Cry Me A River…

And now… Mr. Justin Timberlake sings to the MSP industry:

About a year and a half ago my company took an amazing risk to go into the cloud services head first. We took a ton of partners with us. Scary proposition? Hell yes. At the time our #1 product was a $300/month dedicated server running Windows / SBS / Linux at a profit margin that made our $10/10GB Exchange 2007 + SharePoint something that was very hard to stomach. We were trading a ton of dollars for a handful of pennies.

At the time most of our partner base decided to sit on the sidelines, wait and see. More ignorant ones were boasting about how many people they were disconnecting from the cloud and moving them to on premise solutions. Most of them are not around anymore.

Fast forward 1 year. Our growing products are ExchangeDefender (more on that in a moment) followed by Exchange hosting.

Now here is the kick in the pants.

Do you know what the #1 protected IP range on ExchangeDefender is?

Go ahead, guess. I’ll wait.

If you’ve guessed Gmail (Google Apps), you’re right. Yes, the same Gmail that went lights out yesterday for a few hours. Yes, the same Gmail that people pay $0 for is the #1 ExchangeDefender target because of our LiveArchive (Exchange 2007 business continuity suite) product. Yes, the same Gmail that you told your customers wasn’t right for their business that they eventually dumped most of you and SBS for.

Every day… every single day… we play Cry Me A River in the office. Because every day, without exception, I get to hear sob stories about how clients are dropping like flies. And every day I talk about how well we are doing and how things are growing in the cloud and how well the market is developing.

Yet, every day I get ignored. When I look at services for the crying partners, they haven’t added a client in the last quarter. Or even in the last year.

What’s it gonna take to have the folks face up to the fact that computing as we used to know it has changed? You’re already losing clients and sitting on top of suffering businesses while others are growing. Is being right worth the failure of your business?

Believe me, I understand. I understand the fear. It wasn’t easy for me to take the knife to my dedicated server cash cow and slaughter it for a few pennies. But a year later, we’re growing. Where will you be a year from today?

Wake.. the… FUCK… up!!!!!!!!