Autotask Live Focus

Posted: 1:10 pm
April 26, 2010
Events, ExchangeDefender, IT Business
2 Comments

Last week we sponsored the Autotask Live conference and hung out with a few hundred Autotask users, integrators and sponsors in Miami. As usual, Autotask staff pulled off an awesome event and I’m amazed at the extent that they are willing to work with the partners to make stuff happen. Steve Noel (one of their head dev / integration guys) was by our booth probably half a dozen times with ideas and suggestions on how to extend our feature set (ExchangeDefender integrates into Autotask for billing, support, statistics and LiveLinks).

What I was really curious about was the keynote. Bob Godgard is not on Facebook or Twitter, he doesn’t blog and I think I see him once a year in a booth where he looks more like an inconspicuous swag hunter than the CEO of the whole thing. It’s hard to figure out what’s on his mind and outside of meticulous press releases and scripted speeches, sometimes it’s hard to feel the emotion and the drive behind where the company is heading.

This is extremely important. I remember a few years ago blogging from the Microsoft conference when the mood on the podium turned very anti-Partner. It was clear then and there that Microsoft was about to annihilate it’s partner channel and everyone who stood in it’s way.

So what did Bob talk about?

Platform.

That’s it. There were no elaborate service pitches, even though they got VARStreet there was no long talk about how this service is going to change the way everyone worked: just about how it’s going to strengthen the platform. The entire presentation was about broadening the reach of the platform, making it OS/Browser independent, moving onto touch screen devices, adding more back office stuff.

For integrators and developers like OWN, this was very welcome news. It was similar to Ballmer’s “Developers, Developers, Developers” pitch at PDC a few years ago. It established a clear focus that Autotask is spending it’s money on improving it’s platform and by proxy our ability to continue to help our partners realize additional value by using it.

To me, this is key. Things like Windows, Autotask, etc are platforms. The second they lose the focus on their core (see Microsoft Windows Vista) product and get distracted the entire ecosystem around them suffers. Autotask, in my opinion, is going in the right direction for it’s users and it’s partners.

At the event, we released two products based on the Autotask/ExchangeDefender platform. One is a ticket-to-email gateway, which is free and open to everyone using ExchangeDefender. The other one is Orangutime, a desktop gadget that helps you track time and update tickets (offline) without launching a browser.

I have to say, I am very impressed with what Autotask is doing and I look forward to bringing more and more solutions into that ecosystem. A huge part of our partner base relies on Autotask, and one way we contribute back to our community (aside from t-shirts) is by helping make you more efficient between the two platforms with the software we’ve already developed in-house.

Vlad vs. Double Down

Posted: 10:13 pm
April 25, 2010
Awesome
3 Comments

One thing I’ve learned in blogging is: given a large audience, no matter what you say, you will offend someone. Yesterday I posted a hint that we’re opening a UK office and since then I got some hate mail about being un-American and asked how I dare spend money abroad while people here are starving. (the answer is simple: the people abroad buy our services which keep less people that work at OWN in USA from starving). But logic doesn’t work with idiots, so I did what an American idiot would do: I went to KFC. Enjoy:

doubledownFor more information, please see www.kfc.com/doubledown. Somehow they managed to make the grilled one worse than the deep fried version (less cals/fat, more sodium) which in itself deserves a bow. When done watching me eat, hit this blog up: This is why you’re fat .

The Three Miracles

Posted: 2:55 pm
April 24, 2010
ExchangeDefender, OwnWebNow
4 Comments

Yesterday I observed three things which on their own would amount to a miracle – and I feel compelled to share it with you. Like any other business, we have our ups and our downs, but to see how much better things are doing and how much hard work went into getting us there – to see it pay off and come together – is amazing.

Miracle 1: SMTP resurrection

The more Exchange changes the more it remains shit the more it acts the same. ExchangeDefender is around because we couldn’t keep Exchange 5.5 stable in the 90’s. Now in 2010, with Exchange 2010, we’re still using Linux to keep Exchange breathing. After a seemingly endless list of hardware additions and requests, we moved the edge roles onto Linux and automatically, delays are gone.

Miracle 2: Supportless Support

We launched forums this week. We did it in a relatively low-key way (primary purpose for them is actually to provide support for all the Autotask software we’re writing) and the forum admin (on his second login since launch to tweak categories) noted that people already started supporting one another.

“It’s like a machine that prints money…”  – Check the OWN forums at www.ownwebnow.com/forums (p.s. Your login credentials have been emailed to you. If you haven’t received them, request a reminder on the forum login page)

Miracle 3: We all agreed on something.

This thing I can’t actually discuss in the open (legally) but we all agreed on something. That’s somewhat unusual. The nice thing about it is that it takes us to that next level.

Things at OWN are better than they have ever been and in no small part thanks to our partners that understand the value of the partnership and help push us forward all the time. I know things are not always ideal (and at times can even get ugly) but the track record here of what we deliver and what we’ve been able to build is pretty damn amazing.

Now, on to UK. Anyone over there want to help us build an office? 🙂

Autotask UnLive: Introducing OranguTime

Posted: 11:24 am
April 20, 2010
IT Business, IT Culture, Programming
4 Comments

Back from Miami (if you’re still there please go say hi to Travis Sheldon) but I have one more thing to talk to you about if you’re using Autotask:

OranguTime!

5

What the heck is OranguTime?

Well, if you’ve ever used any CRM solution out there, you know how difficult it is to just track some of the simplest things – logging a call, posting time, etc. It’s like landing a plane. Check that the gear is down (app is open), check the air and ground speed (find the ticket you need to update), review your landing paperwork (figure out where you wrote just how much time you spent on the call/task and any appropriate notes) and then line up the plane and actually land it on the right strip (line up allocation codes, times, billable and unbillable flags, etc).

The end result is that most activity ends up being unreported at best and reported incorrectly at worst. We lose business intelligence about our activities at the best, lose money at worst. It’s ugly no matter what.

Well, friends, let me introduce you to a fat client for Autotask.

  • Allows you to start and pause time as you work on your support requests.
  • Allows you to provide notes that can be posted back to the support ticket along with the time.
  • Resides on your desktop as a native Windows application (it’s fast!)
  • Completely secure, uses Autotask API to post your data.
  • Just download & login, no installation, deployment or management complexity. Or waiting for stuff to load 🙂

Bit of background (feel free to skip this): We call it Orangutime. (get it? Orangutan as in a monkey, time as in money) I call it something else but if I put it in writing she’d beat my ass. [REDACTED] There are many advantages to a fat client, but there are also so many disadvantages too. Likewise, there are many advantages to a light web app but there are also so many disadvantages. I wouldn’t really call the two environments “a choice” if I had an option of navigating a web app on a slow connection vs loading a fat client. If the user is inconvenienced in any way, they don’t use the app and you lose money. Being the slimy vendor whore, I think I can make $ by solving this quagmire.

Simply put: There is a middle ground between the desktop and the cloud that can enable a lot of Autotask users to be much more efficient and profitable. I hope Orangutime fits in there.

The Product

It’s quite simple. The “fat client” is simply an executable that requires no installation. Just download and double click. It will prompt you for your username and password.

2

Select an Autotask ticket to load. This can be pulled from the portal, from the notification email, from the dispatch or even the client yelling at you for not working on their request.

1 

Once the request is in your work queue, just hit the play button and let it count your time while you work.

5

You can work on multiple requests at once, if you click on the arrow to expand the list your active support requests will be there with the current time to be posted to Autotask. Just click the blue arrow to add a note to accompany the update and post it to the Internet.

6

In my humble opinion, this competes with Notepad. I set the guys up with one objective: Make this faster and more efficient than Notepad. If they can click, type or write stuff in notepad faster, we don’t stand a chance.

So, ladies and gentlemen, this is 1.0. We’re obviously going to add a bunch more stuff to this and we’re looking for beta testers – I’ll post details on that in a separate blog post @ ownwebnow.com – but I do want to make it clear that we are not writing a fat client for Autotask. In my opinion, the future of applications is in the cloud and replicating the functionality of Autotask with the technology that should be left in the last decade is not likely to appeal to anyone.

So Mr. Rosenfelt, close ‘nuff? 🙂

I hope you’ve all appreciated a bit of background behind this development, how we came up with it, what the advantage is and how the software companies think. I hope to bring you more of this kind of stuff because as I’ve shared with many of you in person – we are in a partnership here. As much as we try to understand how you work and provide you solutions, you have to understand how we work and how we make money – all with the hope of a win/win goal.

Autotask Live: Extending & blending the platform

Posted: 4:41 am
April 19, 2010
ExchangeDefender, Friends, IT Business
10 Comments

If there is anything I’ve learned in my 13 years in this industry, it’s that when you do nice things for people they tend to repay you more than you ever expected. We’ve been fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of that equation for years, which in part is why we’ve done so well – but in the past year we got to give back to our partner community as well as our strategic partners.

Case and point: Autotask. Trying to create an integration point in the IT space is not very easy. A little over a year ago, when we first started designing our Autotask integration points, we anticipated a very painful process and just hoped to have some basic stuff in for the product in time for the Autotask CommunITy live. We asked for a conference call to help us with some initial issues – Autotask and Brian Sherman (who ran the industry alliances at the time) agreed to help us out and we expected the usual type of a meeting – an apathetic developer, a clueless marketing person and a random person stumbling over promises that won’t be kept. What ensued, shocked and surprised us.

Autotask brought in 11 people in that conference call, all eager to help us out.

The first, and only, time we had an issue the CEO called Steve Noel into his office during the call and we had the documentation in the email within the hour.

Finally, and this is the catalyst for what you will see in the next 24 hours from us, every chance Autotask got our integration got promoted. At every event we went to, Autotask promoted us and talked about our integration. And after every one of those presentations/calls, we had a line of new people ready to sign up.

I assure you, hand on the pile of money we spend on marketing, you can’t buy that kind of publicity and endorsement.

The Payback

In 2009 we spend a record amount of time on the road and started a very aggressive marketing campaign.

In 2010, we quadrupled that effort.

So when it came around to pay back Autotask, we did what we’re really good at: We asked our partners what they would like to see in the solution that wasn’t there already. Over the next 24 hours, I will share with you the details of two solutions that our partners asked for.

Email – to – Ticket Gateway

The biggest gripe among Autotask users has been the difficulty of getting emails into the Autotask portal – there are some commercial solutions, there are Outlook plugins, there is even a commercial Exchange plugin.

But we’re in the cloud age, right? Everything should be free, right? Things should just work in the cloud, no purchasing, no downloading, definitely no server plugins, right?

Right. We’re proud to announce the first free, transparent, secure and cloud based email-to-Autotask ticket interface built right into ExchangeDefender (which is free to our partners and Autotask patners). With our solution you can pick an email in your domain to function as a gateway, everything sent to it will create a ticket in the Autotask system, assign it a priority and even a specific queue. The deployment is dead simple:

Just provide ExchangeDefender with the credentials to your Autotask portal. Important: This is the primary competitive advantage over anything else out there: ExchangeDefender is a secure network, with the current SAS 70 – Type II audit and a ton of people managing, developing and monitoring the network around the clock. Your credentials don’t sit on a random leased server in a colo, you can trust the security behind this system.

step2

Next, pick the default email address from your domain to function as the Autotask gateway. Anything sent to this address will create a ticket in your Autotask portal.

step3

Assign the default Queue, default person to assign it to, etc. This is huge because it now isolates Autotask as the sole SLA engine – if it’s not in Autotask it doesn’t get an SLA and it gives your personnel the ability to only have one place to check. No more looking at portal, or waiting for the service manager to assign tickets – this becomes a part of an automated workflow.

step4

Now for the real kicker: Let’s say you have a real PITA client for which every issue is always urgent. We all have clients like this. Well, now you can offer them a real VIP service. Program their email address into the Autotask gateway, assign a queue and bump that priority up to Urgent (or whatever your highest priority happens to be, the gateway will automatically pull down all of your queues, priorities and contacts during setup).

step5

Another way to think about this is as an extension to every unmanaged/unintegrated peripheral and service you want to monitor through Autotask. If it generates an email alert, it now integrates into Autotask. You’re welcome 🙂

step6

Business Strategy

OWN is a channel only company and much like Autotask, the longer we keep you in business and the more efficient we make you, the more money we make. It’s a true partnership.

So this is free. No questions asked.

I hate to channel Billy Mays here, but we’re not going to be shy about saying that we have the most hardcore integration of cloud services into Autotask, bar none. If we can make it easier and more effective for you to use Autotask, you’ll spend more time in our software and more time in Autotask – which will make the value behind each solution jump. So yeah, it’s free and it will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on what 3rd party solution you may have used for this in the past (or the most expensive one: nothing at all) and it’s a true win-win-win.

So Autotask, partners, thank you for working with us and continuing to do business with Own Web Now. It’s a pleasure to be able to make this kind of a contribution back to people that pushed us so hard.

How do I get it

It’s free. It’s in ExchangeDefender. Just login, hover over Configuration button, setup and give it an hour to do it’s initial rollout.

Next up

Stop by our booth, drop your card in (for a chance to win a free iPad) and we’ll bump you ahead in the queue and hook you up for free with the solution we’re launching at Autotask #CommLive tomorrow. (sorry, trying to pace my pimping)

Little bit of a background: I met a partner at xChange (Brian Rosenfelt) who was thinking about switching away from Autotask. Why??? He didn’t like the web app feel, the lag between page loads and refreshes and wanted something that he could just manage – online and offline – and quickly add ticket notes and track time spent on each.

Well Brian, check back here on Tuesday AM 🙂

P.S. This blog post is brought to you at 4:30 AM by my friend, road insomnia. 🙂

It’s pimpin, pimpin…

Posted: 3:41 pm
April 15, 2010
IT Business, Programming
Comments Off on It’s pimpin, pimpin…

Starting Sunday, you’re going to see some interesting announcements involving ExchangeDefender, Own Web Now and some new software and solutions we’re launching.

Frankly, I think some of you will be surprised by some of the stuff that we’re doing.

People tend to have a mistaken impression of what I’m all about and what OWN does, so I figured I’d offer an explanation.

I talk to a lot of people and I believe that apps & platforms are the future of the IT business. Infrastructure, not so much. It reminds me of being in college, surrounded by Asians, realizing that the computer engineering job market might not exist in USA by the time I graduate. I was lucky enough to be right 🙂

Now, we’re in the business of solution development. When I talk to people, they tell me about their problems.

I think about it, doodle it down, draw a few scenarios and run it by a bunch of people.

Anything we can write quickly, and sell to a ton of people, is my business.

underpants-gnomes1 So, hope we’re all on the same page. To put it in the Internet meme terms:

Step 1: Collect frequent problems.

Step 2: Solve the problem with software.

Step 3: Profit.

There, now you know 🙂

How not to give a ….

Posted: 10:36 am
April 14, 2010
IT Culture
12 Comments

I’ve gotten a lot of praise over the few howto articles this year, glad you’re enjoying them. Really, it’s all just a bunch of common sense mixed with experience that isn’t common sense until someone tells you or you learn the hard way.

hownottogiveaSo, I’d like to ask for a favor. All things considered, I have an awesome job. I make a lot of money, nobody yells at me, I work with very smart people and am generally free to do what I want every single day. Life is good. But… Every now and then, I hit the a**hole mine. Someone finds a way to be unreasonable, ungrateful and pretty much just nasty for no good reason.

 

When I go home, I don’t think about all the awesome people I work with or the dozens of great interactions I’ve had throughout the day. I am stuck thinking about that one bad thing.

So.. my question is: how do you just let it go?

Don’t call it a fat client, call it big boned ;)

Posted: 10:52 pm
April 12, 2010
Programming
Comments Off on Don’t call it a fat client, call it big boned ;)

Pardon the scribble, but most of you that have talked to me during Q1 expressed a great bit of interest in this. So, as I usually do, I’ve delivered. Or will by Monday AM in Miami 🙂

photo123

If this seems interesting, and you’re behind ExchangeDefender and you use Autotask and would like to help – you know the number, call me directly – I’ll get you a free copy in exchange for some beta testing and promotional help.

How To Remove Yourself

Posted: 2:01 am
April 10, 2010
Uncategorized
1 Comment

This week I started a formal process of removing myself from all the critical technical roles I once held at Own Web Now. These days I’m pretty much an “enterprise architect” around here which means I only help point people in the right direction and explain all the broken stuff and hackery that went on behind the scenes when we didn’t know any better. You know the deal “let’s just get it going, we’ll make it look nice later”; except later never comes.

So that’s the why.

Now for the How:

  1. I have a flat text file on my desktop called “Act of Vlad.txt” 
  2. Every time someone asks me about a certain process/configuration/setting I document the question and the quick answer as I provide it.
  3. I rank each request in order of severity (the extent to which the process is broken multiplied by the likelyhood that this will come up again)
  4. Every time I have a spare hour to watch TV I pull the file up and look at the top case.
  5. I knock out the issue I picked in #4, one at a time.

When I fly I like to organize, sort and group these issues and try to find better ways of dealing with the legacy stuff in a better way. Some things are better merged to other systems, others have long ago been simplified by other stuff or outright removed from any sense of purpose and should be eliminated.

The only challenge in this process is to understand how you got here. I had to make some shortcuts to get to where I’m at, and a part of this process is to smooth things out now that I have a lot of resources. The key here is to focus on explaining how and why and resist the urge to just “fix” something because the reality is that there is far more broken stuff that is interconnected in very strange ways in all the ways the things were built in the first place, and you’re better off just educating your staff than fixing the problems you can see while leaving everyone else in the dark. This is in part why I bought the iPad – so I can focus on the braindump and mentoring, not to fix the problems I’ve caused in the first place.

For what it works, the “humble cake” doesn’t taste very well 🙁

How To Grow Profits

Posted: 11:29 am
April 8, 2010
IT Business
Comments Off on How To Grow Profits

The last article I wrote about MSPs still not growing in 2010 really struck a chord with many of the MSPs that read this blog. Due to the work insanity I haven’t had a chance to reply to all of the messages sent to vlad@vladville.com but I will over the next 2-3 weeks. The primary problem is that many of you are asking very specific “how” questions and that largely depends on where you are, how much money you have to spend, how much money you need to make, etc.

One of the primary questions that I hope to answer today is how we’ve grown in the 1st quarter so tremendously. I know that every 1st of the year people make a ton of resolutions – and when those resolutions don’t pan out in March while others are growing – it can be painful. Hang in there. Here is our story:

In December 2009 I made a really long and exhausting trip through California and up the east coast visiting with our strategic partners trying to establish what 2010 was going to be for us. Some of these companies were (much) larger than mine so I got a lot of really good advice that fit my company but not quite Fortune 500 (which is what the really expensive business consultants will offer you night and day). Anyhow, here are some changes we’ve made that gave us a 30% boost in profits in Q1:

1. Outsourced irrelevant stuff

We completely decimated the idea of hand holding. This was one of the problems OWN had largely due to my micromanagement and willingness to help everyone with everything, regardless of revenues that account may bring. Treat everyone the same, right? Well, no. We have very clear set of procedures we follow at Own Web Now and how we deliver the service – but there are many people that refuse to read the documentation, assign the task to their interns or new hires, etc and we spend a ton of time actually “training” people to deal with deployments and support. This is something we’ve thoroughly documented and written and shot videos about.

So we created http://go.ownwebnow.com and moved all of our business intelligence into the Partner Guide.

Then with Howard Cunningham’s help (awesome MSP in the Washington DC area and an all around great guy) we outsourced all our Tier 1 (ie: “Reading the documentation over the phone”) support to a third party.

This had a chain effect of changes throughout our organization. Because we were now able to see the real issues and let the staff that had expertise actually apply it we were able to move up our delivery timelines – a lot – because we were not stuck on the phone with ignorant people all day.

2. Focused on marketing first

Second, we really added a lot of professional flare to our marketing. The way we handled marketing before was “wouldn’t it be cool” and “let’s try this?” and we actually studied and qualified our marketing efforts.

This was the #1 factor this quarter. Instead of trying to create products and services that fix peoples problems, we’re telling people how our products and services fix peoples problems.

We literally just changed our message. And it resonated well.

3. Standardized operations and procedures

Following step #1, we aggressively pursued documentation and SOP processes. Literally every spare moment we’ve had has been dedicated to documentation, videos, podcasts and whitepapers both internal and external.

By being able to clearly define what we do and how we do it we can hire people and onboard them quickly. For external purposes, we were able to grow rapidly without spending a lot of time in support.

Somewhere between our support sucking and our partners not reading the documentation and misconfiguring the services (again, due to our documentation being insufficient or inconvenient) we spent a ton of time in the past dealing with “issues” – In Q1, one cursed Exchange DEWEY box aside, we were able to move forward a lot.

4. Removed growing pains

Finally, we were able to address a lot of growing pains by teaming up with Spherion. They are a large temp agency and once we were able to take steps #1 and #3 it became very easy to address issues and make things happen fast. For example, the process that typically took months in the past only took 3 business days.

Looking Forward

Most of the issues that OWN has had to deal with were caused by me, one way or another. While OWN has grown tremendously through the years I’ve retained a lot of that “DIY attitude” towards many aspects of my organization that really were not healthy for the long term. There were also a few “values” that I held on to way too long that caused a lot of people to abuse us.  Live and learn 🙂

The other thing that I feel made a huge difference is that I really opened up my ears to all the input – not just the suggestions my peers made – and that has made all the difference. When you spend all of your time getting your advice from the same bunch of people then you really narrow down your vision and your ability to grow past what everyone else can see. I can tell you that the numbers we posted in Q1 didn’t come from the same client base we’ve had in 2008 or 2009. They also didn’t sign on with us for the same things we’ve signed on people in the past. The key here is that as business changes it needs to be more open to the external suggestions and not live solely on the ambitions and goals of it’s founder and his buddies. 🙂 Lesson learned.

The future for OWN looks really bright and ExchangeDefender’s new business model has really opened up a ton of opportunities around other products that we’re looking to add to it. My primary agenda for Q2 is to push the pedal to the metal when it comes to knowledge sharing and get us more structured for the new products. In Q3 I’ll be mostly doing the marketing deal and hopefully facilitating the launch of the new products and some of the big licensing stuff that was just signed. The Q4 stuff is still a bit of a secret 🙂