ITBroker.com

Founder & CEO

Technology Advisor Alliance

Advisory Board Member

Stealth Startup

Advisor

Creative Thought, Inc.

President

Phyber Communications, LLC.

Managing Director

USSearch.com, Inc.

Senior Systems Architect

eMind.com, LLC

Information Systems Architect

Network Magic Unlimited

Network Engineer

Buying IT is broken.

I’ve been in the room when the wrong tool was chosen and spent months cleaning up the mess.
I’ve watched budgets disappear on software nobody used.
I’ve been the buyer under pressure to decide fast, knowing one bad call could derail the business.

That’s why I built ITBroker.com — the partner I wish I’d had back then.

Most of my conversations today are with CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs who just want a straight answer.
Here’s what we work through together:
- Figuring out what actually matters for their business, not just what vendors are pushing
- Laying out the real options so they can see what’s useful and what’s just hype
- Making sure contracts are simple and fair so they never get surprised later
- Cleaning up what’s broken so their stack finally works the way it was supposed to

In high-stakes industries like healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, one wrong IT call can cost millions. 
My job is to make sure you get it right without vendor spin, lock-in, or regret.

If you’ve got a critical IT decision on your plate, let’s talk it through. No pitches. No confusion. Just a clear path forward so you can make the right call.

Max Clark

Stop blaming the cloud for your bill.
Blame the “lift-and-shift” strategy that should’ve died in 2016.

Companies didn’t overspend because AWS or Azure are expensive.
They overspent because they moved legacy, monolithic, non-elastic workloads into a platform designed only to be cost-efficient if you architect for elasticity.

In other words:
You tried to run a 1990s data center on 2025 infrastructure and acted surprised when the invoice looked like a ransom note.

Here’s what actually blew up your spend:
Refusing to refactor.
Leaving zombie instances running.
Zero auto-scaling.
No tagging discipline.
Zero storage tiering strategy.

This wasn’t modernization.
This was transferring your mess to someone else’s computer and paying a 40% premium for the privilege.

The cloud didn’t fail.
Your migration plan did.

If you aren’t willing to redesign the app, you aren’t migrating to the cloud.
You’re just relocating technical debt.

Buying IT is Broken — Helping IT & Security Leaders Buy Tech Without Regret | Founder, ITBroker.com | Podcast Host

Walked across a fiber crossing - some of the companies don't exist anymore, but the fiber lives on!

itbrokerdotcom

pivatel

(20) Nelson Brothers: Overview | LinkedIn

li_at

JSESSIONID

Talks about #startups, #technology, and #cybersecurity

60% of IT and security pros say they’re ready to quit.

That’s not a hiring stat.
That’s a warning light.

Not because the work got harder.. it always gets harder.
Because inside most organizations, the work stopped being treated as strategically important.

We automated detection.
We flooded teams with alerts.
We built dashboards that measure everything except who is accountable for fixing root causes.

You can automate analysis.
You can’t automate ownership — and without ownership, the work becomes pointless.

Most teams aren’t “approaching burnout.”
They’re already there: buried in noise, carrying the risk, and ignored when they call out systemic failures.

The next big IT crisis won’t be a zero-day.
It’ll be the talent collapse when the people holding the line decide they’re done.

So here’s the uncomfortable question:
Which leadership behaviors in your org are accelerating that exit?

I recently spoke with a hospital CFO who sounded exhausted.
Their VMware renewal jumped from $30K to $120K, a 300% spike overnight.

That single renewal didn’t just blow up their IT budget.
It triggered a chain reaction:
- Unplanned expenses
- Audit exposure
- Scrambling to protect already stretched funding

And they’re not alone.
Hospitals across the country are getting hit by the same pattern:
renewals spiking, audits tightening, and hidden IT costs quietly destabilizing the budgets that fund patient care.

What hurts most isn’t the software itself.
It’s what happens after.
When the numbers break, it’s not servers that get cut.
It’s staffing, patient services, and financial stability.

After dozens of these conversations, we started mapping the blind spots we kept seeing: financial, operational, and contractual and built something practical from actual hospital data.

The 30-Min Funding Visibility Safety Net
A one-page checklist to help healthcare IT and finance leaders uncover the hidden risks that quietly drain budgets and trigger audit flags before they cause real damage.

It’s fast. It’s clear. And it’s built from what hospitals are living through right now.

CFOs are getting blindsided every week.
You’ve got 30 minutes — use them. 

Link in comments.

Any competitor to Cloudflare telling you to switch because of today's outage is a vampire and should be avoided

Outages happen to everyone, it's how often and how they're handled that matters

Understanding third party risk to your business is another story - let's chat!

An AI SDR just called our AI Receptionist

I'm laughing so hard listening to the call recording that I almost made a mess

No alternative text description for this image

Everyone knows that red is the only correct answer

Sometimes being the voice of reason is the hardest part of my job

"Let's replace Meet/Teams/Zoom with our own homegrown solution"

Umm, Zoom is spending almost $1B/year on R&D. What is your budget for your in-house solution?

"But we're spending $20 x Employee Count on this, and it wouldn't cost us anything in the future"

Sure, even using an OSS base and a crazy small team of engineers, devops, and infrastructure cost you're talking about 10x the annual cost vs just paying for the license

The best part is 100% of the time, the Executive that had this idea and drove the project moved on before it was even close to being usable

Then someone new has to come in, be the bad guy, cut the project and do what should have been done the first time

Too bad the company has wasted years of innovation, money, and productivity chasing some nonsense that isn't core to their business in the first place

I’ve seen hospitals lose millions they already earned.
Not from bad care.
From missing proof.

CMS asked for audit data.
Finance couldn’t  produce it.
Payments froze.

It wasn’t fraud.
It wasn’t negligence.
Just invisible gaps no one expected.

A server that never synced.
An imaging system that vanished off the network.
A missing backup log no one thought to check.

These aren’t IT bugs.
They’re blind spots that make audit evidence disappear without warning.

And every Finance team I’ve met believes they’re audit-ready...
until CMS asks for proof they didn’t know they needed.

It’s still happening.
Right now.
In hospitals that think their data is airtight.

When CMS flags noncompliance, cash flow doesn’t slow.
It stops.

Once reimbursements freeze, the loss is permanent.

We’ve seen this story repeat in hospitals across the country.
So we started mapping the same patterns:
Financial, operational, contractual and built something practical from real hospital data and firsthand conversations.

The 30-Min Funding Visibility Safety Net
A one-page checklist to help Healthcare IT and Finance leaders find the blind spots that quietly drain budgets and trigger audit flags before they cause damage.

If you’re the one signing off on compliance, it’s your balance sheet on the line, not IT’s.

How certain are you that every system feeding your audit trail is still connected and syncing?

Don’t wait for CMS to find what’s missing.
Find it first.

👉 Link in comments.

Funding Blindspots in Healthcare IT

Saw another “digital transformation success story” today.
Slick slides. AI everywhere.

And all I could think was, we still haven’t learned.

Underneath all that “innovation,” most companies are still running on brittle systems held together by duct tape and hope.

We’ve built an industry on innovation theater.
Every deck screams AI.
Every vendor promises transformation.
But the foundation hasn’t changed in 20 years.

You can’t keep stacking new tools on top of:
- Networks running configs from 2010
- Integrations that break if someone sneezes
- Security policies written for an on-prem world
- “Cloud migrations” that just moved old problems into someone else’s data center

That’s not transformation.
That’s a remodel on a crumbling house.

Then comes the same cycle of shock:
“Why are our cloud costs out of control?”
“Why does every change take six months?”
“Why can’t IT move faster?”

Because architecture debt compounds like financial debt.
And every shiny new system adds more interest.

Everyone wants innovation velocity.
Nobody wants to pause and pay down the architecture debt first.

Here’s the thing: you can’t transform a business built on wiring from 2004.
At some point, you either rip it out,
or you wait for it to collapse.

Be honest, why doesn’t architecture debt ever get fixed even when everyone knows it’s killing progress?

I’ve lost track of how many hospital execs tell me:
“Downtime hurts… but we recover fast.”

We both know that’s not true.

Downtime isn’t an inconvenience.
It’s a funding loss event.

The moment your EMR goes dark, the financial damage is immediate:
No charting
No claims
No billing
No reimbursements

I’ve seen hospitals lose 40–80% of their daily volume during what they called a “short” outage.
 And here’s the part nobody likes to admit:

Cashflow doesn’t magically snap back when the system is up.
The lag drags on for days, sometimes weeks because the entire revenue engine was stalled.

You’re not just losing time.
You’re losing the revenue your budget is built on.

And the root cause is almost never the outage itself.
It’s the blindspots that delayed the alert…
the ones nobody noticed until the damage was already in motion.

If your strategy is “we’ll catch it when it breaks,” you’re already too late.
By the time something breaks, your funding is already compromised.

Your funding is one blindspot away from a reporting gap.

These conversations keep exposing the same five blindspots — so we built a 30-minute visibility safety net to make them impossible to miss. 

If you’re responsible for reimbursement, audit readiness, or cashflow stability, this isn’t optional anymore.

Link in comments.

We didn’t “move to the cloud.”
We scattered sensitive data across everything and called it strategy.

Data is now on file servers, laptops, phones, SaaS apps, cloud buckets, AI pipelines — and nobody has a single, honest map.

That visibility gap costs you long before a breach headline:
- wasted tools and duplicate controls
- ugly surprises in audits and investigations
- fines when regulators realize you never had control

This isn’t a “we need another security product” problem.
It’s a “we don’t even know where our data lives” problem.

That’s what I dug into with Sirena Ong, VP, Sales & Alliances at Secuvy — what actually happens when you turn on DSPM in a real environment and see where your data has really gone.

If you own security, risk, or compliance, this is the uncomfortable conversation you can’t keep skipping.

Episode is now live - link in comments.

Insurers are quietly backing away from AI coverage.

Premiums are up.
Payouts are down.
And those new AI-related risks, like training data lawsuits and bad automated decisions, aren’t covered at all.

For years, companies treated cyber insurance like a safety net.
Or worse, a parachute they assumed would open when everything broke.

But here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud:
That parachute’s full of holes.

Coverage isn’t protection anymore.
It’s paperwork.

As more insurers add “AI exclusions,” the smartest companies are finally realizing something important.

Resilience isn’t something you buy.
It’s something you build.

The smart ones aren’t asking who insures them.
They’re asking what happens when the parachute doesn’t open.

Because in today’s risk economy, the only real protection comes from what you’ve built, not what you’ve signed.

Curious — do you think cyber insurance can keep up with AI risk, or are we all just self-insured now?

Global Cloudflare outage. Hopefully they work through this quickly.

2024 was all about moving fast with AI.
2025 feels more like asking where all that budget went.

In the rush to prove they were “doing AI,” a lot of teams said yes to everything.
Every pilot. Every proof of concept. Every shiny demo.

Now those same teams are spread thin, the pilots are collecting dust, and “integration” looks a lot like a shared spreadsheet.

We called it transformation.
But it’s starting to feel more like exhaustion.

Here’s the hard truth.
Most companies don’t have an AI problem.
They have a focus problem.

Everyone’s chasing use cases.
But few are asking the better question.
Where does AI actually make things clearer, faster, or smarter for us?

The winners in 2025 won’t be the ones doing the most with AI.
They’ll be the ones who stopped trying to do it all and started doing the right things for the right reasons.

So I’m curious.
In your world, is AI adding clarity?
Or just another layer of complexity dressed up as progress?

Cranberry Chutney

Ingredients:
1 Ib. fresh cranberries
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 cups fresh orange juice
1 cup apple cider
1 cinnamon stick
6 fresh mint leaves

Directions:
Sort the cranberries, discarding any soft ones.

In a saucepan over medium heat, combine the cranberries, granulated sugar, brown sugar, orange juice, cider, cinnamon and mint and stir to mix. Bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally, then reduce the heat to medium-low. Simmer until the juices have reduced and are thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 1 hour.

Let the chutney cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate. Let stand at room temperature for about 1 hour before serving. Remove and discard the cinnamon stick. Transfer the chutney to a sauceboat or serving bowl and serve. Makes about 2 1/2 cups.

Using AI to pick health insurance - overview and prompts

We've had a miserable experience with United Healthcare over the last two years, so much so that we decided to switch

While cost sharing is an interesting idea, I just wasn't ready to go there and was looking for a traditional plan for my family

The question then becomes what carrier should we use, and which plan should we take

I created a prompt for AI (a sample below for you to copy and paste) and then was able to ask more specific questions to understand what the coverages included and excluded, and what the different coverages and deductibles would mean for us

The real value of all of this was being able to educate myself to the point of being able to ask specific questions to our Insurance Broker, who ended up pointing out things that the AI had missed

All in all I was able to shorten the entire process to a couple of hours with AI and then a 30 minute phone call with our broker

Out of curiosity I ran the same prompt and follow up questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok

I could not get Claude to give me anything of value to work with, it was probably how I was crafting the prompt but it was obviously not the right tool for this task
ChatGPT had issues downloading the SBCs off the websites, I was able to work around this and get to a good response

Gemini and Grok both downloaded, parsed, outputted and gave me (similar) information to figure out what I was looking for

I wouldn't rely on AI exclusively to pick insurance and I don't recommend you do either

Slow news day lol

Netflix is buying Warner Bros and HBO for $82.7B!!!

What do you think this means for the content/streaming wars going foward?

Lololol offshore sales development agencies trying to fake being in the US and then cold calling on Thanksgiving

Who wants to go to the US Open?

Amex Premium Hospitality is on-point

LMK

AVANT Communications

4+ years in, #TeamHodge has built an incredible local Team supporting all of our Trusted Advisors in ARK, OK, and N TX! The HQ2 BattleLab has grown to 20+ employees and we are DFW's fastest growing TSD w over 70% YoY Growth! We empower the Trusted Advisor to navigate the ever-changing technology landscape with the knowledge and support to prepare for the future.

Believe. Invest. Achieve. With an accelerating pace of change in IT, you need a Trusted Advisor to help you navigate the confusion change is causing in the market. AVANT enables the Trusted Advisor with a platform for IT Decision Making, enabling business transformation. Our Vision is to be the global leader in powering next generation technology decisions. The pace of change in IT is too fast for any one CIO to keep up. That’s why 87% of Enterprises that are ahead of the technology curve have a Trusted Advisor guiding them behind the scenes. We’re the platform behind the Trusted Advisors.

If you would like to hear more about who we are, what we do, and what the separates AVANT from the competition, I would love to provide that consultative role. I can be reached at MHodge@GoAvant.net

Channel Director

Vonage

Channel Sales overlay partnering with all Master and Sub Agents in machine learning and digital transformation. Offering Collaboration, Integration, and Programmable APIs, I worked to position the Vonage brand as the leader in one of the hottest markets in the world.

Senior Channel Manager

China Telecom Americas

One of Two National Channel Managers in the United States for the U.S subsidiary of China Telecom Global. Supported 35 Account Managers scattered throughout North America and managed relationships with hundreds of Partners and most Master Agents. I worked daily to increase CT Americas mindshare while helping ensure success of my VARs, Integrators, Consultants, Brokers, and Data Center providers to best support our clients and ultimately win the sale.  My territory was North America, focused on the Central U.S.

National Channel Director

ANPI

Enterprise Sales Manager

West Corporation

Regional Sales Director

XO Communications

Enterprise Sales Director

Cbeyond

Sr Market Director / Interim VP/GM

Sales Manager

Seasoned Telecom Professional and Business Development Executive with 18 years of Telecommunications Management. Results driven leader with extensive operational and marketing experience across multiple industries. A hands-on leader with a proven track record in developing and leading high performance teams, building brands, and driving business growth through innovation.

Built and managed multiple top-performing sales teams at multiple levels across the US, while customizing the strategies relative to the market tiers and geography. A self-motivated and goal-oriented sales professional. Experienced in developing new territories and strategic partnerships, retaining valued client base and consistently drive market share in competitive markets. Creative problem solver and relationship manager with superb partnering and consulting abilities. Recognized for consistently exceeding quota.

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Michael D Hodge

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