It’s a race.. and speed matters.

Posted: 4:33 pm
April 10, 2013
Boss, GTD, IT Business, Shockey Monkey
Comments Off on It’s a race.. and speed matters.

On Monday I posted the following Facebook update:

flamemonkey

By Wednesday, all of the code, bugfix and testing were in place and Shockey Monkey was rocking the 2013 version of clippy. Whether you loved or loathed Clippy, the idea was brilliant but the implementation was terrible (“Are you trying to use Excel?” No shit, what did you think, I just clicked on the wrong icon and I’m about to ask a talking paperclip about what else I can do to waste my time?)

The brilliant implementation came from Angry Birds. It is not uncommon to see 2 or 3 year olds playing these games – that they have never seen – and suceeding at moving through the levels even before they have the ability to walk or run.

I’ll let you sit there with your mind blown for a minute.

All of these applications that are available in the Web 2.0 world have one thing in common: They suck. Ok, two things in common: They are ridiculously simplistic. They are nice to get started but when you need to tweak things a little bit things get astronomically complex.

Problem is: How do you build a mature and feature sophisticated web application / platform that anyone can use (anyone that has never used your system before)?

You walk them through it.

I have been bouncing around the concept in my head for months.

Last week I ran my doodles by the management, asked for feedback, talked to a few of the Shockey Monkey resellers and on Monday I drew it up.

On Tuesday it was being written and put into production.

On Wednesday at 3PM it was being published.

That is how quickly stuff is being added here (more info on that in a bit)

Shockey Monkey Welcome

The biggest problem we have with Shockey Monkey is that people sign up for it but don’t know how to use it to it’s fullest immediately or how to get started.

They sold themselves the dream of managing their business better but there are few things that need to happen first: adding employees, setting policies, setting branding, configuring products, companies, clients, etc.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone held your hand through all that?

That is called consulting. Or in laymans terms, that’s called shitty software: When your solution is so complex and broken that it takes a mountain of people to glue the shit together to meet basic operational onboarding requirements (See: Anything powered by Oracle, Every SharePoint or CRM product ever made)

Not that I have a problem with that at all, it’s just that people get angry when they realize that they not only overpaid for the product but have to overpay for someone to put it together for them. It’s kind of like eating out and paying for the same meal 6 times without ever actually getting the first bite.

Well, not with Shockey Monkey. When you first sign up for your portal and start it.. you go through a 5 minute onboarding process. Yes, 5 minutes. Hey there, how you doing, put some data in me:

clippy1

While the user is waiting for the magical stuff to happen in the background (as we push the unicorns into the meat grinder tail first, trust me on this) they are rolling through 3-5 second previews of what it looks like to manage employees, which features are available, etc.

Nothing excessive, just a glance. I just want them to have a taste of what it will look like so they will know once they interact with it for the first time.

clippy2

When the images scroll through, we do the first intelligence test..

The toolbar checks on their ability to recognize an input button that is clickable. It has a giant green arrow pointing to the Next button.. and if you can’t figure this out.. well, that’s the Darwin law in full effect baby.

 

clippy3

Let’s see if you can hit the piggy

So here we go.. The first thing you need to do when you get to Shockey Monkey is make it your own. This wizard hides all the other complex stuff but gives you an idea and a feel for how the controls behave, interact and manage. If you can fill out these basic things then configuring the rest of the stuff is cake.

clippy5

It’s damn near impossible to break this.

clippy6

Back to selling the dream..

clippy7

More dream…

clippy8

Even more stuff you can manage with Shockey Monkey – for free.

clippy9

And now you’re done. Need help? I’ll call you and sell it to you. Want to figure it out on your own? Be my guest. The point is to make the thing simple enough for anyone to use and to be a ring away when you need help.

Why is this important at all Vlad, how about some Exchange insight?

The reason this is important is that this is your next level of business service delivery.

Long gone are the days of you collecting high 2 or 3 digit per hour fees for consulting someone on what kind of tablet they need. That job is now done by a teenager at the Apple store. Or Verizon. Or AT&T. Or Target. Or Best Buy. Or Costco. You get the idea, gadgets and junk and IT gatekeeper has passed and if you want to grow and grow your revenues you need to step into the actual service delivery.

Shockey Monkey is the platform for the delivery of that service. We are integrating Exchange, SharePoint, Offsite Backups, iPhone, iPad, Android, Printers, document management and everything above and beyond it into it. It’s just a screen. Who organizes it, manages continuity and helps people gain insight into the business – that is the person that will continue to collect high reoccuring monthly fees long after “printer problems” are synonymous with “typewriter problems, keys keep jamming”

Folks..

Seriously..

You have the skills, use them on the next level. If all your tools are available to all your competitors and the vendor is trying to beat you to the client as well then isn’t it time to think smarter than just betting on your charm and relying on the kindness of strangers?

Snap out of it Blanche!

Get some Monkey, learn it inside and out and then call me and figure out how to sell it.

We are not making this stuff happening so fast because we’re bored and there is nothing on TV: the demand is out there and as much of a business transformation as the MSP space saw with the Autotask/Tigerpaw/CW/etc you can deliver to any business out there that has issues with employees, clients, vendors, contractors, manages problems/cases/agreements/invoices and wants to get a better control of those.

You’re welcome.

MSP Extinction Event

Posted: 4:48 pm
April 8, 2013
IT Business
Comments Off on MSP Extinction Event

I spend a fair bit of my time considering doomsday scenarios – it’s a part of responsible business ownership to consider and plan for contingencies that may impact the business model. Many people believe otherwise, that only small course corrections need to be made over time, and those people already work as mediocre middle management if they were lucky to stay in the IT industry at all. No sense debating the dodo bird so let’s just be sensible and review the brief history of what likely leads to the next level of extinction.

elephantit.jpg

Likely candidates

So what’s likely to take out the IT Solution Provider? I asked on Facebook.

Incompetence – Nope. IT is one of those industries where incompetence is par for the course, your job is piecing together stuff that naturally breaks.

Pot – Nope. Legalized pot just means more money changing hands and better economy. Plus more people interested in IT..

Franchising – Meh. Franchised IT is kind of like paying someone for a crappy marketing kit because she has red hair. Using

Cloud – Nope. Besides, most solution providers already rely on cloud solutions.

Bad at selling services – If they sucked at this they would have been long gone.

Retirement – True but not everyone is about to retire. Not to mention that this is the primary driver behind most successful IT shops – they are working harder and harder to be able to make someone else do their job while they live on the beach.

Let’s look at history

I’m a big fan of writing stuff down and looking at it.

Nothing is more sobering and defeating like having your own ego check your stupidity every now and then. Believe me, the archive for Vladville goes to July 2005 and it’s available right here.

What happened the last time the economy imploded?

What has changed since?

Who survived and why?

Cause of the next extinction cycle: The Economy

The last major IT extinction event coincided with the last major small business downturn: 2008/2009.

Up to that point pretty much all sorts of IT related businesses worked, even if they were totally illegal. SPF? Sure buddy, go ahead and reinstall Windows all day and call it a business. Action Pack Reseller? It’s cheaper than retail plus Microsoft sold it to us so why not. Y2K? Ok, I’m pushing it but a lot of people made a lot of money.

Then something interesting happened: The housing get-rich-quick scheme imploded and the IT businesses blew up almost overnight!

Small businesses immediately cut back on long-term infrastructure investment and froze purchasing of pretty much everything except the essentials.

Break-fix? More like bye-bye, the trunk slammers simply stopped getting the calls.

This didn’t affect some solution providers – it affected all of them. Banks froze the credit, pulled lines of credit some people were operating their business on, businesses started trimming their staff that they could no longer afford, office space got downsized (or eliminated) and people started closing down shop.

Folks like to pretend like this was a non-event and that only tiny corrections needed to be made.. but I can tell you of countless discounts and deferment arrangements I had to make for the “cream of the crop IT group/cult” that couldn’t even afford their office space much less SPAM filtering.

When economy takes the hit – everyone takes a hit – big, small, weak, strong, cutting edge as well as tried and true.

2008-2012 was the best period for us financially because we made the changes to go from an infrastructure-heavy data center business that virtualized tons of SBS to offering hosted cloud solutions in a shared environment. When people sobered up from their $10k+ Exchange projects they couldn’t wait to buy $10/month mailboxes and not worry about paying someone $100/hr every time it went down.

The economics, and landscape of IT, changed dramatically and pretty much eradicated the traditional IT model.

The folks that survived and thrived.. were the ones that could quickly scale back, had a plan in place, didn’t live above their means and had a reliable source of revenue to make it through the rough patch.

Now look at your client base: You know who they are, you’ve been to their offices and you’ve seen them do. Which ones will be around when the next economic disaster hits?

Can your business survive that? Cause there are only so many vendor jobs out there and most of them are hinging (very, very losely) on the prosperity of the IT VAR/MSP. So obviously, they are optimistic Smile

I on the other hand have to put the tools and services in your hands that will make it possible for you to both make significant profits today and hedge the likelyhood that the downturn in the economy impacts your bottom line enough to make a significant change in course.

Why the next one won’t be pretty

For the most part, the recent (20 years) economic collapses did not impact IT too much because IT was a highly skilled trade, even in small business.

Small business technology today is not that skill intensive. You don’t need the level of experience in a very diverse set of technical fields and most of the really complex problems have been solved – which is why the six figure IT guy salaries are very much a thing of a far distant past. Lots of high prized technology consultants and authors are far more latter than the former.

With the rise of consumerization, tablets, cloud services.. you don’t even need to be a $12/hour IT expert (aka Apple Genius.. and those guys get free tshirts) to get most of this modern stuff hooked up.

So as long as the economy keeps up, the gravy train keeps on chugging.

Now be honest, how much faith do you have in the leadership in Washington DC?

Start thinking. Small adjustments in the course have left an IT Solution Provider road covered with tombstones. It is important to have a structured business with multiple products, services and revenue streams because 1 trick pony is the first to get shot. Happy Monday!

P.S. Yes, I know this is just a problem and no solution is listed. Mostly because there is no singular solution that will apply to all businesses and the variations are immense. The threat is unique: We are paid well (as an industry) because we are now service oriented instead of product oriented. What that means is: We are paid to deal with IT because they don’t want to. Even though it’s getting easier and easier. Even though they could do it themselves. Because it’s easier to pay someone to deal with it than to hire an employee. But when the push comes to shove.. they might just do the service on their own. And you need a contingency plan. That’s my point.

There is nothing on the Internet

Posted: 7:33 am
March 31, 2013
Cloud, Google
1 Comment

At some point in the 90’s with hundreds of channels and pay-per-view options there was suddenly “nothing on TV” and the selection of random redundant choices made most people simply tune out (and only come back later for “reality TV”) – we are at that point with the web content.

Recently Google announced it would shut down Google Reader. Everyone was outraged. How dare they shut down free software for which there was no similar comparable replacement? Allow me to break it down for you:

Everyone = media, bloggers clinging to a rapidly disappearing headline-scanning audience, people with irrational fascination with RSS.

Shut down = nobody uses this @#% anymore.

So when nobody cares about something that nobody uses and nobody can make money off of it, it dies. The end. All this outrage and insanity and supposed millions of orphaned and homeless readers out there… well, it accounted for about 500,000 transfers to feedly (the second most popular option)

The would-be blogging elite is even so bold to question it’s reliance on Google – if they can shut down stuff nobody uses that they can’t make money on, what is next? Could a private company shut down all of it’s unprofitable projects that the unsuspecting innocent public is mooching on? Yes. And even with all the sound and fury, it will signify nothing.

It’s not negative

You may be reading this thinking this is a bad thing. Quite the opposite.

Yes, the disaffected English majors are yet again forced to face the fact that they are fucking useless and should have gotten a real college degree. Sorry, New Media. Your brief, uneventful moment of relevance is again sunsetting. It’s not Google’s fault – it’s that majority of people simply don’t care to scan thousands of headlines or read opinions of people who don’t actually participate in the industry directly.

This is a good thing in a sense that the web has matured to the point where it’s not about “new and exciting” but actual purposeful implementation –  web is the new application medium not just a collection of porn, shopping sites and meme libraries. And the race to document and organize each and every one of those is making way for things that are actually relevant – connecting people, organizations and applications.

My generation built this Internet web thing into a mainstream afterthought… I for one am glad to be alive and to see it take it’s next step.

P.S. Some of you have asked why I use @#% to mask profanities when I have no problem using other four letter words right next to it. It’s quite simple: sometimes it’s hard to pick the right word and depending on the level of (percieved) intensity the reader will likely fill in the blank with the much more appropriate choice than I could.

XD LiveOnline! Workshop Q&A

Posted: 3:53 pm
March 27, 2013
Boss, Events, IT Business
Comments Off on XD LiveOnline! Workshop Q&A

This is regarding the blog post I made on Monday announcing ExchangeDefender’s XD LiveOnline! Workshop training series. To sum it up, it’s a free 4 hour at-your-desk training seminar for MSP business owners and employees. Our ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey platforms have grown so much both in size and cross-industry utilization that the void of practical business training is actually holding us (our partners) back. Yes, it’s free, sign up here.

That blog post lead to a lot of signups and even more questions and I hope to address some of the top ones here today and offer some more details:

Q: Can we sponsor this? Can we offer content in exchange for promotion? Can we buy this and private brand it for our own customers? Will you be selling the leads?

In short, no.

There will be no commercial content in the workshop – not from us, not from our vendors, not from our partners or industry in general. The whole focus of the event is on our partners success. I know, it sounds like a cliché but please check my track record: Much like everything I’ve ever done in this business, if you take care of your partners best interest first the rest will fall in place and we hope to bring in revenues on the back of service sales and on future training workshops, not through advertising.

The first event is free. The future quarterly workshops will be between $49 and $149 as described on the site.

Q: Why call it a workshop instead of a webinar or training event? What is this 30/60/90 thing? Will there be a certification badge or something I can use to show I’ve done this?

We decided to call it a workshop because bulk of the value you will receive is not during the 4 hours of the actual content/discussion. It’s before and after, allow me to explain:

Each event will have 4 core content areas (about 30 minutes each) followed by a Q&A from the audience (about 15-20 minutes each) followed by a short break.

Every event will be followed by a quiz, additional resources, attention report, and what we are calling a 30/60/90 day plan to put some of the lessons you learned at the event into actual, practical business activity.

The way we intend to structure this is to provide some leadup as well as followup to the event that just makes sense. Before the event you will receive a list of topics, presentations, resources and so on so you can best determine who needs to participate in the event. During the event we will be measuring how attentive you are – giving you a score at the end that shows if you were primarily in the webinar or primary on Facebook or otherwise distracted. At the conclusion of the event, we will send you a quiz and the result of it will give you an idea of how well you’ve comprehended the material we presented.

Finally, each workshop will have a set agenda. It could be to build a better web site, to implement a better process, to figure out a better way to document things, to establish some service or subscription that you need for your business. You know all those great ideas you get at conferences that you jot down and want to get done but you return to the office to get pounded by requests from all angles until you forget what you wanted to do in the first place? Well, I do. And one of the goals of the 30/60/90 day plan is that we will give you easy to follow project steps and remind you 30/60/90 days out what you should have accomplished by then. Call it accountability as a service. Call it nagging. You spent the time to learn something, it’s a waste if you don’t do anything with it. Unless you’re just burning money to be presented with good ideas so you can feel better… in which case I would like to invite you to my garage because there are far better ways of enjoying your money, trust me.

Q: What are the topics that you will discuss? Who will present them? Is this accredited training I can get CPE for?

The training and topics that we will be presenting are from the New York Times best sellers list, Nobel laureates, Harvard Business Review – as interpreted by us. No, you won’t get CPE or college credit for it and this is by no means University of Phoenix. We spend a lot of time in business books, training events, webinars.. and barely scrape 1-2% from each that we can implement in our business. We intend to share those 1-2% with you.

Think of it as a subscription to Cliffs Notes of the best business books out there, combined and delivered by the people that run the kind of business that you run.

We will likely deliver the first few ourselves and then involve our industry friends as well if there is interest in continuing this for more than one year.

Q: The time is inconvenient for me. How about a live in-person event?

I’m sorry. If there is sufficient international interest we will consider doing more than one of these. Unfortunately we are only human and are doing this on top of our daily responsibilities at ExchangeDefender to help our partners. You’re welcome to sign up and get the resources, recordings, etc and if there is a demand for it we will figure out a way to do it at other times as well.

We also have to be mindful of time constraints: There is only a 15-20 minute window for Q&A after each session. If we had 1,000 people in the session that Q&A would leave a lot of people disappointed and us working until 3AM to answer every question.

As for live events, no. The core value of this is that you can do it at work / at home / on the road and not be disconnected from business or incurring ridiculous fees on top for travel and hotel. Economies of scale also don’t agree with affordable training at which point vendors, advertisers and sponsors get involved and hotel food, drink and AV department get involved and suddenly you’re back at your typical “we told you it was training so thanks for showing up for that but in the meantime sit there while we sell you shit” conference.

Q: What are some of the topics you are considering? Is this for me (business owner) or my people?

Here are some of them that we have on the agenda, not sure in which order we will be presenting them or how we will be implementing the 30/60/90 plans:

Sales
Marketing
Finance
Hardware
Personal Info / Career management
HR
Billing & Accounting
Legal
Open Forum / Townhall
Mobility
Lead Generation
Blogging
Social Media
Project Management
Resource Management
*aaS

We will let you know which topics we will cover ahead of time so you can decide who should be watching it.

The content itself is general and practical in nature: it applies to everyone working in business no matter whether they own a business or work in one. We all struggle with the same problems and we recommend sending more than one person in along with you. You only get one quiz per employee so sitting in a conference room watching it as a group is probably not the most efficient way to do this but if you’re on a limited budget it will work.

Q: So are you now a training company as well?

No. But there is a tremendous need and we simply have nowhere to refer our partners for help. We have a very profitable and successful business but without our partners improving that kind of limits our potential as well, so it’s a win win.

This is not an ExchangeDefender exclusive event as it covers our Shockey Monkey clients as well. But I do not have any delusions of grandeur that this will become something as big as ExchangeDefender or Shockey Monkey, it’s just be something we do to help our partners for which we see no other viable alternative. We have a choice of doing nothing or doing something… so we are doing this.

Free Business Training

Posted: 1:44 pm
March 25, 2013
Boss, GTD, IT Business
Comments Off on Free Business Training

As ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey grow in scope and start getting used by more than your average IT firm, we are finding that more and more of our partners and clients are desperate for practical business and business technology training.

Not necessarily business owner training.. but making employees more aware of the business process and how all the pieces of the company fit together.

With Shockey Monkey we’re definitely making huge impact in how the business organization and process implementation are taking place (and yes, I love it when I see you fanboys of other platforms signing up for it and running it in parallel) – but the tool is only as good as the data that people feed it.

We talked to a lot of our partners about their current training issues. Here are some concerns that kept on popping up repeatedly:

1. Too expensive
2. Too general (MBA style courses)
3. Too IT specific
4. Training camouflaged as sales presentation

Those tend to be the choices. The IT world is too small to create effective business training that can fit the budget – we recently got a flyer for a 1 day ITIL seminar at $1,500 a person. The cheaper versions are typically sponsored (read: These are sales seminars, not training seminars even though you may get a nugget of useful info here and there) or so broad that the typical technology firm will get very little value from it.

With Shockey Monkey we proudly built a system that doesn’t require more than an hour of training. But where people obviously need help is in their day-to-day business organization, management, marketing, sales, trend recognition, social media, customer relationship, vendor management and virtually every other aspect of running a business.

And as a technology owner, you don’t want to have an office full of dumb IT guys running around tripping over their gadgets and scripting skills. You’d kind of aspire to make them more creative in the ways that could make you (and them) more money. Asking an IT guy to sell is like asking a sales guy (mostly illiterate) to write drivers. The winning strategy is to make sure everyone gets a taste of what everyone else is doing so they can work better together.

This is something we hope to do.

This is also why it’s great to be me.

I have a lot of friends that want to be a part of this and business-wise.. I am really mostly concerned about the success of my partners (not vendors that I have to play nice with) so here we go..

train

On April 23rd we will be launching an online business technology training workshop.

Online.

Four hours in the afternoon EST.

Free. Yes, free, the first one is on me. No catch.

Accountability matters: This is more than just a webinar. We will be running surveys, quizes, providing collateral and other training stuff that will tell you 1) if your employee paid attention 2) if they grasped the basic concepts 3) where you need to spend more time. There will be no recording of this – but you won’t have to travel or be away from work either. Just the afternoon on April 23rd.

What you (business owner) get out of this is: Employee is still at their desk in your office. They will have a much better understanding of the new emerging technology / trends impacting our industry. Employee is still available for anything urgent and business doesn’t come to a standstill. You get a report of how much attention they paid to the event and how well they comprehended the material.

What your employees get out of this: Free training on the company time. Better understanding of emerging technologies and business. More appreciation for what everyone around them does (or for the cynics: more awareness and more material for office jokes about how useless X department is). Extensive Q&A after every section.

Just training: Only one mention of ExchangeDefender and one mention of Shockey Monkey. Not in a sales “please buy our shit now” way either. No sponsors. No commercial messages. No specials. You don’t have to become an ExchangeDefender partner. You won’t have to accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. You don’t have to donate any organs. You don’t have to eat a hot dog. You don’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn and party till 3 AM as a matter of social obligation: Just focus for 4 hours.

The first one is on me, all I ask is that you let us know how it went and what we should do to improve it. Unless it absolutely bombs and 5 people show up for it, we will do this on a quarterly basis and have already brainstormed a year worth of topics that we can cover at quarterly workshops.. or more often depending on demand.

Please go here to register now.

Register yourself or your employees or your whole company.

I can tell you from running the SBS Show back in the day that I still have people coming up to me telling me how their whole company tuned into it and strategized their business around what we discussed. And that was just Chris and me joking around the annoyances in our industry.

This is a genuine workshop event. No Nobel winners in economics. No IT mavens. You’re not joining a cult. Or signing up for a pyramid scheme. Just practical training from people that deal with the same problems you deal with.. and collectively we can solve them.

So don’t wait. Sign up now – it’s free till April 4th.

What’s in it for me? Well, we are trying to provide a service that is desperately needed by the industry but we don’t know what it needs to look like. This first free one is on me and I know my friends and partners will help me build something valuable. Don’t worry about me, every Corvette has the fuel gauge on the F, we will make money in the long term but we have to get it right first and earn it. So please, if you can, help us promote this.

Cloud Fail

Posted: 3:23 pm
March 20, 2013
Boss, Cloud, IT Business
Comments Off on Cloud Fail

cloudblock_logoSometimes you are just dead wrong. Despite the best intentions and a lot of good technology, insight, research and demand for your service.. you fail miserably. I talk a lot about the stuff ExchangeDefender does great and here is one that just bombed.

The Original Idea

Back when we first decided o go ahead with CloudBlock we were being pushed by a lot of our partners to provide our Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and so on as a management platform. Everyone was going to be a cloud services provider and a lot of people wanted to host it themselves in their own data centers. So we wrote CloudBlock, the fork of the ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey management infrastructure.

Looking back, that should have been the first and last thing I needed to know: If these people were so much better than us at building the cloud – they would have built it themselves not looking to buy it from us.

But it was a great opportunity that didn’t cost a lot and had a lot of promise. We wouldn’t be involved in any of the expensive stuff we’d just build it and sell it.

And we did. Cloudblock has been a profitable experience for us but the growth was pathetic and did not meet our revenue expectations.

The Reality Of Cloud

The humbling experience that has been the reality crushing down on us.. is that the cloud is all about the support.

In the larger scheme of things.. a few dollars per month do not create a significant enough of a hurdle in purchase decisions of real companies. If the client needs a reliable email solution, $2, $5, $20, $50 a month difference in cost is not enough to make them hold back.

Some people are cheap. Yes, and they will subscribe to a free solution.

Some people are stupid. Not a good idea to make a product serving them at least not as a subscription (rob them up front)

For everyone else.. what makes the difference is the customer service, people behind the solution, performance when something goes wrong (because it will no matter what) a long term roadmap, etc.

In the service business the focus is on the service, not so much on the underlying technology. Considering that we built the underlying technology and considered that to be the core of what we were offering – CloudBlock suffered the same fate that so many MSPs and VARs in the extinction category experienced – the demand moves along with the experience not the convenience.

Lessons from the FAIL

Look at the profile of the user that is relying on your service. If you have no faith that they will survive as a company, neither will you.

Keep the line of communication open. If the user does not respond to your inquiries, surveys, etc then there is a good indication that your product is not seen as strategically relevant to even click on the link and that doesn’t bode well for the future.

Stick hard to your expectations. If the product line (given time) does not hit your metrics, do not dedicate more time to achieving diminishing results.

Self-service is in far more demand than good service. This is perhaps the biggest thing I’m picking up from this. I hire smart people, who are there around the clock (and some of them quite literally will get on a call at 3am) but the natural tendency when it comes to technology is to give it a kick yourself first. No matter how great the support phone or chat are, the first thing that usually gets hit is the site and the self-check / NOC tools. We’re bringing that tech to ExchangeDefender in a really heavy way and integrating it up and down through Shockey Monkey and our client-side tools.

So fail, learn, try again. We acquired all the third party assets last year after announcing that the platform was being sunset. CloudBlock will go offline in a few days as there is really no market between free and $10-15/mo email service.

Not gonna lie, taking this one as a bit of a defeat. I really was very optimistic on the notion that there would be more of a follow through on people building out their own infrastructure but there simply isn’t enough to sustain a business model. While this is great news for ExchangeDefender (and gives me more confidence that Microsoft will continue to fail in its effort to get the small and medium sized business) it always stings when you fall down.

The Lie Of Mobile Apps

Posted: 2:07 pm
March 18, 2013
Mobility
Comments Off on The Lie Of Mobile Apps

Here is some bullshit I heard recently that made me laugh out loud and I thought I’d deliver a little dose of reality when it comes to clueless people selling to uninformed masses. For example:

Over 100% of your clients have a mobile phone.

When polled, over 200% of them said they prefer to communicate over it. That’s 80% more than email, 126% more than postal mail and staggering 600% more than those who prefer to receive messages using smoke signals and sky writing.

It follows that you should dedicate 100% of your time, sales and marketing effort after the mobile user.

Holy shit. I almost dropped my Blackberry onto my Windows Phone when I heard those numbers! Of course, the numbers are about as real as my Blackberry and my Windows Phone but let’s agree not to let math interfere with some good bullshit.

No thing is unpossible for someone that failed stats

Yes, there are lots of mobile phones out there.

Yes, there will be more.

Yes, it’s an exciting platform and few people have figured out how to profit from it so naturally it is ripe for unproven exploitation. Granted, hat tip for the effort.

But any sensible, reasonable and honest smart phone owner will tell you that they only prefer to get mobile information on their smartphone that they want when they are looking for it. Everything else for any other purpose at any other time is a cyber version of a Jehovas witness or an inbound call without a caller ID.

Try to trespass my device with stuff I don’t care about and your “app” is gone.

Reality is that the phone is by behavior a consumer device not business device

This nonsense of you must start your development on the phone first is very popular among the stock analysts and unemployed industry experts… the notion that one day the computer as we know it will disappear and that the mobile device will be the de facto communicator of all commercial communication.

OK. Maybe.

In the meantime, using my device as a billboard will only get you shitlisted and your stuff removed. It’s even more effortless of a task than trying to unsubscribe from newsletters – newsletters get filtered and ignored – apps (that are chewing up the bandwidth or throwing up announcements) are gone.

The successful apps on the smartphone are simply extensions of great services online. With the exceptions of games and entertainment, mobile is just another display factor for what you use online. If you don’t love something online you’re definitely not about to start loving it on your tablet or an even smaller form factor device. It condenses the suckiness. It doesn’t open another channel, it just contributes to the annoyance factor.

Currently Google, Yahoo and Facebook are fighting a huge uphill battle of trying to monetize “the mobile space” and so far only Apple and Google are having significant success on advertising and app store transactions. Beyond that, phone is something that spends far too much time next to my privates to be considered anything other than private.

If I’m ignoring your phone calls, your emails, your web site, your portal, your newsletter, your twitter, your Facebook, your instagram.. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not the matter of you not having the right medium to reach me, it’s more that I just don’t really care about what you have to say/sell. But since I’m a nice guy I will lie to the survey and say “Sure, I’d love you to annoy me in yet another way”

Review of CompTIA AMM and notes from the field

Posted: 11:52 am
March 14, 2013
Cloud, Events, IT Business, IT Culture
5 Comments

Over the past few days I had the pleasure of attending CompTIA’s annual member meeting in Chicago. While the event itself was fantastic and featured some great content, I do have some mixed feelings towards the industry in general that just got reaffirmed and I wanted to share them with you in hopes that it helps put some perspective at what is going on out there beyond the marketing fluff. Good times but lots of food for thought, thanks to all that came out and everyone that said hi!

1. There are significantly fewer delusions of grandeur among the vendors.

Last decade was filled with “the next big thing” and “the game changer” and “thought leader of the emerging change in our industry” and to a great degree the level of complexity and reality has really washed away some of the incredible hype that has been around the IT circle as it went from VAR to MSP to Cloud and beyond. The shameless pimping and self promotion was still rampant (and seemingly welcomed as one presenter showed up more than an hour late to the presentation that was seemingly nothing more than an infomercial for their app. Gotta love it baby, ABP. Always. Be. Pimpin.)….

In my humble opinion, this is a good thing. It takes vendors away from our rehearsed marketing pitches and self infatuation and forces us to answer real questions about the reality of working in IT in 2013 – it’s not about what you want to sell, it’s about what you want to help add seamlessly to the existing technology portfolio… And if you only play well with your own toys that’s pretty much the end of it…… The complexity of the solution portfolio and increased sophistication of the client base makes it harder to push incomplete products and services without a track record and that changes the conversation to focus on delivery and the ecosystem, not on the traditional features and cost.

2. Same questions, same answers, same inaction.

Some people in our industry need to buy a calendar. It is not 1993. It is not 2003. It is 2013. The game has changed. The industry has changed. The business practices and business models have changed. If you are still struggling with the same problems you’ve had back then it’s seriously time to seek employment. I know that sounds harsh but the days of easy money and borderline criminal negligence in technology now carry serious penalties.

Otherwise, it is interesting to watch the same concerns solution providers have voiced in the past make an impact beyond the MSP world. Suddenly the same problems regarding margins, scalability, financing, legal, change of business model and vendor dominance are making their way into the communities dealing with Cloud, Mobile and Unified Communications. The technical ineptitude mixed with lack of business acumen or experience is harder to excuse when the solutions are so dependent on the other technologies and vendors that are changing their product selection and technology on a much rapid scale.

For example, I had a longer conversation (than I wanted to have) with a solution provided who was so concerned about the bandwidth and needing a resource to determine how much bandwidth the client needed.

Arbitrary, right? I explained that this is not something that CompTIA can effectively deliver because multiple vendors use multiple standards and multiple compression protocols and scale their application experience based on bandwidth, latency, etc. Skype alone has over 20 different bit rates. This guy wanted a standardized list – I suggested Googling – to which he again remained hopeful that someone will just do his job for him and completely lost sight of the fact that any technical implementation hinges on client usage, budget, experience needs and fault tolerance. Companies that need real time financial data feeds have a different connection to the Internet compared to the call center or a Starbucks.

How some of our industry peers remain in business with such poor work ethic is simply shocking. Which leads me to point #3..

3. Technology business beyond buzzwords is quite serious.

Shockingly, there are still companies struggling with pricing, transition to the cloud, product expertise and the ability to translate technical innovation into true business value. Yesterday I said the following:

image

I was encouraged, by multiple friends, to share this with the audience because “people need to hear it” but if there is anything I have learned writing Vladville for nearly a decade is that people do not like facing the harsh reality. They are happier with polished bullshit by a CEO that is only around right before his big event and tries to pretend he cares about this quarters sales figures far more than his clients long term objectives. So I sat there and fumed until I couldn’t take any more.

Honestly, the reality is that the industry is changing much faster than it has ever before. This unfortunately only leaves the playing field open to the participants who are willing to keep an open mind and adjust as the market changes. If the one and only objective is the sales figures and revenues beyond strategic long term value then I see no reason to ever have anyone look beyond Microsoft, Google or Apple as business partners. On the other hand, there are vendor partners who understand the solution provider business and have a long term strategy that lines up – but I’m sure Steve Ballmer will answer the phone or an email when you have a problem so by all means go ahead and save $2 on Office365, I’m sure it won’t have issues. Or maybe Sergey will hop on Google Glass and take care of your billing issues.

4. Can’t someone else do the hard work?

What I kept on hearing and seeing was great research, thoughtful panel discussions, great presentations and overall a lot of valuable content.

However, the interaction with the audience left me with the impression that “we need more.. More research, more training, more industry direction” and to be honest it just all comes down to whining about why someone else isn’t doing enough to help you with your own business challenges. This is as true of CompTIA as it was for Microsoft communities, the value doesn’t come from the body that paid for the muffins and the cheese danishes – it comes from the interactions you have with the community. The amount of resources was overwhelming and if anyone was left seeking more than I really have to say I am envious of their ability to consume so much data so quickly and shame me in the ability to implement it so much faster than we can. Of course, the reality is that these guys are just whining that the information they are getting is not chewed enough for them and that they don’t want to put the effort into taking this information to transform their business. Sorry folks, nobody is going to do your job for you for free – unless they expect to replace you.

5. Don’t confuse nonprofit with charity.

While CompTIA may be moving at a very slow pace compared to the member expectations (or the snail crawl compared to the industry in general), they are remarkably quick to add a Trustmark and an education / certification revenue stream. Oh the shock and horror of a business that wants to make money!

Folks, honestly, if you have a problem with the above you need to realign your expectations and deal with the reality that these are simply communities. It is all about what we can learn from one another and what we can become enlightened on if we keep a open mind. The meeting isn’t about what CompTIA is going to say, it is about what you’re willing to ask of the guy or a girl next to you.

The expectation of CompTIA to set industry standards or affect large scale change is simply ridiculous. The communities and executive councils are not filled with CxO roles of Fortune 500 companies nor do those companies have any vested interest in anything but competition. It’s a completely different DNA and different mission. CompTIA has always been about the education and helping IT companies capitalize on the trends. They do not set them.

In closing

As solution providers we need to stop looking to the Wizard of Oz for all the answers, we need to stop chasing the big bright logos because those companies want nothing more of us than a credit card number. In some instances, they’d prefer not to have us involved even to that extent! (Took Microsoft 3 years to figure out how to let partners bill for BPOS)

Most importantly, solution providers need to look to other solution providers be it peers, competitors or vendors who are playing on the same level with the same values. Stop chasing the venture capital backed maniacs that are trying to go public and look for the ones that happen to have things that you find important on their top 10 list. How many times do you have to be hit over the head by the people who only care about your money before you realize that your business is about more than competing with the lowest common denominator?

Seriously, friends partners and competitors alike, like it or not we have to come up with these answers and stop waiting for someone to deliver it to us because by that time the answers will not matter. The good news is that for the most part most of us have figured out major parts of the puzzle and we just have to show interest in putting that puzzle together.

If there is anything you picked up from this weeks CompTIA AMM, I hope it was that we still have the advantage and that all it takes is sitting down in the same room and working together.

Guilt & Death in Life & Business (Part 1)

Posted: 2:38 pm
March 11, 2013
IT Business
1 Comment

I guess it’s a slow news kind of a quarter because all the focus is on the guilt and whining about this little thing called life and things that are just common sense are somehow becoming notable news stories because Marissa Mayer or Sheryl Sandberg happen to say them out loud (or make them a company policy or write a book about it).

Yes, you should show up for work. No, you shouldn’t whine about the glass ceiling or apologize for being aggressive or doing what is best for your career / company. Just kick ass and don’t apologize about it.

Most importantly, you don’t need to promote the sense of guilt because all of us have it.

Which brings me to this reverse rant: I hate whiners.

Apparently people with careers feel too guilty spending too much time at work. Unemployed meanwhile feel guilty about not contributing or working on something meaningful. The grass is always greener on the other side. At home you feel guilty about the work piling up and then when you finally start to attack that pile you feel guilty about what you are missing out at home.

Here is a piece of cheerleading for your Monday: You can’t win. So stop trying.

Deathbed Philosophy

Since you can’t be at two places at the same time, you will miss out some opportunities that will advance your career and you will miss out some moments with your family. Often, personal and professional events will overlap.

Given the two events, which one would you regret missing on your deathbed? That’s the one you should go to.

There you go, that’s your life/work balance solved once and for all.

Feel better? Of course not.

What will make you feel better is the following:

1) Everyone struggles with this. It’s not you against the whole world so stop acting like a whiny little bitch every time you don’t get your way.

2) It is not something that you will ever be able to solve or perfect and the more you work on it the more you will think about it and the more you will feel guilty about because you’ll be aware of more stuff you’ll be “missing”

3) It is not something that is fixed with more money, better job, better house, better dogs, better kids, better cars, better weather, etc.

4) Feeling guilty and overanalyzing it and just general dwelling on the worst case scenario only makes it worse.

5) Following up on #4, consuming yourself with guilt will actually take away from the focus you need to have on your job or on your fun. If you’re at work daydreaming about doing fun stuff and then go do fun stuff and end up working or thinking about work throughout… you’re just failing all over.

There, feel better? Smile A friend of mine wrote a book about this, check it out.

The List

08723610700If you happen to suffer from guilt over the unfairness this world has put on your life, start a diary. Write down everything you got to do that was awesome and everything you missed out.

Keep this log for a while and two wonderful things will happen: You will find out that you aren’t doing nearly as poorly as you think you are and you will see a clear pattern of crap that you are doing that needs to stop.

Truth is, we become so consumed in dealing with our own BS that we cannot see how we are continuously contributing to the problem and making it worse.

This is why the word “balance” pisses me off so much – it just feeds into this notion that there is some hope that you will be happy if you changed your priorities, so please spend all the time dwelling on your woes and feeling sorry for yourself and blame something other than your own poor decision making. Why anyone would sit there and give a second thought to someone that would make them feel worse about themselves (for a profit) is a completely foreign concept to me but some people are into that sort of a thing.

Don’t let others make you feel bad for being yourself.

If you feel guilty about your decision making then just try logging your activities and see if there really is a problem and how you can fix it.

Remember – quit blaming everyone and everything for your misfortunes. Only once you realize that you are responsible for the decisions and situations you put yourself in can you start to make changes about stuff you don’t like. Otherwise there is no shortage of stuff that you can blame that won’t change and result in any meaningful positive impact on you. Take charge.

Or Whisky. I recommend Macallan 18.

Manage beyond IT

Posted: 4:04 pm
March 8, 2013
IT Business, Shockey Monkey
2 Comments

This is perhaps meaningless but I wanted to share because it’s a hope for how a business should be managed and the stark opposite to the reality. In reality, most problems in the workplace are fixed as a matter of a response not as a proactive process to optimize how things happen.

For example, most small businesses have that one organized person with an overweight Outlook profile that holds every invoice, confirmation email, password reset request, welcome message, fax, instant message log, screenshot collection and extensive notes.

Over time this person spends more time waiting for the search to return the results (or organizing them into a system only they understand) than working. It’s not optimal, it’s not smart but it happens.

As I have mentioned in a lot of my presentations, we use software to solve problems. Painful problems. We get pushed so hard to the cracking point that we spend incredible amounts of money and time to solve a problem that a few years later we have tons of middleware, databases, knowledge bases, SharePoint sites, defunct Doku sites, Joomla sites and apps, blogs, tickets, public folders.. collection of ancient ruins of attempts to organize knowledge.

The SMB IT industry has done a fairly good job of solving the problem of serving clients in terms of managing support requests and billable time. But when it comes to managing vendors, managing employees and HR, managing goals and careers, passwords, schedules.. it’s still a middleware nightmare ballin’ on a budget.

What I’m about to show you…

Is my humble attempt at taking ExchangeDefender (and everyone willing to use Shockey Monkey to manage their business) to unify all these concepts not as a hacked together pile of halfassed apps with no interest with working with one another… but a well thought through system for management of things beyond support tickets.

If we cared about ourselves as much as we care about our clients, we’d be in a much better place. Unfortunately, nobody pays us to be good kids that keep their room clean – our clients pay us to manage their problems not our own.

Motivation just isn’t there.

But read this post again. It’s never going to be as simple as it is now to get a handle on your vendors, notes, employees, HR policies, notes, knowledge bases and more. Your business, if it grows, is only going to get more complicated and more complex and have more people in it not less.

So here is what we did:

Organize your people (click for image for a higher resolution pic)

v1-employee 

Setup a system to track career goals and accomplishments. Don’t make reviews an annual affair – set the goals and rewards and put it in black and white as to what you want. Then let everyone do what they have to – if people just wait to become more relevant they will never see much progress – but if they can visualize their progress things change FAST!

v1-career

Get better organized about your people. I’d venture every single one of my friends would agree that their team is far more relevant than any of the PCs out in the field – yet we keep metrics and hardware specs and documentation on silicone junk far better than we track even basic stuff about our staff. Track licenses, education, certification. If they are doing it right and you’re managing them correctly their list is longer when they leave – you move them to the next level in their career!

v1-experience

Timesheets that are actually smart. If your timesheet hasn’t changed since 1950’s more than going from a piece of paper to a number entry on the screen then you have the same level of performance and insight that people had in 50’s. Why do you think we have biometrics, checkin, intelligent status boards.. for cosmetic effects? Shockey Monkey checkin systems track when the user shows up for work, when they go to lunch, when they come back and when they leave – they automatically adjust the timesheet for them and document when there is an exception (Are you late an hour every Thursday because you suck or because I forgot that I assigned you a BNI meeting every Thursday?)

v1-timesheet

Finally.. If your company is worth anything IP-wise, you have a process. If that process is not documented and you don’t have a way to instantly pass that process off onto a new employee… you don’t have a process… you just have a preferred way of doing something that cannot be measured, audited or trained to anyone unless you do it all yourself. Well, Shockey Monkey flips all that.

vendors

Naïve or just stupid?

I am not naïve, I know that what I have just shown you will be used by a very small number of people. Perhaps it’s just going to be us.

The reality is that people do not face their problems or attempt to solve them until the pain of living with the problem is more than the cost of acting to fix the problem.

Perhaps I just have some faith in the small business world as technology becomes simpler and more convenient. When the really big problems are out of the way – not worrying about updating Windows because your laptop continues to crash, not worry about why your phone isn’t syncing, why your email isn’t arriving, why your Quickbooks keep on crashing… you have more time to right the wrongs in your business.

In a sense, this is the optimistic take on what I see small business evolving towards.

Perhaps it would have made more sense to spend time and money on some common problems people ARE willing to pay for now – but my take is that people that are stuck in the past or stuck inside the problem so deep that they don’t see the world passing them by – will not be around in a few years.

I like to look forward.

In the meantime, I hope Shockey Monkey 3.3 keeps on pushing you there. It’s live, enjoy. If you’d like to watch yesterdays webinar, it’s here.