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 capabilities.

She shares what an all-hands-on-deck response looks like when a member hits trouble, why network visibility can turn weeks of troubleshooting into minutes, and the one shift she wants every member to make: treat security as an organization-wide culture, not a box the IT team checks for insurance or compliance. Plus a preview of OMC26, OSHEAN's annual member conference, covering quantum, AI, cybersecurity, compliance, and governance.

Key Events

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

01:00 From T-Mobile to OSHEAN

02:00 Serving Members, Not Customers

03:00 Security on Lean Budgets

05:00 Building Unbreakable Relationships

07:00 Security Beyond the IT Department

10:00 Previewing OMC26

12:00 How to Connect with OSHEAN

• Tip worth stealing: Security can't stop at the IT department. Make it part of the culture at every level and in every department, not just something you deal with when an insurance assessment or compliance requirement lands on your desk. No silos.

• Worth a look: OMC26, OSHEAN's annual member conference. https://oshean.org/events/omc26/

Connect with Us:

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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 rates for every member, firewalls and web filtering built in for K-12, and a NOC that knows each member's network.

Mark also walks through what the federal BEAD broadband program got right, why its 25% match and insurance requirements shut out small bidders, and how a shared Wi-Fi model is saving low-income and senior residents hundreds of dollars a month. He closes with why the consortium model matters more, not less, as AI, cloud, and cyber threats widen the gap between the haves and have-nots.

Key Events

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

01:00 Lessons From 14 Years at Cisco

04:00 From OEM Sales to Nonprofit Mission

07:00 Competing With Commercial Carriers

12:00 Proving Value to a Skeptical CIO

13:00 Building a Cybersecurity Office

14:00 BEAD Money and Digital Equity

16:00 Wi-Fi for Low-Income and Senior Housing

18:00 A Secure Statewide Municipal Network

21:00 Consortiums in the Age of AI

26:00 OMC26: Complexity Is a Team Sport

• Tip worth stealing: Shared infrastructure can close the digital divide at the building level. Using a Wi-Fi template built on OSHEAN's fiber, Newport Housing now supports more than 1,000 low-income and senior dwellings, with 700 to 1,000+ devices online at any moment and residents saving $200 to $400 a month.

• Worth a look: OMC26, the OSHEAN Member Conference, November 12-13 at Bally's and Rhode Island College. https://oshean.org/events/omc26/

Connect with Us:

• Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

• Learn more about the amazing software we use to create these podcasts (Descript): https://get.descript.com/mtu0tl2zr3g7

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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 than a checkbox, how an honest self-assessment surfaces the gaps that matter, and why reporting progress against a framework tells a board more than a list of security tools. Dave also shares how he approached the job as OSHEAN's first CISO by treating the organization like one of his own customers and ranking every finding by probability and business impact, and why he sees AI helping attackers find weaknesses faster than defenders can fix them.

The conversation closes with a preview of OMC26, OSHEAN's member conference on November 12 and 13, 2026.

Key Events

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

01:00 Lessons from Armored Fiber

03:00 Frameworks Are Not Checkboxes

07:00 Start Small, Be Honest About Gaps

09:00 Security Is a Leadership Issue

11:00 Chipping Away at the Stone

13:00 Deciding What to Defend First

16:00 AI on Attack and Defense

18:00 When Generative AI Is Just Noise

22:00 What to Expect at OMC26

• Tip worth stealing: Run an honest self-assessment against a framework, rank each gap by how likely it is to be exploited and how hard it would hit the business, then fix the highest-risk items first. Dave calls it chipping away at the stone, and says three to five years of it gets you to a mature security program.

• Worth a look: OMC26, the OSHEAN Member Conference, November 12 and 13, 2026 — Dave previews the security track on frameworks, GRC, and asset management. https://oshean.org/events/omc26/

Connect with Us:

• Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

• Learn more about the amazing software we use to create these podcasts (Descript): https://get.descript.com/mtu0tl2zr3g7

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• Suggestions or want to appear on a future episode? Email: podcast@mtmg.eu

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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 way out. MTMG's Paul Knittle and CISO Reed Savory dig into what "agentic" actually means in 2026, how consolidating a fragmented stack protects an MSP's margins, and the practical playbook for growing security revenue without burning out your team.

📌 Key Events

🎯 00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

🧩 01:00 Why fragmented stacks fail small MSPs

🛡️ 04:00 Identity as the main attack vector

💸 07:00 Consolidating the stack and the margin impact

🤖 08:00 What agentic really means in 2026

🗄️ 11:00 Why the SIEM and the data lake are dying

📈 14:00 Show, prove, and maintain the value

💡 Tip worth stealing: To build security revenue without burning out your team, show the value, prove the value, and maintain the value — surface a client's risk before the first meeting, then report week over week and month over month on what you actually caught and remediated.

To book a demo with Guardz:Book a Demo page

🔗 Connect with Us:

✅ Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

✅ Learn more about the amazing software we use to create these podcasts (Descript): https://get.descript.com/mtu0tl2zr3g7

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📧 Suggestions or want to appear on a future episode? Email: podcast@mtmg.eu

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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 visibility is the foundation for everything (you can't optimize a license you don't know exists), how the problem has shifted from wasted spend to serious security and data-governance risk, and how MTMG's strategic guidance pairs with Torii's platform to turn raw data into action. There's also a candid MSP conversation: how Torii built a partner program that keeps the MSP in the driver's seat and avoids the account conflict every sales leader fears.

📌 Key Events

🎯 00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

🔦 02:00 Why visibility comes first

📈 04:00 Discovery finds 3-5x more apps

🔐 07:00 From wasted spend to security risk

🧮 12:00 The Torii ROI report for MSPs

🤝 18:00 Keeping the MSP in the driver's seat

🧰 22:00 No services conflict with partners

💡 Tip worth stealing: Before you optimize anything, run a real discovery. On average it surfaces 3-5x more SaaS apps than a company thinks it has — and you can't govern access, cut duplicate tools, or renegotiate a renewal you never knew existed.

📝 Worth a look: Torii — SaaS management platform for discovery, spend optimization, and access governance. https://www.toriihq.com

🔗 Connect with Us:

✅ Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

✅ Learn more about the amazing software we use to create these podcasts (Descript): https://get.descript.com/mtu0tl2zr3g7

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📧 Suggestions or want to appear on a future episode? Email: podcast@mtmg.eu

💡 Need expert help to maximize your IT investments? Reach out: info@mtmg.eu

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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 boom: why one cabinet now draws the power that used to run a whole data center, why Northern Virginia priced itself out, and how cold-climate sites from Maine to Iceland are back in play. If you buy technology or care where the cloud actually lives, this one's for you.

📌 Key Events

🎯 00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

🏠 00:04 The buy-side agent model

🔧 00:07 Starrett: free advice to paid project

⚡ 00:11 How AI reshaped data centers

🌲 00:16 84 acres in Maine: the four hurdles

🧊 00:25 Iceland, cold climates, and ROI

🔮 00:29 The future of the IT advisor

💡 Tip worth stealing: When you buy IT the way most people buy a house - through a buy-side agent whose fee is paid by the seller - you get someone negotiating for you instead of telling your story to five different sales reps who all work for the other side.

📚 Books: The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr - the electricity-to-cloud analogy Carleton uses: once power went everywhere, factories no longer had to sit on a river, and fiber is doing the same thing for data centers today. https://www.amazon.com/Big-Switch-Rewiring-Edison-Google/dp/0393345223

🔗 Connect with Us:

✅ Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

✅ Learn more about the amazing software we use to create these podcasts (Descript): https://get.descript.com/mtu0tl2zr3g7

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📧 Suggestions or want to appear on a future episode? Email: podcast@mtmg.eu

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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 stripping emotion out of the decision and replacing it with data got one leadership team aligned for the first time. He also makes the case that the Microsoft versus Salesforce race has flipped, why Copilot and the Microsoft ecosystem are the reason, and where tools like HubSpot and Zoho stop serving a growing business. If you are choosing a platform, or living with one you regret, this is a practical look at how to make that call for where your business will be in three to five years.

Key Events

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

00:01 Why CRM Is Strategy, Not Technology

00:03 Building the Propeller Methodology

00:04 How CRM Shouldn't Suck Got Its Name

00:08 Why Microsoft Is Beating Salesforce

00:12 The Execution Success Roadmap

00:16 The Opportunity Scramble

00:17 Why Frontline Buy-In Decides It

00:20 When to Move to an Enterprise Platform

00:22 Where HubSpot and Zoho Stop Working

00:27 Getting Your Business Out of Spreadsheets

00:28 The Question to Ask Before You Buy

• Tip worth stealing: Ask a client to tell you about every spreadsheet they use to run the business. Those spreadsheets and stray Access databases are the silos your CRM should absorb, and the list is a fast, unemotional map of the manual work costing you money.

• Books: CRM Shouldn't Suck: Avoiding CRM Pitfalls Using Strategies for Success by Christopher Smith - the book Chris wrote after realizing his team was still doing too many CRM rescues. https://www.amazon.com/CRM-Shouldnt-Suck-Avoiding-Strategies/dp/B0DV48CZRK

• Worth a look: The book's own site, with more on the framework behind it. https://crmshouldntsuck.com/the-book/

• Worth a look: Miro - the virtual whiteboard Chris uses to run the opportunity scramble and pull honest feedback from frontline staff. https://miro.com

Connect with Us:

• Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

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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 device strategy, and wireline decommissioning. He also explains why AOTMP never takes vendor commissions and how its Efficiency First framework grades vendors on outcomes rather than feature checklists. If you manage technology budgets, vendor relationships, or AI rollout decisions, this episode gives you a shortcut to lessons other organizations already learned the hard way.

Key Events

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

01:00 What AOTMP Is and Why It Exists

04:00 The Cheat Code of Peer Best Practices

09:00 AI: The Biggest Pain Point in Tech Leadership

16:00 Lessons from People Already in the Weeds

20:00 Virtual vs In-Person: Why Format Matters

27:00 Join the Advisory Council for Free

30:00 Why AOTMP Never Takes Vendor Commissions

Tip worth stealing:

Join the AOTMP Advisory Council for free. It's about an hour a month, second Tuesday, 12-1 PM Eastern, covering two or three technology management topics. Tim's point: even if a topic isn't relevant to you today, you'll use it down the road when it becomes relevant.

• Worth a look: AOTMP Advisory Council — free, vendor-free peer roundtables for technology, telecom, and mobility management professionals. https://aotmp.com/industry-education-advisory-council/

Connect with Us:

• Check out our website: https://www.mtmg.eu

• Learn more about the amazing software we use to create these podcasts (Descript): https://get.descript.com/mtu0tl2zr3g7

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