MTMG's IT Roundtable

Hospitals, schools, libraries, and government agencies can't stop running, yet most of them protect themselves with small teams and tight budgets. Cindy Lepore, Manager of Member Relations at OSHEAN, explains how a nonprofit consortium serving 160+ anchor institutions across Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts gives lean organizations enterprise-level network, cloud, and security capab...

Mark Montalto spent 14 years selling for Cisco before moving to OSHEAN, Rhode Island's nonprofit network consortium, where schools, hospitals, libraries, and towns get carrier-class network, cloud, and security services they could never buy on their own. He explains how a 25-person nonprofit competes with deep-pocketed commercial carriers: a network that isn't oversubscribed, the same rate...

Dave Phillips, Chief Information Security Officer at OSHEAN, the nonprofit consortium serving more than 160 hospitals, schools, libraries, and government agencies across Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts, joins Paul Knittle to explain how to build a cybersecurity program when you can't do everything at once. He covers why frameworks like NIST CSF 2.0 should be run as a program rather tha...

Most MSPs are running ten disconnected tools to secure small businesses — and attackers who don't work in silos are exploiting the gaps. In this episode, Guardz co-founder and CEO Dor Eisner explains why identity is now the primary attack vector, how agentic detection and response automates tier-one triage without the noise, and why he believes the SIEM and its bottomless data lake are on the...

Most mid-market companies think they have a handle on their software stack. Then they run a discovery and find three to five times more apps than they knew about. In this episode, Frank Antonucci, Director of Partnerships at Torii, joins Paul Knittle and Joe McGuire to break down why SaaS sprawl and shadow IT have exploded in the AI era, and what CFOs and CIOs can do about it. You'll hear why...

Ever wonder if you're overpaying on your IT spend? Carleton Hall of Win Win Advisors makes the case for hiring a buy-side agent who represents you, not the vendor - the same way a buyer's real estate agent works, with the seller paying the fee. He walks through a real engagement where free advice turned into a paid project management role, then gets into the physical realities of the AI bo...

Chris Smith has spent almost 20 years rescuing CRM projects that went sideways, and he has a blunt read on why so many of them fail: companies treat CRM as a technology purchase instead of a business strategy. In this episode he walks through the Propeller methodology his team built after watching a nine-year banking consortium client get whipsawed every time leadership changed, and explains how s...

Tim Colwell, Executive Vice President at AOTMP, joins the show to explain why technology leaders are turning to peer networks instead of solo research to make faster, better-informed decisions. Tim breaks down how AOTMP's vendor-agnostic Advisory Council helps IT, finance, and mobility management professionals cut through mixed information on topics like AI adoption, BYOD versus corporate-owned de...

Sean Maguire spent nearly two decades building Synivate, and in this episode he breaks down the fork every MSP owner eventually hits: learn to scale or get ready to sell. He and Paul dig into why the same habits make a business both scalable and sellable, why so many AI projects just produce a faster broken process, and how feeding AI your own resolution history beats letting it fumble a generic a...

What should a small business actually spend its limited security budget on? Reed Savory - 30-plus years across CIO and CISO roles, often at the same time, inside a private equity firm securing a portfolio of startups - makes the case for meeting small companies where they are instead of forcing enterprise tooling on them. He walks through taking a banking-as-a-service platform from zero to SOC 2 T...

AI is being bolted onto everything right now — but does adding intelligence actually help your customers, or just hide the mess underneath? Kabir Roy, a UX and CX product leader with two decades of work spanning global names like BlackRock and Ford, joins Paul Knittle to unpack the AI experience gap: why companies keep repeating the feature-piling mistakes of the early 2000s, and how to tell wheth...

Aisling Mooney spent 15 years navigating infertility before finding her own answer in research her doctors had never heard of - a simple switch in medications and timing that worked straight away. In this episode she tells Tara how that sent her to teach herself Python, index over half a million peer-reviewed papers and trials, and whittle them down to 25,000 core articles for Fertally, the platfo...

Mike Onystok, Founder and CEO of HonestStok, joins Paul to make the case for a TSD built on relationships and radical transparency. He breaks down his crawl, walk, run model for bringing new advisors into the channel with minimal investment and their existing relationships, and explains why he keeps MDF, SPIFFs, and backend bonuses out of the vendor conversation so the customer always gets the rig...

OSHEAN is the nonprofit most Rhode Islanders have neverheard of — even though its fiber, cybersecurity, and cloud connections underpin more than 160 of the state's hospitals, universities, libraries, and municipalities. In this MTMG IT Roundtable, CEO Dave Marble breaks down the member-first model that let his team treat a Providence free clinic's IT like abar rescue, and explains why running a 40...

Cait Espe explains how her transition from female-led salon operations to the male-dominated tech sector served as a catalyst for her advocacy for women in STEM. She provides clear distinctions between mentors who talk to you, sponsors who talk about you, and allies who stand with you to ensure your voice is heard. The episode also dives into the risks of gender bias in AI and why women must take...

Singer-songwriter Emma Langford joins the conversation tounpack how technology shapes modern music-making, why AI needs real guardrails, and what gets lost when we outsource human growth to machines. She shares whatit’s like building soundscapes for a stage adaptation of her partner’s novel Me, Myself and Them , and why studio experimentation is its own creative craft. Emma also reflects on writin...

Procurement leader Janice Marquardt shares how moderne-auction programs drive clarity, speed, and transparency—without devolving into “race to the bottom” pricing. She lays out the right order of buy-in (executives → procurement → technical teams → suppliers) and how language andexpectations shape outcomes. Janice also walks through a real rollout that delivered $2M in value within 12 weeks across...

Hospitality and telecom expert Melinda Kinney breaks down how hotels and small businesses can audit their current technology, eliminate waste, and redirect spend into future-proofed solutions. She explains why RFPs must look beyond the next three to five years, how AI is reshaping requirements, and where leaders commonly overspend on legacy services. With nearly 30 years in telecom, Melinda outlin...

Fractional CMO Anne Mitchell breaks down how small andmidsize B2B firms can stop doing random acts of marketing and build a simple, end-to-end system that actually produces pipeline. She explains why only a small slice of your market is ready to buy right now and how a nurturing engineturns the rest into future revenue. You’ll hear a practical framework for sharpening positioning (think: becoming...

MTMG’s leadership looks back on a year of pivots, patience,and momentum—our first-ever year-end special digs into what worked, what didn’t, and how the team plans to scale in 2026. From “pits & berries” (career transitions, sales slumps that turned into wins, and learning gnarly DNS/DA tooling) to a crisp articulation of what MTMG actually does—“Tinder for business” with eHarmony-level matchin...

Security teams are drowning in alerts — but what if youcould automatically rank every asset by business impact and focus only on what truly matters?   In this episode of Rosie Rewired (MTMG’s Women in Techconversations), host Tara Nelson sits down with Roselle Safran , CEO & Founder of KeyCaliber to unpack the missing link in cybersecurity: bridging “is this a security concern?” with “is this...

What’s the real impact of Broadcom’s VMware acquisition onyour IT strategy—and what can you do about it? In this episode of MTMG’s IT Roundtable, infrastructure expert Dan Wakefield breaks down what IT leaders must consider before jumping into new hypervisors or container strategies. You’ll hear how one client faced a $400K renewal decision, why support ecosystems collapsed overnight, and how a pr...

In this refreshingly human conversation, Eric Davies ofDoodlyDog explores what AI can and can’t do for web development, diving deep into the emotional and practical reasons clients still crave relationships—not bots. From wild camping in the Welsh mountains to saving client sites fromsudden crashes, Eric brings personal stories and sharp insight into why AI should support—not replace—real-world ex...

In this episode of MTMG’s IT Roundtable, former ZTE CTO John Frieslaar joins the team to unpack the seismic shifts happening in telecom and IT infrastructure. From the challenges of geopolitical disruption to the rise of AI-driven networks and open RAN, John shares real stories—includingbillion-pound deals and innovation born from crisis. Listeners will walk away with actionable insights on sustai...

What really separates thriving MSPs from those that stall out? In this episode, David Campbell—former COO of Optimal Networks and now MTMG’s MSP Optimization Consultant—shares the hard lessons, turning points, and culture-building wins that shaped his leadership approach. From dealing with client exits to scaling MSPs through repeatable systems, David reveals how intentional culture, clear growth...