Week Ahead

Put in a full day today. Barely on my two feet.

Tomorrow morning we’re starting early and likely making it a half day, spending the remainder of the day with the family. I’m planning to use the morning to organize a few more things, set the schedule for this week and fit everyone in my schedule.

This week I will be asking two questions: 1) How is business and 2) What are you doing to grow it and why?

Our numbers for January are way ahead of expectations so people are definitely spending money. Now, whether the folks that are doing so well are willing to talk about what they are doing that is so right is a different question but you know the old saying… if you want something, you have to ask.

I however feel this cycle is going to play out for at least 24 months if not longer – people are looking for more affordable and more efficient technology. Whether we’re helping them get a nicer inbox environment with ExchangeDefender or not worry about tapes thanks to our Offsite Backup, the opportunity here is to replace expensive labor with relatively inexpensive services and I’m betting my business plan on the fact that at least for the moment it’s all about reliability and affordability.

When (or rather if) we get out of the doom and gloom people will return to custom deployments and may again become concerned about security, control and deep business integration. For the time being, it’s all about getting the technology out of the way of doing business and that means big money for infrastructure management, projects for modernizing and updating aging IT relic systems and cost saving measures.

I’m very interested to hear what my partners think. The response and amount of data I can gather is going to be the beef of V… #2 (Vladville Newsletter, sign up. If you think you signed up and didn’t get it, odds are removed because you didn’t fill out the form completely; If I didn’t want your address, I wouldn’t have put a form field for it there, don’t waste my time, serious folks only.)