A Conversation With ... Richard Reding

What services do you provide at TierOne?
TierOne is a technology advisory, procurement and client experience firm providing businesses with access to more than 500 leading voice connectivity, data center and cloud services, and solution providers. With that range and visibility to all the different solution providers, it allows us to be agnostic and we can go and help our clients identify multiple options, bring those options to bear, help them evaluate those options. Once they make a selection, we’ll provide a dedicated customer experience manager to help implement that solution and then they maintain accessibility in an ongoing support capacity for the life of the solution. We typically start all of our engagements by creating an in-depth analysis of an organization’s technology environment. We do that work upfront for no cost and with no commitment. We do that because we believe in our ability to provide value. The focus on that is heavily around optimization. Whether that is performance, productivity or cost, sometimes it’s all three, and those are always great. Optimization is a huge focus; three years ago, it wasn’t. It was like bolstering on jet packs to all the things that people were doing. The economy was different. You saw a lot of people buying with intentionality to try to accomplish a thing. Now, there’s definitely a concerted effort to be more mindful of cost and to start kind of trimming the fat and to reoptimize the environment.

What do you see as disruptors in your industry?
We are reaching an interesting age in technology, and I’m going to be careful here with a generalization, where in many cases the tech, there’s a lot of table stakes across differing or competitive products and platforms. There’s a lot of things that are the same. There are small differences. Really what it comes down to is how you are going to use it or how well or easily you can implement it. That really starts to become the big differentiator or disruptors. But the biggest disruption to our industry right now is definitely mergers and acquisitions. That has a heavy impact on organizations. It seems like as these up-and-coming providers or solutions start to get identified, they get gobbled up. When they get gobbled up, oftentimes they get diminished and/or broken for a period of time as they get embedded into XYZ’s suite. Right now, our industry is under siege from private equity. We’re seeing it every week. Voice internet service providers, obviously lots of software providers, security solutions, and it runs the gamut where you see these different providers acquiring them. It’s been the toughest couple of years that we’ve had. The agnosticism is wonderful because we’re not beholden to any one solution or service provider, but on the flip side of that, it comes with great responsibility because we have to make sure that we’re identifying service and exclusions that are not going to be encumbered by these sorts of events.

I imagine another challenge is the growth of the data breaches that companies have experienced. The Identity Theft Resource Center reported in 2023 there was a 72% increase in data breaches since the last record year in 2021. These can be costly incidents for companies.
They are becoming less costly. There are obviously still some substantial costs, but with, in general, the move to the cloud, that has helped a lot of organizations because they are not as vulnerable. It definitely does allow you to have a little bit more control over the way that you protect yourself. There’s a lot that goes into cloud environments and backups and disaster recovery. We are seeing breaches increase, and I think we will continue to see them increase, but I think that part of the reason that they’re increasing is also because each individual breach is not yielding the same amount. The yield for them is going down.

What are other ways you’re trying to protect clients?
What we focus on more than anything is aligning them with good solution providers that are going to manage that experience with them. So oftentimes, organizations may not have the personnel in house to have a robust security practice. Finding not just the product but also the provider that’s going to be that trusted, third-party security solution provider or managed security solution provider. There’s a lot of similarities between the field. It comes down to relationships, people that can say how high when you ask them to jump. And then also leaning back into the different products or platforms that you are already heavily invested in, so you can minimize bloat. That’s a big, big problem across the industry and organizations as a whole. They’ll have three or four different solutions that have overlapping services. It’s very common, particularly in security, where you may have two or three different products that can all do end-point protection, but you are only leveraging one.

Last year, you had 13 employees. Have you grown since then and what opportunities for growth are in your talent pool?
We are at 16 now. We have added an engineering team. So, we’ve brought some of those things in-house where we were previously kind of reliant upon our partner portfolio. That’s a part of the mantra that we have here. Support is another, which we call client services, but that’s another element that we have added. We kind of carved that off as a separate team and been building out that team. What’s unique about us is we don’t bill our client for any services. They don’t sign the contract with us. They sign with the service provider that they selected. But we aim to be their only call. The client can by all means reach out to that provider. But they don’t have to anymore. The more enabled that we can be to provide what I’ll call one call resolution so that we can remedy or resolve matters ourselves is good for all parties.

In 2022, you reported $3.3 million in revenue. What are you tracking for this year?
Last year, we did like $3.5 million and then I think that this year is actually going to be relatively static. It’ll be around $3.6 million. We’ve been more focused on developing internally. So, we’ve added some of those teams. With that comes training and all growth is kind of painful. As you’re building those things up and getting new processes in place, those things can be very time consuming and laborious. So that’s actually been a bigger focus, as well as just working with our existing clients to continue to expand our capabilities.