The Evolution of Cloud-Based Security: A Conversation with Philip Heaton from YourSix

Navigating Cloud-Based Physical Security with Philip Heaton from Your Six

In this episode of The Wireless Way, host Chris Whitaker sits down with Philip Heaton, the Commercial Success Manager at Your Six, Inc., a company specializing in cloud-based physical security solutions. They discuss the evolution of security technology to cloud-based infrastructure, the importance of making technology accessible, and the advantages of a proactive security approach powered by AI and edge computing. Heaton shares insights on the current state of the industry, highlights the necessity of educating clients about cloud solutions, and emphasizes the role of cybersecurity. They also explore opportunities in various industries, including heavily regulated sectors and multi-location enterprises. The conversation highlights the significance of asking the right questions to identify potential security needs and partnering with knowledgeable consultants to deliver effective solutions.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:18 Philip Heaton's Background and Role at Your Six
01:07 Personal Insights and Family Life
02:07 Journey into Physical Security
03:47 Customer Service and Sales Philosophy
05:41 Challenges and Education in Cloud Security
09:28 Evolution of Physical Security Industry
12:17 Cloud and AI in Physical Security
17:12 Cybersecurity and Data Protection
20:19 Understanding Network Vulnerabilities
21:42 Exploring AI and Fog Computing
24:11 Wireless and Solar-Powered Camera Solutions
27:45 The Growing Importance of AI in Security
29:38 Opportunities in Cloud and Multi-Location Solutions
33:05 Selling to Existing Customers
36:07 Identifying and Upgrading Old Camera Systems
38:41 Final Thoughts and Sales Strategies

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Transcript

Chris: 0:01

Hey, welcome to another episode of The Wireless Way. I'm your host, Chris Whitaker, and I'm grateful that you're here today. And I'm also great grateful for Philip Heaton. Today's my guest and he's with your six. And for you veterans out there, that's Code Ward for I got your back. I love the name of this company. Philip is the commercial success Manager at Your Six, Inc. A company specializing in cloud-based physical security solutions. We're gonna talk about why that's important and how it's evolved to being cloud-based. Later he has over eight years of experience in the security and network and technology industry. He brings expertise in sales, management, leadership, and marketing, all the things you need to have a successful program. At year six, Philip plays a pivotal role in promoting the company's serverless, pure cloud physical security solutions. He actively shares insights on platforms features, integrator tips and product updates to various channels, including, of course, LinkedIn and YouTube. There'll be a link in the show notes to his their YouTube channel. You should check it out. Outside this professional endeavors. Of course, he's passionate about his family, including his wife and three children, and he enjoys his life in the greater southeast of the United States. Philip, thanks for making time and joining us today. How's it going?

Phil: 1:21

Going great's a good holiday weekend, spend time with the kids and hid a couple Easter eggs and so it was it's been a good time and a good year so far.

Chris: 1:31

That's great, man. It is crazy that we're already, practically at the end of April, just it's amazing how Q1 just sneaks by you and that's, that, that's, there's a life, there's a life lesson there. You gotta enjoy every day.'cause it goes by so fast. Especially when you're in that parenting phase of life. You should, I, one of the best jobs I've ever had is being a father. We have four kids and they're all adults now. Now we have grandkids. So that's like a, the gift that really keeps on giving. Yeah, absolutely. So as always, we read your professional bio again, check the show notes for links to the YouTube channel and some of the other videos that Philip and his team have done. But I'm always interested in, in, what's not the bio. How did you get here? Did you just wake up one day and say, man, I really love physical security. How did you, what was your journey like to get to where you're today?

Phil: 2:17

Yeah, I think really where my journey began was in a distributor and the, from a technology standpoint, and that was around networking and really one of the passions that I learned from there that really has followed me to this point is. Getting, making things easy for people, whether that's adoption of a solution training people, giving collateral. I've really enjoyed the creative aspect of seeing people who are, they have a need. And we typically, whoever I've worked for at the time has had the solution. It's how do you bridge that gap? And that's been a really fun experience is to be there for people and give them the solution they're looking for. And in my roles, I've really just developed as, a trainer, a developer of the actual ability for allowing people to adopt the product. And that's just taken me down this path. Definitely had some, a lot of friends in this type of industry from a networking and security standpoint. And now I'm at year six. I've been here for four years, and it's it really allows me to really. Scratch that itch of really going and telling people, being an advocate for a product and helping them adopt the actual product. So that's the how I got here was I enjoy teaching people.

Chris: 3:32

Did you start out early in life as a techie or was it something else?

Phil: 3:37

No not really. I more was on just doing things that I, customer service type of things and that kind of what you're really looking to do. And maybe it's maybe there's some, something in the background there of I, I like to appease people. And customer service, you learn a lot of, how do you make a customer happy? And that just developed into, you take that next step of expanding out of that industry into, technology. And it was like, same thing. How do you make the customer happy? How do you make it easy for them? How do you make them come back? And now that we're in a world of. Type of subscription models and things like that the stickiness with the customer. Is there constantly, right? Is how do you keep them happy when you know that there's a renewal down the road? There is in some cases people are getting bills monthly, right? And so they see that bill and they want to know, oh, every month I pay that bill. It's worth it. And making the customer happy kind of starts back at that customer, early retail world I started in and now up to selling it in a SaaS form is the same thing though.

Chris: 4:41

I I agree with you. I think having that background, I always tell people in sales, don't focus on the income, the commission, focus on the outcome. What's the outcome for the customer? It's gonna meet their need. And even as a hiring manager over the years, I'll be honest with you, whenever I saw someone who's ever a bartender, I always found that at least three outta four times, they made great salespeople. For one, they knew hard work, they dealt with every personality type. They had to, negotiate with people, not at their best, had to tell the guy, I can't serve you anymore, or whatever. There was some skills that come with being a bartender and you're, some of'em are really good listeners too. Absolutely. So it is funny how we, everybody's got a different story but I like the origin of everything you said is. Solving the problems of the customer. Absolutely. And do you ever find that hard? Sometimes. You are looking at a business model, you're looking at their situation, and you're thinking. I could make your life so easy. But for some reason they're just not there yet. Have you seen that? And if you do, how do you get around that?

Phil: 5:41

Absolutely. I think, you go back a couple years and the difficult thing about we're a hundred percent cloud focused from a physical security standpoint and for. The early days, it was, I say early days. The, a couple years back, there was more of a fight against cloud in some form or fashion. Whether that was from a security standpoint, a cost standpoint, bandwidth, I. And so it was the hurdle was educating people on the power of the cloud. And really what we find today is a little bit different is that we talk to a lot of customers and partners out there that they, there's so much fluff in the industry around and noise really. It's really noise in the industry that. Is, competitors out there saying, this is the way it should be done, this is the way it shouldn't be done. This is, and everybody's tuning the solution to how they do it. And so they want to go to all the customers and say, this is the way it should be done. This is the way it should be done. And so we spend a lot of time of. Educating the market on why we do things the way we do it. We get in front of the customers and there's nothing better, especially with the hardware we use. It's the best in the industry of sitting there and saying, okay, put us up against any competitor you want. And so really it's, I think most people have bought into the idea that, especially in the physical security world, is everybody needs it. It's, you go walk around, go look anywhere. There's security camera, after security camera, it's on every corner. Is, so really it's educating them on the type of solution we sell and why the way we do it the right way. And so it's helping the customer avoid missteps because of all the noise.

Chris: 7:23

It is probably fair to say, they don't know what they don't know in a lot of cases. That, that's so it's, not only solving the problems, but as you kinda alluded to, a lot of education goes on. They're like, okay, here's the options. Here's what's out there. Here's what you have, here's the gaps. Yeah. Kinda lead them to the realization Oh. You can help me after all.

Phil: 7:40

Absolutely. Yeah. It's you definitely have to and you do get a wide range right there. There's definitely those extremely educated partners and customers out there. But for a lot of them they do look at. They want a consultant, a advocate, or a, they want a partner in their journey, through their, the, their whole IT department, right? It's not just our IT staffing and networking and physical security, it's all of it, right? They need a trusted advisor. I, I look at it like a a mechanic. If you don't have a mechanic that you trust, you're who knows what you're getting. And so I think a lot of people. That's what they're looking for is just that person they can trust, they can go to for questions and we won't steer'em in the wrong direction.

Chris: 8:24

That's right. And I think the days of just being a supplier, just shipping someone a widget and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. It happens on Amazon every day at my house, it seems but I don't have a partnership with those suppliers. They don't know who I am, yeah. Sometimes I actually get, something comes from Amazon, it's wait a minute, this isn't. This is what the picture looked like. This is exactly what I ordered. To, to your point. So yeah, you got two ways of doing it. You can have a supplier, good luck with that. Yeah. Or you could have a partner in business. And I've actually had clients tell me that look, we don't really need a supplier. We need a partner. We need someone that's gonna tell us where the blind spots are. Advise us.'cause we don't know about this stuff. We, we sell, I'm a chiropractic a chiropractor. I don't know about technology. I need you to tell me. So I think that's where a lot of partners listening, just realize. Our customers and clients, yeah they're definitely smarter. This, this time and history. I think that consumers are smarter. They're doing some research, but it's kinda limited. Unless they're just naturally techie or our network engineer, they still need our help. On that note, and you alluded to it, I think physical security, what your six is really good at, it's changed over the years. It wasn't that long ago. It was just a camera connected to, A-A-A-V-D-R some type of recording device. And that might work. It might not work. And now it's wow. 21st century fourth digital revolution this year it is in the cloud. There's ai. So tell us more about, what's the state of the vessel security business?

Phil: 9:48

Yeah, absolutely. It's evolving rapidly, right? There's and obviously that's no different than any other technology industry out there. And I think we recently were at a really big one of the biggest physical security shows in the industry in Vegas a couple weeks ago, and few of us were talking about how the. Showroom floor, the expo floor, how much it has changed in the sense of who used to make up the really big booths right in the middle of the floor right when you walked in. And those were all of your 100% hardware focused. Everything was on-prem. And now it has shifted to, you look at some of these and you, they don't. They may even be a hardware manufacturer, but they also have software involved. They, you look at their booth and you don't even know exactly what they do because they're it's, they're expanding into so many different places. But really what that comes down to is a move away from, this idea of just, I'm gonna sell you hardware and I'm gonna walk away. I am not going to, there's no really ongoing sell there. Everybody, even if they are. Traditionally, mainly a hardware manufacturer. There is some sort of license subscription in there somewhere. Everybody likes to bake that in somewhere. And that, move towards a ongoing relationship with the customer and the partners of. Software reoccurring licenses. And from a general perspective of the topic of cloud is, we've been moving this way for quite a while, right? We've been a basically a hundred percent cloud vendor cloud supplier and physical security for a long time. Some of our competitors who bucked that trend. We even had one, one time in a there was a, our CEO was giving a, or somebody was giving a speech and somebody was like, oh yeah, if somebody has to go cloud, I'll just send them to year six. One of our competitors said that. And looking back, guess what that competitor now does. They're trying to do the same thing we're doing. So I think we've really paved that way of moving towards a hundred percent cloud. And really what that means is camera, and you talked about it, the, that industry has been camera plugged into an NVR. There's servers, there's backup power because of the size of the system. There's additional components in a server room. You've got additional hvac, you've got a much larger requirement from an IT staff. All of that kind of goes out the window, right? And. For us, it's, you take the camera, you plug it into a P OE switch, and you make a connection to the cloud and it's up and running. It's not just, and the other. So the thing there, moving from your on-premise solutions to your cloud solutions moving towards a truly serverless direct to cloud, because a lot of the cloud competitors out there are putting in. Appliances and boxes to make the, make it actually a cloud solution. But the other thing there is just the move towards, yeah. Towards adopting AI into it. And really what that has come down to is a move from, if I asked you 10, 15, even five years ago, what most people used their physical security system for, they would've told you, I use it when something bad happens. Or, I need to review something. It was all looking reactive or retrospectively looking back at things. And we've really shifted and we've been one of the main drivers in this is shifting towards a proactive approach to security. How can I. Before something happens, how can I identify a threat? How can I identify, even if the solution, things like proactive health monitoring, how can I identify if the camera is gonna go offline or there's gonna be a storage disruption or something like that. So really a shift towards cloud. And then now really becoming a shift in the fact that the outcome is more about proactive. How can I deter things as they happen, or even before they happen?

Chris: 13:44

Yeah. I love that. I mean that even looking at your website, there's a lot of mentions of, the cloud and AI and there's your six OS sensors. I wanted to make sure I asked you about that. What type of sensors are you guys seeing deployed? I. Beyond the cameras?

Phil: 13:58

Yeah. Really we look at almost everything to some degree as a sensor, right? The camera has a sensor in it. You've got radar out there, which has been heavily utilized, and you need to cover larger. Spans or even, detect speed of an object, things like that. In the, just the sense of the cameras. You've got thermal devices which are much better at, not necessarily the identification, but the actual detection of an object. The presence, yeah. Yeah, the presence. And if those are pieces of it, the solution kind of rolls itself out with even PIR sensors. Detection of the passive infrared types of detection and we are moving you'll see additional things in the industry and we're kinda moving towards this as well as moving towards more of the environmental sensors of things such as, hey, I, looking at vape detection, those type of air quality things is really where. We're doing a lot of movement in where our solution is heading.

Chris: 14:52

I'm gonna go back to the cloud conversation for a second. Is the, so the, your cameras directly on the internet and they're they can send straight to the cloud so that there's no. On-prem box, if you will. Does that camera have some built-in storage, onboard storage in the sense of if connectivity goes down how is it ours or how Yeah. How much data can it hold? So

Phil: 15:15

we really re one of the things that's really important is that the, the. That there's trust from the customer, that the solution, the video is always gonna be there. And really having redundancy, whether, so we're moving those single points of failure. And so with that though, is around redundancy in the storage sense is we recommend people record to the SD card that's in the camera. That can range all the way up to a terabyte cards now from the manufacturer. And it, so you can get a wide range. You can get. Anywhere from seven to 14 days. If you want way more, you want 90 days, 200 days, whatever you would, the SD card will hold depending on the actual type of footage that's being recorded. And so 95% of our customers record to the SD card, and that's really a. You're always gonna have that if there's any loss in the internet, there's a loss to the wide area connection, or the local connection goes down. You've got that video being recorded. Where the redundancy comes in is the cloud storage. And really what we do is simultaneously as things are being recorded to the SD card, we also record those, that footage to the cloud. And that can be a continuous recording, Hey, I wanna record for the next 30 days straight. Just, it's always gonna have 30 days of recorded footage. Or if I want to limit bandwidth for any reason, something like that, I can record only when motion's detected. And so that's where some of that AI can come in is where you're really helping. The storage side of things is saying, Hey, I don't. The AI is reducing the noise is I wanna reduce the A person being detected. I only wanna record when that happens or a vehicle, and I only wanna be notified of that when it's a person or a vehicle. I don't care about the tree sway in the wind. And so yeah, SD card on the camera record locally, 95% of our customers. And then a lot of our customers use for redundancy will record at the cloud and to really have that kind of paired up to everything's being recorded in two places.

Chris: 17:12

So for clients that are maybe either in a highly regulated industry, healthcare, or maybe, law enforcement or legal, or insurance, whatever manufacturing, if they're like really concerned about where the cloud is can your data and your images be sent to their own cloud environment?

Phil: 17:31

We don't do a bring your own cloud, what we, for most of those customers. And it does come up from time to time. We are a couple things when, depending on the environment, one is we are built on AWS from a actual platform and where the storage goes. For a lot of those customers, they will also utilize on-premise storage. We can support that as well. It's not something that's our driving as we look at our path to the future of saying, on-premise storage. But if somebody requires a server onsite and they want to that and have it in a central location. They can do that and we can record to that. They can play back footage from it on our platform. Additionally in those environments depending on especially like financing we do have our SOC two attestation, which does allow us to. Go into these types of environments and basically provide a, our SOC two report, which basically outlines what we do from a security standpoint, from a cybersecurity standpoint. And really all that does come back to I, I. I joke sometimes that we are a our foundation is cybersecurity. And the physical security platform is built on top of it. It's such a driving component of what, of everything we do. I mentioned in our, previous conversation, we were just chatting briefly before this about our lead architect and one of the smartest guys I know and everything we do. The first thing we talk about is what is the, the actual cybersecurity component of this feature or this functionality. And that foundation's extremely strong. And that does with the SOC two and the ability to record to a local server for most environments, that checks the box of what the customer and most of those industries are looking for.

Chris: 19:21

Even on your website, I see you guys mentioned cybersecurity. I wanna, I'm gonna read a little blurb here. Strengthening Cybersecurity are. Six. Direct to cloud enhancements. Single sign-on, two-factor authentication, modern ciphers. Automated security patching from the cloud to every device. Auto device hardening, hardened root user and password. Support for sign firmware, secure boot and TPM, key storage, brute force detection, suspicious IP throttling, breach password protection. So a lot of these are things you just didn't see on a. On a security surveillance camera website years ago. It is this is the 21st century now, so you guys are very aware and very focused on the cybersecurity of the data, so that's great to hear. And I'm finding more and more conversations around cybersecurity often. It's a great link, segue into physical security. Absolutely. Yeah, so that, and you guys clearly get that, so that's pretty awesome.

Phil: 20:18

Yeah. And it's. They, it works both ways, right? We've seen the, everything that's on the network can be a vulnerability to the, the customer, right? And so I think if you go back and look at one of the big ones a couple years ago, we'll mention their name, large retailer. It was through the HVAC system. Oh yeah. You've, one of our main competitors in our industry was, the vulnerability was found four or five years ago at this point, and a bunch of the recorded footage got leaked. And so that publicity is really, it's, it can be highly detrimental, right? But it also is allowing the customers to understand that this is a constant threat. Make sure you vet. Who you work with. And that works for both the customer working with us. It works with, who we work with for third party, conversations about other things that are out there. The ecosystem that makes up this channel, whether it's the partner, the manufacturer, the software vendor, everybody has to be tightened up and be aware of that. And so our stance on making sure that's a main topic of development and conversation is always there.

Chris: 21:28

Yes. I'm just getting lost in your website. I, I probably should do this more often pick apart the website while I have the guests on the and I, I'm a techie, but I gotta think, the average lay person, if they're at the on your website is what section am I on? Artificial intelligence, which we're gonna go into next, but there's a blurb here, orchestrate edge devices with cloud platform through fog computing. Yes. Explain that to us.

Phil: 21:53

Yeah, so really it, we'll talk about AI as a, that kind of will round into both. The fog computing piece is really at the edge is the. If I, some of the people out there, some of the vendors out there, they re, they'll stream all the footage, all of it to the cloud and all of the analytics and AI is run on the cloud. And really what happens is a ex, the problems, the fears people had about cloud of it bogging down a network from a bandwidth perspective is. You get a, that's a lot of information flying across the airs. And to reduce that and really take the power of the camera is the camera itself is basically like a little computer. The manufacturer we utilize their. Every, their, all their devices now have modern, deep learning chips in them. And so you're really able to get the compute power at the edge, and that's really where the fog computing comes in. And our AI stance really comes down to three things. One is. The power of AI at the edge on the camera. There, and that's where you're gonna see things like a vehicle identified, a person identified. Even we now have the ability to identify are they wearing blue pants and a red shirt? Is it a black car? Is it an orange truck? And so that type of metadata and all that information is. Taken and extrapolated at the edge. And that's one side of the ai. And the other piece is the second piece is what we do. And that's taking that information and refining it, utilizing it in a sense that somebody can actually do something with it. And then the third piece of it is, the third pillar is the other third parties that we do work with that are, AI softwares. And that can be everything from detection of video to, name anything at this point there. If AI is not part of the conversation, it's, somebody's missed marketing, right? So really it's three pillars. It's what the camera does or the sensor does at the edge. It's what we do, and then it's what the companies we work with in our ecosystem do. And so that's the three pieces of, but the fog computing, that's, that was the focus of that. What you read from our website is really the power of the edge device being a, basically a true computer at the edge.

Chris: 24:11

Are these cameras are they all hardwired or can they work off wifi or wireless? Yes.

Phil: 24:16

So actually as a kind of a general topic, yes, they can but what we are seeing probably the most prevalent is the use of LTE. Yeah, or long distance point to point wireless. And so with our solution, not having a server and so really what you need is you take any one of the sensors, camera radar, a speaker, any of that, all you gotta do is give it power and an internet connection and it can work with our system. So we have a lot of people out there who are sitting back and saying, okay, mobile trailers, for example, or construction sites temporary or, any type of mobile. The trailers have been a really big one lately. They're, it's very easy to put some cameras on these, it's a hard setup, but as far as the, your six solution involved is we make it easy for them to not have a server. They put on some, they use LTE, some solar panels for power, a generator for backup, and they have a solution. And some of the ones we work with that the, they are, it's a beautiful thing when you see them up close and see what they've built with these trailers, for example. But again, construction companies, temporary, even things like concerts, any type of venues, those kind of things. Parking lots. So if you want to reduce the footprint of the solution. We're really the go-to, which is, not having a server. And utilizing some ability to not directly have the device directly connected to the wide area network, but instead utilizing like point-to-point wireless and lt for example.

Chris: 25:52

Yeah. I'm seeing an uptick in, private cellular networks as well for, manufacturing and, large campuses and absolutely. Healthcare. So I mean that again, if you have your own cellular private network, then you're not really worried about data. Yeah. And streaming video, et cetera. So that's that's pretty interesting. And you mentioned, you just need power and. Do you guys offer is there a cellular a solar power component to any of these cameras? Would they that, is that an option or is it too much?

Phil: 26:19

Yeah. Not directly on the camera themselves, but the there are. Any of the partners out there that are interested are our channel managers have a kinda a recommended list of solar companies and even networking companies as far as the service goes. But yeah, I mean it really depends on, you get some, especially like the trailers, for example. You need a huge, pretty good size solar panel. You've got maybe four cameras some sort of speaker maybe on that as well. But for some of the single ones, if I wanna mount a camera to a pole. And attach a small solar panel, point to point wireless from a long parking lot back to a central location. That's a pretty easy setup from there's a number of. Of companies out there that focus on the actual housing of that, right? Even like the components that are, besides just the camera, but the actual point wireless and then maybe even having the casing itself have a solar panel on the side. So people have definitely taken some, there's some really awesome looking, pieces out there, boxes is, we'll call'em'cause some of'em have added lights. Strobes, really loud sirens. And so it's I've been part of a couple of companies that have used our product and they test their sirens and I've seen'em tested on their employees, like in the parking lot or at, in the cafeteria and stuff. It's pretty amazing to see how loud they are, but that kind of part of the whole solution. But yeah, the solar power. Solar power, not necessarily part of the camera, but part of the solution.

Chris: 27:45

Are you finding the AI conversation just in general, is that closing more deals for you or is it just an expectation now or are consumers kind of expecting these AI features?

Phil: 27:54

It's really becoming an expectation because what we see is everybody is rushing to the market with some versions of ai. And so when people are seeing different. Solutions to their problems. Almost all of them have some AI aspect. And so again, it kinda comes back to the original issue of educating them or in some cases, removing the poor education they got from a competitor on the way things are done. Because, if I wanna identify a person or let's identify a vehicle, I can rush to market utilizing a lot of components that are already on, online you can create pretty basic algorithms for these things of 70, 80% chance that it's gonna be accurate. But, that's not, a real true solution is gonna be, you need to be in the nineties, you need to be pushing near a hundred percent right. And

Chris: 28:55

right.

Phil: 28:55

The AI piece is an expectation and proving. We know the way we do it and why we do it the way we do it is proper. And so it's again, the AI noise is a requirement, but making sure they understand and don't get, taken off track of what they're actually looking for to solve their solution is what we really have to focus on.

Chris: 29:17

That's so interesting. Yeah. We're we're, even in my industry, we're doing a lot of education pieces on how AI is really making all technology better. No one's just buying AI by itself. AI is always coupled with a, an existing technology. Honestly. It makes it better, more proactive, et cetera, and smarter, if you will. Gosh. We've covered a lot and a few more questions I wanna hit you with. Where are you seeing the opportunities? Where is the channel bringing in the deals that are like no-brainers and that have a high close rate? What do they look like?

Phil: 29:47

Yeah, I. So the high, the easy ones are, I would say the the ones where the customer already is adopting the cloud in other senses, right? And we, I saw some stats. The average person uses like 38 cloud application today. And so the easy ones are the ones who have a, you got a customer with an old system and. They are ready to move to the cloud, they're, that's where they want to go. They've kinda already made that leap. And then it's, let's talk through the value of the solution we bring to the market, the value of the vendor that we work with from the actual camera perspective. And, sell them on the value of that solution from an outcome perspective. And those customers out there who are ready to move. Additionally, probably the easiest place for that we see success is multi-location. The idea of having to put a server at every single site having trained individuals at every site, if I need a remote view in, how do I do that? Do I use VPN? Or, what does that all look like from a multi-site and the managing a solution that's not built for. Remote utilization and remote viewing. And so those are a really easy place for us to go in and go, Hey, look, in some cases they already have cameras, right? And so it, it's even cameras that we support if they're the manufacturer that we utilize. And so you're able to sit back and go for some of'em, you're able to go, Hey, keep your cameras, utilize your current cameras. We will attach'em to our system. And yeah, you have a modern system. Without replacing the cameras, and now it's easy to get in. You can review all your sites, multiple sites from, different locations in the world without actually having to be on site and or, again, VPNN. The easy ones are those that are ready to move those that have multisites. And the last one I'd leave you with is those that are in, as you mentioned, industries that have high, restrictions or requirements in their industry. And it depends. A, an example of one is cannabis. Cannabis is a, or even firearm sales. Any of those type of highly regulated industries they can't afford for their platforms to be down and they need to be notified as soon as something goes down. And the days of an on-premise solution where you may not know something's down unless you're clicking through and viewing the footage and going oh, that camera's not working. Our system proactively tells people that, Hey, your camera went offline, or your storage is headed towards a disruption. And that's really where that proactive piece comes in. So those type of industries and that, that some of them do require like a SOC two attestation, which is what we have. And it allows for them to really have confidence in, they can't afford for any amount of time for their system to go down because the fines are so high. Those are really the big three.

Chris: 32:38

Cool. I was even thinking, commercial new build, those if you could get in, if a partner's working with, has a contact with a developer or, know someone in that commercial construction space not only can you get the construction trailer and the construction, phase, but maybe you could, upgrade the, hey let, lemme do the building too, that's right. So that's even, that's that would, that's an easy one. You don't have to worry about they need gear anyway. That's exactly right. Pivoting just a little bit, from, seeking new opportunities, whatnot. Any advice you have for partners when it comes to selling into their existing base? Let's face it, pretty much every cust, every partner we have I. Their customer is, usually customer facing and has a brick and mortar building and probably has a, large majority of'em have cameras. What's some best practices you see there for partners to sell it to the existing base?

Phil: 33:25

Yeah. I absolutely, I think the I know this is an overutilized statement, but if you're not selling it to them, somebody is, and everybody's got physical security in the sense that. For the most part and you can think of physical security and the fact that. If somebody has assets to protect whether that is physical assets in the sense of I need to protect myself from things being stolen or even my assets and financial assets of, I need to protect myself if something happens, right? So a slip and fall or if I'm a hospital, my assets are really the patients, right and protecting. Them as well as protecting from a legislator or a legal standpoint, protecting the actual doctors and nurses. And so everybody has something to protect. Walk around. I, previous role, I was in networking role at a distributor and. We'd always tell people, walk in and look around. You'll see wireless access points everywhere. Walk around and look at ev. I promise you, there are cameras pretty much everywhere you go. And every single one of those is an opportunity. And now it's not just the camera, right? It's a speaker. I wanna play down music. I wanna have a loud speaker. Maybe there's a an a. You hope it never happens. But if I'm ever in a sense where I need to play down an alert, whether that's an active shooter, a fire, those kind of things can be parts of that solution, which we also work with the speakers. And now our newest piece is our access control is, especially in physical buildings is the ability to control the flow of the human assets coming in and outta the building. And so access control is a piece of it. So you walk in a building and you say, oh, there's a camera, there's a reader on the wall. There's a speaker for whether it's music or loud speaker for warning. They might have a radar on the outside of their building. All of these are components that somebody has sold, right? And all those components do need to be refreshed from time to time. And it's a vitally important thing to ask, how are they doing with that solution? Is it, do you have to, can you view it remotely? Is it giving you what you need? Do you know if it's even online or how old it is? Or what kind of alerting do you get from it? And so our channel managers do have some really good information on, questions to ask. And that's really all it starts with, right? I, in a previous role, I, one of our. Top sales reps. I used to ask him, what are you doing different? He was like, I'm asking, it's that simple. I'm asking. And so all about

Chris: 35:59

asking

Phil: 36:00

and it's amazing. It's that simple, right? Yep. But just ask, everybody's got it. So ask away and be the one to sell it to'em.'cause somebody is, you

Chris: 36:07

know, you mentioned a few times old cameras. Define that. What generation of cameras is the crossover from the old. Cameras, just, analog video to digital cameras, to cameras that can be used with your system. Is there like a three years old, five years old, how far what's the buzzword if you hear six years old? You got an opportunity.

Phil: 36:29

Yeah. So the shift there, there was obviously a shift from your analog to more of the IP type of devices and, we do work with encoders for taking some of those old analog devices to the cloud. There's obviously limitations on, as I said earlier, the camera. There's so much value in the camera itself from it being a computer and the chips that it has, that those old devices that's not there. Really what you, what you lose with older like analog devices is you're really losing the smarts that the camera gives you. Beyond that, older devices tend to bring more, you, you've got way more vulnerabilities in those devices, especially if they're haven't been patched or firmware hasn't been update updated. And that's one of the things we do is for devices, once they're on our platform, we're updating the firmware for the devices to make sure that they're always, up to a, to our expectation, but our customer's expectations. That's a value we bring. And so really looking back at that, we look at about six, seven years ago is really of that line. And really what it comes down to is, again, customer making sure that they can get the smarts out of the camera, that the information they want based on the brains that are in the camera. And it's also the manufacturers. Are they supporting the camera still from a firmware release standpoint? Because what we don't want is, again, to leave vulnerabilities on anybody's network. And so it really becomes one of those things where we pretty much support devices. Up until the manufacturer deems them end of support. And right now you're looking six, seven years back is where we're sitting currently. We do have on our website a full list of devices that we support and, when they went end of support or went end of sale. And so you know that life cycle management is a component of what we do, but the direct answer is probably about six or seven years old.

Chris: 38:27

That's good to know. So that's, if you're meeting with clients, you're trying to sell them anything, technology, and you see that camera up there and go, Hey, by the way how long have you had those cameras up? If they tell you six or seven years? Yeah, let's talk. I'm not be able to help you. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we've covered a lot, I feel and I'm really tempted to keep on going, but I a promise to my listeners. I'll keep it short and sweet. I get it. And obviously check the show notes. There'll be links to a lot of videos and other content from Philip and the team at your six, but Philip last words, anything we haven't covered you wanna hit on or any other words of wisdom you wanna leave us with?

Phil: 39:01

Identifying that last piece right there of identifying the opportunities. If your customers are out there, you ask'em a question, how's your physical security solution? What are you utilizing? If it's an on-premise solution, if it's got servers and nobody's updating the firmware patching the solution, you're talking about a solution that could easily be outdated in. 36 months, right? From when it was purchased. And with a solution like we offer, we try to keep, again, that's that where you get to that six or seven year ability to support devices there is to make sure those devices are still smart and not a vulnerability. But really just asking the questions. And then once you ask the questions, remember that we are that consultant for you, right? We're there to help you navigate through. The solution that the customer may be looking for or even, the questions they may have of why we are different than someone else. And our channel managers are extremely knowledgeable. They have ses sales engineers behind them that have been in this industry for a long time. And so the, between you asking the question, it really just lights the fuse. And from there. We can help you, get started. It's really just get started, start asking the questions and then utilize us as the resource.

Chris: 40:18

Great. Last words. And I think that sums up sales 1 0 1 man. Ask a better question. Ask diagnostic questions. And I have a whole series I could talk to you about that. My friend, bill StanNet former guest on the show here talks about diagnostic questioning, that he's with sales excellence, he's a CEO of sales excellence. Yeah. So yeah, that's another thing. If you're out there and you have a sales team, and we haven't trained them lately, don't assume just'cause they're, great salespeople that they don't need training. So those people, just like any athlete, needs practice and training and I think asking better questions. Is probably the biggest area I see a lot of stuff people struggle with. It's do you wanna buy my service? That's not a good question, as understand the pain points, right? And only way to do that's better questions. Philip, thanks for all the wisdom and information. I'm definitely excited about the offering you have and how it's evolved over the years and great website too, by the way, to your marketing team. Check that out and again, appreciate your time today, Philip. Greatly appreciated. Thank you, Chris. You're so welcome. And yes, if you're out there listening check out the website, d wireless way.net. Does a contact us button there, you can click onto reach out to me and I'll reply directly. I'd love to get any input thoughts on the show, any requests or suggestions. And as always, if this show. This episode, hit home with you. You heard some things you thought maybe someone in your team needs to hear or a customer needs to hear. Please share it with'em. That, that's why we do these, the, to get the word out and have just a general conversation of how technology is solving problems and providing better outcomes. It almost sounds noble when you say it that way. We're really making a difference in the world. I believe in solving problems with technology properly. There's a proper way, there's an improper way to do everything and I'm grateful to work with so many companies like your six and others that do it the right way, and they're open to feedback. So there you go folks. Another episode in the books of the Wireless Way. We'll see you next time.