Dare to dream: You’re all fired.

Posted: 12:42 pm
June 29, 2010
Uncategorized
Comments Off on Dare to dream: You’re all fired.

Greetings from beautiful Southern California and Mickey Mouse!

dream

Here is what I want you to think about: What does the technology landscape look like without you?

Dream. Think. Share. vlad@vladville.com

Most people that read Vladville are in IT industry at some level (service providers, consultants, SPFs, LARs, VARs, MSPs) and our industry is rapidly consolidating more of us out of a job. How do you see the landscape of technology in a company when you’re out of the picture.

What does IT look like without you?

Who pays the technology bills and whats billable?

Who renews the service contracts?

Who buys the contract and what does the contract cover?

That should get you started.

Get creative. It’s the subject of the 2nd Vladville newsletter! Email me your responses please.

P.S. I don’t care what your thoughts are if you’re still employed – it’s a given that the IT support teams will never go completely extinct. This is not what this is about. What I’m curious is what everyone thinks is the next major area of consolidation and how we can make revenues if we are no longer in the picture – the service doesn’t disappear, but the serviceman will. So how do we get paid in a world where we don’t exist?

Please share / blog / tweet and ask your peers. 

Beyond thanks – deep gratitude to everyone I work with

Posted: 3:13 am
June 26, 2010
Vladville
1 Comment

This blog, for all intents and purposes, is community service. You’re by no means obligated to subscribe to it, or support it’s sponsors, yet many, many, many of you do. I’ve thanked many of you in person and on the blog, but the words thank you are these days just a matter of politeness, not necessarily something that expresses ones true gratitude. 

So allow me to do the latter: Today I drove an unreasonably expensive car to the airport where my son and I got on a plane and flew to Disneyland for a few days. He watched a few movies on the iPad, played a game on the iPhone, looked at pics of his mom and his dog. Right now he is standing in a window, watching Disney’s World of Color. As a father, this is perhaps the greatest gift I can ever give my son: that of utter amazement and happiness. When all the problems in the world melt away and you’re left with your mouth open gazing at something that just seems unbelievable.

timmycolor Every day a ton of you choose to part with your money and build your business at Own Web Now. There are far more of you than I’ll ever get to meet or thank in person for enabling me what I am able to do for my family. Likewise, you will never meet the many people at Own Web Now, whose families are supported by your business. I do want you to know that we wake up each and every day and go to work to make Internet suck just that little less – be it by killing SPAM or making Exchange do the impossible.

I just want all of you who don’t actually know me (and only know of the Vlad’s Ferrari Fund) to know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me personally by trusting us with your networks and giving us your money – and what I, as the CEO, do with it. For the most part, it’s making the little guy in the picture above happy.

The 2010 so far…

Posted: 9:12 am
June 23, 2010
IT Business
Comments Off on The 2010 so far…

With first half of the year coming to a close it’s time to look at the agenda & numbers and figure out where we’re at and where we’re going. Everyone should do this as a part of their business because that’s the only way to know if you’re actually going somewhere – and the smaller you are the more critical it is because you don’t get to make many mistakes. The bigger you get, the more relevant this exercise becomes because it takes a while to steer the ship and change things up to stay on the right (profitable) track.

For us, 2010 has been awesome. The gamble on the cloud is still paying off with us growing like crazy on every continent except Europe. We’re still posting positive growth in EU (on the back of UK) but it’s clear that the financial crisis around Greece is no joke. On the positive side, it’s getting more affordable for us to do business there so we’re investing heavily in the new infrastructure in UK.

ExchangeDefender 5 has been phenomenal for us – it took us out of our funk with the previous generation of the product and the new features have been a competitive slam dunk. We keep on winning against all our competitors and now we’re even attracting some big time licensing deals again so I can’t say enough good stuff about that. Anyone @ UCF want a jquery gig? We’ve been looking for over a month!

Exchange + SharePoint has been absolutely insane. Last weekend we rolled out the gear for the new low-cost BPOS-like consumer alternative to our corporate partner-only products at OWN and this business keeps on growing beyond every imaginable metric. At this pace, our cloud business will be bigger than our ExchangeDefender business by 2011. Love it!

Offsite backups, dedicated servers, virtual servers – crapshoot. The era of steel is over. I’m pretty convinced we’re Dell’s only customer 😉 Love ya guys! 🙂 We’ve gone from waiting a month (at times longer) for delivery and now we’re back to the same week shipment.

All the other stuff is doing great.

What’s really amazing is that we’re launching four new things this summer that I believe will be just amazing for us. We’re also changing our pricing and adding some of the features our partners have been begging for (a retail-brand offering for partners that don’t want to be in the billing & bidding war with Google & Microsoft but don’t want to sign up a client with them and lose them forever; a social media play; a book on a successful cloud business model; a PSA with the release track record that puts Duke Nukem to shame) soooooooo… Really looking forward to the next few months.

Towards 2011 and beyond, things don’t look good. The good news is that the bad stuff is largely fueled by economic uncertainty in Europe, the oil spill in the gulf, the death drop in housing sales in USA and the overall financial funk and uncertainty. So yeah, it’s going to get ugly. But much like the previous two catastrophe’s that I’ve had a joy of running this business through (.com bust in 2000, George Bush) it’s all about listening to what people want to buy and not really caring whether I’m right or wrong about what puts my butt in a Ferrari. And the same to you. 🙂

How come there aren’t more “honest” SMB blogs out there?

Posted: 3:05 pm
June 22, 2010
IT Business
1 Comment

I get this question often..

My standard response is to just shrug and say that most people that are willing to put serious effort into something expect to be compensated.

For the rest, there is a significant penalty for being open – no matter what you say, someone will be offended.

So somewhere between the cost of time and lack of pay, there are a few popular blogs. Followed by half a billion whore blogs that spend half the time on self promotion and the other half pounding Google Analytics trying to figure out which comment spambot just landed there and if they can justify writing another blog post nobody will actually read 🙂

These days everyone is concerned with the eyeballs:

You know how I know if people read my blog? I ask if they know who I am. Yes? Have I offended you?

If I haven’t, you haven’t read this blog 🙂

There are three types of blog posts:

  1. Bashing someone or something. Popular, everyone loves to watch a train wreck.
  2. Top 10 list. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they think they are right.
  3. Boring crap nobody reads.

Most of your blogging fits in category #3: helpful posts, insightful thoughts, self-promotional posts and announcements, product reviews, etc. You know how I know I wasted an hour of my time? When someone comments with “That’s helpful, that’s insightful, that’s cool!” – it’s a packrat response – post bookmarked to be lost in a workstation reimage later.

You know how I know I’ve spent an hour on something useful? When someone who has never met me starts talking to me like they know me at a conference and I ask them what they use for spam filtering..

And you know what’s just friggin awesome? More people have read this post and clicked on that link than our own newsletter.

Always. Be. Pimpin.

Intuit, when cloud hits the fan

Posted: 9:15 pm
June 16, 2010
Beta
Comments Off on Intuit, when cloud hits the fan

First of all, we are a happy Intuit client. As much as I hate Quickbooks and everything Intuit produces, it pales in comparison to dealing with a CPA, IRS, Florida DOR, Dallas Tax Appraisers office, anything in California, and of course the VAT overseas.

However, the sketchiness of cloud operations is something that has to come to an end. In the past 24 hours we’ve seen huge failures in privacy at AT&T and it’s been nearly 24 hours since anything @ Intuit Online has worked. For the past day or so we’ve been trying to figure out why our employees @ Own Web Now have not been paid and have been greeted various Apache errors and then finally this:

intuit

You can see further outrage at the Intuit Community.

The Difference Between Cloud and Vapor Promises

The organization I run delivers cloud services.

We have done so for longer than most people and I can tell you, without a slightest shade of pink on my cheek, that everything crashes.

Everything.

We boast about redundancy, and failover, and clustering, and enterprise software – all of which works – until it breaks.

When it does break, there needs to be a safeguard. I don’t care how much money is spent on redundancy, there always needs to be another system to take over in the middle of a disaster. For some things, you can’t expect it – there is a reason you pay $10/hosting or a few pennies or dollars for a gig of offsite backups. It’s a risk you take.

When you get Exchange 2007 and 2010, or ExchangeDefender from OWN, you know it’s fail tested. It’s been broken in more ways by more people in more countries than anything else. For petes sake, it protects Exchange, the worlds most unstable and outrageously overcomplicated mail server software on the planet.

We know it will fail. So we have LiveArchive. Powered by Exchange 2010. Which itself has failed a ton of times.

But overall, our network has a 100% uptime. If the Exchange hosting fails, ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is there. If the LiveArchive fails, Exchange hosting is there. We do it because it is mission critical.

If you buy or sell network services, the difference between mission critical and everyday software is indistinguishable – you have no idea how much you rely on something until you’ve lost it. So take a moment of sitting in your despair and anger and plan for what happens the next time you see the cloud vendor take you down.

Letting the little stuff slide

Posted: 6:49 pm
June 15, 2010
Misc
Comments Off on Letting the little stuff slide

Not really related to anything in the technology field, but just how often do the little things get to you? To me – very often. Mostly because my entire job is on the polar opposites – I set the company direction for years in advance and I also get to deal with the littlest of details because that’s what sets us apart and makes sure we’re not “just like everyone else out there.”

Living an actual (non-professional) life with those qualities is tough.

Stuff that would not even be noticed by a normal person just.. gets.. to you.

Earlier today, I got back home to find that our trash hasn’t been picked up.

We pay a @#% in taxes to a village (I don’t live in “Orlando”) that does relatively little.

Compared to real cities with mass transit, etc this place is pathetic.

So when we pay such a premium, is it unreasonable to expect the city to pick up the trash and not leave half of it in the trash can? I think so.

But it’s all in how you handle it.

My first thought was to take the remaining trash and go huck it at the city hall. Pro: brief moment of satisfaction. Con: I’d have to drive with trash in my car, throw it at a place when it’s closed.

My second thought was to take the trash to the actual department that handles this, leave it there and ask if it’s too much to expect to have it picked up every week or if I should just keep on bringing it back to the counter and leaving it there? Pro: brief moment of satisfaction and abuse. Con: trespassing, littering, court time, more penalties, etc.

My final thought that I actually went with: Close the garbage lid and thank god I’m not a garbage man. Pro: I walk into my house. Con: Da man wastes my tax money.

For the most part, many things you do will not affect you a lot a year from now. Losing your temper/patience (or taking calls from people that will do so) is worth deferring and ignoring. My buddy Karl says you shouldn’t work with people you don’t like. My buddy Andy Goodman only works with his friends. Both make a very good point: Life is a lot nicer when you can be thankful for being better off than the people that try to screw you.

At which price point are we competitive enough?

Posted: 11:26 pm
June 14, 2010
IT Business
2 Comments

Last week, after I changed up my presentation at MSPU to be a little more straight forward, I got to have several conversations with people who were extremely concerned not about the cloud, but their ability to compete with those that choose to go with it. Quote:

“With both Microsoft and Postini clearly advertising their pricing on the web site, I am finding it more and more difficult to offer solutions because clients are asking why they are paying so much more?”

This is where I give you my brilliant solution to the above problem.

I wish I had one. Sadly, I don’t.

This is something that has been beaten to death on Vladville since 2007 so I’ll sum up 3 years of posts in one paragraph: We’re seeing consumerization of business solutions which are making VAR/MSP margins tighter and technical solutions reduced to recommending which vendor to sign up with. As the technical competence becomes less and less relevant, the transition from a technology company to a marketing company becomes critical… for survival.

P.S. I’d like to take this opportunity to clear the air about the speculation my investments and about what I’m working on during my leave of absence and to which extent it’s going to help the above problem: It’s not. What I’m spending money on and building has everything to do with the paragraph above and absolutely nothing with the ability to price compete with a $5 Exchange mailbox or a $1 antispam solution. So please don’t buy the stories you’re hearing, if you’re concerned I’m one of the easiest people to reach – feel free to ask.

Thank You

Posted: 9:12 am
June 10, 2010
Vladville
1 Comment

I’d just like to take a moment to thank so many of you that have taken the time to send me some constructive feedback on what you’re contemplating, fearing and considering on your journey to the cloud – or why you’re not making one at all – it’s been extremely valuable.

I’ve already added four things that were previously not on the map.

I really, really, really appreciate all the support. It should be out very shortly, first as an ebook, second as a dead tree and eventually audio book if enough people happen to be interested in either of the first two.

Writing a book on Cloud Services

Posted: 7:04 pm
June 8, 2010
Vladfire
1 Comment

Yep. The body of American Literacy is about to take a huge step back. I am incredibly literate when I spell check and proof things so we’ll see. The stuff I’ve written is so far very similar to Vladville so hopefully it will make for very enjoyable, quick read.

Why? I’ve traveled a lot this year and I’ve spoken with literally thousands of people about the subject of cloud. I have to admit, most conversations are rather scary. The way most of the people I’ve spoken to are approaching the cloud is effectively signing off their clients to the service providers that will put them out of business – not a good way to make money. And after 13 years of moving vapor, I know a bunch of stuff that I don’t think anyone would pay attention unless it was on a dead tree, read far away from the distractions. Here is the general outline so far:

Section 1: What’s In The Cloud
Overview of different cloud-based solutions, from colocation to hosting, virtual and dedicated servers, online services and utility computing.

Section 2: Cashing In The Cloud
Overview of existing business models that integrate the cloud: from all-in to hosted infrastructure and services to complementing solutions that extend the existing service provider solutions.

Section 3: Does That Cloud Look Like…
Marketing strategies for positioning, implementing and delivering cloud services. Basically, a chapter on marketing and designing differentiation assuming all the underlying bricks are the same.

Section 4: Selling Clouds & Vapor
Section covering sales strategies, role playing, handling objections, pricing concessions and cross-selling.

Section 5: Is This For Me?
Perhaps the most important part of the book – how to decide if this is something you’re going to do and which steps to take first, second, third, thirteenth..

Here is where I ask for a favor: Email me at vlad@vladville.com and tell me what you’d like to see in there as far as these sections are concerned.

The goal of this book is to take you from knowing relatively little to having a full marketing, sales, positioning and implementation process. In two hours. And since I’ve already made a ton off the community (and don’t have speaker / presenter / educator aspirations by any means) this is not going to be an expensive book.

The goal is to help people be a part of the cloud revolution, not just a reselling bystander. And training on this business model is thus required of every tech, accountant, support and sales person on your staff.

So help me make this something truly valuable.

Email vlad@vladville.com with your ideas and suggestions. Thanks!!!

What I wish I knew 10 years ago

Posted: 11:44 pm
June 6, 2010
Boss
1 Comment

Earlier tonight I was in my driveway (King of the Hill style) washing our cars with my son and wife and remarked: “We’ve got some nice s*@#’”; It got me thinking about one thing I learned the hard way that I wish I knew ahead of time. So if I were to time travel and talk to the 21 year old self this is what I’d say:

“There is no such thing in life as work-life balance. Your work is your life, your life is your work and the more you try to split who you are on arbitrary hours of selfish focus on family, friends, job, etc the more you’ll fail at everything.”

I truly believe that. And it took a lot of out-of-office clarity to realize it.

Life is not worth living if it’s managed by an accountant on a spreadsheet. Think about it. I can’t imagine how hard my wife would kick me in the balls if I walked up to her and said: “I have 1 hour set aside for the intimate stuff. Let’s go, I have a hard stop at 11 to go do some yard work.”

I have been lucky to become very successful. Yes, it took a lot of hard work and dedication of a lot of people, but it could have failed as well. I’ve also been very lucky to marry a girl that loves me, to have a healthy kid, to hire some amazing people and fire/frustrate the right ones along the way too. But one regret I do have is that I think I would have had a lot more fun along the way if I didn’t do it all so hardcore.

So Hakuna Matata, thanks to all my friends and followers that read this blog, I’m working on something I think will be very helpful to many of you and tomorrow I start asking for input, so get your knowitall vitamins and start writing to vlad@vladville.com 🙂