dnsUNFILTERED: Nathan Svec, Rewst

[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: Welcome everybody to dnsUNFILTERED. First, I have a little bit of housekeeping. We've been in a bit of flux with this podcast. Not sure what to do, but we have a clear direction now. We have a biweekly post schedule and we have some great content lined up for you guys. Starting with Nathan from Rewst, DNSFilter and Rewst have recently had a integration and we're gonna talk a little bit about that, but mostly about automation for MSPs.

So Nathan, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:00:29] Nathan Svec: Yeah. Hi. So Nathan Svec I'm the VP of Strategic Partnerships at Rewst. I've been in the MSP space now for about almost 10 years, so I'm getting a little older. But it's been fun, been a transition. I worked at an MSP for a while and then I was able to move over to the vendor side.

So I was at Webroot and then Carbonite and OpenText throughout those acquisitions. Then I moved over to a company called Black Point Cyber. I was there for a little bit and then came over to Rewst. I've been here pretty much since the beginning. I was one of the first five employees, so I've been able to work at the company through all of it, which has been a lot of fun.

It's been been a rocket ship. That's been fun to be part of.

[00:01:08] Mikey Pruitt: Awesome. So you're at here, at Rewst, at the ground level, and I actually did a little research to see your background and everything, and you've been in the cybersecurity space and roos, not necessarily cybersecurity, but definitely connects all those tools together.

What do you think was your, I don't know, motivation to move to something like Roos as opposed to some other cyber company?

[00:01:28] Nathan Svec: Yeah. When I was at when I was at Black Point and even Webroot, there was a lot of talk about, the, solar platforms and there was a lot of automation being starting to be added to a lot of those EDR AV products, and that, that's great.

There's a cool space, but that really started getting my mind working and trying to understand in the MSP space, there's so much more that can be done. And then you kinda look at automation and what MSPs initially thought of automation was your RMM. You had your RMM right?

And you would run scripts, and that was the first kind of step in automation. So what we saw there was people running scripts and that was task automation. What, when Aaron, our CEO, when he was launching the company, he wanted to do more security focused things. But when he listened to our advisor board, which was a bunch of MSPs, they said, Hey, that's cool.

But what would be really cool is if you can help us automate client user onboarding and offboarding and ticket triage and all these things that, aren't as marketing sexy, but to MSPs, right? Sexy is the word. Save ton time. Yeah.

[00:02:31] Mikey Pruitt: Very cool. So you so let's talk about Rewst for a second. Yeah.

So this RPA robotic process automation's kind of a fancy term for automation. And I come from the DevOps world. So my first job at DNSFilter was a DevOps engineer, so my entire job was basically to automate myself out of one. So I feel like Rewst is the missing piece for msp. So could, can you just describe the platform a little bit?

[00:02:57] Nathan Svec: Yeah so Rewst is, like we said, a an RPA. What that means is just a, it's a platform that we give to the MSP where Rewst builds and maintains all of the integrations. So when you look at, other automation tools, you have to go build, script. Then you're gonna have to build those you're gonna have to connect all those API endpoints of the different products you're trying to connect to.

And you, the MSP or the MSP technician have to manage all of those integrations yourself. The benefit of using a product like Rewst is Rewst builds and maintains those integrations. Like what we're able to do with DNSFilter. We looked at the DNSFilter, API, we built an integration around the authentication mechanism of DNSFilter, and then we build a dropdown in Rewst for every API endpoint that DNSFilter allows.

So instead of just looking at DNSFilter and trying to identify the things Rewst thinks would be beneficial for us to build an integration with, we build everything. Giving the MSP the ability to do, for instance. DNSFilter, billing, reconciliation. Just being able to take data from DNSFilter, dump that into the PSA so that the MSPs can make sure that they're billing the correct amounts.

[00:04:00] Mikey Pruitt: Wow. So I've read our, the DNSFilter and Rewst press release marketing press release. Yeah. And it highlighted some of the use cases, but I didn't realize that you actually have access to all of our API endpoints, which is essentially all of them. 'cause DNSFilter was built on the API.

Like everything is done through our API and we just give that to you. So is that what happens in Rewst? Do you have access to all of those endpoints? Pretty much.

[00:04:22] Nathan Svec: Yeah. Exactly. And that was one of the biggest things. So I know. Mike I've been working with your team now for a little bit and one of the big pushes that I have from my role is to go build and find partnerships that I can find with vendors who have that open ecosystem.

A lot of the vendors in our space have constrained what you can do with the API endpoints, right? And they're restricting it only to their products and things like that. What an open API allows MSPs to do is be able to use your product but build their processes around your product instead of following your processes, they get to build their own processes, maintain those processes themselves, and be able to take our products like all the vendors in the space and be able to put them in puzzle blocks in their stack so that they can run the processes the way that they want to.

[00:05:12] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely. And that's why I'm so happy about this Rewst integration for DNSFilters, because we can't it would be impossible for us to integrate with everything that exists and the way, in a way that every MSP desires. So having Rewst already integrated with most things that MSPs are using really shortcuts that automation step for us.

Like I'm very excited, like I used to be on the. Product team at DNSFilter and I was like, oh my gosh, there's so many things to integrate with. What do we do? We actually integrated with Zapier was one of our first integrations because it has a large footprint, but that's, not nearly as flexible or powerful as a platform like Rewst.

[00:05:52] Nathan Svec: And even with the Zapier integration, that's great. And it allows MSPs to then connect all the different tools, but they have to build those automations. And so something else that, that we're working with DNSFilter on is identifying with some DNSFilter, ROS customers, identifying some use cases where ROS can automate things.

For MSPs that they normally would have to do manually. So if that's setting up a new customer in DNSFilter, pulling some of that billing data, making sure an agent's set up on an endpoint if an agent isn't responding, maybe using the RMM to restart that agent. Things like that where it's just those simple steps that a level one tech would have to do.

Those are the remedial, repetitive tasks that you know, those guys really don't like doing. And again, if you can. Automate those little things that gives them the ability to work on more complicated, harder things, because, Skynet doesn't exist yet, and so we haven't built a machine to replace all of us, and so there's still jobs out there to do.

[00:06:46] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, exactly. It's you're writing music to my ears right now, automation love. But I do have a few questions I really want to talk to you, Nathan, about the MSPs and automation. What are some of the most impactful areas that an MSP's operations can benefit from, implementing tools like Rewst?

[00:07:07] Nathan Svec: Yeah, so some of the big kind of takeaways that we've seen from our partner base is, the client, new user onboarding and offboarding. So when an MSPs. Customer decides they're gonna hire a new employee. A lot of times that comes with a ticket for the MSP, and that ticket can create anywhere between 45 minutes to two and a half hours worth of work for a technician.

And that's just them hopping between different portals, going to the distributor, purchasing the license, going to Microsoft 365 to the M-S-P-C-S-P tenant, and then diving into the organization, tenant creating that user. Logging into the ad server and the local environment, right? Creating the local user, all of those steps, when in reality all of those pieces have API endpoints, and you can actually automate 90 to a hundred percent of that process.

Which then that user can be onboarded faster. But then the reverse is true. You can also offboard users faster. So if you're gonna offboard somebody, you can actually schedule it offboarding for say Friday, five o'clock. Instead of an Ms. P technician having to stay after hours or something happens and somebody has to do something late at night, MSP's customer can just fill out a form and then that can actually offboard the customer's user for the MSP.

[00:08:21] Mikey Pruitt: When you're talking about like a workflow like that, onboarding and offboarding, what is the typical like trigger step that you see, like maybe setting up the email inbox or something that kind of kicks off all the automations? What do you see as the first thing that happens?

[00:08:34] Nathan Svec: So for most of our customers are gonna be, it's gonna be kicked off through a PSA ticket.

And so the email will come into the ticket and then Roos could respond to that ticket with a form link, and then the form could be filled out. Also, if the MSP wants more of that white glove approach, and they want their technicians to do that, distribution managers, right? Like the people who aren't as technical at the MSP, they could just fill out the form based on the information that came in from the ticket, and they could.

Kick off that automation for the customer, or you could give the customer the ability to just fill that form out and then they could kick the form off themselves. Then you can also put approvals in place so it's not just, one person firing somebody. There can be that person's manager that's approving it, or the MSP has to approve the automation before it runs.

[00:09:20] Mikey Pruitt: I love that. It made me immediately think of basically you have a salesperson. Could say, Hey, customer wants to pay us, and they click the button to that they paid or some credit card thing happens, or whatever it is, bank transfer, et cetera, and that kicks off the automation. That saves your technicians hours of time.

Exactly. Hey, tech MS, P technicians, if you wanna make the sales guys not have to do more work, but do your work for you, set up automation.

[00:09:46] Nathan Svec: Exactly right. Yeah. Some of our partners actually use the CRM. So if an MSP salesperson goes off and closes a new deal and they move that deal to closed one in the CRM, Roos can go through and create that new tenant, say in, in DNSFilter, in the RMM, in the PSA send the request link from the Microsoft CSP to the tenant so that they could take over that tenant.

There's all those steps that the technicians don't have to do anymore, that the salesperson, just by clicking that closed one button. Then they kick off those automations.

[00:10:14] Mikey Pruitt: So

[00:10:15] Nathan Svec: the,

[00:10:16] Mikey Pruitt: This glorious future is here, like you can do this today. So what do you think, why do you think MSPs are hesitant to start implementing these tools?

[00:10:25] Nathan Svec: Some of the time it comes down to resources and then just people being nervous about it, right? People are nervous that like we, you said in the beginning your job was to automate yourself out of a job. And so I think some people view it as well, if I automate these things, what am I gonna do?

And I think. As an owner, right? An owner's looking at that as, oh wait, if these guys are automating these things, that means I can go sell more. And the MSP doesn't necessarily have to hire that many more people because they can hire less, automate more, and then their guys can actually do that more difficult work, right?

Those deployments those bigger jobs that require actual, coding and stuff like that to run scripts on the endpoints, building out servers and deploying new software and those things.

[00:11:09] Mikey Pruitt: What do you think they should start with? Something that's easy to automate? What do you recommend typically?

[00:11:14] Nathan Svec: So we, in our onboarding process, we'll typically work with an MSP and get their client new user onboarding and offboarding workflows set up for them within that first 30 days.

[00:11:25] Mikey Pruitt: I love that's the best one to start with. 'cause it means you got paid

[00:11:29] Nathan Svec: Exactly right. Yes. And it just shows that value right away.

[00:11:32] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly like money in automation. Yes. Love that. What do you think some of the mistakes are that MSPs are making? You're recommending the onboarding and offboarding, onboarding, maybe first, then offboarding. What do you think their common missteps are?

[00:11:48] Nathan Svec: Automating processes that don't exist yet.

And I think that's a pain point for a lot of MSPs because, like MSPs like me, right? You're going all the time, right? And sometimes MSPs necessarily don't have processes written for some of the highest value tickets that they have in their PSA because, their technicians just know how to do those things, so they just do them.

And so if there isn't really documentation around those processes. It's really hard to build an automation because then you can't, that documentation allows you to follow that blue blueprint. Okay? So this is step one. So we automate step one, step two, step, right? And you don't miss anything if you're trying to just build an automation because you see a problem and you don't have that problem documented already.

Then it's really difficult to build an automation. It's the same thing like building a software, right? You have to take and you have to build out that framework of what you want the software to be, and then you have to build a plan to get there. And it's the same thing with automation.

[00:12:39] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. And I'll tell you a little personal story from DNSFilter.

I was the lone DevOps engineer for a while and I'm, not an expert for sure. Yeah. But eventually we hired somebody who was a Docker expert. His name is Raphael Gomez. We call him Gomez. And he's awesome. He's freaking awesome. Look him up on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever. So he comes in and I was like, gom Max, what do you do first?

'cause what I typically do when I'm writing and trying to automate something, I will start, I would, excuse me, I would've started with the automation first. In Ansible, basically writing an Ansible playbook to, update a set of servers, hundreds of servers are on the globe or updating some software.

And he said, no, you should probably do it manually first. And then automate your manual steps, which is same as documenting at first. Absolutely. And I was like, absolutely. That sounds like too much. Do I need to do that stuff? And anyway, so we had a little test and I lost really bad. So I agree with you because gom Max set me straight.

[00:13:37] Nathan Svec: Yeah. It's just those little things, right? Because I think and then you lose value of the product because if you're taking too long to try and troubleshoot all of those steps that you haven't manually done you're then dumping a ton of time into that product and then you look at it and you're like, whoa, we haven't gotten anything out of this.

And I've spent so much, so many man hours building this stuff. And when you have that documentation, it really allows you to automate those processes even faster. 'cause you know what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:14:03] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. And let's, and about accomplishments. What do you think an MSP should measure to recognize success?

[00:14:12] Nathan Svec: I, so at Rewst, when we automate a process. Rewst, kicks off an automation. We do something. What we'll do is we'll go back into the ticket. We'll add notes for every action Rewst completed in that automation, and then the MSP actually tells Rewst how much time that process would take them to automate.

So then we can actually add a time entry to the PSA. So then in the PSA, you can just run a report and see how many hours Rewst has saved you over the course of time. So

[00:14:41] Mikey Pruitt: Ru will basically fill out your KPI report, is what you're saying in a way. A little bit of it. It'll tell you the time savings. And that's, so you're saying like Ty tie the success metric, essentially a k key performance indicator to time saved or hopefully eventually revenue earned, I would imagine.

Yeah, absolutely. How do you think, so I looked at the flow conference that you guys held in June. I looked at some of those talks. They were really good. Rewst has a vendor neutral conference in Tampa. We're probably gonna do it again next year, probably around June, I assume.

[00:15:17] Nathan Svec: Yeah, I I don't know if marketing will let me say the date yet, but you should definitely keep watching.

Don't

[00:15:22] Mikey Pruitt: get on LinkedIn. Don't get in trouble, Nathan. So flow is really good. Some of the videos are on YouTube. Definitely check them out. But Aaron, the, he's the CEO right? Founder, correct?

[00:15:32] Nathan Svec: Yep.

[00:15:32] Mikey Pruitt: Okay. So Aaron's keynote, he was talking about the levels of automation maturity zero through three.

Yeah, zero is we think our RMM is automation, which I love. Yep. And three is we are automating stuff for our clients and we have metrics on that and all that stuff. So what do you think the success, let's see, the, how does the automation enhance the client experience?

[00:16:01] Nathan Svec: So one of the things that I talk a lot of conferences and one of the things that I like to point out is the customer experience when that customer is interacting with you is really set in their onboarding.

And if. Someone set up something wrong. A step was skipped. A software wasn't set up correctly. A policy wasn't set up on, the DNSFilter agent, right? All of those things, those automatically set up bad expectations. For that customer because they you just failed, right? And as an MSP, the more of those interactions that you can automate.

So the same thing happens every single time for those customers. They're gonna expect that. And when they get that expected result, it's a lot easier for them to, be excited by that result because it's consistently happening.

[00:16:49] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. And how do you, so you've got this consistent robotic RPA process automation happening.

When do you feel it's appropriate to inject some humanity into those steps?

[00:17:01] Nathan Svec: Absolutely. And those are, the more advanced tickets, right? If someone has, a problem that they need troubleshooting help with, or they need guidance in, trying to figure something out. That's where the MSPs can really shine because that's where that technician can really show their experience and if they have more time to be able to do those things.

When Bruce removes the resetting MFA codes restarting print spools, like all of those small little things that take a lot of the MSP's technician time, if they're more available to be able to be on the phone, to be able to respond to emails more concisely without using right robotic AI language the customer then sees that.

Human interaction versus those small pieces, they're not really gonna notice that it's automation because they're just looking for something to get fixed right away, versus, oh, hey, I, I lost my budget file that was on my desktop, I deleted it. And so then the MSP has the opportunity to work with them to go back through, pull it up in, OneDrive recovery or like any of those steps, right?

The MSP can interact with the customer because they have the time, because all of those. Excuse me, those repetitive tasks those remedial things have all been taken care of by automation.

[00:18:12] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And that's the scare, I guess you could call it, of taking our jobs, like automation took our jobs, or even AI took our jobs.

But I, a lot of people don't understand as the. Automation will actually free you up to have a slightly different job where you, the human can do things that humans are best at, which is talking to other humans, mostly like we're doing here. Absolutely. Yeah. So I love that this automation can free you up to deliver a customer experience because it's automated at a higher level experience.

Absolutely, yep. What do you think the right balance is between automation and like human interaction? Is it just automate as much as possible and see what free time you can fill with that customer interaction?

[00:19:01] Nathan Svec: I think when you look at your PSA and you look at like your top 10 tickets and you look at the amount of time your technicians are spending on those things like password resets, right?

And those other things, I think. In those instances where you can automate those things and some of your customers might need more handholding, right? My, my father doesn't really like computers, right? So for him any of those things, he has to call me and he has to have me walk him through those steps, right?

Everybody's got that person in their life, and some of 'em be customers, right? You have that person, they're gonna need more handholding. But. On the other side, you have customers that are just they're moving fast. They want things done quickly, and that's where you can lean towards automation because you can get those things done in a.

Quicker timeframe for those customers through automation, because it doesn't take a technician time. Then that gives the technicians the ability to, schedule on sites with even that fast customer who might need to talk about, Hey my computers are running slow. We need to get new computers and be able to set up that new package for them to, so to get new computers there's those upsell opportunities that are put in place because again you have more time to be able to be human with the other humans.

[00:20:08] Mikey Pruitt: Love that. And everyone listening to this probably has more than one of those people in their life. Hi there, nerds. What do you say? We're talking, we got onto AI and automation is already a future looking aspect of the IT world. What do you think are, what do you think we're gonna see next in the next few years?

You don't have to spoil any secrets for risks specifically, just general trends or if you wanna break some news, go for it.

[00:20:37] Nathan Svec: I don't have any news to break. Unfortunately, our CEO does a really good job of doing that. So he likes to break the news. I, ai I think, everyone, I think everyone is talking about it in the space, right?

I don't know of a vendor who doesn't have some type of AI marketing right now, right? Everyone's talking about it. I think it's gonna be interesting to see how it impacts things in a real tangible way, right? Versus. Responding to emails and analyzing documents and stuff like that, right? We all use, chat, GBT or copilot to do some of those things.

And yeah, they save time, but are they really making that big of a difference right now? And so what I'm really looking at is I'm trying to figure out what real difference AI is gonna make in a real software driven response, right?

[00:21:22] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, I did notice that Rewst has an open AP open AI integration.

Yeah. And I've used that a little bit too, and it's really good for adding a little bit of. Fake humanity into processes. So maybe you wanna send your team a Slack message or a team's message when some automation runs successfully or and have a check, did these steps happen?

It does. An email account exist, does do that. Does this user have access to this platform? And there are some wins that AI can integrate into those workflows? Yep. Yeah, I agree that it's a little farther away for it to be, you autonomously doing stuff on its own?

[00:22:03] Nathan Svec: Yeah, so through our OpenAI integration, what we're doing is we're looking at a ticket when it comes in, and then we parse out the ticket data, so like the actual subject of the ticket the words.

And then we look at, we pass that through OpenAI for it to set the type subtype and item of that ticket, and then. Depending on the length of the ticket, because I've got somebody on my team who sends extremely long emails that copilot summarization is really helpful for. And that's the same thing, right?

That we use the OpenAI for, it's just quick note of the summary of the ticket, right? If it's, 12 paragraphs long, but the summary could be two sentences that can help a technician just be able to look at it quick, understand what needs to happen, and then go from there. And also. The ticket being set with the type subtype and item, you can actually then have roos kickoff automations based on different types and subtypes.

So if the ticket comes in and it's a printer issue and it's classified as a printer issue, roos can automatically kick off and go through your RMM and do your printer troubleshooting steps in the RMM and then update the ticket with those results. So then a technician, again can look at it and say, okay, I need to call this person because something else isn't working.

[00:23:10] Mikey Pruitt: That's really powerful. 'cause you can, I imagine you could give open ai Chad, GBT, like a pick list essentially. Summarize this and does it land in one of these five? Types and then based on the type do X with it. 'cause AI is really good at taking unstructured data and formatting it into something structured that then your other computers, like your non-AI computers can then understand and do stuff with.

[00:23:37] Nathan Svec: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:23:38] Mikey Pruitt: What do you think MSPs that are looking to do for automation? What kind of advice would you have for them to get a kickstart on that?

[00:23:47] Nathan Svec: Anyway. Looking at your PSA, again I just go back to that 'cause that's for most for most MSPs, that's gonna be the source of truth.

To be able to look at what tickets you're spending the most amount of time on, what processes you have around those tickets, and then taking a step back and saying, okay this ticket touches these six applications. This is the process we have around it. How much of this can I automate? How long is it gonna take me to automate?

So say that ticket happens, five times a week, and it takes you an hour every time it happens. That means realistically in a month you can spend 20 hours on building that automation. Because if you spend 20 hours in a month building that automation, you paid for it the next month, and then.

The next month is, just more time savings. So you just, and that's the nice thing about automation is it's just that compounding time savings, once you say it, once you have that process set up, it's just repetitive and it just takes that off your plate.

[00:24:44] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. The initial time spent saves the time in the future and that, but it's hard, like you said in the beginning resource constraints may not give you that 20 hours, but it sounds like you really need to find time for that 20 hours or whatever happens to be.

Exactly. Yeah. Anything else you wanna tell the audience, Nathan, while I've got you here?

[00:25:05] Nathan Svec: No, just would love to love to connect anybody who's interested in Rewst. You can ping me on ping me on LinkedIn. And also really excited to, to announce the DNSFilter integration and some of the use cases that we're looking to building.

I think there's some pretty cool automations that we have that are gonna be pretty exciting for the community.

[00:25:23] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely automate everything. Awesome. Thank you for joining me, Nathan, and we'll see you around LinkedIn.

[00:25:30] Nathan Svec: Thank you for your time.