September, Finally.

Boy am I happy to see September! Oh, and check this out: www.exchangedefender.com

There are still a few bits and pieces along with the documentation / training collateral coming together slowly. But it’s a step in a new direction leaving the platform of a software company catering to IT providers to one trying to help consumers and business decision makers get their stuff together. (in case you’ve misread that let me make it clear: NO, we are not going direct or competing with our partners).

Epiphany

The cloudpocalypse of August 2011 has been godsent. It, along with the soul crushing conversations that I’ve had with many of you and some of your clients, gave me the resolve to finally push in this direction. Hiding behind the partners is just not working anymore.

First: You can’t blindly point at someone else for the problem because that makes you look incompetent. As I recently told my staff, “I am not paying you to tell me who broke it, I’m paying you to tell me what’s being done to fix it”.

Second: When we talk to your clients in the same manner we talk to you, it doesn’t come off right. There is a different language shared between IT professionals and ordinary humans and even this description is borderline insulting.

So the obvious question becomes – why the hell are you talking to end users anyhow? The answer is equally blunt – because you aren’t doing your job.

That is something I wanted to say to everyone I talked to in August but I couldn’t. I dropped the ball. I know. I’m sorry. But when I took the time to talk to people below the CEO level and to the end users few things became apparent:

• Your staff is either unaware, uninterested or uninformed about the solution, they only know the bits and pieces they were told or stumbled upon accidentally.
• End users are even more confused about what you do, what they are paying for and what their alternatives are when things go down. Not one of the users I spoke to knew about LiveArchive. Not. A. Single. One.
• There is no incentive for staff learning or end user training, roles are seen more as a fireman than a solution provider (hint: put the effort or stay at the same pay level forever; do your job only and you might not be replaced by someone else).
• End users #1 complaint: IT provider communication.

Now it’s going to take some time to address all of the above but I have to admit that I’m a large part of this problem as well. I deal with some really, really smart people that have their stuff together. So when I get feedback (“Vlad you suck.”) I both take it personally and am very passionate about our product and the approach. My job has been to make sure things are perfect here without bothering with what you do.

Well, over the past month I’ve been confronted with the fact that your users want and need more than that from the solution they rely to. We’re here for our partners, always will be.

But.. we’re going to spend a lot of money on the user facing stuff going forward too. There are two things you can do. 1) Ignore it completely and take a chance that they fire you. 2) Figure out a way to offer some of this stuff and risk the client knowing that a 2 person IT shop isn’t managing thousands of SPAM filtering and Exchange servers out there.

Looking forward to showing off what we’ve been building over the past 2 weeks over the course of the next month or so. I hope you like it. I know you need it. Your clients are asking for it. Are you going to give it to them?