Scaling Smart: Automated Collaboration and AI Governance with Rencore’s Matt Einig
Welcome to the IMCP Profiles and Partnership, the podcast that showcases how Microsoft partners and IMCP members boost their business by collaborating with other members and partners. I'm your cohost, Anthony Carano. 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 to other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities.
Anthony Carrano:Whether you're looking for new customers, new markets, or new solutions, IMCP can help you achieve your goals. We hear their stories, learn from their experiences, and discover the best practices and strategies they use to increase customer loyalty and grow revenues. Whether you're a new partner or an established one, you'll find valuable insights and inspiration in this podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode and find it useful and inspiring. If you do, please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Anthony Carrano:And don't forget to follow us on social media and connect with us on our website, www.profilesandpartnership.com, where you can find more information, resources and opportunities to partner for success. Thank you for listening, and now let's get started with today's episode. But before we dive into our interview, let me ask you, what does it really take for organizations to stay ahead in a rapidly changing digital landscape? And how can strategic governance transform the way we collaborate, innovate, and protect our most valuable resources? And what are the most effective ways companies and their partners can achieve early wins and lay the groundwork for long term success?
Anthony Carrano:We dive into these questions and more as our guests discuss how being a Microsoft partner has contributed to building a robust partner relationships internationally and share examples of successful collaborations that have driven significant achievements. Are you ready to join us on this journey? Then stay tuned because we have a great guest show for you today. Our guest is Matt Einig, the CEO at Runcor, the leading provider of software helping organizations to stay in control of Microsoft three sixty five Copilot and agents in the Power Platform. Let's hear what he has to say.
Anthony Carrano:Welcome, Matt, to the podcast today. Thanks for joining us.
Matt Einig:Thank you very much for having me.
Anthony Carrano:Well, excellent. Well, we're really looking forward to getting started and having a a great conversation, you know, with you today. Let's start off. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Matt Einig:Yeah. So my name is Matt or in long Matthijs. I'm from Munich, Germany, currently based in Munich. 47 year old, married three kids, know, holding three girls, so Nice. Don't have much to say at home.
Matt Einig:Studied studied computer science, went into consulting, started in the Microsoft world 02/2004, so quite a while ago. I have been doing SharePoint consulting, started with SharePoint portal server in 02/2003, so I've been around quite a bit. Ten years MVP in Office service and services. Not anymore. I have to focus on my business too much, but since last year, I'm no longer in the program.
Matt Einig:But, yeah, I have been around quite a bit in all areas.
Anthony Carrano:Nice. Nice. Now I know so you started, you know, Remcor. Why'd you start the company?
Matt Einig:It was actually out of coincidence, I would say. I was a consultant at a larger enterprise consultancy, and we did intranets and extranets based on Microsoft SharePoint at the time, and well, as it usually is when you're in a large consultancy and the customer is threatening you with a contract, then you have to source the people to deliver project, and then we figured, yeah, at the time this was still on premises, of course, SharePoint development, WSPs, so on, all that stuff, probably recall if you have been around that long. We built for ourselves initially a tool to do static code analysis of our SharePoint customizations. So we did basically in order to deliver better quality projects, didn't intend to build a product out of it, but then suddenly customers came to us and asked us if we can buy that, and then we figured, okay, why not, let's give it a shot. And then things kind of snowballed from there.
Matt Einig:We grew as a company, then later on we figured out, okay, there are even more problems that we can tackle, and a couple of years ago then we switched over and saw a big need for governance in the Microsoft space, and this is where we're at now. So it's almost twelve years in the making so far.
Anthony Carrano:Wow. Wow. Now can you elaborate a little bit more and share a little bit about, you know, RENCORE's area of specialization?
Matt Einig:Yeah. So nowadays, we offer a governance solution for Microsoft Microsoft platform. It's a SaaS solution, so classical software as a service hosted on Azure in multiple data centers worldwide. Governance, of course, is a very, let's say, broad term. It can mean a lot of different things.
Matt Einig:So what we do is basically, we call it AI and digital workplace governance, and basically we structured it in three different areas. The first area is collaboration governance, so anything around M365, SharePoint, Teams, VivaEngage, OneDrive, Entrite, Planner, and all these kind of services that are mostly used for collaboration. Second area is anything around Power Platform, so it's Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, DataWorks, Fabric, so everything around building applications on the no code, low code platform. And the third area that we are currently adding is anything around AI in Copilot. So that's Copilot, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, helping organizations to stay in control of these environments.
Anthony Carrano:Wow. Now okay. So I know we're gonna get into our partner story, you know, a bit that's around more around the collaboration governance. But let's talk a little bit before we do. Let's talk about with AI.
Anthony Carrano:I'm gonna ask a really open question. Like, what are what are some things that you're just you're seeing in general, you know, around AI governance with a lot of the the concepts you're working with?
Matt Einig:Yeah. I I I think with AI, we are basically experienced the same that we have been experiencing with the rollout of Teams. So during the pandemic, everybody rushed into Teams. They didn't have any other choice. They needed to somehow make their workforce capable to continue working, so they rolled out their services without any plan, and then as a result they created a lot of chaos, a lot of sprawl, clutter that nobody really took care of.
Matt Einig:Things got created, nobody took care of who owns it, who's in charge, who has access, what's inside, what data is shared with whom internally, externally, and so on. And with AI we see now exactly the same things happening. Everybody is trying to very quickly adopt it because they feel like, okay, we cannot miss that bus because we might lose our ability to remain competitive on the market, so we need to leverage AI. So we are starting to build agents, build our own applications with LMS in the background and so on, and then we face the same problems. Now it's not team sprawl, then it's agent sprawl eventually, that suddenly people start creating AI enabled solutions, agents, and then again, who creates it, who owns it, who has access to it, which data does it have access to, what happens throughout this lifecycle, how does the risk also change?
Matt Einig:Maybe on day one when you create an agent maybe only a handful of people have access, and there's limited knowledge behind that agent, and then throughout the life cycle more people are added, then suddenly the risk profile is changing, and if you're not governing that AI enabled resource, then you might run into data loss, into data privacy issues, and general also IT operations issues that data might be exposed.
Anthony Carrano:I've got and you just opened up. I've got a lot of questions now.
Matt Einig:Go ahead.
Anthony Carrano:So as you've kinda, you know, stepped in in the sit with the with the AI governance, what's been one of them in a without, obviously, you know, sharing, you the the customers' names and revealing their identities, but who like, some of the most creative ways in which they've are utilizing AI and how their governance solutions had to, you know, you know, protect them and keep, you know, the right boundaries and things in place so they can continue to leverage that creativity to, you know, give themselves an advantage and grow their business.
Matt Einig:Yeah. I think creative ways. Well Or or maybe the most creative
Anthony Carrano:instance where you've seen a company using using AI that you've had to come in and provide your governance solution.
Matt Einig:Yeah, so I can only tell things from what customers are telling us because we are not ourselves looking at the data. It's all encrypted and only accessible for the customer, so we kind of say like what did you do there? This is crazy. This is not happening, so we're not consulting here. This is where our partners come in, but we are providing the solution for discovery, for implementing policies, for managing, automating, also the management at scale, but what we see, there are quite some different approaches, and some companies are more having this Wild West approach where they basically open up the platform for everyone, and then people start building things, similar like with Power Platform also.
Matt Einig:People just start building apps and flows and whatever, and it's sometimes amazing what comes out of it, but then I think the crazy things that happen that, for example, people build an agent and expose that agent publicly with company data, and nobody's aware of that, and then suddenly you are basically having an open door into your company data, and other people are adding data and knowledge, and totally unaware that this is actually a public accessible component, and of course there's a lot of risk, and there's a big moment when they suddenly realize, okay, what are we doing here actually? Okay, we need to put some guardrails in. But some approaches are, I would say, questionable, and others are more from the other perspective. They lock everything down and rather don't want to allow anything, and have a very, very targeted, structured approach, but that then of course slows adoption, then it's harder to justify the ROI, to see the ROI and justify the investment into it. So it all has its pros and cons if you like.
Anthony Carrano:Yeah. Yeah. Now what because obviously, I know you you do business globally.
Matt Einig:Yes.
Anthony Carrano:What have you seen or have you seen, you know, different parts of the world, how, like, people are approaching implementation with AI differently and just situations that you have to step that you have to step into?
Matt Einig:Yeah. Definitely. There's quite some AI difference. In particular, if you look at North America and Europe, or even more if you look into Germany I think Germany is the prime example of cautiousness in that case so here in Western Europe it's more like, okay, governance is basically a necessity to even get started to build something on AI, and they're really, really careful that things could go wrong, so rather not do it before they go wrong. I think the North American approach is more like, Okay, let's break some eggs and then fix it later, so let's get started, and we need to adopt and we need to show that this actually can help us to make a leap forward in our business, in our efficiency and whatever, and if there is an issue, then we'll fix it at a step labour.
Matt Einig:I think from our perspective it's also in our go to market a quite different approach. Here in Western Europe we are more like, okay, we are the enabler and help you to prevent bad things from happening, and in North America it's more like, okay, are the ones who help you to rein in that chaos and get some control and guardrails around it.
Anthony Carrano:What are and without maybe giving up too much of the secret sauce, what are just for companies that are looking, you know, that need to have governance and they realize they've implemented it. What are some, you know, just some suggestions that you would have for companies to avoid maybe some really catastrophic pitfalls as they're implementing AI across their enterprise?
Matt Einig:Yeah, I think a general pitfall is always with any of these new tools in their adoption, you just let people do things and don't give them any guidance or training or whatever, because then they might invest a lot of time also without any value getting out of it, so one part where basically wasting money, or you get a lot of things created that you might need to shut down later because you actually didn't want that to happen. So I think having some plan at least doesn't need to be in super detail, but having some plan is certainly something that you should think of before you start enabling things. Maybe, okay, if you're still in a POC stage that's a different thing. Maybe then you play more around with it. And then if you take that analogy to how Teams rollout was also, when everyone can just create Teams, then they will create Teams, and then they are there, and then they forget about it, and then these things are left behind, and then nobody knows do we still need that, and What do we do with that, and is that actually used anywhere, and what's with the data inside, and can we delete it?
Matt Einig:If we delete it, does anything break? Do we lose anything important? The same thing is happening on the AI part as well. You have to think about the life cycle of what's happening and also how you manage that life cycle, because from a business perspective, when you are someone in an organisation who has a need, well, they want to solve that need somehow. Build something, they create something, a resource, whatever, but as soon as that need is gone, they will just forget about it.
Matt Einig:They will just leave it behind. Nobody's ever cleaning up after themselves. If a project is ended, if, I don't know, strategy is changing and suddenly this is no longer relevant, then these things are left behind, and for that, some proper lifecycle management is a super important part, and this is also what we address and where we come in, so that you not only manage creation and who creates and who has access and so on, but also manage the life cycle and identify what's no longer used. Can we clean that up? Who is deciding on that?
Matt Einig:And so on. One of the core values that we provide also with our solution, no matter if it's AI or anything else that we support, is that you delegate that decision out to the organization again. So if you are in an IT department of a 100,000 employee company, then it's impossible for you to decide on any of those resources if it's needed or not. So you need to have a process to delegate that out to the organization as it scales and let the business users do the decision, or if they don't take the decision, have more the opt in approach. So you say, Okay, if you don't say I need this, then we will remove it, and then you basically have the same result at the end that you keep things clean and in order to avoid that chaos.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. I know I wanna get to the the collaboration governance partner story. But before I do, last question from the AI is is for folks that are listening, who's the ideal customer for this solution, and who's the what do you look for as an ideal partner for this?
Matt Einig:So in general, so no matter if it's now AI governance or collaboration governance or power platform governance, Eventually the problems are everywhere. It doesn't matter if you are a 50 people company or a 200,000 people company, you have all those problems. We have the problems ourselves and our organization. But we learned that they become really painful usually when the company is a certain size, so usually our customers are a thousand employees and above, and eventually the bigger they get, the bigger the problem is also, because then you can no longer manage it with point solutions only focusing on a single bit, let's say just provisioning or just access management or so on. You have to address that problem in a more holistic way, and you can also not DIY yourself out of it, build a PowerShell script here, or I don't know, use the admin center of x service teams or Power Platform or whatever.
Matt Einig:So for us, our ideal customer profile is actually the larger that they can get. Our biggest customer at the moment is actually a US customer, has a quarter million employees in that tenant, so it's really large scale, or we have also customers like Amgen or Honeywell, so that size of customers have real pain there in those areas because I think one of the core parts of that problem is that the problem is never solved, because in an organization, especially the bigger it gets, is constantly changing. There's constantly people coming and leaving, There's constantly reorganization. There are M and As. There are carve outs.
Matt Einig:There are projects that start and end and so on. So there's constantly new data and chaos always creating, and cleaning that up manually is just an impossible task. So you have to define standards, policies, and automated remediation of those policy violations, and this can only be accomplished with a technical solution.
Anthony Carrano:That's
Matt Einig:fantastic. Partners was the second question, sorry. Partners, so we have basically classical solution integrators or consultancies who go to customers, who do workshops, who sell their services, consult the customer in identifying what their challenges are, our product also, but maybe also providing additional services out of it, so usually partners start then maybe, okay, let's start with maybe Teams and SharePoint, and then we expand, okay, let's govern our enterprise applications in Entra, or let's look what we have in Vivend Engage and implement provisioning. So it's a phased rollout often that you're not overwhelming everyone. First it's maybe just insights, and then based on the insights you build your policies and your automations.
Matt Einig:So this is an ongoing business, and there's also a lot of reproducibility for a partner, because our software itself has multi tenant capabilities, and it's also built in a way that you, for example, can build a governance framework, a set of policies, and export them, and then import them for another customer, so you can reuse the work you have done already for one customer, increasing the margin of the partner, and also providing better value to the customer at the end. And then another type of partner is often an MSP, so managed service providers who just incorporate governance as part of their service offering operating M365, so implementing those policies helps them to deliver their service more efficiently, consistently, across multiple customers. That's what MSPs is all about: high efficiency and standardization across multiple customers, so this is where we help as well. Then of course there are also other types of partners that we work with, where there are value added resellers and so on, but different approach, I think, and also different kind of target customer that they approach. So the SIs are often more on the lower end, the smaller organizations, because those organizations have usually less internal expertise and they need some helping hand, whereas the larger organization then it's more like a bigger project and there are different types of partners usually that are working with them.
Anthony Carrano:Well, that's fantastic. Well, I really appreciate you expounding and sharing about the AI piece. Now I do want to get to the partner story.
Matt Einig:Yeah. Go ahead.
Anthony Carrano:In the story we're about to tell in this Partner Showcase, tell us a little bit about the client. We don't have to reveal their name or any of those pertinent details. Share maybe a little bit about some of the challenges they were facing.
Matt Einig:This particular case, this was a company in the food and beverage industry, about 10,000 employees roughly, and this is all about collaboration, so the classic M365, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and they had actually what I talked about a little bit, they had this Wild West approach, so they really when the pandemic hit, they rolled out Teams, They didn't have any real rollout plan, so everyone was creating Teams and sharing on SharePoint and they were on premises before, so suddenly they faced a lot of chaos. They really, really figured, okay, we have actually more teams than employees. We so much data that is also duplicated in multiple places and abandoned resources that nobody knew are they still relevant or not. So there was a lot of chaos, lack of structure, and that was basically where they started. I realised, okay, first of all we need to get the current situation under control, so we need to do some cleanup and implement some guidelines and structure.
Matt Einig:And second, we want to make sure that it's no longer happening again, that this whole chaos is not recreated. So first of all, well, they implemented our solution initially to get the insights. What's actually going on? Were lacking already the insights. One of the core problems with Microsoft three sixty five is that all the data is in silos.
Matt Einig:So if you, I don't know, I think Microsoft has about 150 admin centers in the Microsoft cloud. So Teams is their own admin center, SharePoint is an admin center, Power Platform is an admin center. So there's no connection. Of course, it's all connected, the data, but there's no connection apparent, so it's very hard to see how things are actually connected. If I look for you, Anthony, then I cannot see, okay, which SharePoint sites do you own, which apps do you own, which flows to your own, and so on.
Matt Einig:This is the first step that they did with our software. We create a massive inventory of everything and connect everything together and allow them to build reports and dashboards on that to basically see, okay, what's going on? And based on that, they could already identify, okay, there's unused SharePoint sites that we could archive, so we can save also additional storage costs. There are unused licenses. There are over licensed users who have maybe an E3 and an E5 which is overlapping, or things like that.
Matt Einig:So they could already initially gain a lot of value out of it in the cleanup process, and then in the next step, in order to avoid that clutter from happening again, first implemented policies in order to structure things, so policies like redundant ownership of resources so that you don't have any orphaned teams, for example. Whenever our tool finds a team that has no or only one owner, inform someone, maybe the remaining owner or someone else, to appoint a second one or IT to decide should we still keep this or should we remove it. Implementing those policies and automating the processes, that was the next step. Then they implemented a provisioning process, so standardized templates. What type of teams, what type of chatbot sites do we want to actually offer to our organization?
Matt Einig:So they standardize templates, let's say a project template, an onboarding template, a department template, and so on, making sure that the sensitivity labels are set correctly, naming conventions are implemented, and so on, and then they offer those through our Teams app instead of the standard experience that you can just create the resource yourself, or Teamify your SharePoint site, and so on. So taking away the standard approach from Microsoft and putting a more structured approach on Hub where they can control who sees which templates, or not every template is relevant for everyone. Maybe let's say an onboarding team template is only available for HR members, so you can apply those to specific security groups. So building out that part. Then as a next step, it was also implementing access reviews, so automating the process that, for example, resources that are shared with external files that have maybe external sharing and the external hasn't accepted the sharing invite to clean that up, to delegate to the owners of the resources to perform a regular access review.
Matt Einig:For a Power App, for example, does everyone still require access to that once per quarter, once per year, depending on the criticality of the app, or for SharePoint site, similar way. And this is one step further. And then step by step, they basically replaced also custom built components like PowerShell scripts or flows that they've built and used our solution for that. Sometimes they maybe put the existing script into an Azure function and we just trigger it so they didn't have to re implement everything, if it was something more complex that was maybe talking to some other LOB systems, or we could just rebuild this entirely in the governance platform. So quite a lot of things that happened.
Matt Einig:They didn't happen all at once, but this was like a phased rollout over several months. They are now our customer for a little over three years, so quite a while already, and they went step by step, and they used a partner of ours to actually guide them through this journey, because they didn't have the resources themselves. Also, had already a relationship to that partner before, so that was a joint success for all of us, because the partner could expand their business. They offered now governance services. They were also due to this, and we could together succeed with the customer on that journey.
Anthony Carrano:Okay, so this was the situation, this was your partner's customer and they brought you guys in, brought Rinkor in?
Matt Einig:Yeah, I think now actually the customer reached out to us, so they were actively looking for a solution. They reached out to us and found us, but we had already a relationship to the partner in the past, not with a specific customer, so it was a coincidence in this case. And then we brought in the partner and said, You are there already. They were in a different department. How about we join forces here and help the customer as they had already, also their trust relationship to the customer, so that was a win win for everyone.
Matt Einig:We don't provide services ourselves, so we always do that together with partners. If the customer requires services, that is for us, of course, a big benefit as well, that we have somebody on the ground that can do the handholding and guide the customer through their journey.
Anthony Carrano:So what was your criteria now? I know you mentioned you had a prior relationship with that particular partner, but I know you work with a lot of partners.
Matt Einig:So what
Anthony Carrano:would friend for this, you know, particularly, you know, big, you know, project, what was your criteria for selecting a partner, you know, for this client?
Matt Einig:This specific partner is more a boutique consultancy, so rather small, like less than 10 employees. So they're very focused on M365 consulting, and they had a very high level of expertise, I would say, and of course also a criteria for us in this specific case that there was already a relationship also to the customer, so it's of course always easier to bring somebody along when a customer has already some experience with. It depends very much on the customer, but in this case this was a no brainer that we bring them in and work together on that deal. In other occasions we sometimes propose a partner to the customer and say, Hey, there is this partner. We have done already two, three projects with them together.
Matt Einig:We had a good success with them. They bring the experience in our solution also and in governance. How about you two have a talk with each other if you're a fit? And if they don't think like it, we're not forcing of course the customer. Sometimes also the customer says, hey, we have already a solution provider who we work with, who is already under contract.
Matt Einig:That's actually much easier for us. They might have not a relationship with us yet, but for the customer it's easier because they can just send out another SOW and say, okay, let's do this also, instead of having to do the whole contractual part, let often the customer actually guide us. So it depends very much from where this relationship is triggered. It can be also coming from the partner itself, of course.
Anthony Carrano:Now with a project like this, this is something I think you mentioned, if I heard correctly, took over several years, process. How do you measure success? Or I should say, how does the customer measure success with something like
Matt Einig:this? So initially so what we try also, when we do our direct engagement, so it's not always that a partner is involved. Many customers have their own resources, and of course we want to be successful with those customers as well. Usually with our own customer success team, at the beginning when we start the rollout with customers, we define success criteria with them, and also define some kind of a roadmap, and that doesn't have to be years. It can be also months only, depends on what the customer is trying to achieve and also what resources they want to invest.
Matt Einig:Usually we focus on quick wins in the first step, so what is really currently a pain? Where do you currently have a problem that we need to address, where we can maybe support you? Maybe a process that needs to be automated, maybe an incident that needs to be resolved, and we want to make sure that such an incident is no longer happening in the future, so finding something very current that is creating an immediate ROI for the customer: Okay, this really helped us. In this particular case it was costs, so they identified very quickly: Okay, we have over licensing, we're paying a lot of money in storage to Microsoft for additional SharePoint storage, so identifying what can be cleaned up gave them a very quick ROI, and that course ROI is a good measure for success, of course. But it depends very much.
Matt Einig:What we recommend often customers also, especially the larger ones, the bigger they get. There are so many stakeholders usually that often they have people for each individual Microsoft services, they have multiple people, and then we try to split it up and separate it and have separate streams and say, 'Teams' team, what is the pay that you need to solve?' and don't know, 'entra team' what can we do for you? We have individual success criteria and then they fuel each other in the organization as well. It gives you also a much better visibility what's going on.
Anthony Carrano:That's awesome. Obviously this project was a big success. What were some of the challenges that you had during the engagement?
Matt Einig:Well, there are always challenges, of course. In this particular case, guess, one okay, was a European customer, so they were hesitant at first, as I would say, so they wanted to start in a test environment first and really had this very cautious approach like, okay, we don't want to let a new tool onto our production environment, and it might do whatever we don't know and cause a lot of harm or whatever, so they used a test environment that had a staging M365 tenant with data in it, and they started building up on that, and then they rolled it up on the production environment. This is actually not such an uncommon approach that there is a staging environment. We also provide staging environments to our enterprise customers, we have the ability that you can build your policies, report dashboards, test them out, your automations, and then you can export them and import them to another environment. That helps you also to make sure that not suddenly accidentally your entire organization gets an email that they were not supposed to be getting only because you did a mistake in your automation.
Matt Einig:So I think this is a sensible approach in general. But also the way our solution is built, as we are aware that customers are worrying that a new tool that is rolled out might cause a lot of harm unintentionally, the way we have built our solution is that you do not have to give us full access from the start. So we have a very granular permission model where you can grant in the initial step read only permissions to our solution, maybe even only for individual services, and once you start adopting it step by step, then you gain insights and you realize, okay, there's something we need to do, then you can add additional permissions, say, okay, now I want to do an automation on SharePoint, okay, now I give you full control on SharePoint, oh, now I want to maybe deactivate users, okay, I give you permission on M365 user or Entra, and so on. So we have this ability that also differentiates us from any other solution on the market, that you can have a very structured phased rollout where you can mitigate that risk that due to some user error maybe you cause havoc unintentionally, and that gives a lot of trust.
Matt Einig:But this specific example, where a customer was very cautious, okay, let's test this out first, and then let's try this, and then before we let this onto the live environment.
Anthony Carrano:Now, based on this partner experience, did this engagement increase customer satisfaction and or grow revenue for the customer?
Matt Einig:I cannot really claim, I believe, grow revenue. I think this is very hard to measure because, well, of course you could argue an efficiency gain in the organization due to de cluttering the environment can make customer make it easier for the customer to make money, but I think it's a really tough sell to correlate more revenue to cleaner M365 and standardized processes. You can do that, of course, but
Anthony Carrano:There's it's probably a big impact on employee satisfaction and experience, I
Matt Einig:would imagine. That's definitely. Of course, end users can find data easier. They are less confused with all the different teams, they have a clear process how to create what they need, so definitely this has an impact. But it's extremely hard to measure it, that's what I'm saying.
Matt Einig:It's really hard to measure, okay, you saved five minutes a day because we have a clean environment. You can claim that, and anyone can claim that, but nobody can ever prove that really, that this is correlated directly to implementing that. Where you can prove something is cost savings, so you can measure, okay, we spend less money in licenses, we spend less money in storage, we may be more efficient in IT, like we have more time for other things than cleaning up the mess of our end users, because we can actually automate these processes, we can focus on the fun part and not on the annoying part basically, maybe less you can measure maybe less support tickets, things like that. This is something that you can measure certainly, and where we can make an impact. And then of course on the security posture also, okay, we have better control of our data, we have cleaned up unnecessary access, we have cleaned up external access that was no longer required, these kind of things that you can also measure.
Matt Einig:All of that contributes somehow to a more efficient and hopefully more successful company at the end. Putting a number and dollars on it is, I would say, a little bit of a stretch or a hard hard to
Anthony Carrano:sounds like there's there's a lot of there's a lot of really great benefit, you know, to to this, especially we're seeing at the with I know you've talked a lot about, like, with large companies. What's is there do companies need to be a certain size to get the most use out of these these governance modules?
Matt Einig:In general, the problems or the challenges that we address play everywhere. No matter how big the company is, you have these challenges at some point. But I would say up to a certain size you can still ignore them. I don't know if you have a 500 people company, for example, well, some of these things you can just ignore, or you can solve them by writing a PowerShell script and running that once per month and getting the report out of it, or you can, I don't know, buy a point solution just for provisioning or things like that? So you can get your way around in the small organization, but we learned that when a company goes beyond, let's say, a thousand employees, then this becomes not feasible anymore.
Matt Einig:You need a more holistic approach. You really need to think of it from the start to the end. What happens from creation of a resource to the deletion or archiving of resource, and how do you manage that process and scale also that process as these organisations are constantly changing, and the bigger they get, the more change is in the organisation. If Anthony is leaving the company, what happens to all the data that you own? The things in your OneDrive, the apps that you have created, the teams that you own, what happens to all of that?
Matt Einig:The bigger the company gets, the more often that happens, and the more you need an automated, scalable approach in order to resolve these kind of challenges.
Anthony Carrano:Now I've got two more questions, Matt. First is like, so from this partner experience, this larger food and beverage company, what did you all, Remcor, learn that enabled your company to improve?
Matt Einig:With every customer that we actually work with, well, every customer has the same problems, but there are always nuances to each problem. So especially the larger enterprises, they have sometimes very weird things that they have going on, like, I don't know, not using actual users but creating internal accounts and just naming them external or things like that. Like, where you think like, okay, why don't you use what Microsoft has recommended? And then suddenly you realize, okay, we have to cover that use case as well somehow. This is not how we expected it to be, but some customers deal it that way, or there are customers who are never deleting user accounts.
Matt Einig:They always stay behind, and they keep them forever apparently, so they have more deactivated users than actual users and things like that, and then you learn, Okay, this could be a new policy. This could be something that we can add to the product for future customers to gain value out of that, because they might have the same problem. So this is an iterative process, and one of the cool things about our solution is that it's basically a platform, and anything like a policy, a report, an automation, a dashboard, an access view this is all just content in our platform. So it's very easy to add additional policies. You can create hundreds of policies with every individual Nuance that you want to build, and that allows us very quickly to add new value for future customers, or also existing customers, and also partners can build their own governance framework.
Matt Einig:They can build their own set of policies of their learnings and then sell that to their customers. So there's a lot to be gained, and the flexibility of that platform allows us to adapt very quickly on those quite different demands.
Anthony Carrano:Now, Niasus, in closing, what advice would you give to companies like yours regarding partnering?
Matt Einig:Well, think, so I've been in the Microsoft business for twelve years and we had our fair share of partnership experience, I would say. So we had successful partnerships, we had unsuccessful partnerships, we had real partnership failures. So I think initially to start a successful partnership everyone needs to be aligned in finding a relatively quick success story, so finding relatively quick a common way of making together business, because interest at the partner and also at a vendor in a partnership degrades the longer it takes to actually get something new. It's natural, of course, because if you are a partner, let's say you are a consultancy, and you have a great partnership with Rancor and announce that and so on, and then no customer is there, and then you invest time in trying to gain customers, and then you don't get the interest, then at some point you dial back your efforts, and then when you dial back your efforts then you will not really get that success result, and then it degrades, then the partnership fails. Similar for us, of course, and I think this is an honest admission that every vendor needs to do well, a partnership that lasts a year with an own business to be made and no real prospect also of a business to be made, well, then you need to prioritize where the business is to be made.
Matt Einig:So finding initial traction is actually the fuel for a successful partnership. Initial traction, let it be something small, doesn't really matter, and we go the extra mile there also. We help the partner, we bring our solution engineer in and help them when they are not enabled yet maybe to close that deal, but that gives them the justification to invest more, because well then they have the first customer, they can build services around it, they learn with it, that they can repeat doing that and resell it to the next customer, so then you gain traction. But if things take too long or if they're only half hearted, yeah, okay, we put your logo on our website and you put ours on your website, then this will eventually fail, and we want to focus on successful partners, and there's no hard feelings to be honest, so this is just business. At the end we want to do business, the partner wants to do business, we want to do business, and the customer wants their problem solved.
Matt Einig:If you don't find a customer who wants their problem solved, then it's hard to make business together. So you just have to be honest in that partnership also, and to each other also. Otherwise, this is bound to fail.
Anthony Carrano:Mhmm. That's fantastic advice. I can tell you, in all the episodes that we've done so far, that that was a unique piece of advice. I'll just leave it at that. That that was great.
Anthony Carrano:And I love it. I love it. That's great because at the end of the day, it's I mean, you're not partnering. I mean, just to, you know, to to partnering just to kinda get along and have kicks and giggles. Yeah.
Anthony Carrano:You you want to create in coming together to create, you know, a unique value, you know, to solve a customer's, you know, problem, And it's it's finding those early wins and getting that initial traction. That that was just fantastic. Really appreciate you sharing that. Very on point. Well, so how how do folks, you know, find out, you know, more about you and how can they connect?
Matt Einig:Well, you can go to our website, franco dot com. So everything you want to know, will find there. You can reach out to us. We have a partner page where you can contact us if you want to become a partner. We have dedicated partner account managers who work with you, who enable you, who help you to build also your offerings around it.
Matt Einig:So the offerings are we have standard offerings that you can get white labeled from us, basically, that you can slam your logo on and get started and show it around and see what sticks, but you can put your secret sauce into it as well, and we advise you on that. So that's one way to reach out, and then of course we are at conferences. So next one is I think May in Las Vegas is the M365 conference, so just come by our booth there, talk to my guys, they will tell you all about it, about our solution, what we can do for you, how we can do business in Europe. We will be at the European Collaboration Summit May, I will be at the Gartner Summit in London in May if you want to meet me personally. I will be in San Francisco next month if anyone wants to have a drink with me.
Matt Einig:So just reach out. Reach out on LinkedIn. Any any channel is fine with us.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. And I'll include any of those kind of relevant links in the show notes, you know, as well. Well, Matt, thank you. This was a lot of fun. Really appreciate your time.
Matt Einig:Thanks very much for having me, Anthony. Same here.
Anthony Carrano:All right. Have a great day. All right. Before we rock back, let's hit on a few standout insights from today's conversation. First, as organizations scale, it's clear that the old way of doing things just doesn't cut it anymore.
Anthony Carrano:Managing collaboration, AI, and digital workplaces really demands a modern, automated approach to governance. Relying on manual processes or ad hoc tools leads to all sorts of challenges from data sprawl to security risk. Second, quick wins and strong partner relationships are absolutely essential. When teams focus on early visible successes like saving time, cutting costs, or automating routine work, it not only builds trust but also gets everyone excited for what's next. That early momentum goes a long way toward building lasting partnerships and delivering real value.
Anthony Carrano:And third, we heard that adaptability is non negotiable. Every organization is a little different, so governance solutions need to flex and evolve, and that the best outcomes come from learning, adapting, continuously improving as new challenges pop up. I really want to thank Matt. Appreciate him taking time here on our podcast today. I thought there was a lot of fantastic insights.
Anthony Carrano:I want to thank you all, our audience, for joining us on this episode of IMCP Profiles and Partnership powered by Dynamics Marketing. We hope you enjoyed this podcast and find it useful and inspiring. If you did, please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform. One of the best ways to partner for success is to join IMCP, a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive. IMCP members can find and connect with other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities.
Anthony Carrano:So whether you're looking for new customers, new markets, or new solutions, IMCP can help you achieve your goals. To learn more, visit the website at www.iamcp.org.
