Today is the last day to win some beer money from me, just hit this link:
Vlad the Imp Aler Survey
We’ve gotten a lot of responses and some really surprising data and every little vote and piece of feedback counts.
Now there is a lot of speculation over the Shockey Monkey RMM and I have certainly spent a lot of my time talking to my partners about what we are doing and how things fit into the business model. Some less informed people have suggested that we’re building a free RMM and I think that conclusion is somewhat misguided so allow me to lay out my cards on the table and let you figure it out.
First, we owe our business to our partners. Every dollar that comes in comes through our partners and we have constantly put money back into the products. Yes, I know some of you have been burned by ExchangeDefender bugs or delays or issues in the past but one thing we have always done is taken as much money as we can and spent it on commoditizing stuff within ExchangeDefender while other solutions outsourced and made you pay through the nose for things like encryption, business continuity, compliance, web filtering, etc. With us, those pieces are free. That represents an ongoing investment back into the company.
Second, the dynamics of our partners businesses are starting to change. Many service providers out here wouldn’t have a cloud solution if it were not for us. We’ve spent a lot of time building, scaling and reassuring server rollouts over the past few years. Now we find ourselves in a spot where we can help a lot of our partners scale their business by just having us as an entire independent unit in their organization. As in, we’re pluggable. If you want to offer Hosted Exchange you need to read manuals, create agreements, manage billing, manage support and the pain of migrations and data imports. Don’t get me wrong, none of it is rocket science but it’s time consuming and we’re can take care of the whole thing for you, down to answering the phone and connecting to the remote PC and helping your client.
Finally, service providers are starting to reevaluate their business models. I’ll leave this part of the explanation up to you, answer it according to how you see the future.
Finally, where does this put the Shockey Monkey RMM
First, there is no such thing as the Shockey Monkey RMM. We started the survey so we could figure out how you rely on your RMM software and what you primarily monitor, how many alerts you generate, what kind of reports you expect out of it and how they are used. For two reasons:
1. Research helps us identify what is relevant in the sea of data that RMMs collect. By being able to extrapolate this data inside of Shockey Monkey we can give better integration experience for the RMMs that chose to sponsor Shockey Monkey.
2. As we offer the managed services on top of our cloud offerings, we still need a way to get to the users desktop. So we could either build the thing ourselves or we could risk offending one of our integration partners that sponsored Shockey Monkey by signing up with their competitor. Not a good recipe for success.
Will the real Shockey Monkey RMM please stand up?
First of all, there isn’t one. Not saying we’re not working like crazy on a monitoring solution but it’s not something you’re going to put neck and neck with the RMM industry.
The remote access, logging, inventory, desktop and screen sharing tool we are developing is for our ExchangeDefender partners. Yeah, those dudes and ladies that helped us build this big company. It’s payback time! We are playing with a concept of offering a free RMM-like product that our partners could go and deploy in their clients offices or prospective leads/clients offices. “Here you go, just install this on your network and it will give you all sorts of useful info and ability to look at your employees desktops, interact with them and get alerts when something goes wrong. It’s free and it’s on us.” What happens next? Well, when something breaks, you can pick up the phone and give them a call. You can alert them when their warranty is about to expire, when their systems aren’t patched, call them right as they are failing to print because their print spool service keeps on crashing, etc.
We are looking at a way to take this commodity of IT, connect it with the efficiencies gained from Shockey Monkey, and tie them together into one massive, inexpensive, overly efficient IT service demand generation engine.
Shockey Monkey + Sponsor Solutions + ExchangeDefender = $$$ for everyone.
It’s really that simple as far as I’m concerned. I want to make it dead simple for you to generate profits from solutions and stop wasting all of your time trying to figure out what your business is going to look like and how little bits and pieces of it are going to connect. Because if you are a business, wasting time managing your vendors crap all day is a profit sinkhole. You should be spending time on your clients systems and getting paid, not being your own janitor.
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