Leading Edge Technology: What’s Next for SkyTerra

Ross Jordan: Welcome to the SkyTerra podcast, where we are empowering your business to do more. I’m your host, Ross Jordan. Every other week, we’ll explore the world of technology, what has changed, how it might impact your business and why it matters to you. We will bring you interviews with business and industry leaders and discuss how technological advances impact your business and our lives.

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a professional in the field or just curious about the future, this podcast is for you. So grab your headphones and join us on this exciting journey into the world of technology. Let’s get started.

Welcome to today’s episode of the SkyTerra podcast. We are thrilled to have a special guest with us today, Dan Bergeron. Dan is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in technology and business. Dan’s a partner and one of the two co-founders of SkyTerra Technologies. Dan has a passion for helping businesses of all sizes.

Not only is Dan a renowned architect, but his decades of experience using the systems he planned gives Dan a very unique perspective on how to not only design and build an IT solution, but how to build it in a way that allows the organization to actually use it. It’s one thing to build a complex system, but building it in a way that enables everyone in the organization to benefit from it creates value to the leadership of that company on so many levels.

This experience was gained serving as vice president for a highly respected, multibillion-dollar, Boston-based financial services firm where he had to design and build and manage these systems daily. 

In addition to his role at SkyTerra Technologies, Dan is also a co-founder, board member and technical advisor at Skylytics Data, where they have worked to design and develop leading-edge technology solutions that have been instrumental in bridging the data management gap by creating continuous intelligence technology and generating actionable business insights from it since 2020. And, as if starting a company on the leading edge of technology was not enough, Dan also co-founded this company in the midst of a global pandemic, creating its own sets of challenges. 

Dan is not only a sought-after speaker, advisor and leader for the business community in New England, but Dan’s building a legacy on how to generate viable IT solutions, allowing his customers to focus on the business of their business. So join us as we dive into a conversation with this dynamic leader who is dedicated to driving innovation and helping businesses thrive in the digital age.

We appreciate you joining and appreciate you taking the time to do this. We are trying to get a little bit of background on the founders of SkyTerra. What caused you to start it? What made you want to keep fighting to get it to where it is today? And what challenges do you see in the future? So there’s really a whole myriad of questions that we’re going to try to ask over the next 30 minutes and see if there’s a way we can communicate what makes SkyTerra successful.

So we’re going to cover three areas: the personal part of your life, your business startup and then where you see things going. I so appreciate your time today, Dan. 

Dan Bergeron: Thank you, Ross, for putting this together. It’s fun to talk about SkyTerra and what we built together. It’s become quite the family and how we continue to succeed together is quite awesome.

Ross Jordan: Absolutely honored to be a part of this, too. So, tell us a little bit about your history. You didn’t come from the world of MSPs. You came from enterprise, correct?  

Dan Bergeron: It’s an interesting journey. It’s interesting I got into computers at all. So I started off in my life doing drywall, believe it or not, of all things.

And probably learned what hard work was at that point. So everything since doing drywall has been pretty easy. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek because there’s been many 100- to 150-hour weeks through my decades of doing this. But the enterprise side is really where I grew up in technology.

Working at a large financial services company, well income management, I was one of the younger people going in at like 23 years old and having to earn my place in an enterprise like that. We were 200 people and change. And when I left there was 2,400 plus another thousand consultants.

But that’s where we learned to do more with less. We were managing a tremendous amount of revenue IRAs, revenue assets under management, and we were doing it with such a smaller business compared to our competitors in the industry. 

Ross Jordan: That’s very cool. And it’s different coming from an enterprise perspective to launch an MSP. How does that force you to think differently about 1, the solutions that you provide and 2, how you reach out to your customers? How do you appeal to your customers? 

Dan Bergeron: Yeah, so it’s different, but it’s not. It’s different because that’s what the industry thinks is different.

You look at traditional MSPs: They take the approach of looking at customers and saying, “We can do all their IT stuff. And now we’re going to plug in this, this and this and this.” And they do it really 100 percent for profit. Everybody says this is technically for profit, but they take a different approach to it.

When we started being an MSP, we were inspired to do more with less and concentrating on recognizing that our customers aren’t in the business of IT. They’re just like on the enterprise side. We were in the business of investments. We weren’t in the business of IT. We used technology to do that more with less.

So how we’ve addressed being an MSP, MSSP, you know, alphabet soup, everything else we do in that space, we’re looking at it as an opportunity to work with these companies to be an extension of their business. And in some cases it’s being an MSP, sometimes it’s just looking at where they’re struggling, where they can be more efficient.

You know, we will maybe do a team’s VoIP project or we might do SharePoint managed services or security services for them, or it may just be a one-off project to consolidate some of their technology so that they can do things on their own. 

Taking that approach of offsetting what a business does to, on the technology side, allow them to concentrate on their business is kind of what differentiates us and inspires us being an MSP. Not so much a land grab and we can do whatever… That’s not the approach. And it’s also not how we recruit people. When we listen to prospects and candidates coming into the organization, a lot of what we concentrate on is looking for individuals that think like us as well, who are not just in it because we like computers and we’re nerding out all the time, it’s about listening to people who like to problem solve and like to work with organizations to fix things. 

Ross Jordan: Absolutely. It’s critical. Having gone through that process, I can certainly amplify the value that brings, because the organization finds ways to not just build in new areas of technology, but also to use that talent to amplify what’s already here.

So it’s a great thing to experience. You guys started 2014 or 2015, right? Okay, so you’re in your stride, you’re growing, you’re moving: There’s always going to be exciting things that happen. I call that exciting with air quotes because they’re challenges. But you got to the point where you’re in full stride, and then, damn, you guys got hit with a pandemic. Like that never happens, right? It’s the first time it’s happened in technology. 

Explain what you went through as your business started up and as you guys were growing and then just to have this absolutely unique experience get thrown in your lap.

Dan Bergeron: It was an interesting time because we had just started hitting our stride as the MSP component. We were doing a lot of merger and acquisition work. Those were kind of paused at the time as well. And we were a smaller organization at the time. We were at a crossroads, I have to admit, because we were just about to take that process on the managed services side from crawling to walking to running.

We had to rethink how we were going to do things at the time. And what was really bizarre was, it got really eerily quiet for the first month. I was listening and hearing from my peers in the industry. Everybody else was panic-stricken. They had deployed technologies that were not able to be worked on from home.

Their VPN pipes were too small. They didn’t have enough access to their offices. Their phone systems weren’t working. And it was eerily quiet. So I started calling up each one of our customers at the time and the feedback was great. A lot of the feedback was “You have worked with us over the past couple of years to get us where we are. And the reason that we’re not panicking is that we’re in a good position because of SkyTerra.” 

That was flattering, but didn’t really help us in growing our business. So we’d ask the question, where can we help you? And, and in some cases it was stuff we hadn’t done with them before, like moving them from an on-prem via phone system or deploying virtual desktops in the cloud instead of being on-prem or working with a customer and saying, “Hey, you know, we’ve got this last file share that we have on-prem. Let’s move it up to SharePoint.” 

We did a lot of that for the first year and we were surprised; we got a call from Microsoft six months into the pandemic We were one of their top 10 voice business partners in the country. Actually, restate that, in North America. I took the call and said, “I don’t understand why you’re calling us. We’re not doing anything that amazing.” And they asked what we were doing to get all that work in that volume. I had to share with them that we just called our customers and tried to do the right thing, and it was great to have that recognition.

Microsoft thought at the time that we had these massive email campaigns, but it was just really being a good steward for our customers. We’ve taken that and we’ve grown upon that. We’ve done that with managed SharePoint services over the past year, doing a lot more with MSSP, the security services, and more recently in the past three to four months, we’ve now done that with data governance. 

You’re going to see something different with SkyTerra this year, where we’re going to be proactively demonstrating to our customers of the service: You’ll be seeing webinars, email campaigns, more marketing, because we are built to scale.

We go back to the original thing: We were doing more with less. We’re built to scale. We ate our own dog food. So we’re in that great position right now to succeed. 

Ross Jordan: The reference that you made earlier to crawl, walk, run, speaks volumes as to how you adopt and apply technology for not just your customers’ needs, but for the organization as a whole, right?

Not chasing the squirrel or being the squirrel and chasing everything that happens. So using that crawl, walk, run theory helped me understand when technology moves, it seems to move at a lightning pace, right? Just in the last year, artificial intelligence has become something big, right?

How does that apply to data governance security? It’s an ever-evolving threat. Help us understand how crawl, walk, run is applied in technology to make SkyTerra a more viable resource for its customers and apply technologies that are moving so fast. 

Dan Bergeron: So one of the things that’s been nice is that, between the enterprise experience, as well as the experience with well over 200 customers (we might be approaching 300 soon), we see where customers are successful. We use our own personal intelligence, and we can see where we’re succeeding versus where we’re not.

Where we see our customers succeed is where they do not try to boil the ocean and try to resolve all things at once. Data governance is a great example. A lot of the more complex organizations have these boards and they think “We have to do this.

We have to do that.” They’re boiling the ocean. And when they do that, they can’t get out of their own way and they will never succeed. What we have done is hired somebody we worked with back at Wellington. She was doing data governance for them for the past 17 years. She’s a business analyst by trade and she listens to the customer. She will take all their feedback and then work with them as well as our really smart engineers who also usually come from the enterprise side. 

We devise a plan to take a small bite out of what they’re trying to achieve to show that they have a little bit of success, and then we devise a plan to do more down the road, not to elongate the project: When you do it this way, you actually are able to build off your success and have a pragmatic approach to deploying and implementing new solutions. 

We do that across the board, whether it’s Teams VoIP project where you can do a call queue or auto attendant… You build it out on the side. You walk through it and you create QA testing. Then when you’re ready to deploy it, you go live. But you’ve already gone through and done the small piece of it so you can test it with a sampling. Then you grow and adopt it for the larger group.

We’ve been successful over and over and over on Teams VoIP projects. But we do that for every single technology we work with. It’s really great because that patience just leads to better successful deployments. So we’re not putting out fires. 

Ross Jordan: The reference that comes to mind is that you eat an elephant one bite at a time, right? You don’t try to do it all. Your reference to boiling the ocean is very accurate. But there is a lot of patience and, and almost resilience that it takes to not go after the land grab, right? Somebody asks you, how do you do this? And you have the talent that could do it, but maybe you haven’t applied it in the past.

Explain why you’re more reserved when it comes to building off those because you haven’t maybe walked yet. How do you do that as a co-founder? 

Dan Bergeron: There’s the old adage of don’t put the cart before the horse. Right? I actually don’t follow that. What we do is take little bits and bites and, whether we do it internally or we work with our customers who are leading edge all the time, we figure it out.

We build our special sauce behind the scenes with our WBSs and visioning documents. Then we put together our framework to ensure that not only can a specific engineer execute it or a specific PM, but by putting all the fundamental foundational pieces in place first, we’re able to scale the solution and deploy the solution and price it up properly.

By doing that, the customers have more faith in us; we have more faith in ourselves and we’re able to scale. This is why we’re in that place right now where we are positioned to grow and bring more people on who will be able to grab our core and quickly use that as a foundation to expand upon.

Maybe it’s my roots of being in construction and doing drywall and framing and such… They’ve been building homes for thousands of years, right? You can’t take shortcuts. And those who do, end up having a house that falls apart. There’s an order of operations where you put the foundation in, you frame, you put your roof on, etc.

But if you decide to put your drywall and insulation on before you put your roof on and it rains, what happens? Maybe it’s just a logic thing. And it’s that I’ve naturally had in my, my genes for working in a family that does construction, that this just makes sense to me and don’t really need to stress it.

So it’s a patience thing, right? You know, keeping calm and moving on. If you really take that approach and don’t panic, you inherently do the crawl, walk, run methodology. Or plan, build, operate. There’s different ways to look upon it, but we have 50 plus employees now who are built around that mindset.

We occasionally find somebody who doesn’t think that way and maybe it’s not a fit – the core of the organization follows this mindset. 

Ross Jordan: I think it speaks also to my experience as well that when you go for the land grab or when you go for the shiny penny and you haven’t thought through the processes as you’ve referred to through construction. I actually framed a basement at one time myself because I was a framer on summer jobs in college and I thought I’ll just frame my basement, no big deal. But I did not do a good job planning the plumbing, did not do a good job planning the electrical, but that’s because that had always been done for me when I was on the job site. When you’re doing it yourself, you can miss things. And it’s it costs a lot of money to fix those things. 

So, for the first several years from inception, you guys really didn’t go after markets per se, right? There was a client base that built referrals for you. There was business coming in. 

Not that those have changed, but as you grow, the need for revenue will grow, as well. So you’ve done a lot in the last few months to focus on the next 12 months of technology communicating out, building a marketing strategy to help clients find us easier. Talk to me about some of those things that you have coming in the next 12 months that you’re excited about that allow SkyTerra to move to the next level.

Dan Bergeron: A lot of people around think these things just happen, right? But there are years and years of vision that go in. And unfortunately, sharing that vision sometimes scares people. So, we spent the greater part of the last 12 to 18 months looking at what we were doing really well and slowly putting together a framework.

I say slowly, there are aspects that were slower and faster, but we put together this framework on the backside so that we had marketable and scalable solutions that we could deploy with a foundation of A players in our organization to execute on. Then last fall people saw a little bit of this because we were in a place where we could start building the communication aspect, the marketing sales component, which we’ve really never fundamentally did – most of our growth is in, in the financial services, life sciences and a lot of the regulated industries, because we came from regulated industry, so it’s kind of in our DNA and we’ve gotten tremendous amount of referrals from our customers that way and we thank them tremendously that they’ve helped us grow. But as you noted, we’re at that inflection point where we needed to do something else. We can’t just count on referrals because if we’re going to have growth and we need to have work for those people to grow and we want it, we need to provide more services to organizations from subject matter experts, then we do need to specialize a little bit more in different pods.

So we saw that writing on the wall and we’ve been slowly going through and ensuring the engineering and the project management and the paperwork side was all in place. Once we did that, we brought Deborah in to do some sales strategy. She’s been building out that very huge portfolio of communications on the backside, which people are starting to see whether it’s through our LinkedIn, social posts, our website, email newsletters, which have been rebuilt. So the quality of those are getting better every single time and we’re getting feedback that they are. 

Now we’re seeing a slight demand of these services increase through our internal customer base. And we’re starting to reach out and proactively distribute those to other circles because if we’re going to bring in another layer – in the subject matter experts – to bring in some of these solutions, which I’ll talk about in a moment, then we need to be able to do that.

So a couple of these solutions are the MSSP, or managed security services provider. We’re doing that a little bit differently than you would if you were to go through a traditional bar for that, whether you’re using Splunk or Arctic Wolf or Sentinel 1 or whatever, where we’re kind of leveraging our own customers.

We are leveraging our own customers’ infrastructure. So we’re building it on Sentinel, which is in the Microsoft ecosystem. We’re taking an approach of understanding that there are different types of customers where some customers want us to build it out for them and then they get the alerts and they act on the alerts.

We have another layer where we triage the first layer and then escalate to them. Then in the last layer, we triage and remediate or mitigate, depending on the security vulnerability that we’ve identified. All three of those are working great. Then another area that we’re growing in is the data governance business.

We’ve been doing data governance pretty much since day one. It goes back to why COVID was successful for us: We have moved people over to OneDrive and SharePoint and everything, and that data governance component is initially deployed with things such as gated access to certain sites or with MFA or restricting sites or restricting the creation of things or even automating. 

So if we had a customer who is in the business of sharing files externally, we created a power automate script that somebody fills out a form. The form gets approved with the data for that new customer. The site is built and now all of a sudden there’s a shared site for somebody.

When COVID occurred, that was one of the benefits. Most of our customers had already adopted that. Now we’re getting into data governance and we’ve done the baby steps of user access controls and such, but we need to take it to the next level with the new regulatory components out there and taking that MSSP to the next level as well, where traditional MSSPs will look at endpoints, firewalls and authentication.

At the end of the day, it’s data that you want to secure, so they’re not saying anything about data security when you’re going through that. Data governance will bring you up to that data security aspect, and then on the data governance side with Purview and the logging and the behavioral analytics, risk mitigation, that can alert to the MSSP.

So, we’re different in that space. There are other things that we’ve created. I’ve mentioned that managed SharePoint is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. We’re doing a lot more with Viva Learning. Viva is a component of the Microsoft ecosystem that sits on top of SharePoint and is intertwined with Teams and has provided a great learning platform for customers to learn to go beyond SOPs and provide different mediums for getting your trainings out. So that’s been extremely successful. 

We became SOC 2 compliant a few years back. That’s awesome. And we leveraged a solution for helping us become SOC 2 compliant. It’s really great that we became SOC 2 compliant, I wouldn’t say easily, but the pathway was well-defined because of the solution that we’ve worked on internally and because we ate our dog food in the Microsoft ecosystem. So once we completed that, we said this may be an opportunity for helping our customers out and becoming compliant.

So we started putting together an offering on that side as well, where we will help customers become NIST 800, SOC compliant, SOC 2 compliant, HIPAA compliant, and make that as easy as uploading some information and providing reports to the auditors or for our customers being able to download our SOC 2 report, making that easier for them.

Again, it allows for that customer to concentrate on their day-to-day work and not concentrate on the next audit because they’re living and breathing that audit all the time. So, I think we’ve been very innovative on how we’ve looked at that. We’ve built off our core and expanding into areas that are not a stretch for us whatsoever, but providing more value to our customers. 

Ross Jordan: A lot of the future podcasts scheduled over the next 60 days relate to those areas, security, governance, compliance – what it takes to do that, helping customers understand that. So I’m excited to help present some of that when the opportunity arises.

We’re winding up on the time that we have, but I think I’d like to close out with the final question being, What excites you about the future of SkyTerra? What do you see this organization doing in the next 12 months? What is going to look different with our next founders’ podcast versus where we are today?

Dan Bergeron: We’re not complacent, right? It’s funny, the Blackberry movie came out and I watched it on a plane a few months ago and I watched how Blackberry, they had two CEOs. You had a really great head of architecture of the solution and, he was played as a space cadet, not really strategic to the organization. With the two CEOs, one of them was looking to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and move them to Ontario.

And the other one was watching the iPhone come out and saying, “Ha! There’s no keyboard and there’s no feedback on the keyboard. How the heck is that gonna be successful?” But he wasn’t quite wrong. The initial iPhone was vaporware pretty much. And it wasn’t that solid, but he was missing about the future.

He was complacent; they were both complacent. One was complacent and “Hey, my business is doing great. I’m going to go concentrate on buying a hockey team” because that was his dream and the other one was complacent because he thought his stuff didn’t stink. 

If you’re going to ask me what I’m really excited about in the future is I see innovation. I see that we’re moving forward and we’re recognizing that we have deficiencies in areas, but we’re recognizing it and we’re building upon it and we’re looking at it as an opportunity, not a deficiency, right? There’s always an opportunity to improve. 

I still interview every person that comes into the organization. When we interview with them I say, “Hey, where were you five years ago?” A lot of times they wonder where is that coming from. Because I’m staging them for “where do you think you’re going to be in five years?” That’s an interesting conversation I have with them because they aren’t doing what they were doing five years ago.

I can’t predict where they’re going to be in five years. Things are moving too quickly, but it gets them thinking and they’re constantly challenging themselves. And I’m looking for people who aren’t complacent, right? If their answers are giving me some food for thought and stimulating me, it’s stimulating them as well.

And generally, that means there’s another great person to add on to the bus. 

Ross Jordan: That’s awesome. We only got through a few of the questions because there’s so much I want to ask you, but I do appreciate the time today. Thank you very much. Obviously, thank you for the opportunity to be here as well.

It’s an honor, a privilege, and I don’t take it lightly, but look forward to being a part of the future, being a part of your future, and watching this organization grow and really want to thank you for your time today. 

Dan Bergeron: Thank you, Ross, for everything you’ve done. And this podcast is going to be massively successful. I can tell it’s going to be fun. And I didn’t even mention that it’s one of the great fun things that we’re doing in the next 12 months. We’re bringing this on live and I think you’re going to get a pretty decent following. Looking back a year from now when we celebrate this anniversary, this will be one of the great successes that we have.

Ross Jordan: Now we’ve got a lot of material to get out there, and Deborah’s got a lot of material to work with once we get going, but looking forward to being a part of it. Again, thanks a bunch for being the visionary leader that you are, and I’m not saying that because I work for you. I’m saying that because I’ve worked for other organizations that don’t have that. It’s a privilege to not just talk about it in a boardroom but to be a part of it. So thanks for that opportunity and look forward to next year’s update. 

Thank you for your time today. We appreciate you listening to the SkyTerra Technologies podcast. For further information, you can find us on LinkedIn or at www.skyterratech.com. Have a great day.