How to Double Your Gross Profit with Network as a Service

Transcription

Chapter 1: Introductions 

Hey everyone, I'm Philip, I'm with SecurEdge and I'm here with, Jessica Reece with Check Point. Jessica, how are you doing today? 

Hey, Phil. I’m good. How is your day going? 

So, a little tired. I've been traveling a lot the last couple of days, but I'm good.  

I noticed you're in your home office. 

I am, and we're bringing it real today. This platform doesn't offer backgrounds. I actually have an idea for another webinar. We should do how to be a mom and have a big family and run your family and still be a busy executive. 

Yeah. So, I appreciate you joining for the webinar today. 

Our marketing team picked a very provocative topic on doubling your gross profit with Network as a Service that I know we're gonna tackle today, but before we get going, can you talk just a little bit about your background and what you do with Check Point? 

Yeah. Absolutely, Phil. Thanks. So right now, I head up Check Point Strategic and Managed Service Provider Organization. 

What that means is that our group focuses on working with many companies and partners and helping them to build out their go-to-market around cybersecurity strategies and create different service delivery models that are really tailored to the specific target market that they're going after.  

I've been in the cybersecurity industry for over a decade and from the very beginning, that's really been my focus and it's helped get us as a team to where we are now really in covering the expansive group of partners that we do today.  

What are the types of companies that you guys work with? I'm talking about the partners that are presenting the solution to the customer.

Absolutely. So, we cover a wide range of partners. Some of them are global technology leaders. 

We cover tier-two telco organizations and also down to the very regional MSPs that are focused on their community and servicing the market that they actually live and work in.  

Well, good to have you on the call. So, my name is Philip. For those of you who probably have never heard of me, but I own a company called SecurEdge. 

Jessica and I have been working together for eighteen to twenty-four months, and we used to be a VAR, slash MSP, and we ended up selling that company and then, just building software. The reason I explained that is simply because if you're on this call, you’re a VAR, you're at MSP, you're building a Network as a Service program likely or considering that. And I did that for fifteen years.

So, I was a CEO and built programs. 

So, that's really why I'm joining Jessica for the conversation.  

With that, let's go ahead and jump in here. 

Let me see if I can share this. Here we go. Yeah. 

Chapter 2: Current Trends & Opportunity 

Okay. So why don't we talk a little bit first just about kind of what you're seeing, I know you've got thousands of, resellers and VARs, if you will. MSPs that are selling Check Point and then you also got an executive team that's talking to end customers about what their experience is working with the VARs because that's really what the job is. 

So, talk a little bit about some of the trends that you're seeing out there in the industry.  

Yeah. If we kick off with the trends, we're seeing the bigger picture opportunity with Network as a Service. 

Over the last few years, just as a human race, we've seen this increase and we've had this expectation of moving to an online tech-based experience for everything that we were going through in life. Right? We experienced this at a very personal and raw level and in our day-to-day kind of like consumer lives, but we took all of that and all of that experience, and that flows now into the work that we do. 

And the expectations that we have for our employers, for our employees, from all the companies that we work with in whatever capacity that might be and we hear this all the time and so this new standard has been set for now, the first trend of really a digital experience for everything that we do. Right? 

Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry.

Okay. I was gonna say, you know, I was just gonna move on to the next trend. 

I just want to dive in on this a little bit. So I owned a company for fifteen years. 

We were selling stuff to customers and one of the things that we thought was, like, a big problem is a customer can order a pizza and they get a tracker and they know exactly where it is when it's being made, and everything. And then the pandemic kinda just sped that up where, you know, I order sandwiches, groceries, and all that and the stats are actually that there was a three hundred percent increase in online marketplaces because customers just use that. 

So just as a VAR or an MSP, the thing to consider is if my customers can get better tracking on a pizza more so than they can on a million dollars in infrastructure. 

Like, they're gonna be upset about that. It's kind of a problem that we need to address. I just thought that was kinda funny.

Yeah. Absolutely. 

You know, the next thing is, we're hearing this new thing from customers that they really want to just have a solution. They just want whatever it is they need. They sometimes don't even know that. 

But whatever it is they need, they just want it to work. And MSPs have this unique ability to take that and whatever vendors they're choosing and really add it into a stack and offer that solution out to their customers. Whatever customer base they're going after, this is a way that they're differentiating themselves in the market that they're servicing. Right? 

And as they take that and they differentiate themselves, the customers at the end, the whole this is powered by... fill in the vendor’s name. It's becoming so less relevant, and it's superseded by the make things work. Follow the SLAs. Make sure they're met.

This phenomenon is really where that as a service model begins to truly make sense for our MSP partners and how they deliver it to their customers or how they're able to do it.

One hundred percent. I love it. So, one of the things that I saw as a company is, we started really the business as a VAR and then we would go to customers, and we would sell them firewalls. 

We'd sell them security solutions. We would sell them networking and more and more, they would come to us and say, hey, I just want my stuff to work. Like, I'm building this warehouse, and, you know, of course, our sales team, we have sales engineers go in. "Hey, let me tell you about the, you know, let me tell you about the throughput on this firewall, and when you turn on the security services...."

And we literally would have customers go, I don't really give a shit. Like, I really just want you to make things work in my facility. Can you do that? 

And we actually got an email from a CIO that literally said, the trail was our engineer telling a bunch of technology stuff and he literally responded back and said, "Hey, man, I just wanna pay my bill and I want my network to work in my warehouse. Can you do that?

That's right. What happened? 

Like, the world is changing now. We're now in this new model it's no longer innovative to sell them this stuff. It's now just infrastructure, and it's like a utility. And so I agree, a hundred percent, with your thinking there. 

That's right. And, you know, so they want the digital experience. They want it just to work for them. They want it to cover everything that's gonna be in their networks, but they need options. 

How do they actually make that happen? 

And so they look towards subscriptions as a very, very practical option for them when it comes to actually procuring all of these things that they want and need to happen. Right? 

This is the "now we can pivot" from just as a service and now we're pivoting to Network as a Service, and a Network as a Service model is an opportunity for these partners to deliver to their customers that next level of, how do we differentiate? How do we innovate? How do we make a difference? 

And this is where we're seeing all of that opportunity today.

Yeah. So I agree. One hundred percent, like, specifically, and just thinking about this selfishly from the resellers' perspective, if you will, One of the opportunities with doing the subscription is you're really packaging things together and delivering an outcome. 

And when you're doing that, it just changes kind of the margins and the capabilities in it and I believe more and more, we just need to present it really as an option and so definitely trends that we saw. 

Chapter 3: The Benefits for MSPs Selling Naas 

Now, from a motivational perspective, if you're thinking about it, if you're on the call and you're an MSP and you're thinking about building this, there's a lot of kind of benefits that we saw when we moved into this business model.

Obviously, the first one is growing recurring revenue and if you're on the call, that's really why you are here. You're you're thinking about growing recurring revenue. 

And if you can grow your recurring revenue, then your company is worth more and things like that. So huge, opportunity there. And then the other thing we found is that you just sell a lot more when you offer the subscription option. If you think about, like, how we buy houses and cars, well, if everybody paid cash for their car, they probably wouldn't be driving, you know, a Tesla it'd probably be something a little bit more reasonable. 

Right? So, if you offer that subscription option, your customers can obviously afford more. So, it's great for them and the other thing I've heard a lot recently is that your company itself is not as much "lumpy" from an up-and-down perspective. 

And so, if you go into the pandemic, we had a lot of our customers that put purchases on hold and things like that. If your revenue is recurring and all that, it gives your company, obviously, a lot more, opportunity to be stable.

The other thing that I think is, something that people don't spend enough time thinking about is if you're transaction based, I'm talking about I'm gonna ship you or I'm gonna come out and I'm gonna figure your security services, whether it's firewalls and things like that. Well, that's really a transaction at one time. 

But if I go in and I'm selling them a sixty-month relationship where I'm now managing that on an ongoing basis, I now control that or I own that relationship with my customer for delivering that outcome.

So, your retention is just way different and you're not competing against a lot necessarily the online resellers and things like that.

And so overall, it's obvious, that your company value increases, your MRR grows, and so, there's just a lot of great opportunities, IF, let's say, a big IF, if you can solve the riddle, if you will, of selling networks on subscription. 

Chapter 4: What are your options to build a NaaS program? 

And so, let's get into, like, How the hell do you do this? What what are the options? I don't wanna be a consultant and just say, here's all your problems. 

I actually want to be able to solve it. So first, let's talk about kind of the strategies for building. So, could you unpack this just a little bit?

Yeah. So, when you think about building or having Network as a Service as an offering, you've got two options. Well, really you have three. Okay. Three is to do nothing. 

Yeah. That's not why we're here today. Right. We don't have time to unpack that in and of itself today. 

Wait to die. Right? It's an option. 

When we look at the two you have, you can choose to resell a program that somebody else is built out and is really making margins and revenue off of, or you can build your own program and be the one that benefits from that and have that direct connect out to your customer.

So when we look at when you decide to resell a program, this isn't a bad option. 

Right? If you have the resources, then this makes sense for your business, This is an okay option and people do it all the time. But when you do this, you're taking the margin stack and it's fundamentally changing. It is being allocated out to the manufacturer, the vendor that's delivering this that you're just reselling. 

Okay. If Check Point were to build some fantastic as-a-service model, we would manage that offering, and you as the MSP would sell it out to your customers. 

The margin in this hypothetical situation, this shifts. This is now Check Point's margin where Check Point is making that money. Right?

Again, not a bad option. 

We do this kind of business every day, but it's different. Your other option then, what can you do if that's not what you want to do? 

In reverse is to see where you can focus on building out your own and where you can see those profits. This is where the importance of a Network as a Service program really shines. 

Being built by you, the MSP, that's where the service happens. That's where the service delivery happens between you and your customer and this is where it should happen.

This is what makes you sticky. Keeps that customer's attention. All those great things Phil just talked about by delivering this, creating this, and differentiating yourself in this manner. This is where you build that customer base that you're looking for.

Yeah. So, I gotta pipe in here just because I have such strong opinions. 

I don't know if you know this, but I actually do. Some would say potentially too strong, but that's a personal problem. 

So, a couple of things here. Obviously, as a VAR and MSP for fifteen years, there are a lot of manufacturers that are coming out and they're offering essentially their own programs. I'm not gonna mention any manufacturers by name, but there are several where they raised a lot of capital recently, and what they're doing is they're telling the traditional MSP or VAR to resell their program, and again, nothing wrong with that. 

I agree with you in your approach, there's nothing wrong with that but just understand that what you're doing is a really important part. And what you're doing is, you're saying, I'm not gonna be the provider. I'm gonna resell somebody else's program. They're gonna be the provider. 

I'm willing to do that. I'm now a broker, of a relationship instead of the relationship owner and so there are two significant differences. One is, that I'm changing my profit structure as a company because I'm no longer reselling products and things like that. 

I'm now giving this away and we're selling that or whatever. But the biggest problem I have with it is the relationship problem and I believe if you're on this call and you're a VAR or MSP, you should own that customer relationship and you likely have already owned that for several years. 

If I was a VAR, still, I would say, nope. I'm gonna own the relationship. It's my customer. 

I agree with this kind of approach. Now as an executive with a manufacturer, you have to be a little bit torn, between the two models. Do you have kind of a preference on how you think about the problem? 

A preference, no. I think they both have their own applicability based on the type of business that we're doing. 

As we work with companies to build out go-to-market strategies and service delivery, it’s heavily weighted in this area where they're differentiating. They own the relationships. 

They're building out the offerings and the customer in most of these situations, like I said, don't know it's Check Point. Right? It's powered by Check Point, but it's really the partner that is putting their name and their branding and their reputation around it to deliver out. 

It is important in those situations that they have that relationship and that direct connection with the partner. We're there on the back end supporting everything that they do. 

Chapter 5: What are the 5 things you'll need to build your own program? 

So, now I wanna go into the… as I'm assuming if you're on the call, you are here to learn about how to build a program. And so, for context here, I owned a SecurEdge for fifteen years as a VAR/MSP. The last five years, we spent it trying to figure out how do we take a network, and package it to the customer essentially on a consumption basis. 

And we had all sorts of problems doing that. And so, I wanna talk about kind of the five things. So, if you're thinking about doing this, let me tell you the things you gotta figure out, essentially, as an IT company.

The first thing is, that you have to have some sort of customer experience, and I'm talking specifically about a customer portal. 

And what I mean by that is, if you're let's say you're reselling a vendor, whether, you know, Check Point, you wouldn't want your customer necessarily logging in to the management console, if you will. You really want them logging into your customer console so if you wanna think about it.

And so, think about when you buy something from Amazon, when you buy something from, let's say even an ISP, like, a Spectrum or whomever, you're logging into a portal you're opening service x.

So, you have to rethink your customer experience and what that needs to look like, and it needs to be yours. It needs to be built around you and the service you provide to the customer. 

The second thing is, and this powers kind of the customer portal side, is you really have to have a connected tech stack. 

And what's really interesting about a lot of these, you know, we're talking about customer experience, and you know, what the customers expect. But what's really interesting is if you go inside of a VAR or MSP and you just ask, like, tell me about how your systems are working. Are they integrated together? Does your CRM talk to your ITSM? Does your ITSM talk to your PSA? What we find is that it's very, very fragmented. 

And so, we really have to build this connected stack. And I don't mean just internally. I also mean with partners like a Check Point, which is why we're here talking to you. The service provider, like you said earlier, the MSP facing the customer, has to be connected to Check Point on the back end but to the customer, it's essentially one experience. 

And that comes with that kind of, fully integrated tech stack.

And then the third problem that I think is somewhat obvious, but something that, maybe people don't think a tremendous amount about is, you really have to integrate the finance into the workflow of your sales team.

So, if you think about, again, how you buy a house or buy a car, in those industries, eighty-five percent of the transactions are financed in some way. The forecast in the actual IT world is actually seventy-five percent of everything that customers buy will be subscription-based in the future. And so, we have to start thinking about how we embed essentially that whole process, into the workflows. 

And then the fourth kind of big problem is, since we're talking about problems, is you've gotta have what's called configure price quote or CPQ software that's really built around selling on subscription.

And I've had so many conversations this week, with large VARS who're trying to build out these types of practices and some of them are hundreds of millions and one was actually well over a billion dollars in revenue. 

And their biggest problem was how do I get my team to quote this because they've been quoting firewalls for twenty years. How do we get them to sell services from my company? And so that's a big problem. 

And then the fifth one is the services lifecycle.

And what I mean by this is like I said earlier, you're no longer just selling a point solution. You're now owning the relationship for sixty months. And if you own the relationship for sixty months, it's no longer enough just to say, oh, I can go and install and configure it. 

What about supporting it on the back end? What about offering, you know, updates on the software and things like that to keep that system up to date? And so, you have to think about the entire life cycle of, let's say, a Check Point security solution whether it's a firewall or endpoint technology. 

You've gotta think about that entire life cycle of deploying it and managing it. And this can create some kind of holes for the IT. But do you have any comments on that? 

Yeah, I was just gonna say, Phil, it's really interesting when we go in and talk to partners, and they excel in one, two, three of these different areas. Right? They have it down. They've been doing it the same way for a long time and they just don't need help. 

But when we talk about these five areas, all together in unity. 

Things tend to quickly fall apart, and not be as rosy as they may seem. 

Chapter 6: Here are the results you can expect 

If you can solve these five things, and I'm not saying that they're not daunting and hard, I wanna talk about the numbers. So, and this is mostly, just to explain exactly what the math looks like if you decide to do it. 

Now I was at an event this week, and that's one of the reasons I'm tired. I was at an MSP event on, Monday and what was interesting when you talked to, like, pure bread MSPs, like managed service providers, like pure bread, they built a whole company on recurring revenue, which is awesome and, impressive. 

They seem to not care about selling the equipment. And they're like, oh, don't really care about selling or whatever. Okay? You know, I'm just interested in managing the equipment. 

And I think that is a good approach or an interesting approach, but I'm kinda like, two things there. , one, your customer wants a solution, and the solution involves the equipment. So, you really should consider packaging already. So, customer first, like, what do they want? 

They want a solution. And then the second thing I wanna think about is you're leaving a lot of money on the table, man. Like, why don't you just package it all together and make money?

And then the other side of the kind of the world is kind of the VAR world. And some of them are really, really good at just like selling this stuff, maybe even setting it up. But then they're leaving all the managed services under the table. I'm like, why aren't you building a managed services practice? 

I wanna talk a little bit about, like, why you should do both. Like, why you should be both a VAR and an MSP. 

I'm gonna talk a little bit about, like, literally from a strict numbers, perspective.

I was just gonna say it's so interesting right now where we've got partners that are doing one or the other really well and their customers are now coming to them and asking for the other model.

What the partners are realizing is they either adapt or find a way to serve these customers in the specific ways that they want or these customers are starting to look for companies that will do it. 

And that flexibility that you're gonna talk about now from a numbers perspective alone. But just in general, that flexibility is where we see a lot of our partners at more of an inflection point right now where they've gotta figure out a way to do it or risk losing that business.

I would one hundred percent agree. I mean, it's obviously the future, and the answer if that's written on the wall is if you look at AWS as a business model, okay, we used to sell servers, and we used to go in and sell storage and all that. 

AWS essentially packaged a solution called a cloud and now they sell a data center as a service. And customers went to that model's one of the fastest growing models in the history of the world. Actually, it was the fastest growing. And so, it's a model that we have to look at and go how do we do that as IT companies? 

How do we go in and provide that? In our model, what we're saying is you present to your customer essentially on subscription. Now, I'll point out that not all customers wanna consume it that way, but what I would propose is that you always present it that way and then you let them back it off if that's not how they wanna do it. 

Hey, I've got some capital I want to spend upfront, but you lead with the subscription. And I can tell you this from experience. 

Because, five years ago, I was skeptical of this. Okay? When I got our sales team to pitch the subscription model first, the customer chose the subscription eighty percent of the time. 

And so, for those of you that have selling firewalls out there and think that that's, you know, b.s. or something, get your team to pitch it, and then watch what happens. But that was the experience that we had.

Now the way the numbers work, if you lead this way, and this is actually real numbers utilizing our software, and I'll talk about that later. But, this is a Network as a Service solution that we created. 

We're using Check Point as the edge security product, obviously. And by that, I mean, firewall solution. We're using a solution from HPE, and the bill of materials is here. I just wanted you to know it's not made up. 

It's actually real. We did this for a long time, so we built the actual real numbers. And the way that the math actually works here is, in a VAR kind of business model, you would go in and sell the customer, a revenue. But the problem with this is, if I go and present this only on a project basis, I'm really just selling one-time revenue. 

And so, the way that the math would work out is I'd make sixty thousand dollars in top-line revenue. I'd buy that for forty-nine thousand dollars, and I'd make a gross profit of around thirteen, fifteen thousand dollars depending on, you know, how you package your services.

And then the other model, which is the MSP model, I wouldn't care about the equipment. I'd I wouldn't make any money off it. I'm not worried about that. I'm too good for that. I'm gonna just make money on the MSP service, and then I'm gonna do it this way. And in that model, it's actually very good as well, where I'm getting paid monthly, on a monthly basis over the term. 

But what happens when I merge those things together? 

If I'm able to sell the equipment upfront, wrap it into a subscription with the customer, and package all that together into a subscription over the term. What happens with my total contract value is that it actually doubles. and so we talked about how your gross profit actually doubles over the term.

There's one mistake here that I'll point out is that this says on the right is the total contract value. That's actually just revenue monthly and not the contract guy. But on the left where you have Network as a Service provider, that's actually the math of what this looks like, and this is actually our experience, being a Network as a Service provider. 

Absolutely. So, what you're saying is the customers are asking for this and you can double your revenue?

I am saying that

Sounds like a great problem. 

Exactly. And you own the relationship for sixty months which is another kind of, huge benefit, to the business model. 

So, the problem is, all this kind of stuff sounds great, but what you'll notice is that we did some creative financing. We tied it all together into a customer subscription, and all this kind of stuff is very complicated. 

SecurEdge today is a software company. 

Chapter 7: A simple solution to build your own NaaS business

The reason why we decided to become a software company is because there wasn't really an easy way to build this as a service provider. And so, we actually started building software for ourselves to solve this kind of complex workflow problem.

When we built the software, we showed it to some of our friends that owned other VARs, and MSPs. We also showed it to partners like you and you all said kind of the same thing.

Hey, the software you created would be useful to other VARs and MSPs, so, if you could get rid of your services business and then help us with the software, then we could we could help sell more Check Point using your software. 

That's right.

Yeah. Absolutely. And when we think about, like, you know, going back to the main question, like, how does a how does a partner do this for themselves, right? And maybe in a more simplified way.

If we talk about building the program yourself and when you're set on building it, then what's your best option here? Where can you at least start or think about even, you know, biting off this big, maybe tedious task that looks to loom in front of you? Right? 

And the best thing to do there would be to plug yourself into a framework that already exists. 

When we talk about that, think about, Central Office. It's a Network as a Service platform that has all of the pieces that you already need in place to be able to deliver those services. It plugs into the tools that are already existing, and you are already using today and it helps streamline the entire process for you.

Sales into fulfillment, into management, and then beyond that into whatever else your customer relationship might look. Going back to what people are asking for. This is giving you that digital experience. 

This is giving you the opportunity to offer your customer just that overall solution. It's a solution. We've got it all, and it also provides them that option to buy through subscription, and that's a really practical, option that people do wanna hear about. Hello. 

Chapter 8: What is Central Office? 

So, the software that we created that Jessica was talking about is called Central Office. 

We designed it specifically as a software platform for, IT Service Providers, we say, which includes VARs and MSPs. And it was designed to do all the things that we're talking about today.

So, the way to think about this is it's really a hybrid of three types of software. 

The first category that you would think about is we built essentially a marketplace with APIs and we did this so they could have a connected tech stack. We built integration directly with the distributors you're working with, like Ingram Micro. We built programs into it from Check Point, obviously, that we're here to talk about today. We build integration with finance partners to make it easy to build subscriptions. We also need to integrate with your existing software. 

So, CRMs, ITSMs, PSAs, you know, we don't really care what your stack looks like. This was designed essentially to glue that together. The other layer that we built, which was the more complicated layer, was the configure price quote software. 

So, on our platform, you can produce Network as a Service quotes in a few minutes. 

That was a process that used to take us literally several weeks with engineering and all that. We really had to figure out how to automate that kind of process so we built that CPQ kind of functionality.

The last thing that we created; is we create a commerce system as well. So, if you think about that customer experience. Where's your customer log-in to? We can give you one of those if you don't have one, or we can interact with one if you already have one.

So our system is commerce with APIs that we can talk to something and it's that kind of online experience. So, the idea here is it's simply something you just turn on, connect to your existing systems, and then you're off to the races.

Now the way this ties back into your Check Point relationship, is that Jessica and I have been having, eighteen, twenty-four months of meetings.

Chapter 9: SecurEdge / Check Point Partnership 

So, let's talk a little bit about our relationship, and what we've done with Check Point.

We've spent a lot of that time talking about the synergies between the companies and why it makes sense for Check Point partners to leverage this to sell more Check Point. 

We built out templated and preconfigured bundles that include Check Point as one of the technologies. 

It's really important to say here that I understand, Check Point as a whole understands, Phil understands. Check Point is a component of your customer's network. We are not all of it. They're going to have other network requirements that are outside of what Check Point does.

Central Office gives the ability to pull those bundles that we've preconfigured around Check Point solutions and in a simplistic way, order the network needs for your customers. That's multiple components that they're required to have in a really seamless platform of Central Office. 

The other thing to keep in mind is these bundles that have been built, including Check Point, so including other vendors, they're really based and configured on individual customer's needs.

So, what their network needs are, what market segment they fall into. All of these unique characteristics of your market, whatever that is, have been taken into consideration and built into the tool already for you. 

One of the things we spend a lot of time doing is working with your solutions engineers and thinking about if I go to my customer, and I'm no longer just selling them whatever I can sell them. 

I'm really designing a solution that meets an SLA based on the customer type. And so, if I go into a retail environment, I don't necessarily need to sell them the most expensive firewall. I might sell them something that really fits based on the usage in that type of facility.

As a service provider, what we were trying to figure out how to do is how do we standardize our solutions based on our customer's needs, which is what you were talking about. And the answer is I have to think a little bit differently about delivering SLAs and things like that.

So, we really try to take a customer's needs and line that up with Check Point, and then make that really simple to design inside the workflows. 

What we found is that if we just can organize things, in bundles, and make it simple for your sales team to choose the right solution when they're running through essentially a workflow, you could sell a lot more stuff. 

If you reduce friction, in the sales process, you'll sell more. Like, that that's the thing here.

We boiled it down to some different things that we can, we can talk about. 

It's actually two hundred or more things that we built, into the software. And we've ran the numbers on this. It's actually way more than ten times faster, but ten times sounds really good. So, we said ten times because if you said like thirteen times, you know, whatever, but it is way faster to build quotes like this on the platform. 

What we're working on, is automating a lot of the costs and the pricing. So we made it so you can set your pricing in a standard way so that you can automate that for your customer.

We worked with, both Check Point and partners to figure out how to fill in those service gaps if you don't have things like a NOC service for example. 

And then we designed it so that it can automate some of the bill of materials creation and then take essentially anything and convert it into a subscription. I know I'm rambling here, but do you wanna add anything to that?

Yeah. This is great and I think it's really important to call out that, as a partner, if you're listening to this and you're like, this is great, but it's more than I need because in that one area of those five, I've got it down. 

That's okay. Keep doing what you're doing. You have the flexibility to leverage Central Office in those areas which will give you the ability to offer a robust Network as a Service option to your customers. 

Not that you want a cherry-pick as a platform, it's great. But if you're if you've got your own NOC, let's talk about everything else that this is gonna benefit you and your customers with. 

One hundred percent agree. So, with that, that's actually most of the content we had today.

Chapter 10: Learn more about the Check Point Partnership Ecosystem 

I think we're gonna answer a couple of questions now if people have questions. 

Talk a little bit about if the people on the call are not a Check Point partner today, how do they sign up, all that kind of process?

Absolutely. Go ahead and visit the website to learn more about the Check Point partner ecosystem and how to become a Check Point partner. 

Join the Check Point community right there and let us work with you to help you build out your security go-to-market strategies for your target markets. Let's talk more about how you can sell and deliver Check Point as a service as part of your Network as a Service offering through Central Office.

If you're an existing Check Point partner, and you're interested in learning a little bit more about Central Office and how you can solve more with it, we created a really short link here that's only seventy-five characters long. You can take a look at it. We're gonna send that out in the notes as well and then you can have access to that.

Chapter 11: Q&A 

So, let's open up the floor for some questions. 

The first one is how expensive is Central Office?

Very tactical question. The pricing for Central Office is all online. 

The short answer is that it starts at three hundred dollars a month and goes up from there. We charge for the access to the platform and then, monthly active team members. So, how many people do you have using the software? We designed it to be very service-provider-friendly if you will. What we mean by that is we wanted the entire team to be able to use it. We didn't go with the traditional per-user license model, because then you end up assigning stuff to your users and then they don't use it, and that sucks for everybody.

The way we designed it is that you access the platform, you invite everybody and then we bill you based on usage. All that stuff is public knowledge. It's on our service provider website. 

If you go to securedgenetworks.com, and click on service providers, there's a pricing page there. 

What's the onboarding process and are there onboarding fees? 

The onboarding fees are determined by the things we're integrating with. 

The process takes about thirty days and it really depends on the size of the company, and then how many tools we have to integrate with.

This is actually an interesting stat. The average IT company or service provider, if you will, that we are onboarding, we're integrating with five different, tools and that's including, Ingram Micro, Salesforce, HubSpot, etc. What's really interesting is that it's kind of sitting in the middle. It's that kind of digital connectivity, if you will, amongst all these different tools. 

It depends on how many things you have or if you want us to do some sort of custom stuff but it's a pretty simple, process where our team is doing most of the work. 

What types of Check Point bundles already exist? You wanna talk about that? 

Yeah. Absolutely. So, we focused on the specific markets that your customers might be in.

Phil gave the example of a retail. In a retail environment, what does that look like? What kind of security needs are there on-site maybe back ending to like a data center or a corporate office? 

We built it out based on the configurations you put in there. Trying to ensure that we've hit all of the security features that your customer would be looking forward to to secure their entire environment. 

There are over two hundred of them, lots to choose from and you can always go in and configure your own as well. These are templates that are extremely customizable if you don't find just what you're looking for. 

I want to talk about that a little bit, because that's really, really important that you mentioned that. If you think about a lot of bundles that you get from, let's say, a distributor, or from your manufacturer only, that's good because that might be the firewall with the licensing and support, which is great. What we have to do from there is, we have to take that and package our own services and with it.

The bundle was really our bundle, made up of their bundle if that makes sense and then we have to take that to a customer. You have the ability to tie it together. We spent a lot of time working on that and making it so that the MSP can add their services to a Check Point bundle and then they can simply sell that to the customer inside the workflow. 

That's a really good question. 

How does the payout process work when you're getting paid one-time revenue and recurring revenue? In terms of when it's actually implemented and just exactly how the payouts work?

That's a really good question with a long answer. 

The first is that, we talk about the platform having integrated financial services. What that meant is that we actually spent two years, working with, some big financial providers like Wells Fargo as an example, and literally integrating their technology financing into the platform itself. If you think about just financing in general, most of us aren't set up to do that. 

I have to check a customer's credit. I have to take these things that were one-time charges and convert them into a subscription-based model and it's actually fairly complicated.

When we had a VAR, it was sixteen steps that we counted just for financing and I was like, this can't scale. This is not gonna work. And so, we essentially built that process into the software. 

The way that the software will work is the order and everything looks the same in an Ingram Micro/TD Synnex where you're placing that order. But the cash flow to the IT company, the revenue gets paid upfront, and then it gets paid on a recurring basis, and all that happens essentially inside the platform. 

Is there some sort of documentation, that we can send out to reference later? 

Yes, and in addition everybody's gonna get a recording of today's webinar so they can have it on demand. We do have some additional documentation that we will send out. As always, they can reach out to us as well, and we can send them some more information. 

We also have a couple more webinars planned for this series.

In the next one, we'll talk about really rounding out your practice. If you're gonna build something, we're gonna dive into what partners should you think about when you're building your Network as a Service practice that can really help you deliver it. 

The last planned webinar is what everybody wants to talk about, and that's about automation. How do you build automation into your workflows and then specifically what should you build into your workflow so you can automate as much of this process as possible?

Well, thank you so much for your time. I know you're extremely busy with family and work and everything. So, thank you so much.

Thanks, Phil for having us. This was really great. 

It's so important. A great message for our partners to hear. Thank you so much. 

Alright. Thanks, everybody. 

Alright. Bye.