Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Dux Raymond Sy - The Playbook for Building AI-Ready MSPs
As the AI revolution reshapes the technology landscape, MSPs stand at a crossroads. In this episode, we explore why the next wave of high-growth partners won’t just adopt AI, they’ll be born from it.
We’re joined by a seasoned channel leader Dux Raymond Sy, Chief Brand Officer at AvePoint, who has helped countless MSPs build new revenue streams through data security, AI services, and brand-driven growth. From practical steps like data estate readiness and AI monetization to brand building and differentiation, we unpack what it takes to lead in this new era.
In the episode, we discuss:
- How MSPs can turn data chaos into a recurring revenue goldmine
- Why building an AI practice starts with a data security assessment
- The rise of born-in-AI MSPs and the threat they pose to legacy players
- Why brand building is no longer optional for technical founders
- Common marketing blind spots that are holding MSPs back
Whether you're an established MSP or exploring your AI practice, this conversation is packed with insights on how to stay ahead.
Connect with Dux: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetdux/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, dax. How are you?
Speaker 2:doing. Hey, alex, I'm doing fantastic. How are you yeah?
Speaker 1:I'll be honest, I'm really excited for this one. My audience knows I'm slightly obsessed with how marketing and how channel, but very specifically how MSP works, and I think you've landed at the perfect intersection with yourself. Maybe, for the uninitiated, you can give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Well, first and foremost, Alex, I am grateful for this opportunity and for everybody listening. Thank you for supporting Alex and really an amazing podcast. My name is Dux. I serve as the chief brand officer here at AppPoint, where we provide the leading data security platform for MSP to grow their revenue in this new age of AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were actually just touching it literally before the call started. I'm amazed about what AI is going to do in lots of areas. Right, I think you know. Think of the vertical, and AI is going to do a lot. But, in the MSP space, in the sort of SMB technology space where it's very people heavy, even though what we do is technology. I think AI is going to be fascinating to what it can do to the market.
Speaker 2:Well, alex, I've been spending a lot of time, frankly, in the last year with our MSP partners and, while AI is a big buzzword a lot of times, there's still this sense of loss where, where do I start? Right, we know it's coming, we know it's here, we use it in our personal lives, but from a business perspective, certainly, how can I capitalize on it? Where do I start? And that's always the conversation I get into with MSPs and hopefully we can unpack that further and I'll walk through some examples on how some of our MSP partners are really maximizing this massive, massive opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think predominantly, when people hear AI, they put it into two core buckets. Right. So they're thinking how is AI in my product and every technology brand I think about I just recorded one with Zoom AI is at the core of how they are building their technology. The second is in their operations. How do I do my job better, faster, cheaper? But for the MSP space one? Obviously, ai in product and AI in operations makes sense. But how do you build a practice around AI? How do you monetize?
Speaker 2:AI? Sure, well, pop quiz, alex. At the end of the day, what does ai rely on? Data, data, and that's something we don't talk a lot about. You know we blame ai. Oh, ai is hallucinating. Oh, it returned the wrong information. Well, it returned information. I'm not supposed to see right. But at the end of the day, it has to do do with data. And right, there is the goldmine.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of us get caught up in oh, we want to do the cool stuff, we want agents, we want automation. It's all good, don't get me wrong, but all of that relies on data. Okay, so where can an MSP start? Look, a lot of customers, doesn't matter enterprise size, smb, mid-market, they're all ready to do AI. But I don't know if you saw this latest Gartner report. It says that while a lot of companies are excited, a lot of them are worried too, because they know their data estate is not ready. Now what does that mean? Two important things. Number one a lot of companies, especially most of them, are in the cloud now they don't have good data quality. I mean, I'm sure, alex, you've talked to partners or worked with customers where they have stuff from 15, 20 years ago just sitting in their OneDrive, google Workspace. It's just there, or box, you know. It's job security. I want to keep my TPS report from 1945, right. And then if you ask your AI tool, be it Copilot or Gemini, and then it pulls up that wrong information or old information no good. So that's one area where it needs to be fixed and I'll talk about how MSPs can deal with that. Second is in the area of data security. One of the biggest problems that we find in Microsoft 365, for example, is oversharing. It's too easy to share, share Word, share PowerPoint, add you to Teams and let's say, alex, you share a Word document with me. Do you know if I shared it with somebody else and that person shared it with another person? You won't know. But the problem is AI trusts that whole sharing was intentional. So now when I ask Copilot, show me all the files I have access to with the word password or compensation, suddenly I see things I'm not supposed to see.
Speaker 2:Data security is another area where partners can thrive so quickly. How do you get going? First step is you do what's called data security assessment. You go into your customer's environment it doesn't matter if they have Google or Microsoft and a quick consulting engagement, eight hours, two days, what have you? And you can run an assessment. Number one figure out what their data quality looks like. Are they redundant, obsolete or trivial data? And second, look at their data security posture. Are their sensitive information being shared to people they're not supposed to, or being accessed externally by vendors or contractors? Right, and once you show that, obviously where the money comes in now is you remediate it or fix it, and then on a recurring basis that's magic word. Right, monthly recurring revenue. Have a service around data protection and data optimization, because as you use AI, more data will be created. People won't stop sharing information anyway, so now you provide that service to be able to deal with that, so that the use of AI would be even better for your customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the thing is funny to talk about data. I've long had this argument in sports. People say this all the time they go. You know, sometimes you need the eye test. The data doesn't tell the whole story and I I've just always that phrase really bugged me. It just means that just means you don't have good enough data. Right, if you're relying on eye test or intuition, that's just your interpretation of the data that you have seen right, we know that this athlete is going to be great and this one isn't.
Speaker 1:That's just a prediction based on what we understand right, and the requirement to build great data is the ability to make great decisions, right, whether that's in sport or in technology, and maybe we could.
Speaker 2:No, I'm going to say more. So in business, right, because at the end of the day, as MSPs, we serve our customers. Again, it doesn't matter the size and shape. Data is critical now to running any business. It doesn't matter what kind of business they are right From, you can say, a small business, an accounting firm, be it a retail organization they rely on data, especially in this day and age where every dollars and cents are being measured. And I also want to go back to your first point, where, in this business of MSPs, we rely on people, true, but what I describe, no matter how much people you throw in, how can you clean up redundant, obsolete, trivial data manually? You just can't. The same way, how can you actively monitor if data is overshared to the wrong person? You can't use people for that. And this is where technology comes in. And this is now the beauty of as a partner. You rely on industry-reliant technology to expand your services revenue, expand your business model, and this is where we come in and help MSPs.
Speaker 1:So, talking about that business expansion, I'm sort of forever looking for the shortcut that history can provide. So I think if you don't learn from what happened previously, what's the saying? You're bound to make the same mistake forever. What happened previously, where it was the same, you're bound to make the same mistake forever. We saw msps massively change, go to markets when we found born in the cloud msps. What I'm sort of finding fascinating is I think we are on the verge, if we haven't already started, to start to see born in ai msps. Talk to me about how transformational that is, how much of an opportunity there is for those forward-thinking MSPs, but maybe a little bit of stick with that carrot. Why should some of those legacy MSPs be worried about this?
Speaker 2:Boy, it's an exciting time, despite sometimes, depending on the time of day, the news you watch feels like doom and gloom, but actually it's an amazing time. Well, first and foremost, while we in technology we think AI is so passe, it's already been there, done that Our customers, it's so new to them. So, first and foremost, the opportunity for us is to be that guy, that expert, to lead our customers to start thinking about how can they maximize it. But step one again. Before you can run, you have to walk right Before customers start. I'm sure they'll be excited. Oh, I want agents, I want this, I want that. Well, hold on, it's great, we can get there.
Speaker 2:Let's start looking at your data right now. So that's opportunity number one. In fact, microsoft is urging partners to build a data security practice because, selfishly, without proper data posture, customers won't adopt Copilot. So they're providing all the resources, the education, to partners. Go, build a practice, because the days of flipping licenses every month are over. I mean, I'm sure, alex, you know about their changes too, right To the CSP model. So now partners are looking for what other ways can I make money? And this is it right? And then past that, sure, once you get the data posture in place, then you can start upselling to things like oh, let's start looking at agents, let's start looking at use cases, how we can use agents. We have a customer, actually a partner, we're working with. He was telling me, you know, one of the first things they're going to do now with agents is HR onboarding. So they build an agent so that a new employee comes in. The agent will just talk to you on chat. Hey, docs, you know it's your third day here at the company.
Speaker 1:How your third day here at the company? How's it going? I noticed you haven't filled out this form. That's cool, but again, data has to be in a good place. Tons of opportunity, yeah, I'm I'm really bullish on what ai is going to be for the channel. I think my, my opinion was, and I still to a degree, is I think direct go-to-market is going to benefit in the short term, because it's very easy for us to be agile as direct businesses. But what I'm really bullish on, when we talk about complexity, when we talk about data and when we talk about ideal customer profile, this is where the partner wins, because if I sell to legal firms that's that's my icp I can take the learnings of how we implemented and drove ai adoption in one legal firm and apply not the data set but the learnings to the next, meaning that we can have the de facto standard on what does a born in AI legal firm look like and we've got a narrative, because we've already done it once, twice, three times.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. I mean, before we started the recording, I was telling you about MSP here in DC. Their sweet spot now is in healthcare and they're an MSP for 250 hospitals and they're helping one hospital at a time with their journey to AI and they're starting with data security. You know the first few ones. You'll learn, especially in highly regulated industries like health care, legal or financial services, but it's an opportunity right now because not a lot of MSPs are doing this.
Speaker 1:No, and also, you know, sometimes MSPs come up against conflict against direct technologies, but there is no direct technology in the world that can go well. We understand the entire ecosystem and we understand it in your vertical and I think that's what I'm so bullish around. Ai is a sort of magical hammer that can break, can simplify complexity, but is built on complexity, and so for the msp to be like well I, I've done this 20 times, we've taken 20 hospitals, 100 hospitals on this journey. So let me tell you what the next three, six, nine months are going to look like. That is a calming salve to people who want to go through that journey, and then you can build that trust.
Speaker 2:And the beauty of this tactic or strategy, should I say, is now you are truly a partner, as an MSP, to the business, to your customer. You're not looked at as, oh, they're the IT people, they'll set up my laptop I mean sure you'll still do that but now you are a partner to their business. Here's how we help you move forward your business. Have you considered this? Have you thought about that? This is how we can reduce costs. This is how you can automate right.
Speaker 1:And that's really exciting and you all know this better than me. But I see a lot of MSPs who are building those agentic AI processes, but they are holding those processes and so the stickiness that you then have with your customer you know, it's the old Salesforce trip, right, no one can turn Salesforce off. There's no, we'll just decide we've had a bad quarter, so we'll just unplug this piece of software. No, no, the whole bones of the business is built from there. And so if you're an msp, the stickiness and the value that you provide, because you've built all of this automation, you've designed it, you optimize it, that process, you can't just go well, we'll just change provider, right, and I think that's what's so powerful.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent right. Because if you look at the old model where, oh, I'll just sell licenses, I get margin from the provider, now it's a race to the bottom right. The next year, if I put this contract out, I find a cheaper vendor, then I'll go with that, but now you don't buy business. I don't have to explain it to you. Then you know look, people want to buy, they don't want to be sold to, right? So that's the point. And what I love about this new, I would say, age we're getting into is there's really a lot of opportunities, but there's a lot of help that people need and we are the ones the MSP community, are the ones that can provide that help. Now the question is will you be the first right? I think right now there's tons of opportunity, but I don't see a lot of MSPs differentiating themselves, highlighting their value proposition in this area.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no.
Speaker 2:I think you're absolutely correct.
Speaker 1:Well, let's double click on where I think this becomes nuclear, which is one you can distill your value down, but then you have to explain your value, and one of the most powerful ways to explain your value is you don't you build a brand. Talk to me about why the intersection between MSPs and brand is an opportunity and maybe so complicated.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to put on my grandfather hat here and I want to tell you back in my days, and this is something that I think would be valuable for everybody. So my background well, I carried the title Chief Brand Officer at AvePoint. I'm very technical. I have a degree in electrical engineering. I started my career in assembler For those of you who don't know what that is, you weren't born yet, but that's where I started.
Speaker 2:And, in fact, before I came to AvePoint, I had my own SI MSP business here in Washington DC. So, as a lot of you know, when you start your own business, usually you start one person's shop. That was me. So I would get gigs and, by the way, I started in the world of NET programming and eventually SharePoint, and I thought I was the bomb. I can code, I can build apps, I can make internet. At that time I used ASPNET, but the problem is nobody knew me. At that time I used ASPnet, but the problem is nobody knew me, no customer. I just knew people and, as they say, mother is the necessity of what's that Necessity?
Speaker 1:of invention. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Speaker 2:Necessity is the mother of invention. And I'm like man. I don't have money. I need to promote myself. I need to somehow market or else I won't get paid. This month and at that time I grew my business to two or three people. I said you know what? I'm going to write a book. I wrote a book for O'Reilly Media Never written a book in my whole life I don't know if you know O'Reilly, alex, it's the books with animals.
Speaker 2:So back in the early late 90s, early 2000,. That was it right. There's no online resources If you have an O'Reilly book. You made it Like all the geeks read O'Reilly books. So I got my O'Reilly book. I wrote SharePoint for Project Management. The difference with that book? All the SharePoint books were very technical how to set up SharePoint farms, build web parts. But for me I took a different take. I took it from a business perspective, made it easy enough and spoke in project management language, because I used to run PMOs and that was my shtick, that was my brand, right? I'm not just the SharePoint guy, I'm the SharePoint for project management dude and I learned so much from my publisher At that time.
Speaker 2:They're like you got to write a blog to keep up with this. I go what's a blog? All right, this was like early 2000. You got to be at that time. Twitter just came out, you got to be on Twitter, you got to be on LinkedIn. So they educated me this idea of being a now it's called a thought leader, but at that time like an industry expert, right. And the whole gist of it is this Like I said, people want to buy. They don't want to be sold to. Everybody looks up to someone that they want to trust and they want to learn from. So lesson number one for brand building, especially if you're a small business and you don't have endless marketing budget, is you have to be a trusted advisor. So there's the discipline. Now, okay, I have to write a blog once a week, and the blog's not about hire me but to showcase.
Speaker 2:Here's what I learned on how do you SharePoint for project kickoff or project tracking. I would record videos, but at that time video recording is not that simple, so I had to edit, pop it on YouTube and I thought that was good enough. My publisher was, like you know, your online persona is great. Not enough. You need face-to-face. Fortunately, they connected me with local events, so I started speaking at user groups, conferences. And for me, I had to learn also public speaking and communication skills, because that's the strength of every technologist. Not but you just have to right, but slowly. That's how I grew my business Just being out there.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of work, don't get me wrong. And then I differentiated myself. So number two is not just being a trusted expert, but how are you different and who's your audience? So, again, my shtick is SharePoint for project management. My audience are project managers in the enterprise. They have SharePoint at that time.
Speaker 2:And the third lesson is you have to be maniacal in putting metrics and tracking. So at that time, my metric was okay, I'm going to spend all this time. I wrote a book. I'll be out there speaking, not that I'm getting paid writing articles. I want to, in a month, build a pipeline of this much In a year, make this much money from all this time I'm spending. And I did that. So the key here and even to this day, people may think wow, there's so many voices out there, there's so many experts out there. Where do I fit? Like Alex says, opportunity is massive. You could be the AI person for financial services. You could be the AI MSP for healthcare right. Nobody's doing that. Everybody's still at least from my purview is I'm MSP for 365. I'm MSP for Google or I'm MSP for? It's okay, but you got to differentiate yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the thing I would also say is you know, some people become thought leaders because they enjoy the process of becoming thought leaders, which is fine. Most people do this because they, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. They need to put a roof on their head, they need to keep their employees fed right. There is a financial reason, and I always, when I sit down and I take MSPs through why marketing is so important, why thought leadership is so important, the exact people who are looking for the answers are the ones who are ready to buy, and so, if they are going, I'm really struggling with project management and how SharePoint comes together. They are the ones who read the books and a portion of those ones go. I bet Dux would do this for me. I don't have the time. And so you build this funnel right, and I think the more that MSPs can provide free value, the more that value won't be free.
Speaker 2:I think that's where the true power of building that sort of brand comes in and you hit the nail on the head, right. Certainly, that was my intent, you know, today, it's true I want to pay forward, I share a lot of stuff there, but at that time it's like I got to feed my family, so people did hire me and then, from one project, now I have a bunch of projects. Now I did managed services, so it was great, right, and I do empathize and realize that it's easier said than done. So that's why one thing we're doing today for a lot of our partners we offer marketing as a service, if you may.
Speaker 2:We're not just, you know, working with our MSPs, for example, depending on the tier and the level they are, we provide things like content and social and guidance and coaching, because it's more complex today, like, oh, you know, I get questions like where should I go? Should I be on reddit or linkedin or twitter or everywhere? Well, you go where your customers are right, correct, and that's a key, because people sometimes like, should I just be on linkedin? I go, where are your customers? Because there are certain industries they're not on linkedin, frankly, they're on facebook, right, there are, uh, certain industries that are on ig. So I would advise, uh, some of our partners. You got to be on ig and ig's medium is video, right short form.
Speaker 1:So no, I think you're. I think you're so correct and I I often suspire about this where chanix is a business, we we deliver a lot of value to msps. I speak to global channel leaders and I generally just think it's funny.
Speaker 1:I think it's funny that there are all these high-powered people and they're talking about strategy and drive really really nice cars and they are relying on hundreds of thousands of partners who do zero marketing, which just is a fundamental vote. If I walked into Harvard Business School and said, hey, there's all these billions in revenue flowing and there's no marketing, how would you allocate resources? It'd be like, well, we'd spend a load of money on marketing and drive all this volume. And the answer is yes, that is how you would solve it if you were a direct company. Msps are direct companies. They're direct to their customer, exactly.
Speaker 2:You company? Yeah, msps are direct companies. They're direct to their customer, exactly. Yeah, you know I can see why. To alex right, like reflecting on my journey being a technologist. You know this is the stereotype, but in some sense it's true. You know, I'm an engineer, I'm the bomb, like I know everything. I don't need no marketing. Right, marketing, they don't know anything. It's funny today I carried out chief brand officer. Sometimes when I meet they would joke, but I know they're not joking. What do you know? You're a marketer. I'm actually very technical. I can't code.
Speaker 1:No, but I once sat down with an MSP and I really said to him he was quite stressed, business isn't growing at the rate he wanted it to. And I asked him what are you doing? You know what's your LTV, what's your CAC LTV unbelievable, unbelievable. So okay, quality of service not a problem, okay, fine. How are you acquiring customers? Well, I've got this really good program. One of my customers will refer me into another great referral model. Awesome, love it into another great referral model.
Speaker 1:Also love it that yeah, yeah, great indication that you deliver a lot of value. So that's great. So it sounds like the fundamentals you visit. What else do you do? I don't okay. So why don't you do any marketing?
Speaker 1:I feel sleazy and there is this feeling of like, no, no, my job is to be helpful and and his interpretation of that meant well, I wouldn't want to hassle anyone, I wouldn't want to call them and ask them, I wouldn't want to put information in front of them, because what if it's not necessary? And I was sort of sat there going but all you're doing is giving them the information. It's there if they want to pick it up, right, and so actually building this brand of being a problem solver in your very. To go back to that, if you are the guy to take legal firms through their ai journey, then be that guy. That's right, because and communicate that that is, that is who you are, and if you're unique and authentic and passionate, it's going to carry right. I've seen the most flamboyant extroverts and I've seen the quietest introverts and they are both authentic and it works wonderfully yeah, and now the conversation at that point is once you build that trust and following.
Speaker 2:It's not about the dollars and cents. No, people are not going to ask you know, why are you 50 more every month than this other vendor, right?
Speaker 1:that's not the conversation no, and the other thing is I find that that my experience both is hosting this podcast, my experience in general is, when you really get brand equity, they don't ask the competitor and so their only question is can I afford it? Stop not. Are you more expensive, right? So if, if I'm a lawyer to keep continuing and I go, well, we want to go on an ai journey and this is going to cost thirty thousand dollars. The only consideration is is this within budget? Not well, let's go and get seven quotes and find out everyone else's story. I trust ducks. Ducks is good. That's gave me loads of free value and so, yeah, I think if there's one improvement we can make to that msp channel, it is driving that marketing performance and watching the dollars flow.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. The other thought was to your point, your story about the person feeling sleazy when they market. I'm always curious why there's somewhat of a disconnect Every time. It doesn't matter you, me, msps, enterprise customers when they go home at night at seven o'clock and they aimlessly doom scroll on Instagram or these social feeds. I'm sure everybody sees ads and there are some ads that are not good. Some ads are actually pretty good and a lot of it is informational. It's okay with us. In fact, at some point after watching so much, I end up buying stuff actually I don't need. So that's the same analogy Into the consumer and learn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's why MSPs are a thing. This isn't something I see in the reseller, because resellers are typically owned by salespeople and msps are typically owned by engineers. Right, there's a fundamental difference in how those two channels are built, and so the thing that I think is engineers, by psychology, are broadly problem solvers and helpful, and so the the revenue acquisition motion can be perceived as not helpful, because it's helpful to me and not to you. But if you come from the perspective of my job is to take customers on the journey and my job is to help them understand how we can help them, then I think you can sort of psychologically understand OK, actually is helpful to the customer to take them on that journey. But I think what I'm sort of fascinated is where AI and automation and marketing and MSPs are all going to come together and I think that problem is going to solve itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I mean, you see it today, right, even on LinkedIn, is having this problem now, like there's tons of AI bots and there's tons of automated posts. I'm not against using AI to help your posting, but people forget, right? It's again I don't know, maybe it's human nature. That's why I love how Microsoft named their Gen AI co pilot. Gen AI is your co-pilot. It helps you with the first draft, whatever it may be a video copy, and then you tweak it, you clean it up, but you see a lot of it is automated where it's just auto posting or some people just copy and paste, and to me that loses in some ways the authenticity script right and so love your post into with x and y.
Speaker 1:But and I'm like this because I think there's really it's one thing if you sort of say, hey, here is why copilot's going to change business, so okay, well, that's information. But if I'm commenting and you're like that's not alex like it, I think it degrades that's right I feel like I'm being lied to right and then that's like having the what, the inverse swing of what we're trying to do yeah, and there's a there's some people doing this.
Speaker 2:Um test now on where you could do a post and just randomly throw other words there, like awesome um, okay that I knew I was going to enjoy this.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking us through the, the value around ai and MSP and marketing. I think it's super interesting. But I know you also want to continue that conversation your recommendation on who we should have on next. So who is that?
Speaker 2:You know, alex, I recommend a good friend of mine. He has an MSP firm here in the Washington DC area. His name's Nabil, with FSI Strategies. Amazing personal story but at the same time, amazing story of how he pivoted his business, really focused on this AI journey and, like I said, their sweet spot is in the healthcare. So make sure you connect with him, chat with him, pick his brain being a practitioner and see how he's growing his business.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Nabil, I'm super excited already.
Speaker 2:And Dux, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome, alex. Thank you.