With first half of the year coming to a close it’s time to look at the agenda & numbers and figure out where we’re at and where we’re going. Everyone should do this as a part of their business because that’s the only way to know if you’re actually going somewhere – and the smaller you are the more critical it is because you don’t get to make many mistakes. The bigger you get, the more relevant this exercise becomes because it takes a while to steer the ship and change things up to stay on the right (profitable) track.
For us, 2010 has been awesome. The gamble on the cloud is still paying off with us growing like crazy on every continent except Europe. We’re still posting positive growth in EU (on the back of UK) but it’s clear that the financial crisis around Greece is no joke. On the positive side, it’s getting more affordable for us to do business there so we’re investing heavily in the new infrastructure in UK.
ExchangeDefender 5 has been phenomenal for us – it took us out of our funk with the previous generation of the product and the new features have been a competitive slam dunk. We keep on winning against all our competitors and now we’re even attracting some big time licensing deals again so I can’t say enough good stuff about that. Anyone @ UCF want a jquery gig? We’ve been looking for over a month!
Exchange + SharePoint has been absolutely insane. Last weekend we rolled out the gear for the new low-cost BPOS-like consumer alternative to our corporate partner-only products at OWN and this business keeps on growing beyond every imaginable metric. At this pace, our cloud business will be bigger than our ExchangeDefender business by 2011. Love it!
Offsite backups, dedicated servers, virtual servers – crapshoot. The era of steel is over. I’m pretty convinced we’re Dell’s only customer 😉 Love ya guys! 🙂 We’ve gone from waiting a month (at times longer) for delivery and now we’re back to the same week shipment.
All the other stuff is doing great.
What’s really amazing is that we’re launching four new things this summer that I believe will be just amazing for us. We’re also changing our pricing and adding some of the features our partners have been begging for (a retail-brand offering for partners that don’t want to be in the billing & bidding war with Google & Microsoft but don’t want to sign up a client with them and lose them forever; a social media play; a book on a successful cloud business model; a PSA with the release track record that puts Duke Nukem to shame) soooooooo… Really looking forward to the next few months.
Towards 2011 and beyond, things don’t look good. The good news is that the bad stuff is largely fueled by economic uncertainty in Europe, the oil spill in the gulf, the death drop in housing sales in USA and the overall financial funk and uncertainty. So yeah, it’s going to get ugly. But much like the previous two catastrophe’s that I’ve had a joy of running this business through (.com bust in 2000, George Bush) it’s all about listening to what people want to buy and not really caring whether I’m right or wrong about what puts my butt in a Ferrari. And the same to you. 🙂
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