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Someone on your team says the platform you run is holding you back: too much tech debt, a code base that needs a rewrite, or another vendor that's simply better. Max explains why "X versus Y" is usually the wrong place to start, how changing one piece of your environment affects everything connected to it, and the four questions to answer before anyone replaces a platform. What You'll Learn Why a...

A buyer recently emailed Mac McClenathan asking for two servers hosted on Hyper-V to run his Sage accounting software. His only reason was to avoid Broadcom's 72-core minimum. Mac's company sells VMware capacity from a pooled license, so the minimum never applied to him. He was ready to change platforms over a rule that wasn't his. Mac McClenathan is VP, National Partner Development at 11:11 Syste...

You got three quotes, pushed all three vendors, and took the one with 20% off. That process compares price on the basics every platform shares and hides what actually decides the purchase: whether the platform fits your business, and what the service really costs to deliver. Max explains why the three quote rule breaks down for enterprise technology and why a discount off the industry's opening pr...

Before you compare a single vendor, a lot of the decision is already made. The systems you run today rule some platforms out, and the choices you make now decide whether a requirement three years from now means adding a license or replacing something the business runs on. In this Playbook, Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, answers a question he was asked directly: which is harder, brownfield or gree...

Steve Wilson built his own AI assistant the careful way. He gave it its own Google account and read only access to his calendar, and told it not to talk to strangers. His company's CISO had a pen testing team go after it, and 4 days later the assistant reported that it had compressed his source code and attached it to a meeting with an outside consultant. A fake email from a lookalike domain, writ...

You bought the EDR. You checked every box your insurance renewal asked for. In this Playbook, Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, breaks down why 60% of ransomware victims had a leading EDR product deployed when they got hit, and what the other 40% were doing that they weren't. From the four tools insurance actually requires to the ones nobody budgets for until it's too late, Max walks through the gap...

Buying Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or Azure direct feels like the simpler choice, until you need support or get locked out of your own tenant. In this Playbook, Max Clark breaks down what a Cloud Solution Provider (a CSP) actually does between you and the platform: faster support and escalation, help recovering a locked tenant, engineering and migration support, and access to vendor funding y...

Which workloads actually belong in public cloud, private cloud, colocation, or bare metal? Jeremy Pease, CEO of Aptum, joins Max Clark to break down how application requirements, infrastructure costs, connectivity, resilience, and scale should determine where your workloads run. They get into cloud migration and repatriation, why connectivity can cost more than the infrastructure itself, workloads...

You didn't choose your cloud provider. You inherited it, from whoever picked the safe option first and called it a decision. In this Playbook, Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, names what that habit actually costs: three decades of consensus defaults, from the dot com era stack to LAMP to AWS's US East 1, and what the buyers who never questioned any of them paid for it, including the 15 hour outage...

Approving a technology invoice is not the same as validating it. Tommi Ellis, Channel Director at Intratem, joins Max Clark to explain how companies can tell whether anyone is actually checking telecom and technology bills against contracts, inventory, services, and real usage. They get into roughly $4,000 a month found sitting unnoticed on a 270-line wireless account, larger audits recovering as...

You're paying an MDR provider to protect you. Most of them will alert you and wait for someone else to act. This conversation names the one question that tells you which one you actually bought. Know the answer before it's 2am and someone's waiting on you to decide. You signed a contract for managed detection and response. You assumed that meant somebody would step in and stop an attack while it w...

A VP spent weeks building a plan to cut an eight figure cloud bill. He walked into one meeting with engineering. Three words killed it: not my KPI. The bill lands on whoever gets handed the mandate to cut it, but the authority to actually change it sits with someone else entirely, usually engineering, whose time is already spoken for by other priorities. A FinOps platform will find you the free mo...

Every vendor stretches the truth somewhere in your sales process, and most buyers respond to all of it the same way, forgiving everything or torching a good deal over nothing. In this Playbook, Max Clark sorts vendor lies into three categories, a harmless stretch, one rep's invented promise, and a lie the whole company stands behind, and gives a different response for each. Then he turns the mirro...

Your security tool says you're protected. Most of the time nothing is lying to you on purpose. It's just reporting what it was configured to report, whether or not anyone ever checked if that setup was correct in the first place.  Zach Stewart, CISO and Director of IT at Steno, spends this conversation walking through exactly where that gap hides, and it's not only the tool. There's the BAA that o...

Your website is no longer read only by people. Tony Lauro opens this episode with a client whose sequential order numbers let a competitor read their daily volume through a public API. No breach. No alert. Just a number counting up in plain sight. The same blind spot shows up when a product drop gets sniped by bots in seconds, or when the large language models you're exposing to customers and empl...

Six months before the largest retail breach in U.S. history, Target's threat detection system worked exactly as it was supposed to. It caught the attack. It fired five separate alerts. Then nothing happened, because the system could watch, but it couldn't act. That gap between detecting a threat and stopping it is where most MDR contracts fail their buyers. Max Clark recently evaluated a well know...

Most Teams Voice buying decisions start with carrier pricing. This conversation argues that's backwards. Before comparing price per seat, you need to know who's actually running the infrastructure, what you're locking yourself into, and which risks stay invisible until after deployment. Eric Burton runs National Channel at AudioCodes. He spent two decades selling dial tone on the carrier side befo...

Anthropic built Claude Code. Anthropic still couldn't stop its own source code from leaking straight into a competing product. If a coding tool is running behind your VPN right now with full access, this conversation names what that's already costing you. Thomas Cooper is AI Product Lead at Expedient, where he works daily with enterprises building AI governance after the fact, once a tool is alrea...

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...