3 Tree Tech

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[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

One of the more satisfying engagements we've worked on this year started with a problem most technology leaders will recognize: data volumes growing faster than the budget to store and use them, with security visibility getting quietly sacrificed to keep costs in check.

Monks was dealing with all of it. Engineering and security teams buried in logging cluster management instead of insights. Heavy sampling that left critical information missing during incidents. Cold log rehydration that took hours. And an AI platform in Monks.Flow generating event streams that threatened to make the economics worse, not better.

We helped Monks evaluate a range of solutions and landed on Axiom, whose patented data compression fundamentally changed how they could approach data. 95% compression, 40% lower observability spend, 65% faster incident resolution, strict data governance without sacrificing developer transparency, and zero-configuration ingestion through the Axiom Events API.

Monks converted a significant operational and financial burden into a strategic asset, and made Monks.Flow economically viable at scale.

If you're stuck in a similar tradeoff, the full case study is worth the read: https://t.co/wDNtX1fQSL

#EmpowerLeaders #AIReadiness #TechStrategy

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

You might have noticed 3 Tree Tech looks different lately.

That's Vitor Marques, our new Head of Product Branding and Marketing.

Vitor leads the alignment of product, brand, and go-to-market strategy across the company, including the integration of https://t.co/842BfB6r8X. The new brand identity, visual system, and market positioning are all his work. He's also partnering closely with leadership on how 3 Tree Tech presents itself as the company grows.

His background is 15 years as an executive producer and project manager across arts and culture, hospitality, and IT startups. He's led cross-functional teams and international projects, and he brings a systems-thinking approach to how brand, product, and operations connect. PMP certified, with a Social Communications degree and coursework in IT network administration, art business, philosophy, and art history. He's currently expanding into software development and AI architecture.

If you think the rebrand looks good, wait until you see what's next.

#EmpowerLeaders #Branding #TeamGrowth

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Every channel partner says the right things during the engagement process. Long-term relationship. We're here for you after the signature. We'll be your partner through the whole thing.

Then the contract gets signed and the experience starts.

The person you built a relationship with hands you off to someone you've never met. The implementation team asks questions that were already answered during discovery. The quarterly check-in feels like a thinly veiled upsell.

None of that means the partner lied. Most of the time they meant it. The gap between what gets promised and what gets delivered usually isn't a character problem. It's a structural one. The people who engage early aren't the people who deliver. The org is built to move on to the next opportunity.

Customers feel that gap even when they can't name it. Something shifted after the handshake. The energy changed. The relationship they were promised isn't quite the one they got.

That gap is why our policies exist. Commission tied to implementation success instead of the close. No activity spiffs that reward motion over outcomes. A team built around specialists who bring in teammates instead of faking expertise. A vendor evaluation process based on customer fit, not who can afford the biggest partnership investment. None of it is complicated. All of it is designed to make sure the experience after the signature matches what came before it.

#EmpowerLeaders #RelationshipFirst #ChannelPartners

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Kodie Kennedy has joined 3 Tree Tech as our Chief Product Officer.

If you're wondering why an advisory firm needs a CPO, that's kind of the point.

Kodie has a business degree from Texas State. Started in cybersecurity sales at Axis Security before HPE Aruba acquired them. Somewhere along the way, he got so frustrated watching buyers get buried under cold vendor outreach that he taught himself to code and built Konnectio from scratch. The whole platform. AI matching engine, anonymous browsing, everything. A business major who willed a software company into existence because the problem annoyed him enough.

We already announced the Konnectio acquisition earlier this year. What we didn't say enough about is Kodie himself. He's the reason the platform exists, and having him on this team full-time changes what we can build going forward.

More on that soon... stay tuned.

Welcome, Kodie.

#EmpowerLeaders #Cybersecurity #TechInnovation

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

There's a moment in every technical conversation where the depth either holds or it doesn't. The question gets specific. The environment gets complicated. And the standard talking points stop being useful.

What happens next tells you everything. One version: the conversation stalls. You get a pivot to a case study, a promise to follow up, a handoff to someone you haven't met yet.

The other version is different. The person across from you leans in. They engage with the specifics, connect what you're describing to something they've seen before, and flag a risk you hadn't considered because they've watched it play out somewhere else.

That second version is what we hire for at 3 Tree Tech. Not people who can cover everything, but people who go deep enough in their space that those moments don't faze them. And when the conversation moves beyond their domain, they know exactly who on the team to bring in.

#EmpowerLeaders #TechnicalDepth #ChannelPartners

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

This is 3 Tree Tech's fourth year participating in the nationwide St. Jude walk. You'll find us at this year's walk at the Oregon Zoo in Portland on September 19th.

St. Jude is a cause we're proud to keep showing up for. Since they opened in 1962, the childhood cancer survival rate has gone from 20% to more than 80%. Families never receive a bill for treatment, travel, housing, or food. The research gets shared freely, so kids everywhere benefit.

Join our team, donate, or spread the word here: https://t.co/HPWXz5PpgJ.

If you're not local to Portland, you can join virtually, or see if there is a walk near you here: https://t.co/UbPPHFtsER

Additional sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to Addie Rouse for details.

#EmpowerLeaders #StJude #StJudeWalk

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

We're a small team. Everyone knows each other. Not in a "we've met at the company offsite" way. In a "I know how this person thinks and what they're going to say before they say it" way.

That shows up in how we work with customers. A conversation shifts direction and the handoff happens without friction because the people involved actually talk to each other every day. There's no ticket to file, no warm introduction needed, no three-day lag while someone gets up to speed. Whether it's an initial engagement, an implementation, or a support issue six months down the road, the same team is there and they already know the story.

Big organizations try to manufacture that with team building programs and cross-functional initiatives. When you're small, it's just how things work. The person who started the relationship and the person helping deliver on it already have context on each other's work.

Our customers get the benefit of a team that operates like one because it actually is one.

#EmpowerLeaders #SmallTeamAdvantage #TeamBuilding

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

The time between a vulnerability being disclosed and a working exploit appearing has gone from two years to under a day.

Michael Meis, ACISO at The University of Kansas Health System, wrote this month's article for our insights page. He gets into what that compression does to the security programs organizations have spent years building, and more importantly, what he's changing in his own. The four-layer defense model he lays out is built so each layer operates on its own. If one breaks, the others still work.

The other thing worth flagging: Michael is honest about making bets on unproven approaches right now, something he says goes against his own rule of never buying roadmaps. He walks through how he's limiting the downside on those bets with exit ramps and performance milestones.

A working CISO thinking out loud about a problem the whole industry is feeling: https://t.co/ErP1C6Ek9f

#EmpowerLeaders #Cybersecurity #VulnerabilityManagement

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Speed matters in the channel. Not just in closing deals, but in the handoffs, the introductions, the follow-ups between partners, vendors, and customers.

When any part of that chain slows down, the customer feels it. They don't always know where the delay happened. They just know the experience didn't match the expectation. And that shapes how they feel about working through the channel the next time around.

Nobody owns the whole chain. Partners depend on vendors. Vendors depend on internal routing. Customers depend on both. Everyone's moving fast on their own priorities, and the gaps between those priorities are where momentum quietly dies.

We sit in the middle of that chain every day. We don't control all of it. But the parts we do control, we take personally. When our name is attached to an introduction, the experience that follows matters to us whether we're the ones delivering it or not.

#EmpowerLeaders #PartnerEcosystem #Responsiveness

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

If you're a technology leader working with a traditional channel partner, it's worth thinking about how the solutions in their portfolio got there.

A lot of the time, the answer involves upfront fees, free deals, or margin concessions that only established vendors can afford. A startup with a genuinely better approach to your specific problem might never make it through the door because they couldn't afford the cost of entry. That doesn't mean your partner is doing anything wrong. Partners need margin to operate, and vendors with deep pockets can offer it. But the downstream effect is that the options in front of you have already been filtered by factors that have nothing to do with your environment.

We think about this when we evaluate vendors for our own portfolio. The question we care about is whether the technology solves a real problem for our customers. How much a vendor can spend on the partnership isn't part of that conversation.

#EmpowerLeaders #StartupInnovation #VendorEvaluation

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Every channel partner will tell you they put the customer first. The real test is what happens when putting the customer first conflicts with the business model.

Sometimes the customer's problem doesn't line up with anything in the portfolio. Sometimes the honest answer is "you probably don't need to spend money on this right now." Those moments happen more often than most people realize. How a partner handles them tells you everything about what they actually optimize for.

At 3 Tree Tech, we've been in those situations. They're never comfortable. But the team we have doesn't really operate any other way. When the fit isn't right, they say so. Not because there's a policy requiring it, but because that's the kind of people they are.

#EmpowerLeaders #ChannelPartners #TrustInBusiness

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Every organization has decisions it stopped questioning a long time ago. Not because someone evaluated them and confirmed they still make sense. Just because they've been around long enough to feel permanent.

The meeting cadence nobody revisits. A vendor relationship that runs on autopilot. Some process that exists because it existed last year, created by someone who left the company two jobs ago.

None of these are necessarily wrong. That's what makes them tricky. They work well enough that there's no obvious reason to reexamine them. And "well enough" is the quietest way an organization stops getting better.

It's something we think about a lot at 3 Tree Tech. Not because we've solved it, but because we know how easy it is to stop looking.

#EmpowerLeaders #BusinessStrategy #ContinuousImprovement

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Somewhere between parking a DeLorean at a Stealth Event and letting President Camacho run a Technology Summit, we realized something: the best professional events don't feel like professional events.

The 2026 Empower Summit is sketch-comedy themed. September 23–24 in Portland. Two days you'll actually enjoy.

Early bird pricing through May 26: https://t.co/fZJx4QGrNL

#EmpowerLeaders #EmpowerSummit #Portland

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Nobody on our team is expected to know everything. That's the point.

We let people thrive in the areas they're strongest, and when a conversation moves into different territory, they bring in a teammate who lives there. An infrastructure question turns into a compliance discussion? Someone on the team owns that space and jumps in with real context.

That means the person you're working with can actually engage with your specific environment. They can tell you whether a solution fits the problem you described five minutes ago, or if you're about to spend six months implementing something that addresses a symptom instead of the root cause. Whether it's an initial conversation, an implementation, or a review six months in.

When your partner's team pivots from confident to vague, that's the edge of their actual knowledge. Ours just bring in the next person.

#EmpowerLeaders #TeamSelling #SubjectMatterExperts

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

There's a difference between building a partner organization from the vendor side and building one from the customer side. Most channel partners are built by people who grew up in channel sales. The instincts and assumptions about how things should work all come from that perspective.

When Carraig joined 3 Tree Tech, he brought the other side with him. Years as a technology leader, sitting across the table from channel partners, remembering which practices felt helpful and which ones felt like they existed to serve the partner, not the customer. That perspective now lives inside how we operate.

It's not that one perspective is better. It's that the customer perspective is almost entirely absent from how most partner organizations are designed. That absence shows up in a hundred small decisions that individually seem fine but collectively create an experience that feels like it was built for the partner, not the buyer.

#EmpowerLeaders #ChannelPartners #CustomerExperience

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Did you catch Jacob Friedman on the Zero Trust Forum's No Trust podcast?

He sat down with Jaye Tillson and John Spiegel to talk about what's actually driving cybersecurity purchasing decisions right now, how to evaluate early-stage vendors without getting burned, and why the gap between visibility and remediation keeps getting wider.

If you're heading to RSA next week, the conversation on surviving the expo floor is especially worth your time. Jacob's advice: define what success looks like before you land in San Francisco, or you'll spend the whole week reacting instead of executing. The vendor noise is louder than ever. Showing up without a plan is how you come home with a full inbox and nothing to show for it.

🎧 https://t.co/2lm0QNVCOa

https://t.co/R4RPlAHh5u

#EmpowerLeaders #Cybersecurity

@jspieg67 @JayeTillson

[3 Tree Tech @3treetech]

Structure is sneaky. It shapes behavior in ways that nobody explicitly designed for.

How opportunities get routed, which vendors get prioritized, how reviews get run. None of those things are neutral. They all send signals to the team about what matters. And those signals don't always match what leadership thinks they're communicating.

The tricky part is that misalignment doesn't usually show up as a big visible problem. It shows up as a pattern. Maybe recommendations keep skewing a certain direction without anyone deciding they should. Or engagement tapers off at a predictable point in the customer relationship. The drift is quiet, which is what makes it hard to catch.

We're not immune to this. Being a small team doesn't automatically mean your structure is clean. It just means the drift is easier to spot if you're paying attention. We try to pay attention.

#EmpowerLeaders #IncentiveAlignment #OrganizationalDesign