Our Biggest Show Of The Year

On Tuesday, I will be presenting our roadmap for 2011.

It’s basically the biggest show of the year.

Last year we used it to launch ExchangeDefender 5. This year, we are announcing our new business plans.

First of all, a disclaimer: There are no changes to what we are doing or to our products. Your pricing, service and support will remain the same.

Beyond that, lot’s of new stuff. Here are a few hints:

1. Lower cost version of ExchangeDefender.
2. New third party company offering Exchange 2010 and on-premise SPAM filtering solution licensed from OWN (think BPOS, cheaper)
3. New “managed” solution.

Of course, the devil is in the details and I will share those with you on Tuesday at 1 PM. We are responding to the demand from our partner base. There are basically two new types of partners that have come out of this entire cloud shakeout:

1. Those with really solid business models – that want to add on the cloud but don’t want to manage it. This leaves room for our premium offering that will be managed and billed end to end under our partners branding.
2. Those that think the cloud is a commodity and are willing to ignore it but don’t want to lose their clients to Google or Microsoft. This leaves room for a bare bones Exchange offering to move the more essential messaging to the cloud while everything else stays in place.

We are kind of at a point where the cloud is no longer a discussion point at all, it’s a part of business model and partners have to choose what to do with it: ignore it (and lose), embrace it (and take their chances), embrace it somewhat (and try to live on smaller margins) or embrace it shoulder length (and just keep the clients).

In the end, it’s all about the clients needs, and you’ve seen what I’ve done in 2010. We’re built a world class CRM platform with Shockey Monkey absolutely free to help people manage their cloud services under their name / brand / pricing. Then we added Looks Cloudy, a blog to cover the cloud deployment strategies and considerations. We also rolled out Monkey Remote to enable remote support and monitoring.

Next, we introduce the actual support and service no matter where you are on the scale.

Our business model for 2011 is simple: We will only focus on messaging. Yes, we do a ton of backup business, a lot of security, virtual servers, dedicated servers, SharePoint, etc. At this point though, it’s make it or break it time and with the economy still struggling and record unemployment we can bring in the rest of the services later. But if we cannot address the most critical part of their business immediately, we may as well just close the doors and try to tell ourselves that being an Apple Genius still makes us an IT professional and not a slimy 201X version of the 90’s beeper salesman.