Signed

The clause that matters most in your vendor contract is usually the one everyone skips. It sits there looking harmless until a patent troll shows up. By then you cannot renegotiate it. In 2025, patent trolls filed more than half of all U.S. patent lawsuits. In high tech, it was over 90%. More than half their targets were companies under $25 million in revenue. They are not chasing Apple. They are...

Lumen just announced it's acquiring Alkira. If your network strategy runs through a vendor that just changed hands, or through one that might, this conversation covers what actually happens next. Ali Shakh, CEO of Graphiant, was part of the Viptela founding team when Cisco acquired them. He was in the room for that integration. Prices went up. Not by a little. The customers who got hurt were the o...

Dave Chronister has been doing penetration testing and incident response since 2007 — back when Fortune 500 CIOs called it a novel concept. In the years since, he's walked into breached environments where the EDR was running, the MDR was installed, the SOC 2 audit had passed, and none of it mattered. This conversation covers the gap between what companies think they bought and what they actually h...

You've read the post. A CEO goes on LinkedIn. Hard decision. I own this. Because of AI, we'll come out leaner, faster, stronger. Max Clark has written one of these. He's also been on the receiving end of one. In this Playbook, he breaks down what that post actually says — and what it's designed to leave out. Not to indict the people who write them, but to hand you  one question: whenever a company...

You bought the platform. You renewed the contract. And 80% of your breach risk is coming from the one thing the platform wasn't built to catch. Craig Patterson spent years inside the channel ecosystem that sits between what security vendors ship and what enterprise buyers actually receive — and he's unusually direct about where those two things don't match. In this conversation: the Microsoft "fre...

The average enterprise uses 44% of the Microsoft stack they're paying for. Denis O'Shea knows because he's measured it — the same 120-point assessment, hundreds of organizations, the number doesn't move. The other 56% is licensed and sitting idle while the same teams buy third-party tools to fill gaps that 365 already covers. Denis is the founder of Mobile Mentor and has managed 14.5 million enter...

MSPs sell their book. The vendors they're authorized on. The platforms they're certified on. The products they have margin on. The infrastructure they're about to recommend for your business is shaped by all of that before you walk in the room. This Playbook covers what that actually means for you: how to size the right MSP for your company, what security capabilities a small MSP genuinely cannot...

Nobody in the building owns the cloud bill. Not IT, not finance, not engineering — and when a CEO finally gets desperate enough to set a hard ceiling, like getting spend below 9% of revenue or the business isn't viable, that's when everyone finds out the EDP they already signed made the target structurally impossible before the conversation even started. The problem wasn't technical. It was in the...

You're making infrastructure decisions on a system you can't see. It's fast, stable, and invisible. That's the problem. Underneath it, global capacity is planned years in advance, routes are shaped by geopolitics, and resilience depends on infrastructure you don't control. Max Clark sits down with TS Narayanan, CTIO of EXA Infrastructure, to explain the layer most enterprise buyers never see — and...

SOC 2 certification has become shorthand for security. It isn't. Max Clark breaks down what SOC 2 actually demonstrates — and the costly mistake most buyers make when building their controls: anchoring them to a specific vendor's tool. When you replace that tool, the control breaks. And you won't find out until your auditor does. 

You’re paying for your network in ways you don’t see. Most teams don’t catch it until the bill shows up. Traffic leaves the cloud for inspection, then gets sent back in. Every step adds cost. Most teams never map the full path, so it goes unnoticed. Max Clark sits down with Doug Houghton from Alkira to break down how double egress happens, why costs can spike by 300x, and how these decisions quiet...

Most enterprise networks weren’t designed for what they’re carrying today. The problem isn’t traffic—it’s the decisions underneath it. Those decisions weren’t made for today’s reality. They were made years ago—then inherited, layered on, and never fully revisited. Over time, that turns into performance issues, rising costs, and risk that only shows up when something breaks.  In this episode of Sig...

The IT market is built for sellers. After 200+ episodes of Tech Deep Dive, one pattern kept showing up. The technology wasn't the hard part. The decision was. What got approved. What finance pushed back on. What vendors didn't say. What broke after the contract was signed. This is where the focus shifts — from the technology itself to the decisions behind it and what actually happens once you sign...

Max Clark is joined by Ed Bailey, Field CISO at Cribl, to discuss why many companies invest heavily in collecting data but struggle to turn it into meaningful outcomes. They explore common mistakes in data strategy, the gap between tools and skills, and what organizations should consider before collecting more data. What you’ll learn: Why companies are spending millions collecting data without cle...

What happens when your contact center hits peak demand… and the queue explodes? In this episode, Max sits down with Michael Cibelli (PolyAI) to break down how one major brand went from 400+ callers waiting in queue to zero hold time—without wrecking customer experience. You’ll learn why traditional IVR trees (“Press 1 for…”) fail, what replaces them, and how modern Voice AI can contain calls end-t...

The demo was perfect. Then deployment happened.  If your contact center AI “worked” in a pilot but fell apart in production - this episode explains why. Max Clark sits down with Jim K. Tennant (VP, Channel Sales at Observe. AI) to unpack the real reasons contact center AI projects fail after approval: weak data foundations, missing guardrails, messy knowledge sources, agent adoption breakdowns, an...

What if the real problem isn’t Azure… it’s putting the wrong workloads there? In this episode, Max Clark sits down with William Sellers, Solutions Architect at DartPoints, to dissect a real-world migration from the energy sector: an internal research app that went into Azure “to move fast,” scaled to nearly $30K/month, and finally forced leadership to draw a line. You’ll hear how technical debt, p...

If you’re betting on “the cloud is secure” and a few DLP rules to save you, you’re exposed. Most breaches aren’t a tool failure, they’re a visibility failure. You can’t protect data you can’t see. In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Sirena Ong from Secuvvy to break down Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) : what it is, how it differs from DLP, and why every CISO is suddenly waking up to...

You know that moment when the alerts start flooding in, and your entire network goes dark? Systems down. Phones silent. Operations frozen. Now imagine that happening inside a prison. Six hundred of them. One outage away from chaos. In this conversation, Max Clark sits down with Oliver Maxwell from APX Net, Inc who had to build a network that literally keeps the peace. They get into what happens wh...

Ever feel trapped in the endless cycle of network refreshes, license renewals, and “surprise” upgrade costs? You’re not alone. One school faced the same uphill battle and decided to break free. The result? A $250K turnaround and a totally new way of thinking about IT infrastructure. In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Francisco Tello, Senior Sales Engineer at Meter, to unpack how a forward-t...

You know the risks. The board knows the budget. So how do you bridge the gap? For most IT and security leaders, convincing executives to prioritize security is the toughest job they face. In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Alejandro Ziegenhirt, Sr. Manager of InfoSec & DevOps at OfferUp, to unpack the real-world struggle of funding security. From cloud myths to phishing to why ROI argum...

Every minute you wait to respond, another lead dies. Missed calls, ignored forms, slow follow-ups, your IT system might be the silent killer behind your pipeline collapse. In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Kaitlynn Crossno, Sales Engineering Manager at Capacity, to uncover the hidden IT gaps that kill pipeline in minutes. From speed-to-lead failures to dealer bottlenecks and weekend covera...

Imagine signing the lease, hiring the staff, setting the date and then realizing you can’t even open your doors. That’s exactly what happened to a fast-growing healthcare provider. In this episode, Max Clark and Darcy Guidry, Regional Channel Director at Epic iO, expose the hidden IT gap that can shut a business down: months-long fiber delays, shocking $1,000 copper POTS lines, and overlooked conn...

Imagine your call volume doubles overnight, but your hiring budget is stuck at zero. Most contact centers would collapse. Heritage Federal Credit Union didn’t. In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Brent Wilford and Patrick Russell from Glia to unpack how Heritage: Navigated a messy merger without adding agents Reimagined customer engagement with true omnichannel done right Used AI to empower...

They had backups. The storm didn’t care. When a major client demanded proof of uptime and recovery, a Florida-based marketing company realized their DR plan was just a plan, not a solution. In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Keith Lukes from UbiStor to break down how backup confidence can quickly turn into recovery chaos. From untested runbooks to budget-busting HA demands, they dive into w...