 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for tech, telecom and data center professionals. I'm Buffy Harriketis, coming to you from Channel Partners 2022 in fabulous Las Vegas. And joining me today is Cori Cohen, Vice President of Marketing for MetTel. Cori, welcome to JSA TV. Buffy, is that how you say your last name? I'm just kidding. Yes, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Cori, you're such a veteran industry professional, especially when it comes to the channel and marketing. My dear friend, it's so good to see you here in Vegas again. Hi, I love seeing you. I mean, you show us all up when you look like this. And I'm, you know, in a jean jacket. Hi. Hi. I'm here. I mean, the excitement here at Channel Partners is bigger than it's ever been. Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, the energy was electric in November. And now it's still there because people are just so happy to like be connected to people again and be out and about with the world. And without the mask mandate, I mean, it's kind of great. I mean, it's also dangerous, but it's great. Well, we're definitely trying to keep safe here in Vegas. But let's talk a little bit more about your role at MetTel. So you recently joined MetTel, one of my favorite organizations in the whole entire world. And I was so happy to see that you joined MetTel. Tell us a little bit more about your role and what you're doing to develop and even grow and enhance their channel program. Well, to say I'm thrilled to be at MetTel is like an understatement. I've been working with the crew, the MetTel family for the last like seven years. And so it was a really natural fit when they called on me to lead channel marketing. And honestly, it's home. Like it feels like home. I can tell you, since I started, the channel, so the majority of business actually at MetTel is channel. And as true as that is, the channel team was divided into like three different teams. And it was really, to say it was a little confusing to work with MetTel is also an understatement. So when I came on board, I think I actually was maybe a catalyst for unifying the program. So now we have one channel team. Tim Hanley is channel chief and we have a fabulous, fabulous leadership team. Jake Aranao, he's kind of like our executive sponsor for channel. We have Dave Mitchell, who's VP of channel sales and Dave Dixon, who's VP of channel ops, channel sales ops. And an incredible, very tenured. You and I were just talking about that at tenured sales team. And from a marketing perspective, they've spent many years sort of building out their services, which I'll talk about in a second. And so my whole job is building up this channel marketing team and promoting the heck out of MetTel. Well, congrats to you, Corey, for joining such a wonderful organization. And congrats to MetTel for having you. So Corey, I mean, MetTel's solutions have grown and evolved so much over the years. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the new solutions that MetTel has offering? Yeah, so, you know, not new. This is, and this is, when I was doing my listening tour, meaning like calling up partners and saying like, what are you selling with MetTel? What do you need more of? How can I fully support you? The resounding answer was kind of like, you know, MetTel could do a better job of communicating with us, which, yeah, that's why I was hired. I agree. And so I think a lot of people know MetTel, 25, six years in business, as an aggregator. And honestly, that's not, that was the backbone and it developed into a whole practice of POTS transformation. We are the only US-based company on Gartner's Magic Leader. We're a leader in their Magic Quadrant for managed network services. Our SD-WAN Sassy solution is, you know, honestly, I think the best platform, it's proprietary network. And I think it's the best in the industry. And then there's obviously our mobility and IoT practice, which doesn't compare to, you know, anyone else's. And that's true. I mean, such a leader in the mobility space for so many years. But you mentioned Sassy. So it's like one of the hottest acronyms out there. Do you wanna talk a little bit about Sassy? I mean, no. Am I an engineer? And also like, what is Sassy? It's so nebulous. Like, it's like cloud. No, I mean, listen, I think that selling Sassy is, it's a concept at this point, more than an actual product. We are building out that product as part of our SD-WAN entire holistic network approach. But you can't have, I mean, SD-WAN is a secure, it's a secure network to begin with. We layer, and I'm not the best person to talk about this. Like I'm not a solution engineer, but we layer Fortinet within our network. And when you're talking about Sassy, you're talking about like zero trust networking and you're talking about, you know, secure gateways and firewalls. And I think that as a concept rolling out, you know, secure edge is something that everyone, I mean, we all have, we all have end points that need to be managed. And I think that it's, at this point, we need to figure out how to make money on it. I mean, making money in the channel is definitely at the forefront for sure. Let's talk a little bit more about Metta's mobility solution set. Yeah, that I can talk about all day. So the way, I think it's a fair assumption. I think it's a fair, a safe thing to say that like business has changed because of the pandemic. Like I think we can safely say that. Gartner came out with the prediction that for the next, I don't even know how many years, but from now until who knows forever, it's a 50-50 split, 50% in office, 50% at home. And business no longer is like wireline versus wireless. It's like a holistic approach to your entire network, but also your mobility program. And like I said, we have endpoints everywhere. They need to be managed and secured always. So the mobility program with Gartner, we created a program called Mobile Device as a Service. So Mdass, which we're actually debuting here at Channel Partners. And Mobility Device as a Service is awesome, if I could say so myself. Basically, managing mobility, enterprise mobility is complex, right? You have equipment, software, ancillary services like MDM and device protection, break fix, recycling. And then you have staging and kidding. And we actually take all of that and we roll it into one solution and we provide devices. So this is actually something else, and I'm sorry I'm talking so long, but this is actually something that came up in my discussions with partners. We're one of a few carriers that have like a very large, a rather large federal government contract. And a lot of partners don't actually necessarily understand how that benefits them. It actually very much benefits Channel Partners. Here's why. First of all, security and compliance, rigorous testing in order to be on a government contract, you actually need to prove that. Number two, we have to have, as part of government mandate, we have to have US based support, customer support 24-7, which we do. And third, we have to, from a mobility standpoint, have to have warehouses with like 20,000 plus devices like on hand at any moment, at any given time. You don't know when FEMA needs whatever. And frankly, we're dealing with a chip shortage, but that has nothing on us, I guess, because we have to have that on hand. So when it comes to an Amazon-like experience where you can purchase and order devices and data, and then we stage, we kit, we drop ship to your employees anywhere at their home. And we have break fix, 10% of the spend is recovered through someone leans over and drops their iPhone or whatever and it breaks. We send it out the next night, the next day, and everything from secure wipe and clean to vice recycling. And now I've bored you to death with mobility. You could never be bored with mobility because it is the future of the landscape here, especially with the remote workforce, the hybrid environment that we're in. And like you said, I mean, we're completely headed towards a hybrid environment well into the future. Cory, what are some of your predictions for the future when it comes to the channel specifically? Video case studies and just further interactive ways to showcase success and rather than traditional prospecting if you will. So I think that's the future. Yeah, video case studies from Metel are coming soon because the best vice president of channel marketing, Cory Cohen is here with us live at Channel Partners 2022. Cory, where can viewers go to find out more about Metel? You know what, it's metel.net, M-E-T-T-E-L.net. And I look forward to seeing you and hearing from you. Cory, it was such a pleasure having you on JSA TV. Thank you so much for joining us and viewers, thank you for tuning in to another exciting episode of JSA TV at Channel Partners 2022. Happy channel networking.