What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Speed, Clarity, And Trust In Modern IT Ops
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Patch Tuesday shouldn’t feel like roulette. We sat down at Gartner Symposium with Egan from NinjaOne to explore a simple, disciplined idea: beat IT misery with speed, clarity, and trustworthy automation. Guided by decades in the DoD and intelligence community, Egan frames endpoint management as an operational craft where time-to-value, clean data, and risk-aware decisions matter more than shiny features. That lens drives concrete outcomes—deployments that go live in days, ROI signals within 24 hours, and onboarding that turns new admins productive in days instead of months.
We dig into pragmatic AI that actually helps the person doing the work. Patch sentiment intelligence aggregates global signals so teams can prioritize, stage, or defer updates with confidence, reducing outages and ticket spikes while maintaining security. Under the hood, AI-assisted asset data curation cleans messy inventories, improving patch targeting, vulnerability accuracy, and compliance reporting. When the data is right, every downstream action—from rollout plans to rollback analysis—gets faster and safer.
We also break down a partner-first go-to-market built for scale. Starting in the MSP world and expanding across mid-market, enterprise, and public sector, NinjaOne relies on certified services partners for deployment and operations. That rigor creates predictable rollouts, preserves institutional knowledge, and aligns incentives so customers see results quickly. The payoff is practical: fewer tools to manage, less training overhead, and a clearer path to automation that junior and senior admins alike can trust. If your team is under pressure to do more with less, this conversation offers an actionable blueprint for stability and speed.
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And we're here at Gartner Symposium with Egan from Ninja One. Egan, how are you? I'm good, thanks. Well, you guys are really shaking things up in the enterprise IT world. Before that, maybe introduce yourself, your journey, and also what is Ninja One up to these days?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. So I've got about 35 years in the industry. It's a mix of a handful of startups, both federal and private sector. Long time in the DOD, both as a uniformed military personnel. Thank you. Spent a long, long time in the intelligence community and then got back out into the startup world and have kind of kept my foot in both camps and tried to always make sure that if I'm gonna go to a tech company, if I'm gonna put in the time and the effort, I want it to serve uh dual purpose and be a dual-use technology, quite frankly, so that it serves not only uh our commercial markets uh but also our our federal and defense.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. I love the tagline beating IT misery. IT folks are under tremendous stress, pressure doing more with less. Yeah. Talk about that tagline.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so it it's it certainly is more real now than I think it ever has been, and that's true both in public sector and private sector. Uh the amount of downward pressure, both on capital spend, so things like software license, uh, but also operational spend, right? You can't afford to own a system or a platform or a set of tools uh that cost more than they should operate, quite frankly. And there's a lot that goes into that. And I think that's really that's what differentiated Ninja One for me, is we have a solution that really not only does have sort of that full and robust uh umbrella so that we can help them consolidate tooling, consolidate platforms, but we also have a time to value that's nearly turnkey, right? So I can go into a large enterprise, I can deploy and be in production literally in a matter of days, and I can start giving them a return on investment or giving them a time to value of around 24 hours post-production install. Uh, time to onboard new administrators to the platform is measured in typically days as opposed to months, which is a very real thing. You you get into some of these legacy environments, and that's one of the biggest challenges our customers face is if I have to replace an admin on a system, I've got a six-month ramp time before they're proficient. And it look, as an industry, we we we owe it to our customers to give them better, and they deserve better.
SPEAKER_00:Well done. And you know, endpoint management traditionally has been kind of a hot mess. That's my words, not yours. Um the time is now really to automate, to leverage AI and to put tools into the hands of perhaps less experienced administrators. How's that all working?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it it I I boil it down to what I refer to as pragmatic AI. It's fun to talk uh really big thoughts and you know, slap an AI sticker on the side of your product. At the end of the day, it it needs to serve a purpose, it needs to have a pragmatic use that impacts the day-to-day life of the administrator or the person using the tooling. Uh, for us, that plays out in very specific ways. So we're using AI very intelligently to do things like giving um patch sentiment, right? So that as if patch Tuesday rolls around, you've got a slew of work to do in front of you. Look, I would like to know if across the tens of thousands of Ninja One customers or globally, just based on available information that that starts to trickle out uh post-patch Tuesday, um, is this patch going to cause me a problem? Do I need to reconsider maybe delay a particular patch within this group of patches I need to send out? We're also doing things like that in terms of uh data analysis and data, let's call it, um, data curation, where if we need to be able to um take things like asset data as an example, which is traditionally very, very messy, um, we need to be able to cleanse asset data and make it incredibly accurate without needing an army of people behind the scenes to do that. Fantastic. So that that then feeds into patch accuracy, vulnerability accuracy, all of the things that you're gonna use the tool for. Um, so we're really trying to impact the day in the life of the Ninja One user in a way that just saves them time.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. And as far as your go-to-market, you seem to be pretty partner-centric, savvy. Very and your the sweet spot is MSP. Tell about your partnering in go to market.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we've actually expanded that dramatically. So Ninja One started in the MSP world. Uh that's that's where the idea was born. That was the core customer base. We then expanded to mid-market and below uh internal IT, and now we're making that leap into uh large enterprise and uh large federal uh public sector. Um that's my focus. Uh and certainly our partners are critical to that. In fact, I would argue in in the upmarket space, you will not succeed without strong partner play. Um, and that is both channel sales as well as services partners. Um, we are signing up new partners in droves. Uh, we on the services side, uh, we do push out all of our services to our services partners who we put through a very rigorous onboarding and certification process so that our customers can be very confident that if this person's going to provide you a Ninja One service, whether that's deploying the product, operating it on your behalf, whatever that looks like, that you have a badged, absolutely highly qualified services partner to work with. On the back end, we want to make sure that our partners themselves are very satisfied with the relationship that we have with them. And so we put a huge amount of time and effort into getting that right.
SPEAKER_00:Well, fantastic. Well, congratulations on all the success. Thank you. Onwards and upwards. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks.