I knew I had a long day ahead of me. And as I learned, Air Canada put me on a United flight on the way home. So it wasn't really them operating the return flight, which started to come into picture as to what happened.

[00:44:31] And so I was bouncing in between the two airlines and effectively I was had to go to the customer service desk of one and then the other and then the one and then the other. And then finally, I got a flight home. So that was the old school non-technology answer. But I'll tell you what, every time I tried to communicate to that or every time I tried to call in, it did not get me to an answer. I had to actually be in front of a human being. And that's like last month, Jim. This is not 10 years ago.

[00:45:00] This is 2026, my friend. So for all that technology, right? Yeah. Each of the apps kept pointing to the other app saying you've got to go to their app to do it. And their app saying, no, you've got to do it to that app, right? And so it's just like the automated customer service agent, you know, passing the buck, right? So the story ended with, I ended up because Air Canada, you know, they fly out of there. That's a hub for them. And United only has a couple of gates.

[00:45:27] I had to go to United Gate that was flying to another city and beg the person behind the computer to register to like check me into the flight that was going to a completely different airport because they were, you know, United employee with United login that could actually go in and fix my reservation in the end. And I was like, man, this is just absolutely fantastic. Oh, well, you're definitely, you have a lot more patience than I do. I would have been like, I'm just booking with somebody else.

[00:45:57] See you later. At one point I was like, should I just rent a car and drive? I mean, we're on the edge of that making sense. So all that being said, back to experience and adoption and how does this all fit, you know, with your customer and all that jazz, right? Like one of the things that you said was, hey, for the first bunch of customers that moved between the current platform and the new platform, got to be handholding that process to make sure it's smooth.

[00:46:24] And then eventually we'll just wizard it, my word, so that you could just self-service like. Like, like anything, right? You want to make sure that process is as smooth as possible so that people don't run into a problem. And so back to my airline experience, it would have been great if Air Canada, who I booked solely through, right? I went to their app, not a third party like Orbitz, right? Like I went to their app, booked on their direct company.

[00:46:50] Like it would have been nice if they could have just said, yep, let's just fix your flight for you so you don't have to bounce around. That would have been the preferred route, but that's not what happened. Yeah, so, so we're not going to have that happen in between your platform migration. Correct. Definitely not the Air Canada experience. I mean, I can't, unfortunately, I can't admit that Air Canada is, doesn't have the highest satisfaction rating.

[00:47:18] I, I, I, personal experience, not surprised. Not surprised at all. I mean, listen, every airline's going to have a problem. I get it. You can't control weather and all that jazz and airport delays, whatever. But how you handle and remediate that, super important, right? That's how you keep people coming back, in my opinion. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm going back to Air Canada anytime soon. But hey, back to you want to keep customers happy and you want to keep them on your platform instead of them running away.

[00:47:46] This is a pretty important process. You know, you know, moving in between versions and stuff. So I'm cautiously optimistic for you because I know this is a big thing, you know, like moving, like you've rebuilt your platform, which is awesome. You know, hoping that the plan to migrate between platforms is super smooth. Yeah, well, you know what they say, slow is fast, right? Very true.

[00:48:16] I feel like, you know, unless you're, you know, warp speeding, you know, in the future that we don't exist in yet. So we're going to see at Exchange where you're going to announce this and launch this, right? And then I assume you're going to notify all your existing partners that like, hey, if you weren't there, this is the announcement, right? And hopefully we can help you get that message out with this pod.

[00:48:39] And then, you know, people can elect, basically raise their hand to say, hey, I want to be at the beginning of this line. Show me, right? How do I get on this thing? And then you did use the word indefinitely, right? So the people who are like, nah, not exactly an early adopter guy. I'll let everybody else stand in line. And then like when you force my hand and I got to move, then it'll be pretty smooth at that point. Is that in the cards or what is indefinitely?

[00:49:09] Is it really indefinitely? Well, I mean, I use that, I mean, you know, sort of cautiously. But really the intention is, is that we want to make the experience so smooth that at some point it's just like it's a no brainer. Right. But with any of these types of transitions, I've been in the same situation before where, you know, vendors have come up with, you know, new versions of things and they want you to move over. But maybe it's not as important to you at this point. Right.

[00:49:39] But it's also on us to make it such a, you know, an easy decision for them to do it, that it's, you know, that it's a non-issue. Right. So, I mean, you know, our expectation and hope is that, you know, within the first, you know, year to two that we'll have everybody over. But really it's up to us to make sure that the experience is as smooth as possible. So I'm right there with you. So, all right, let's, let's cut this back into twofold.

[00:50:08] If I'm a person that's not a CyberQP customer partner, whatever the right word is, I assume they go to CyberQP.com and that's where they're going to learn all about 2.0, the new AI version of everything. If they're, I'm putting out there, you'll correct me. If I'm an existing customer partner, where do I raise my hand to ask to be put into the line for the new thing? Well, good question.

[00:50:36] So we do have a new email domain, CyberQP.ai, which you can either get to by going directly to the website or going to CyberQP.com. There'll be a banner there. We will be redirecting people in the near future as well. So not a huge issue there. We have all already reached out to all of our existing partners to give them a heads up and let them know what's happening.

[00:51:03] But essentially it's all driven through our partner success team, right? So every, all of our partners have a partner success team member assigned. And they can either reach out directly to their partner or sales directly or via our website to sign up for the waiting list. Okay. So we're going to go to the opt-in. Put me at the front of the line. I want to try the new stuff. I'm usually that guy, by the way. All right. Awesome. Well, this is really exciting.

[00:51:33] If you're, if you're not already headed to exchange and you happen to be in the Northeast here, I think it's in National Harbor. Yeah. Like DC, Baltimore area. Maybe you go check that out. But I'm sure you'll be, you know, putting it all the feeds, right? You know, like, Hey, big announcement, billboard, check it out. You know, new thing here. So I'm looking forward to it. Panthera, Panther. I like Panther. Yeah. They launched Panther. That's just me.

[00:52:02] Jim, anything else that's coming up that you're excited for? I know we're on the back end of the year and I know that the MSP calendar has really almost inverted for some reason, right? Used to be very back-loaded, you know, middle Q3 and the Q4. Now it feels like it was front-loaded, probably because DattoCon got merged into the, you know, the Kaseya and a bunch of other things. So anything on the back end of the year you're excited for? Yeah. I mean, we're, we'll definitely be at IT Nation as well.

[00:52:30] But our main focus is, you know, the launch that we're doing and then also adding in as many integrations and connectors as we can. Because our objective there is to, you know, accelerate that development and have as many fast falls as possible. As you know, you have to kind of draw a line to get things out the door. But it's the continued push to add as many integrations after that as possible to make it so that, you know, everybody's got, you know, what they need in the system. Awesome.

[00:53:00] Yeah, 100%. And obviously, you know, I'm sure you had that in mind when you baked a new thing. So I assume that you're going to go pretty fast, you know, once you're past this, you know, major, you know, announcement launch, right? Like you're probably, you know, gearing up for some, some rapid integration work. So that'll be exciting. I'll be looking, keep my eye on the feed, right? As you're, you know, I start seeing new logos coming out there for you. Everyone, this was, you know, listen, CyberQP has been in the space for some time.

[00:53:30] I think you've seen them probably everywhere at some point. Looking for cyberqp.ai, new domain. So now you've heard it. And, you know, these guys are going to be at some of the events coming up here around the corner. Check it out. I'm sure, you know, it's worth looking at. If nothing other than, hey, everybody wants to know what's available, right? And probably trust somebody to know their lane than trying to build everything on your own. Still don't think that's the right move.

[00:54:00] But my personal opinion, I digress. Jim, appreciate you, my friend. Be careful on that Air Canada, man. I don't know. I hope you don't have the same problem I did. But, you know, they may and definitely don't want to be confused for me. I always get stopped at security. So I hope you don't do that. For everyone else, this session was recorded. I'm sure you're listening to it already. This is on MSPinitiative.com and all the podcatchers, YouTube and all that good stuff.

[00:54:29] Looking forward to running into you guys in person. Check out Channel Sports Tour, which will be online here on the website. And if not, see you at an event around the corner. Jim, I'll grab a beer with you when I see you next, buddy. All right, man. Great to see you, George. You got it. Have a good one. Talk to you later.