Nerdio CRO: Eye On GenAI, More Security Capabilities And Training Camps Coming

‘If someone’s going to make a paradigm shift in their business, you have to show them how,’ Joseph Landes says.

Joseph Landes

Joseph Landes, chief revenue officer of Nerdio, a vendor that promises solution providers a platform to simplify Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop management, said that the company is at work rolling out new capabilities around Intune and Defender while investing in more training camps and keeping an eye on generative artificial intelligence.

Landes told CRN in an interview that the Chicago-based vendor plans to go from 16 training camp events in 2023 to 24 in North America and 10 international ones. Landes estimates that between 50 and 100 MSP employees join each camp for two days of learning how to build a Microsoft Cloud practice.

“This is not just about coming out with a product,” he said. “If someone’s going to make a paradigm shift in their business, you have to show them how.”

[RELATED: Nerdio CEO: ‘We Are Expanding Our Value-Add To Physical Endpoints’]

Nerdio Pushes Into Security

Marcial Velez, CEO of New York-based Microsoft partner Xperteks – a member of CRN’s MSP 500 – told CRN in an interview that he’s used Nerdio’s training camps to quickly train his architects on how to use Azure.

The camp helped because Azure felt “so abstract,” he said. “It was such a big universe to try to get into.” Finding time to take employees off day-to-day work to train was also a challenge.

“We stepped into it very slowly,” Velez said. “And that management tool allowed us to start doing environments on our own and then start offering those. … We’re now very comfortable talking to clients about their cloud-first strategy because we know we have a tool set and a support system that will help us.”

When it comes to a component for Microsoft’s Defender security application, Nerdio plans for the component to “really be built out” by the end of 2023, Landes said.

Along with continued functionality added to the platform for Microsoft’s cloud-based endpoint management solution Intune, Chicago-based Nerdio finds itself more and more in the security space.

Landes doesn’t quite accept the label of security vendor for Nerdio, he told CRN. Instead, his company is looking at ways to give manager services providers (MSPs) “ one product, one console, one single pane of glass to manage Azure and Intune” and other relevant technology from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.

When asked by CRN about the opportunity for Nerdio with generative AI technology from Microsoft and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Landes said that his engineering team is looking into it. Given the automation capabilities within the Nerdio platform, generative AI could give the platform a boost.

“Are there ways of integrating OpenAI into something we’re doing that will make it easier for a partner to be successful? I think that’s the question we have to answer,” Landes said.

In regard to expansion for Nerdio, Landes said that he’d like to add to his ecosystem more solution providers in Australia and Latin America. For vertical specialties, he said that solution providers who work in education and state and local government can benefit from the platform, although it is industry agnostic.

“The great thing about what we do with Azure as an infrastructure play – we’re relevant to everybody,” he said.