Ep.238-PHP2Shell, The Crack in the Internet's Foundation

The numbers are staggering. Anthropic lost $80 billion in six months while committing half a trillion dollars to compute. And yet, study after study shows that 95% of enterprise AI projects produce no measurable result. So what is actually going wrong?In this episode, Josh Lupresto breaks down the gap between AI hype and AI results, and explains why the trusted advisor is the most valuable person in the room right now. The problem is never the model. It is always the integration, the scoping, and the proof. Companies are measuring activity when they should be measuring outcomes, and CFOs are starting to notice.Josh walks through the exact questions that separate the 5% of AI deployments that deliver real financial returns from the 95% that stall. If you are advising customers on AI spend, this episode gives you a practical, repeatable framework to help them land on the right side of that number.Topics covered include the real story behind the Anthropic financials, why saved hours are not saved dollars, how to set a baseline before any AI project begins, and how to position yourself as the advisor who makes AI actually pay off.

A 20-year-old vulnerability buried in PHP, the programming language powering roughly 70% of the internet, was just discovered by AI in about a week. Human researchers never caught it in two decades of looking. The result: hospitals pulled websites offline, European governments had MFA secrets and password hashes stolen, and 22 million servers were left exposed. This episode breaks down what PHP2Shell actually means, why the AI-assisted discovery of chained vulnerabilities has permanently changed the threat landscape, and most importantly, why this is one of the clearest and most timely opportunities technology advisors have had in years to go have a real conversation with their customers. Josh walks through how to lead with curiosity instead of alarm, which questions to ask, and how one headline legitimately opens doors across security, infrastructure modernization, code review, and even voice and UC. The ground has shifted. This is how you help your customers find their footing.

How does a premium golf club outfitter recover 20,000 missed calls a year — and turn that pain point into a better customer experience across voice AND chat?In this CX & AI edition of Inside the Win, Sam Nelson, VP of CX and AI at Telarus, sits down with Justin Shively of PolyAI to break down a real, closed customer win — and the practical lessons every Telarus technology advisor can bring into their own conversations.🏌️ The Customer: A well-known premium golf club outfitter with ~160 global locations, handling 200,000+ calls per year.⚠️ The Challenge: Roughly 10% of calls (~20,000/year) went completely unanswered — no voicemail, no BPO overflow, just lost revenue and a degraded customer experience for a brand that competes on exactly that.✅ The Solution: PolyAI deployed agentic dialogue to answer every call, eliminate reliance on the BPO, free up full-time employees for higher-skill work, and — once discovery uncovered a hidden need — unify the experience across both voice and chat.📈 The Results:$135K ARR win (Phase 1 — North America only) Deal doubled in size after discovery revealed chat + global opportunities 6-month sales cycle, anchored by a metrics-driven proof of value A clear path to expand into global sites and new channels 💡 Key Takeaways for Tech Advisors:Look at the opportunity in totality — ask about future state and vision. The voice-only deal grew into omnichannel and global once they asked the right questions. Get the customer's actual data — real benchmarks, workflows, and integrations drive a credible ROI (and are a perfect place to bring in Telarus). Define success up front — a mutually agreed proof of value with specific, accountable KPIs is what de-risks AI and gets deals closed. As a pure-play AI solution, PolyAI works irrespective of the customer's existing platform — no rip-and-replace, no vendor lock-in — making it easy to solve for high call volume, missed appointments, and customer experience gaps.Bring Telarus into these conversations early. We'll help you explore the opportunity, shape the next steps, and bring the right supplier teams together.👉 Subscribe for more real customer stories and practical, field-ready ideas from Inside the Win.Chapters: 00:00 Intro — Inside the Win: CX & AI Edition 00:30 What PolyAI Does (Agentic Dialogue for Enterprise) 01:30 Meet the Customer: Premium Golf Club Outfitter 02:30 The Challenge: 20,000 Missed Calls & Lost Revenue 05:00 The Solution: Replacing the BPO & Unifying Voice + Chat 07:30 Expanding the Deal Through Discovery 08:30 The Sales Cycle & Proof of Value 10:00 Key Takeaways for Technology Advisors 13:30 Final Thoughts & How to Partner with Telarus

AI agents are already operating inside your customers' businesses — accessing real data, making real decisions, and answering to no one. Two-thirds of office workers admit to using AI tools that weren't approved, and nearly half of all enterprise AI activity runs through personal accounts that completely bypass company controls. This year, shadow AI is showing up in 43% of data breaches — more than double the year before — at an average cost of $5 million each.In this episode, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, breaks down the shadow AI problem and why it's a fundamentally different challenge than the shadow IT issues we've been managing for 20 years. Unlike passive chatbots, today's AI agents take action — logging into systems, reading email, pulling records, and running workflows with little to no human oversight. And when they're unsanctioned, no one is watching the blast radius.But here's the opportunity: your customers can't see this problem, and that makes you indispensable. Josh walks through the exact discovery questions to ask, how visibility alone builds instant trust, and how the Telarus solution map — spanning governance, zero trust, identity, and monitoring — turns one invisible risk into a full security engagement.If you want to be the advisor your customers call before they adopt anything new, this episode is your playbook.

Can a single network deal become the doorway to much more? In this episode of Inside the Win, host Graeme Scott (VP of Network & Mobility at Telarus) welcomes back Mac McClenathan of 11:11 Systems to break down a real-world Network as a Service (NaaS) win—and the cross-sell opportunity it unlocked.Mac shares how 11:11 has quietly become competitive in the network space over the last 18 months, especially on the managed edge side. This deal came together the way many great channel deals do: through trust, relationships, and a partner who recognized the right opportunity.In this episode, you'll learn:🏥 The Deal – A healthcare organization rightsizing from 11 sites to 7, battling aging firewall infrastructure, failed failovers, and configuration loss with their previous aggregator/MSP (running VeloCloud under the hood).🔧 The Solution – A full network redesign built on managed Fortinet firewalls with built-in security, consolidating SD-WAN and firewall into a single appliance, refreshed switches, simplified failover, and single-vendor aggregation for one point of contact.📈 The Cross-Sell Proof – How following the wire led to attaching a backup tool and uncovering a future infrastructure opportunity (~$5K/month) on top of the ~$8K/month network deal. Mac reveals his internal 6-month cross-sell tracker currently sitting at an impressive 44% attach rate.This is land-and-expand in full display. If you're an advisor looking at network refreshes, renewals, or responding to a client incident, this episode shows exactly how strategic partnership with 11:11 can turn one opportunity into many.Engage Mac and his team at 11:11 for your next network deal.🎧 Subscribe to Inside the Win for more real-world wins and expert breakdowns.

Quiq founder and CEO Mike Myer joins Josh Lupresto to explain why voice is the real battleground for AI in customer experience. Learn how multimodal AI agents combine voice, text, and mobile handoffs to resolve issues end-to-end, why voice is "super hard" to make conversational (interruptions, pauses, latency), and how AI can assist human agents with back-end data entry and system integration. Real-world use cases include a health insurer handling spiky enrollment volume, a garage door troubleshooting QR handoff, and a resort AC rebooking demo. Discover the ideal AI customer profile, the "process guide" approach for business users, and where AI-powered CX is headed by 2027.

In this Cybersecurity Edition of Inside the Win, VP of Cybersecurity Sumera Riaz sits down with senior engineer Josh Haselhorst to break down how a simple circuit renewal at seven locations grew into a $17K MRR deal—complete with dual disparate circuits, a Fortinet NextGen SD-WAN refresh, outsourced firewall management, and a clear runway to XDR/SIEM/SOAR.You'll learn:• How to partner with an existing MSP instead of competing with them• Why "everything is connected to everything" opens cross-sell opportunities• How to move a client from MPLS to SD-WAN without a costly rip-and-replace• How platform consolidation (fewer devices, fewer portals) lowers spend and lifts the burden off thin IT teams• How to position security as certainty—not just another productWatch to see how solving the network problem the right way set up a SOC and XDR conversation for the future.

In one 48-hour stretch this year, roughly $285 billion evaporated off the value of the world's software companies. The press called it the "SaaSpocalypse" — the fear that AI agents would gut the per-seat software model that the entire industry was built on.But here's the take: this isn't software dying. It's a reshuffle — and nobody's guiding your customers through it. In this episode, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, breaks down why the SaaSpocalypse is one of the best opportunities advisors have had in years.You'll learn:• What the SaaSpocalypse actually is (and why Airtable selling for a tenth of its value isn't what it looks like)• How to sort every customer's software stack into three buckets: overspend, leverage, and gaps• Why helping customers cut wasted spend grows the relationship instead of shrinking it• Where this all maps to the Telarus Solution Map — license optimization, cloud, AI, security, and connectivity• Four questions to ask a customer Monday morning to open real pipelineYou're not the budget cutter. You're the portfolio manager for your customer's entire tech spend — and that's the most valuable seat in the building.

In this episode of Inside the Win, Chad Muckenfuss and partner development manager Jeff Farley discuss a critical success story involving a brand new partner. Jeff describes how Telarus responded to an emergency call regarding a municipality experiencing a DDoS attack that had lasted for 36 hours. By coordinating with suppliers to provide remote cloud-based remediation overnight, the team was able to restore normal operations for the customer within 24 hours. The incident resulted in a significant long-term win for the partner, who secured a one year contract for monthly monitoring following the successful resolution.

The price of intelligence just collapsed a thousandfold in three years—so why are AI bills still going up? In Part 2 of the AI Inference Flip, host Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, breaks down what happens when useful intelligence becomes an abundant utility, just like mechanical power, energy, information, and computing before it.This episode is all about the money: where cheap, abundant intelligence actually creates business value, and how you—the trusted advisor—help customers find it. Josh unpacks the Jevons paradox (why cheaper intelligence means more usage, not less), the concept of "LLM-flation," and the three buckets where value lives: cost savings, doing the previously-too-expensive at scale, and building genuinely new capabilities that weren't possible at any price.You'll walk away with the exact questions to ask your customers to connect nearly-free intelligence to a number their CFO cares about—and why "point them at the abundance, not the savings" is the advisor move that makes you indispensable.If this reframes how you see AI, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Rate and comment to help the show.Next Level BizTech — hosted by Josh Lupresto, Telarus.