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SmartChoice Joins The Consortium to Advance Network Automation and Managed Services

SCOTTSDALE, AZ – September 29, 2026 — Stramaglio Consulting today announced that SmartChoice has joined The Consortium, a think tank of imaging industry leaders dedicated to accelerating innovation and sustainable channel growth.

SmartChoice is a managed connectivity provider that helps organizations simplify and manage complex technology environments. The company brings expertise in connectivity, managed services and network automation to The Consortium as office technology providers increasingly expand their capabilities across managed IT and workplace technology services.

At the center of SmartChoice’s technology portfolio is its proprietary SmartTile 2.0 platform, which connects functions that have traditionally operated across separate systems, including network monitoring, carrier management, IT service management, documentation and vendor coordination.

SmartTile 2.0 is designed to go beyond identifying an outage or network problem by helping automate and coordinate the operational work that follows. The platform can add site and device context, create IT service management tickets, engage carriers through APIs or an AI-powered voice agent, coordinate follow-up and escalation and document restoration details and service-level agreement evidence.

By reducing repetitive tasks and connecting previously disconnected workflows, SmartTile 2.0 helps IT teams move more efficiently from detection through resolution while maintaining human oversight when intervention is needed.

As a member of The Consortium, SmartChoice will contribute its expertise in managed connectivity, network automation and managed services while collaborating with fellow members to identify new technologies, business models and opportunities for the evolving channel.

“SmartChoice is at an exciting point in our evolution with the launch of SmartTile 2.0,” said Jarrett Wolfe, managing partner and CEO of SmartChoice. “The platform was built around real customer challenges and is designed to give IT teams greater visibility while automating much of the repetitive work that happens after an outage or network issue is identified. Joining The Consortium allows us to share that experience while collaborating with industry leaders to explore how technology can improve efficiency, strengthen service delivery and create new opportunities for growth.”

The Consortium was founded by Mike Stramaglio, president and CEO of Stramaglio Consulting, to provide an open, collaborative platform where industry leaders can exchange ideas, explore emerging technologies and help the imaging and broader technology channel evolve through digital transformation.

“SmartChoice brings a powerful combination of connectivity expertise, managed services experience and forward-thinking technology to The Consortium,” Mike Stramaglio said. “What the team has developed with SmartTile 2.0 demonstrates how AI and automation can be applied to real operational challenges while supporting the people responsible for delivering exceptional service. We look forward to collaborating with SmartChoice as we explore new technologies, new business models and new opportunities for partners across the channel.”

One circuit dropped. We got 47 alerts and 47 tickets.

It’s 10:14 on a Tuesday. The fiber circuit at your Dallas branch goes dark. Within a minute, your monitoring console lights up: the firewall is down, then the core switch, then three more switches, twelve access points, eight cameras, the printers, the phones.

By 10:16 you have 47 alerts. Your ticketing system, dutifully integrated, has opened 47 tickets. Your inbox and your team’s phones are buzzing with every one of them.

None of those 47 devices is the problem. One circuit is. And somewhere in that pile is the one alert that actually matters.

This is network alert fatigue in its purest form. It isn’t caused by too many problems. It’s caused by one problem reported 47 times.

One circuit outage, two outcomes: 47 tickets with device-by-device monitoring, or one confirmed site ticket with SmartTile. Why one outage turns into 47 tickets

Most monitoring tools watch devices one at a time. When a circuit fails, every device behind it stops answering. The tool sees 47 separate failures because, from where it sits, that’s exactly what happened.

Three habits turn that into a flood:

• Every device is its own alert. The tool doesn’t know the switches, access points and cameras all sit behind the same circuit, so it can’t tell cause from symptom.
• Every alert becomes its own ticket. The integration with ServiceNow, ConnectWise or Jira does what it was built to do: one alert in, one ticket out.
• Every blip counts. A single missed ping triggers an alert. A circuit that flaps for 40 seconds and recovers produces a burst of alerts and tickets for something that fixed itself.

Multi-location organizations feel this worst. A retailer with 60 stores or a healthcare group with 30 clinics has the same stack of devices behind every circuit. One bad morning at the carrier can bury the service desk before anyone has had coffee.

What the flood actually costs you

The obvious cost is cleanup. Someone has to read 47 tickets, work out they’re the same incident, link or merge them, and close 46. That’s time spent on paperwork while the site is still down.

The less obvious costs are worse:

• The real cause is slower to find. The circuit alert is one line in 47. Engineers start troubleshooting a switch that’s fine, because its ticket was on top.
• The carrier gets called later. Nobody opens a carrier ticket until someone works out it’s a circuit problem. Every minute spent sorting the pile is a minute added to your MTTR. (We covered that gap in why MTTR stays high even when detection is fast.)
• Your ticket history stops meaning anything. Reports show 47 incidents where there was one. Trend data on problem sites and carriers is buried under duplicates.
• People stop reading alerts. After enough floods, the team learns that most notifications are noise. That’s when a real, isolated failure sits unread for an hour.

That last one is the heart of alert fatigue. The tool is technically working. The humans have stopped trusting it.

How SmartTile stops network alert fatigue at the source

SmartTile is built on a simple rule: one outage gets one incident. Here’s the Dallas morning again, this time with SmartTile watching.

1. It sees the drop fast. SmartTile polls every device with 30-second ICMP checks, plus SNMP and vendor APIs for platforms like Meraki, UniFi, FortiGate, Aruba and pfSense. The circuit failure shows up almost immediately.
2. It confirms before it acts. A single missed ping isn’t an outage. SmartTile requires a sustained 15-minute outage and a final ping re-check before declaring a hard down, so a circuit that flaps and recovers never opens a ticket. The wait is deliberate: SmartTile sees the problem in seconds, but it won’t wake anyone up until it’s sure the outage is real.
3. It groups by site. All 47 unreachable devices at Dallas roll into one ticket for that location. If a carrier problem takes down several sites at once, SmartTile consolidates them into a single master incident.
4. It opens the ticket where you work. ServiceAutomate creates the ticket in your own system, whether that’s ServiceNow, ConnectWise, Jira, Autotask or another platform, with device, site, circuit and diagnostic data already filled in. Only then are the site’s contacts and escalation path notified, so nobody gets paged for a blip.
5. It calls the carrier. Because the incident is already identified as a circuit problem, CarrierAutomate opens the carrier ticket through an API or through Joey, SmartTile’s AI voice agent, then keeps checking status until service is restored.
6. It closes the loop. The carrier ticket number, call notes and ETAs are written back to your ticket as they happen. Once restoration is verified, the ticket closes itself with a full audit trail, or stays open for a human if you want an RFO or a credit request.

The result: one ticket, one carrier case and one timeline instead of 47 tickets and a scramble. Your team supervises the outcome instead of sorting the pile.

The automation runs at scale today. In the last 30 days of production, SmartTile placed 825 carrier calls, handled 81 hours of hold time and kept a 98% ticket update rate, according to the SmartTile automation page.

If you’ve already connected your monitoring to your help desk and still see floods, our post on automated ticket creation covers the other half of the problem: getting the data right in the one ticket you do open.

Five questions to ask any monitoring tool about alert storms

Whether or not you use SmartTile, these questions show quickly whether a tool will flood your team:

1. When a circuit fails, how many tickets open? The right answer is one per affected site, not one per device.
2. How long must a failure last before it’s an outage? If one missed ping creates a ticket, expect noise.
3. Does it know which devices sit behind which circuit? Without that link, the tool can’t separate cause from symptom.
4. Can it roll a multi-site event into one incident? A regional carrier outage should be one master incident, not dozens of site tickets.
5. Does the ticket close itself when service is back? If a person has to close every ticket by hand, the cleanup cost never goes away.

For a broader look at how AI helps with correlation and noise reduction, see 10 AI-driven network management tasks.

Frequently asked questions

What is network alert fatigue? Network alert fatigue happens when IT teams get so many alerts, most of them duplicates or false alarms, that they start ignoring notifications. The risk is that a real outage gets missed or handled late.

What causes an alert storm? An alert storm usually starts with one upstream failure, such as a circuit or firewall going down. Every device behind it becomes unreachable, and a tool that monitors devices one at a time reports each one as a separate failure.

How does SmartTile prevent duplicate tickets? SmartTile groups every affected device at a location into one ticket per site and consolidates large multi-site drops into a single master incident. It also requires a sustained 15-minute outage with a final ping re-check before opening a ticket.

Why does SmartTile wait 15 minutes before opening a ticket? To make sure the outage is real. SmartTile detects the failure within seconds, but brief drops often recover on their own. Waiting for a sustained 15-minute outage and a final ping re-check means every ticket and every notification to site contacts is for a confirmed outage, not a false alarm.

Does SmartTile work with our existing ticketing system? Yes. SmartTile opens, updates and closes tickets in ServiceNow, ConnectWise Manage, Autotask PSA, Jira, Zendesk, Freshservice, ManageEngine, Salesforce, HubSpot, Rev.IO and other platforms.

Stop sorting the pile

One outage should mean one ticket, one carrier case and one clear timeline. See how SmartTile handles it with a 60-day free trial, or book a demo and bring your worst alert-storm story.

You watch the network like hawks. Who’s watching the cloud?

This happens in a lot of IT shops. The branch firewall gets polled every 30 seconds. Every switch and access point has thresholds, alerts and an escalation path. Then there’s the production database running in AWS, the app servers in Azure, and the DigitalOcean droplet someone set up two years ago. None of them are monitored at all.

So the first sign of trouble is a customer calling to say something’s broken.

How the cloud fell outside the NOC

Nobody decided to leave cloud servers unmonitored. It usually happens in steps:

• Different owners. Network gear belongs to the infrastructure team. Cloud workloads often got spun up by developers, a project team, or an outside vendor.
• Different tools. Each cloud provider has its own console and its own native alerting, and none of it shows up where the NOC actually looks.
• “Someone else’s hardware” thinking. When AWS or Azure owns the physical server, it’s easy to assume uptime is their problem. It isn’t. The provider keeps the platform running. Whether your instance, database or service is healthy is still on you.
• Permission anxiety. Giving a monitoring tool access to a cloud account feels risky, so the conversation stalls and nothing gets connected.

What you end up with is a NOC that has deep visibility into the parts of the business that rarely fail, and none into the parts customers actually touch.

What that blind spot costs

When a branch circuit drops, you know within seconds. When a production server in the cloud goes down, you find out from:

• A customer who can’t log in or check out
• An employee who can’t reach an internal app
• A developer who happens to notice something looks off

By then the outage has been running for however long it took someone to notice and call. Your response time starts at the complaint, not at the failure. That hurts customer trust, and it hurts your team’s credibility, because the question afterward is always “why didn’t monitoring catch this?”

How SmartTile 2.0 brings the cloud into the NOC

SmartTile 2.0 includes CloudAutomate, which puts cloud servers on the same footing as everything else you monitor.

• AWS, Azure and DigitalOcean servers are imported as ordinary SmartTile devices. No separate dashboard, no second tool to learn.
• Each one lands under a location named for its region, so cloud resources sit in your inventory next to your physical sites.
• Same buttons, same thresholds, same tickets as a firewall. An unhealthy cloud server alerts and escalates exactly the way a down branch device does.

To your NOC, the production database in us-east-1 is just another location to watch.

Read-only access, scoped by you

The permission question is usually what stalls cloud monitoring projects, so CloudAutomate starts there.

You choose exactly which permissions to grant. SmartTile then generates the least-privilege IAM policy (for AWS) or Azure role that covers only those permissions and nothing else.

And the access is read-only by design. Nothing SmartTile asks for can create, change or delete a resource. Your security team can review the policy before it goes live, and they’ll see that monitoring can look but never touch.

Questions to ask about your own coverage

For a quick check on whether you have a cloud blind spot:

• Which production workloads run in AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean today, and who owns each one?
• If one of those servers went down at 2 a.m., what would alert you?
• Do cloud alerts reach the same people and ticketing system as your network alerts?
• Are your cloud resources in the same inventory as your physical infrastructure?
• What’s holding up giving your monitoring platform read-only cloud access?

If the honest answer to the second question is “a customer,” the gap is real.

The cloud is still your problem

Most teams poll the branch firewall every 30 seconds and don’t monitor the production database in AWS at all. Cloud servers are still your responsibility, even though they run on someone else’s hardware. SmartTile 2.0 brings them into the same view, the same thresholds and the same ticketing workflow as the rest of your network, with read-only access you control.

See how SmartTile monitors your cloud servers → Network monitoring software | SmartTile

Your monitoring found the outage in 60 seconds. So why is your MTTR still measured in hours?

“Our engineers are the integration between the monitoring system and the carrier.”

Nobody writes that in a job description, but it’s the reality in most NOCs. The monitoring platform does its part fast. The carrier does its part once it knows there’s a problem. And in between sits a person with a browser tab, a spreadsheet, and a phone on speaker playing hold music.

If you’re trying to reduce network MTTR, that person’s workload is where most of your time is hiding.

Where your MTTR actually goes

Break down a typical WAN circuit outage and the timeline looks something like this:

1. Detection (about 60 seconds). Monitoring flags the circuit as down. This part is already solved.
2. Validation. An engineer confirms it’s a real outage and not a flapping interface or a local power issue.
3. Lookup. Someone finds the circuit ID, account number, and service address, usually in a spreadsheet that may or may not be current.
4. Contact. They open the carrier portal or dial the support line and work through the phone tree.
5. Hold and explain. They wait, then walk a rep through the problem from scratch.
6. Ticket opened. Only now does the carrier start looking.

Steps two through six typically cost 20 to 40 minutes of an engineer’s time on every single outage. None of that is repair time. It’s transcription and waiting. And because it happens before the carrier’s clock even starts, it lands directly on your MTTR.

The overnight problem

During business hours, that 20 to 40 minutes is a productivity drain. After hours, it gets worse. An outage at 2 a.m. means one of two things: you pay for an on-call engineer to wake up and make the call, or the ticket doesn’t get opened until someone logs in the next morning.

Either way, the branch, clinic, school, or store is down longer than it needs to be, and the delay has nothing to do with how fast the carrier can fix it.

Why “just use the carrier’s API” isn’t enough

Some carriers offer ticketing APIs, and where they exist, they’re the fastest path. The problem is coverage. Most multi-location organizations work with a mix of carriers, and plenty of them still expect you to call. APIs also fail: credentials expire, endpoints change, requests time out.

An automation strategy that only works when the API cooperates still leaves you with outages where nobody opened a ticket. That’s the scenario that hurts most, because everyone assumes the system handled it.

How SmartTile 2.0 closes the gap

SmartTile 2.0 includes CarrierAutomate, which takes the engineer out of the middle of the process entirely:

• Detects the outage through continuous monitoring
• Validates it before acting, so you’re not opening tickets on false alarms
• Opens the carrier ticket itself, by API where the carrier has one, and by an AI voice agent where it doesn’t. The voice agent navigates the carrier’s IVR and talks to the rep, the same way your engineer would.
• Chases the ticket on its own schedule instead of waiting for the carrier to send an update
• Writes every update back into your own ticket, so your team sees status without logging into a carrier portal

The result is that the carrier starts working the problem in the same window your monitoring detects it, day or night.

API-first, with a voice agent as the safety net

CarrierAutomate is built API-first for each carrier, with the voice agent as the fallback. If an API call fails, the voice agent picks it up, so a broken integration never turns into a ticket nobody opened.

Today, Verizon and Granite run over their APIs, and credential slots are already configured for eight additional carriers.

Questions to ask about your own MTTR

If you want a quick read on how much of your MTTR is carrier overhead, start here:

• How long does it take from alert to open carrier ticket, on average?
• Who opens tickets overnight and on weekends, and what does that cost you in callouts?
• Where do circuit IDs and account numbers live, and how often is that source out of date?
• How does your team get carrier status updates today: proactive, or by calling back?
• If a carrier API fails, what catches it?

If the honest answers involve a spreadsheet, a phone, and “whoever is on call,” your monitoring isn’t the bottleneck. The handoff is.

Stop making your engineers the integration

Your monitoring knows about the outage in 60 seconds. The gap between that alert and an open carrier ticket is what your MTTR is actually made of. SmartTile 2.0 closes it automatically, so your engineers can spend their time on the problems that actually need them.

See how SmartTile handles carrier tickets → Agentic AI Automation & Network Management | SmartChoice

Firmware Management: The patching everyone forgets

“We found out we were three firmware versions behind after the breach, not before.”

Most IT teams have a routine for patching laptops and servers. Operating system updates get pushed, endpoint tools report compliance, and someone can tell you roughly where things stand.

Firmware is different. The switches, firewalls, access points and security appliances running your network each have their own firmware, released on their own vendor schedule. And on most networks, nobody’s watching it.

Why firmware is the patching everyone forgets

Firmware doesn’t show up on a daily dashboard. A switch running an outdated version works fine right up until someone exploits the vulnerability the vendor already fixed. There’s no pop-up and no reminder, and nobody gets an alert when a device falls behind.

That makes firmware invisible until it turns into an incident report. By then, the question isn’t how to patch. It’s how long the gap was open and what got through it.

The problem grows with every location you add:

• Every vendor publishes on its own schedule. Keeping up means checking multiple portals, release notes and advisory feeds.
• Every site drifts separately. A device replaced at one branch runs a different version than its twin at another.
• Every update is manual. Someone has to remember it, schedule it and do it, and that someone is usually busy with something more urgent.

The first question a cyber insurance assessor asks

Firmware isn’t just a security problem. It’s a coverage problem too.

When a cyber insurance assessor reviews your environment, patching is one of the first things they ask about, and firmware is part of that. Can you show what’s running on every network device? Can you show it’s current? Can you show how you handle vendor advisories?

If the honest answer is “we’d have to check,” that’s a hard conversation at renewal time. It’s even worse after a claim.

What good firmware management looks like

Good firmware management replaces remembering with tracking. That means:

1. Knowing what’s running on every device, at every site, all the time.
2. Comparing it to what the vendor has published, so you know what’s behind without having to go looking.
3. Showing the advisories that matter for the devices you actually own, not every bulletin a vendor sends out.
4. Scheduling updates instead of relying on someone to remember them.

That’s what SmartTile 2.0 does.

How SmartTile 2.0 handles firmware management Every device checked against the vendor’s latest release

SmartTile tracks the firmware running on every device and compares it to what the vendor has published. Anything behind is flagged. You don’t have to log into vendor portals or keep a version spreadsheet up to date.

Advisories matched to your own devices

A vendor security advisory only matters if you own the affected hardware on an affected version. SmartTile matches vendor advisories against your own fleet and shows the ones that apply to you, broken down by device, by site and by customer.

For multi-location enterprises, that means seeing exactly which sites are exposed. For MSPs, it means a clear firmware picture for each client.

Updates scheduled, not remembered

SmartTile can automate firmware updates, and you turn that on device by device. When it’s on for a device, updates are scheduled instead of depending on someone’s memory.

When it’s off, nothing changes. Nothing updates unless you’ve turned it on. Your team decides which devices update automatically and which stay under manual control, whether that’s a core firewall that needs a change window or a branch access point that can update overnight.

Tracked continuously, at real scale

Firmware status in SmartTile isn’t a quarterly scan. It’s tracked continuously. SmartTile already tracks firmware on 597 Meraki devices alone, and it matches vendor advisories against each organization’s own fleet as they’re published.

So when an assessor, an auditor or your own leadership asks where firmware stands, you have the answer ready. You don’t have to go dig it up.

Who benefits most from automated firmware management

• Multi-location enterprises with the same hardware spread across dozens or hundreds of sites, each drifting on its own.
• School districts protecting student data with small IT teams and many buildings to cover.
• Healthcare, financial services and legal organizations where security questionnaires and cyber insurance requirements are strict and get checked.
• Private equity portfolio companies that need a clear security posture across newly acquired businesses.
• MSPs managing firmware across many customer environments that need per-customer visibility.

Find out before, not after

Firmware is the patching everyone forgets. It stays invisible until it shows up in an incident report, and it’s one of the first things a cyber insurance assessor asks about.

SmartTile 2.0 tracks the firmware on every device, flags what’s behind, shows the advisories that matter, and lets you schedule updates on the devices where you turn it on. You find out you’re three versions behind well before anyone else does.

Ready to see where your firmware really stands? Schedule a SmartTile demo and get a firmware view of every device, every site and every customer.

Cloud Cost Optimization: Why nobody can explain the cloud bill

“Nobody can explain the cloud bill, and it only goes up.”

Every month the invoice comes in a little higher. Finance asks why. IT can point at a few new projects, but those don’t explain the whole increase. Nobody has the full answer, so the bill gets paid and the question comes back next month.

The problem usually isn’t that your team is careless. Cloud spend grows quietly, one small leftover at a time, and nobody has the hours to go looking for it. That’s why you need cloud cost optimization.

Where the money actually goes

Most cloud waste isn’t one big mistake. It’s a pile of small ones that keep billing in the background:

• Idle instances bill 24/7. A server spun up for a test, a migration or a project that wound down keeps running and keeps charging, whether anyone uses it or not.
• Storage outlives the server. Someone shut a server down months ago, but its attached storage is still there and still on the invoice.
• Oversized capacity. Instances sized for a peak that never came, or for a workload that has since moved, keep charging for headroom nobody uses.

Each item looks small by itself. Together, across services and regions, they explain a lot of the bill that nobody can account for.

Why nobody audits it

A proper cloud cost audit means pulling billing data, matching it to real resources, checking utilization for each one and deciding what can go. That’s hours of careful work, and it’s never urgent enough to beat an outage, a ticket queue or a project deadline.

So nobody does it. And the problem gets worse, because the billing data and the performance data sit in different places. The invoice shows what you paid. Monitoring shows what you used. Until you put them side by side, you can’t see the gap between the two, and that gap is where the waste is.

What cloud cost optimization should look like

Good cloud cost optimization doesn’t start with a quarterly spreadsheet exercise. It starts with seeing, all the time, what you’re paying for next to what you’re using.

That means:

1. Spend broken down by service and region, so you know where the money goes, not just the total.
2. A forecast, so next month’s bill is expected instead of a surprise.
3. Spend read against actual utilization, so capacity you pay for but don’t use is obvious.
4. Clear, specific recommendations, so your team knows exactly what to change and what it will save.

That’s what SmartTile 2.0 delivers.

How SmartTile 2.0 makes the cloud bill explainable Spend by service and region, with a forecast

SmartTile 2.0 breaks down cloud spend by service and by region and adds a forecast. You can see what’s driving the bill and where it’s headed before the invoice arrives.

Spend read against real utilization

This is the key difference. SmartTile shows spend next to actual utilization, so you can see capacity you pay for and don’t use. The bill stops being one total and becomes a line-by-line view of cost against real usage.

Idle resources flagged automatically

Anything running under about 5% CPU for a week is flagged as idle. No one has to go looking. The resources quietly adding to your bill show up on their own.

Right-sizing hints with the cost attached

Every idle flag comes with a right-sizing hint and what that resource costs you. Your team gets a clear decision to make, not a research project: here’s the resource, here’s what it costs, here’s what to do about it.

Built on data you can trust

SmartTile pulls cost data straight from your cloud provider like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, and its own billing API, so the numbers match your invoice. That billing data sits next to the same utilization data that already drives SmartTile’s alerts.

In other words, the metrics telling you a resource is idle are the same metrics your team already relies on for monitoring. There’s no second tool to set up and no separate dataset to reconcile.

It pays for itself

Idle and oversized resources bill every month, so finding them saves money every month too. For most teams, the first month’s savings usually cover the cost of the tier. After that, the savings are yours to keep.

Who benefits most from cloud spend visibility

• Multi-location enterprises running workloads across several regions, where leftover resources are easy to lose track of.
• School districts with tight budgets and lean IT teams that can’t spend days auditing cloud invoices.
• Private equity portfolio companies under pressure to show clear, defensible cost reductions.
• IT leaders who answer to finance and need to explain the cloud bill, not just pay it.

Stop paying for capacity you don’t use

The cloud bill goes up every month and nobody can explain it. Read spend against utilization and the answer is usually right there: capacity you’re buying and not using.

SmartTile 2.0 puts that answer in front of your team automatically. You get spend by service and region, a forecast, idle resources flagged, and a right-sizing recommendation with the cost next to it.

Ready to finally explain your cloud bill? Schedule a SmartTile demo and see your cloud spend next to real utilization.