Talk to me about the expanded partner program and Cytracom University.

Conkle: When you become a partner at Cytracom you gain access to Cytracom University. We have multiple levels of certification and training for different folks and different staff within your your organization as a MSP. In talking to MSPs, educating and education resources are key to success. We have resources for sales, onboarding and delivery, ongoing support, how to take a managed security offering to market and how to charge more for managed security. We’ve had Cytracom University for several years, now we’re completely relaunching it with a lot more courses and content.

Are there any other new enhancements to the partner program?

Tippet:  As we moved over to the network and security space and expanded what we consider connectivity, it’s still one platform, but the depth of education is now more important than ever. MSPs understand networking, we’re not teaching you how to manage a network. We’ve adopted what we believe is the future of how networking is going to be executed and implemented into the space across all verticals and all sizes. It’s early in the MSP space, and so using and leveraging community and university to not only explain, ‘You are looking for X in your traditional network deployment, here’s how you do this now in a software defined network.’ That’s important, but also we’re so focused on the channel we built the ControlOne platform to be able to be sold fully as a managed service.

That’s a big deal because MSPs today see that product and think, ‘I can displace my traditional firewall. I don’t have to buy VPN licensing. I don’t actually need a content filtering service anymore. That’s integrated. That’s interesting.’ Inevitably they then think, ‘I want to replace those things and sell it the same way,’ which is not how we built it. We built it for them to make far more profit and bring far more value into their managed services agreements. We’re leveraging tools and resources in university to show them how to sell the product and deploy the product in a way that meets their technical needs to have network connectivity and security, but also enables them to increase their top line revenue and profit margins as well. University is the platform that we’re getting that message and that capabilities out into the market.