Better Together: IAMCP Partners Unite for Impactful Change – A Conversation with Promod Antony and Denny Ghim (Part 1)
Welcome to the IAMCP Profiles and Partnership, the podcast that showcases how Microsoft partners and IAMCP members boost their business by collaborating with other members and partners. I'm your co-host, Anthony Carrano. And in each episode, I'll be talking to some of the most innovative and successful partners in the Microsoft ecosystem. The International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners, otherwise known as IAMCP, is a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive. Members can find and connect with other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities.
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Anthony Carrano:But before we dive into our interview, let me ask you, have you ever wondered what it takes to turn a simple idea into a monumental project that impacts thousands of lives? And how are you leveraging IAMCP to learn about the programs and specializations of each partner to help you effectively achieve those projects and grow your business at the same time? We dive into these questions and many others in this podcast with the help of our guests as they share their stories, challenges, and successes, and give you practical tips and advice on how to partner for success.
Anthony Carrano:Are you ready to join us on this journey? Then stay tuned because we have a great show for you today. Our guests are Promod Antony, the CEO at Logic Intelligence, a data platform and analytics company, and Denny Ghim, the director of channel sales at Sandler Partners, a national distributor of IT services and products. Let's hear what they have to say.
Anthony Carrano:Well, welcome Promod and Denny to the podcast today. Really excited to have both of you on and appreciate you joining us.
Denny Ghim:Thanks for having us.
Promod Antony:Thank you for having us.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Excellent. Well, let's start off. You know, Denny, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the company?
Denny Ghim:So Denny Ghim with Sandler Partners. We're the largest privately held, technology service distributor in the country. So what that means is a single place where technology professionals and IT leaders can come to and get all of their technology services ranging from internet, IT support, data storage, software development, and you name it. And so it goes very deep and wide as we have over 300 plus different carrier providers, and adding more every day as AI is expanding and growing is only limited to people's imaginations. So that is essentially what I do there or what Sandler is.
Denny Ghim:And my role is a channel manager. I, I do two things. I recruit agents. So, for instance, Promod is a great representation of that as we built a partnership where I'd say, "Promod, hey, I can add all of this value to your business, and let me show you how." As he's been focused on software, I can provide him support on all the services that the businesses that he's talking to, already use in the internet space, IT, support, data storage, Internet of Things, and even more and beyond to help deepen those relationships.
Denny Ghim:So I recruit agents, and then I also help those agents close business, And then I also, will talk directly to businesses and sell directly and try to close businesses. And when I find those opportunities, in this case that we're talking about today, I, will bring those sometimes to my partners like Promod and say, "Hey. I think there's a fit here. We should do business, and I think you can help this customer." So that's that's what I do in a nutshell.
Anthony Carrano:No. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Now and, Promod, how about yourself?
Promod Antony:Yeah, I'm Promod from Logic Intelligence. I am the CEO and President of Logic Intelligence. I've been in, we've been in business for twenty five years and been, leading the company for a couple of decades now. We are a technology solutions provider specializing in advanced analytics, business process automation and smart manufacturing. We work with manufacturing companies construction and non profit.
Promod Antony:Those are the sectors we are concentrated in. Mainly we help companies to make their decisions faster.
Anthony Carrano:And maybe just a little bit about why did you start the company?
Promod Antony:Yeah, I always had a passion to start the company and I came from India like twenty five years ago and back then I started as a packaging company when I came here. Later I started and found my business partner and started the business and ever since it's so nice and getting that freedom, freedom of time, freedom of choices. That's the main thing for me.
Anthony Carrano:No, that's awesome. That's awesome. I can definitely share in those sentiments as I've been kind of a founder entrepreneur ever since I got out of college. So it's an incredible grind, but there's definitely a lot of freedom that comes with that. So that's fantastic.
Anthony Carrano:Now I know you both, you know, are are heavily involved, like, within IAMCP. When did you join, the IAMCP?
Denny Ghim:I joined in 2022. I was introduced to the IAMCP by, JP O'Donnell. It was a whole new world universe that I hadn't really even known existed. The whole micro Microsoft universe, which I lived completely outside, but running parallel to for many years. And so just understanding and still getting my head around, that business. And and, it's been a wonderful journey so far, and I've met so many great people and so people like Promod.
Promod Antony:Yeah. And for me, I started like three years ago. So we were a Microsoft shop for a long time, maybe like twenty years or something but we didn't know that this IAMCP group accession so when we were at one of the conferences at NMSDC conference one of the guys came back to me and said, "Oh there is a group in IAMCP they meet every month at CL," so I found the group and then ever since it's so nice we we actually go for networking at the high CPCL chapter.
Anthony Carrano:Nice, nice. Well, I know we're really anxious to kind of get into your story and how you guys have collaborated and really create some unique value for a really cool organization. But before we do, I know you guys have some really amazing, some fun projects that you things that you've done on the side. Now, I know, Promod, I mean, you've got a couple of things going on where you've got a YouTube channel and some other things. So why don't you share with our audience kind of what do you have going on there?
Promod Antony:It's a fun project. So it started during the pandemic when we were sitting inside the house and we don't have any ways to go outside. No networking, nowhere to see people. So my wife and I actually said, why don't we start a YouTube live channel and go live at a particular time and we, she became an Amazon influencer and then we went live every Monday and Friday at 5PM and we start to see people coming in like 3,000 to 5,000 people.
Anthony Carrano:Wow.
Promod Antony:And we see those repeated people coming and say it's a fun thing and at the same time by the time we are done we have the dinner ready.
Anthony Carrano:What's the YouTube channel called though?
Promod Antony:It's called Curry TV.
Anthony Carrano:Okay. And it's going on how I mean, that's kind of a silly question, but it's how you can prepare various dishes, you know, curry dishes.
Promod Antony:Yeah, I mean, she loves cooking. I like taking videos and photos. So I get excuses to buy all these equipments. And then she'll do the live demonstration of the cooking and we make a healthy food at home. That's the main and we try to encourage kids to eat healthy. That's our main motivation to do this channel.
Anthony Carrano:And are all these still available on demand?
Promod Antony:Yeah, it's curry.tv. Curry. So we trademarked the name too. And then it's curry.tv
Anthony Carrano:Well, we'll definitely have the link to that in the show notes. That's, that'd be fun. That'd be fun. Also though, but you were mentioning as we were talking about, you get your sons or your kids that are in college and they're involved in the business. Tell us a little bit about that.
Promod Antony:Yeah, it's a family business and even though I was in business for a long time, my wife is my business partner now and my kids, I have four kids and the elder kids they are in the business. They are working with the business. Elder one he's already Power BI certified and working together with the team. He'd been to a couple of IAMCP meetings as well. So he's getting the next generation ideas and everything. He's bringing those kinds of ideas to the table.
Anthony Carrano:That is fantastic. Now, Danny, you've got a really cool background story where like you're, you know, an action star.
Denny Ghim:Well, this is back when I was quite a bit younger. I had an opportunity to, be in a movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle 3, when they used to have animatronic heads and actual physical actors and so forth. In 1993, my karate instructor let me know that they were casting for a film. And there were about 200 martial arts people that showed up. And I have a of a little bit of a history of martial arts where I used to learn martial arts under a gentleman named Junki Yoshida, who's the inventor of Yoshida sauce you'll see in Costco's everywhere.
Anthony Carrano:Wow.
Denny Ghim:Yeah, he was my sensei. And then his nephew, Kent, is the one that I started learning under during college. And so anyway, he told me about this casting call.
Denny Ghim:We went out and they selected 11 of us out of the 200. And then we spent the next four months in Astoria, where they were building out a fifteenth century village palace inside this hangar. And us 11 guys just were a bunch of meatheads working out all day, playing fight scenes and making stuff up as we went. And our stunt coordinator would stamp his rubber stamp and say, "That's good." That's his credit that you would get.
Denny Ghim:But we had a fantastic time and it was so much fun. I remember as like almost like a summer camp and getting paid for it. I bought my first sports car that summer. I bought a 300Z T-Top. And man, I thought it was the coolest thing.
Denny Ghim:And we had a little two bedroom apartment with seven guys. We all stashed in one apartment. I think back now, that place was so disgusting. But, you know, we're a bunch of meatheads. We didn't really think anything of it.
Denny Ghim:But, yeah, we spent that summer making fight scenes. I negotiated with a local high school to open up their gym so that all the all the extras, they were probably like, I don't know, maybe a 100 to 150 martial arts guys and extras and villagers and whatnot. They came into town and didn't have anything to do in the downtime. So I got the gym open so we could all shoot hoops and would lift weights and hang out. And we had a good time. And then yeah...
Denny Ghim:And so I guess that movie came out. I got an opportunity to wrestle with the main people, April and Casey Jones, and they're throwing me around and all that kind of stuff. So it was it was a lot of fun. A couple of my friends went on to do other things.
Denny Ghim:One of the turtles, I think it was Michelangelo, was actually one of the characters in that video game Street Fighter. And yeah, he was I don't know what the name of that guy is, but he was, the he actually had a cartoon of him in it, which was kind of funny seeing him in there. So, yeah, it was a lot of stuff that spawned off of that. But I knew acting wasn't going to be my career, but I tell you what, it was it was one fantastic opportunity. And I think we even had a spot on the news channel that summer.
Denny Ghim:So I recommend highly recommended if you guys can get away for four months and get on a film. Go do it.
Anthony Carrano:That's it. That's it. But just keep your apartment clean, though. That's right.
Denny Ghim:That's for sure.
Anthony Carrano:Well, that's fun. That's fun. Those are some great stories. Really appreciate you guys sharing that. One thing is, as you were sharing, so maybe, a little bit about, you know, you talked a little bit about you know the areas of focus can you share a little bit more about the area of like specializations there at Logic Intelligence?
Promod Antony:Yeah we are a technology solutions provider mainly providing decision support systems so we help companies to automate their data flow and workflows to create meaningful insights from the data and help with their decision making process. We work with companies in the manufacturing construction and non profit. Sometimes it may be for sales and marketing, it may be for retail IT or some of the departments but then the main concept is to create that unified data analytics platform to take decisions, intelligent decisions based on the data and the insights.
Anthony Carrano:And before we get to the story, Denny, is there some more that you could maybe share a little bit about the areas of specialization for Sandler?
Denny Ghim:Yeah. So Sandler is, you know, it's a little bit more difficult to give one specific specialization, but if you can just think of the model of a technology distribution center. So I'll give you a perfect example is one of my agents, the director of IT, had originally reached out for some Internet circuits. Oh, piece of cake. You know, let's take a look at your locations.
Denny Ghim:You have five locations. Let's talk about, "Okay, how can we do this securely?" And network security is actually very important these days, as those cyber guys, some bad guys are going after these medium sized SMB to enterprise customers. So we started talking about that. And then we started talking about, well, you know, we're going through a digital transformation.
Denny Ghim:We need to upgrade our equipment. We need to get into using Cisco and Meraki platforms for WiFi distribution for our business and modernize what we're doing. On the software side, we want to move our licensing over so that you can manage it. And by the way, our ERP and various CRM systems are a little bit antiquated. We'd love some help in that.
Denny Ghim:So that, you know, roughly thousand dollar account all of a sudden became a $10,000 biller monthly. And we were able to modernize and lift up that company so that their competitors may be at the same level, but because of what they're doing, technology is allowing them to up their game. They're going from high school players to NBA players. Now they're able to move faster, do bigger things, not be restricted by the technology that's holding them back to organize and help with workflow efficiency and also do it securely with all the cybersecurity strategies and platforms. So their cyber posture is state of the art.
Denny Ghim:They're on par as a, I would call them they're about a $40,000,000 company, kind of a small enterprise SMB type company, but they're able to compete with any company that's a billion dollar company because of the things that they transitioned over. So if you think of what we do specialize in is we bring solutions and technology to surround organizations, companies to bring up the full potential of what they can do. And so I guess that would be kind of the specialization is you can take a little bit or all of it. It's just a matter of, you know, what is needed.
Anthony Carrano:No, that's fantastic. And I really look forward to hearing about how you guys really collaborated in this upcoming story. Rudy?
Rudy Rodriguez:Yeah. Well, let's get started on this story. I want to hear this partner showcase that you guys worked on. Can you tell us a little bit about the client, you know, how big they are, the industry that they're in, and the technology that you implemented, and particularly what challenges they were facing that brought you two together?
Denny Ghim:Well, I'll start. So Oregon Food Bank was originally my client. So, I, I did a number of things for them on the infrastructure with, VoIP, Internet, and so forth. I had a relationship over there. And, there came a need where, their project manager reached out saying that they need a data repository platform.
Denny Ghim:You know, to be honest, that was something that I had never dealt with before. And so I had known that there's probably a dozen or so different providers that can do that. But when I met Promod, I guess we can go more into how that kind of evolved. But when I met Promod, I found out Promod says that's exactly what we do. And I'm like, well, perfect.
Denny Ghim:It was meant to be. So, you know, I felt quite blessed in that situation that not only did I meet an expert in the field, but somebody local, somebody I could see eye to eye. And those IAMCP meetings, I think, are important. Not as many people show up in person, but I think the value of showing up in person sometimes, you get to meet them, know, get to know who they are. And so I was encouraged once we met how that developed and the need from the Oregon Food Bank.
Denny Ghim:You know, they're probably they're the largest food distribution company or nonprofit in the region. And they kind of set the tone for other food banks in Oregon and Washington and probably some other states as well. So a lot of what they do, you know, get distributed to their, I think, something like 250 different affiliates that they push out. So and what they do is they literally save lives daily because people go hungry. You know, there's a lot of, food insecurity.
Denny Ghim:And an organization like Oregon Food Bank is one of the critical pieces, I think, in our society that has really designed a phenomenal platform to distribute food across our region to make sure that those in need have resources and food and can be fed. And they do it in a great way. And if you have an opportunity to also volunteer for a food bank and put food packages together and so forth, I'd highly encourage it. It's a very rewarding work. And for me, it was more of a passion project, getting involved with the Oregon Food Bank.
Denny Ghim:I have a good friend working there that kind of made the introduction to some of the leadership in that organization. And so I felt very honored and proud to be able to be a part of an organization that does so many good things. So that's, that's about it from a starting point, at least on the Oregon Food Bank.
Rudy Rodriguez:Promod, can you tell us a little bit about what the solution was, you know, how you put it together and how long it took and, you know, all the things that you did?
Promod Antony:Yeah. Sure. And so, really, they wanted to create a start with a data platform, but then when they look at it, it's on prem, everything was on prem and the data refreshed only on a quarterly basis and everything, and it's manual so we see a lot of opportunities actually we've been doing that for years and we can do that in our dreams that's the kind of thing which we do every time so when they came to us we actually was the first thing was it's actually showing them we can do it and then the other next thing is to actually educate them about how moving to the cloud is actually kind of saved their time and effort. So we were able to convince them and then, start the project. So we built all the process which they were doing manually.
Promod Antony:We automated the whole process. They've been getting the data from all these affiliates and all these different places about, I mean, all these, businesses who are providing them food and and all those different things. So, we were able to automate it and, get it in Microsoft Azure. Use Azure and and all these technologies Power BI and all these automation Azure Data Factory everything to cleanse the data, prepare the data and then show that in meaningful reports and it's scheduled so then no one has to touch it. It can be scheduled if you want to I mean it could be even scheduled to run on a daily basis so and it was done for like eight months. It was done within eight months.
Rudy Rodriguez:So as partners, which one have you handled the licensing for this Azure implementation?
Promod Antony:So as Oregon Food Bank, we were able to leverage Microsoft's nonprofit grant. We want to get started, right? We want to show that the first thing so we started with that grant and that grant actually took them for the first eight months so the next one so every year they can get that grant so we are trying to bring that cost down to that particular grant and if it goes over, then will be doing it and I will be sharing some of the profit or something. Haven't fully decided that yet. Denny can talk more about that.
Denny Ghim:Well, I also add, Promod's team and his implementation was five stars, five out of five, because Oregon Food Bank came to us as not really even understanding or knowing what they wanted to do. They needed somebody to hold their hand and really teach them how to crawl, you know, walk and run. Now they're able to fly. So this is where I saw in the beginning, Promod set up an initial in person meeting for the Oregon Food Bank team to meet his team. We met physically, locally.
Denny Ghim:And I think that was really important because for a company that really wasn't sure and also leadership that wasn't 100% sure their steps, that helped give them some confidence, little bit of handholding. And then then after the weekly, you know, Zoom Teams type meetings, it was actually Teams because we love Microsoft. We did our Teams meetings and we're able to go through the different pieces of the project and keep the client well informed along the way. And there was great communication between Promod and the leadership there. And even when, you know, those times, I mean, it's not all, you know, roses and and butterflies.
Denny Ghim:It can be kind of difficult, but it was handled with compassion, very succinct, very direct help. Those things and being very responsive were instrumental. And so, you know, what it did for me is it gave me just the confidence to know, wow, Pramod did such a fantastic job here. I wonder how many other deals I can find for him like this. So it kind of it was like exciting for me to kind of think about the potential.
Denny Ghim:And I'm hoping for Promod, you know, he can see hopefully on the other side, the Sandler side, it opens his mind to like, woah, here's a good partnership where maybe not only on the data side, because it's easy, I think, in the Microsoft worlds to kind of have the blinders on and then not be aware of all the other businesses happening around that's already on the table. And so that's really, the exciting part going forward for us.
Anthony Carrano:Thank you for joining us on insightful conversation with Denny and Promod. We've heard about their impressive backgrounds, the innovative work they're doing, and the meaningful partnership they've developed. Be sure to turn into the next part of this podcast where we'll dive a little deeper into their collaboration on the Oregon Food Bank project and explore more about their journey together. Until then, stay inspired and keep exploring new possibilities. Be on the lookout for part two.
Anthony Carrano:In the meantime, don't forget to follow us on social media and connect with us on our website, www.iamcp.org, where you can find more information, resources and opportunities to partner for success. One of the best ways to partner for success is to join IAMCP, a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive. IAMCP members can find and connect with other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities. Whether you're looking for new customers, new markets and new solutions, IAMCP can help you achieve your goals. To learn more, visit the IAMCP website at www.iamcp.org.
