Back

After a true month-long vacation, I’m back! Typing from over 30,000ft on my way to Las Vegas, I’m actually really looking forward to getting back on the road, hanging out with the partners and helping my team hit all the stuff we have on the roadmap.

As many of my friends (incorrectly) guessed that I wouldn’t even come back to work, here is my mission for 2011:

Unify all of Own Web Now’s brands under the same name, same mission and same strategy.

We are doing great with ExchangeDefender and Own Web Now products even as the original business models established around on-premise IT, severs and infrastructure are clearly sunsetting. We are outright kicking ass with Shockey Monkey even though we haven’t even done anything significant with it (but will tomorrow morning!) yet other than making it free and making it the platform to start your IT business without thinking about the cost. Our collaboration on the CloudBlock is taking off with some surprising results (will share later)… and perhaps most importantly, the professional continuation of all the contributions I’ve made to the community I’ve made through the years is going through Kate Hunt at Looks Cloudy.

ALL OF THESE ARE GETTING A MAJOR UPGRADE OVER THE NEXT 90 DAYS!!!

So as I see it, the new version of ExchangeDefender 7 is going to kick some major butt in the areas of compliance, business continuity and security – all three cornerstones of our business that have made it so well known and deployed around the world are getting a major overhaul. As we’ve seen from recent reports, the cloud is still managed by people on the same crash-prone servers as you know and love – so the big push for us as we promote OWN cloud services is to keep reminding everyone that ExchangeDefender is always behind it and always running. Shockey Monkey is going to get some friends this summer – lots of them – and the direction that product is going may surprise you if you’ve been under a rock – as the technology we all once built and maintained is consumerized and now managed by end users, don’t you think they’ll need a more sophisticated way to manage it all even as the complexity goes down? CloudBlock is not something I have to answer for so I’ll just say that as the price competition intensifies and Microsoft keeps on bleeding (nearly a billion dollars of losses a quarter to fight with Google) end users will turn to a solid and profitable alternatives that work on the go. Looks Cloudy will get a new look and a bunch of new contributors – The Weather Report has been hugely successful and the follow rate on those podcasts is amazing – as I promised you when I announced it we don’t want to be a press release reprinting site or a rumors-for-clicks that most of the tech sites have become, our community has some outstanding people in it and we need to learn as much from each other as possible.

My job is to make sure that no matter what you come to us for, we make you aware of everything else we’re doing too. Frankly, if we only cared about ourselves and money was the bottom line we wouldn’t have partners – we’d have sales people. So as every product is designed to play well with others, we want to make sure we share that love and benefits with you all.

As for how I’m going to do it all – I don’t have the slightest clue I really tried not to think about OWN at all on my vacation and I haven’t figured out what kind of schedule I’ll keep or what it will take. But as you’ve seen from me over the past 14 years – I eventually figure it out. Looking forward to this journey more than anything else.