ConnectWise Partner Summit – What I’d like to know..

Posted: 8:50 am
November 1, 2009
Events
2 Comments

ConnectWise Partner Summit starts in a few days and it’s one of the biggest MSP-centric events of the year that brings together all walks of IT life.

Last year the vibe was very positive, attendees were excited and everyone was “trying to move my clients to managed services” but since then we’ve had a catastrophic collapse of the banking industry, something damn near a stock market crash, record streak of unemployment growth and a slowdown of all measurable economic growth indicators.

Looking over the numbers that we track, pure play MSP’s have been hit the hardest. They led the pack in the percentage of closed shops and they were overwhelmingly the ones that lost the largest number of seats.

In the same time span, OWN has had an all time record growth in accounts, revenues and profits (unfortunately we’ve also had to do a lot of collections and longer DSO as economy spares no one). Today is our biggest $ day, ever. Our partners at MSP University, ConnectWise, Autotask, CharTec have also posted record numbers and the MSP solution provider presence at conferences and events is bigger than it’s ever been.

What Vlad would like to know is….

It’s obvious that the only people making significant money in the MSP industry are the software and outsourcing companies providing managed service providers with services that they use to manage end customers. MSPs aren’t doing so hot. Some are even losing out to their suppliers that compete for MSP business, such as Dell.

With the space getting crowded and the deliverable/value very difficult to differentiate and distinguish between MSPs.. which other lines of business are MSPs going into to actually generate profit growth?

So where is the money at? Let me know, we’ll have a booth at both HTG and ConnectWise events next week, would love to hear some really good MSP stories and ideas for a change.

Community Challenge (Important)

Posted: 6:12 pm
October 30, 2009
Deals, ExchangeDefender
2 Comments

Over the next two months we will be unveiling our grand strategy for the deployment and management of cloud services in SMB. We have been wildly successful with this model for years and it’s what’s attributed to the phenomenal growth of Own Web Now.

Note: This is being piloted through HTG partners first and it’s the only way to get it right now. It is not an exclusive arrangement by any means, it’s just that a lot of companies in HTG reviewed, guided and helped design this model for us. Later this year it will be available for everyone and through our alliances.

Ok, now that we got the messy part let’s get straight to the point:

We are going direct!!!

If you haven’t had a heart attack or a brief moment of blurred vision, congratulations. You’ve worked with me before, you know what I’m all about. No, Own Web Now Corp is not going direct. No way, no how.

But we have built a brandable (your label) portal, workflows, support and accounting processes to enable you to go direct and not incur the costs of supporting our own products. Here is what we’ve got:

  • Free branded portal secured with SSL (https://yourportal.yourcompany.com)
  • Free backend integration to ConnectWise and Autotask for service orders, service tickets, account configurations, inventory and statistics.
  • Free support services for all our products. Your users can open support requests either through this portal, or through your own ConnectWise or Autotask and automatically get delegated to us for resolution.
  • Free updates to inventory and configurations, when something changes on our end it also changes in your own home portal so you can always bill properly.

The big picture here is that you can now offer cloud based services backed by a SAS 70 – Type II audited company, with a full SLA, redundancy and history to back it all up.

So without the cost of supporting, or accounting or actually maintaining and managing the service… because hint: Users can make their own orders and changes for things like Exchange hosting… what are you going to do with the markup?

I’m buying a Ferrari or two. But that’s just me.

Most of you have seen this path a long time ago – there is no ignoring the consumer that wants a cheap cloud solution. But as so many of the HTG members said over and over again.. if we can’t make a margin, we can’t do it. Well, Own Web Now has always been behind the channel and now we’re doing it again.

Oh… and one more thing:

There has been a little company out of Cali that has for year been a giant pain in my butt. It’s the only one we lose to competitively. Why? Price. Always comes down to price. Well, we’ve optimized ExchangeDefender to the point that the new release (ExchangeDefender 5) runs in 1/5th the infrastructure the v4 did.

So for the first quarter of ExchangeDefender 5, all new accounts will come with a new price. $0.75. No minimums. One user at a time. Full feature set. Everyone you sign up at that price level will stay at that price level.

Oh… and just one more thing: Instead of launching the product and providing education, marketing and training after you’ve already grown frustrated with the product: We’re spending all of November holding webcasts, training and producing your direct marketing collateral. Bigger partners also get MDFs.

So when December 1st, 2009 strikes… I will have the biggest month in the company history. Vladdy needs a new Ferrari and a bigger market share.

Game on. I’ll be in Orlando pimping this stuff all of next week.

What’s left of the cloud after it’s done raining?

Posted: 11:58 am
October 28, 2009
ExchangeDefender, Friends
Comments Off on What’s left of the cloud after it’s done raining?

A pwn3dclose personal and professional friend of mine and OWN’s apparently made a terrible business partnership decision. Naturally, I promptly offered a swift kick in the balls because your friends should always be there to kick you when you’re down so you never let it happen again.

For the past two days, a small portion of our friends client base had been seeing the screen to the right. It sucks. But as these things go, the CEO apologized, refunds have been issued and hopefully the business goes on.

My heart goes out to them on this, disasters suck… but..

The one thing…

The one thing I have learned in the past 12 years of managing Exchange is that Microsoft will never, EVER, make one that is capable of being fault tollerant. Never gonna happen. We’re getting as much unpredictable crap with 2010 as we’ve gotten with 5.5 and every version in between. Such is the nature of the mail servers, throw enough crap at them and they will go down on their knees.

This in no small part is why ExchangeDefender exists.

One thing I know as a cloud provider is that my stuff will eventually crash. It has in the past, it will in the future.

One of key things behind ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive, a realtime business continuity solution based on Exchange 2007. Not on Bubba’s Pretty Good ASP Webmail.

As we process inbound and outbound mail through ExchangeDefender, we create a copy. One goes to the recipient, one gets copied to your ExchangeDefender LiveArchive enterprise network in our data centers.

When, not if, your Exchange server goes down you just open up our OWA and continue working in realtime, with your same identity and email address. Even same login and password. Everything works – calendars, notes, reminders, and you have a FREE year worth of your email that was sent and received – not just a few messages since you’ve crashed.

This, in no small part, is why even people that hate the cloud work with Own Web Now and use ExchangeDefender. Certain CPA’s. We even provide LiveArchive with our Exchange hosting. Yes, the same clustered Exchange 2007 we offer for resale comes with ExchangeDefender and gets you a full year of free business continuity. Why? Because if we have ever leaned anything in our experience is that stuff WILL go down.

And we do it for free. We’ve covered people during migrations, when servers were down for a few days, even our partners non-profit who had their server go down and couldn’t afford a new one – they worked through LiveArchive for over 2 months.

This is the KEY aspect of providing stuff in the cloud – who has your back? Can you trust that the specs are what they are? Maybe.. But can you trust the odds that two separate server infrastructures won’t go down?

When it does, you can continue working. All you gotta do is drop me an email. If you want to check it out, vlad@ownwebnow.com is where you can get it from me for free.

Talk it out… Talk it out…

Posted: 10:11 am
October 22, 2009
IT Business
1 Comment

I’m in Dallas at the MSPU event and I have to admit they have really brought out an impressive attendance. Quite impressive. I don’t really want to give Erick all the credit in the world for it, but it is very evident that the riffraff is gone. The SPF mentality that once dominated our industry (“Smaller is better, more caring and the future of consulting…” and “I am a trusted advisor, not a technology business”) is long gone. Who would have guessed, business fundamentals apply from the guy selling ice cold water on the Las Vegas strip all the way up to GE.

. . .

What is more interesting is that a lot of people are curious about my vendor tour and the new products that we have coming out of Own Web Now that I have hinted at, yet not talked about. I know that is quite unusual for me since there is very little secrecy about what goes on @ OWN but to be honest it’s more of a realization/admission that mine (and yours) time has passed. The more remarkably successful people in the channel I hang around the more I am convinced that we don’t have the skill set for the changes that are coming our way.

I grew up idolizing Billy Mays. I received my business education from 60+ year old professors at University of Florida. My business value set works like a 1980’s arcade “He who dies with the highest score wins!” and movies that said that “greed is.. good”. What matters in business? Money. What’s my job? To make a profit.

But how do you get out of bed each day and go to build something that isn’t measured on profits, where a win doesn’t come with a $ commission based reward?

It’s a new world out there. It isn’t just the economic recession/depression, Obama vs. Rush, Mac vs. PC or us vs. them anymore. The values are changing and it’s probably the most interesting time to be in the technology business since the .com days.

The Fresent

Posted: 8:00 am
October 18, 2009
IT Business
2 Comments

Exciting, exciting time… We’re on our final day of big time network deployments and upgrades to our network to prepare for two huge product launches that will carry OWN through the next 12-18 months. To say that we’re full in would be an understatement, particularly given my travel schedule over the next month: San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, New York, Chicago and a few trips up and down California trying to drum up some support for what we’re doing.

And what we’re doing is a bit of old mixed in with the heck of a lot of new stuff: that is now a necessity. Allow me to demonstrate this clearly because it’s typical of our industry:

mse

That’s a free Windows 7 antivirus program. Required no registration.

It took 5 seconds to download. Another minute and about half a dozen clicks to roll out and for it to automatically download updates and start scanning.

Still think that your business model of running around installing RMM tools and marking up software licensing is going to work in the future today? Even when it’s free? What “services” will you manage?

Brief note on my availability..

Posted: 8:07 pm
October 13, 2009
Vladville
3 Comments

Second day back at work, feels like a lifetime has passed since the last vacation. Today I tried, unsuccessfully, to bail from work for 5 solid hours. In the end, I was the last sucker left there. 🙁

I love what I do and (for better or worse) work is my life. I guess that makes me appreciate time I spend away from it that much more. Every minute counts..

to wit…. (trust me, it’s a word, means “shitty transition phrase joining two otherwise unrelated topics in an attempt to mask the fact that the writer is likely illiterate and probably retarded”) here is a brief Vlad Followup Process (VFP):

Vlad Mazek returns scheduled phone calls Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9:45 AM to 10:30 AM EST.

Vlad Mazek is generally available for scheduled conference calls Monday through Friday, from 3:30 to 4:30 PM EST.

There is a difference between the two. Morning calls are meant for external parties that have a suggestion, question, recommendation or otherwise need a problem solved. This only happens if Travis was unable or unwilling to address the issue with the MonkeyForce. I will do everything I can to address the issue you are experiencing and my goal is to get off the phone ASAP. In the afternoon, I am likely just back from lunch and down for anything. If you need me to talk to multiple people, clients, executives, approve paperwork or spend money, this is when you need to book your time.

Electronic media:

I am available via email. If I know the answer, I will respond immediately. If I do not know the answer to that question the message is dragged into an “Active” folder which is gone through several times a day. Staff calls this “Vlad Queue” or more affectionately “Oh, you’re vqueued” (don’t try to spell out “v” and you’ll get the idea). If you end up in this folder, I will respond once the person that actually knows the question has the answer.

I am really not a bad person: If you ask something so ambiguous that nobody wants to respond to it, you might not hear for a week or longer. Things like “Are there any issues” is like asking people to kick themselves in the crotch, repeatedly. Nobody will ever admit to an issue. So be specific “Hey, email from X to Y didn’t arrive at Z and I have M ready to shoot L.”

If I am alone in my office, I will respond to the MSN IM, my address is vlad@ownwebnow.com. The odds that I am alone in my office are slim to none. Again, I am not a bad person – but I run a large organization and with a lot of new people I do not yet know what level of sensibility is appropriate. Most people send me filthy, filthy, filthy stuff…. so if there is a lady in my office I am not going to click on anything that starts with the words Erick, Dave, Mark or Karl. I just won’t. You know why.

I update my Facebook when I’m in the bathroom or if I just got off a terrible conference call. It’s really not a good time to chat with me either way. Trust me.

What else, what else… Yeah, Facebook has a cell phone on it. I answer it. It’s my second iPhone. Same rules for all of the above apply.

I’d love to sit here and lie to you about this being a temporary issue and that as a result of some terrible HR issues I’m yet again in charge of ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey and that really soon now the staff I hired the last quarter will kick butt – they will, no doubt – but this is just the way it is. If you want my time, you’ve gotta buy me a drink. Simple as that. 🙂  Someone has to pay for Versace suits.

Death Reincarnate

Posted: 10:00 am
October 11, 2009
IT Business
Comments Off on Death Reincarnate

Yes, I’m alive. No, I have not suffocated under the pile of money we made in Q3 and ExchangeDefender is well on it’s way to being a defacto security platform with 5.0 release coming-any-day-now-Duke-Nukem-Forever-style.

Yes, that’s really me on Facebook. Yes, I’ll be your friend.

Now that’s where the good news ends, at least for me. I’m back to the Ironman mode, working about 12-20 hours a day. On Friday, I started my vendor tour at ConnectWise trying to solicit feedback and figure out what the next 5 years holds for us.. because the IT industry as a whole is dying.

Now dying could just be consolidating. It could just be outsourcing. Whichever way we look at it, the road ahead has far fewer players with far less profit margins for premium products and the traditional way of marketing ourselves is just not going to cut it anymore because competing with free is just not a possibility.

But what if free lead to product differentiation and instead a marketing upsell opportunity?

Here is the bottom line: everything is trending towards free. And given the option of taking a freebie or paying for something, almost everyone would try the free route first. What do you have to lose? If you really get what you pay for, all you have to do is pay a little more than $0.

Our partners and vendors need to get aboard with a plan to cross-promote ourselves.

If you work with us or we work with you, please reach out and find me. If you don’t work with us then this is probably one of those posts I’ll be linking back to a year down the road to explain why things are the way they are and how early you had the opportunity to do something great.

Great week for Autotask!

Posted: 9:22 am
September 30, 2009
Friends
1 Comment

It’s a good week to be an Autotask User! Tomorrow at noon eastern the ExchangeDefender team officially kicks off the Autotask integration showcase, starting with the Autotask webcast event..

Click here to register

Thursday, October 1, 2009: 12:00 pm

Autotask has the strongest integration with OWN/ExchangeDefender, somehow even better than our own stuff (because our API was written in 3 hours and they have like 3,000 people working on theirs) and everyone that’s seen this “1.0” release is blown away with what we’ve been able to do. We’ve taken the top three things that any MSP and service provider has to waste their time on when dealing with an external vendor.. and we’ve automated them with Autotask.

Now in interest of full disclosure: Why? Why spend thousands of dollars developing software for someone elses platform to automate what we might be able to do in house? Because (and this is Business 101): if we reduce the time required to manage, deploy, support and bill for our solutions then the price and minor feature gaps make our actual competitors in the antispam, offsite backups, hosted Exchange/SharePoint irrelevant. So what if you can get it for a quarter less somewhere else, the first time you need to waste time double entering tickets or copying and pasting the number of seats from your other providers to Autotask you will lose far more than a few pennies here and there. And that… is the operational efficiency you get with Autotask.

In other news…

My buddy (and hopefully still a SPAM Show co-host) Mark Crall has a new job with Autotask! This is certainly an amazing hire for Autotask as they continue to move forward… but a small part of me hopes that Mark already cashed his check:

IMG_2093

Way to go Mark!!!!

Shockey Philosophy

Posted: 5:24 am
September 25, 2009
IT Culture
1 Comment

Recently I was chatting with someone on Facebook about the whole concept behind naming and the cynical way we deal with failure in the workplace. This all started with Dave Sobel from Evolve who once said this to his burning jungle (paraphrasing):

“I could make more money by setting it on fire than paying you.”

The cold hard truth behind technology management is that most of it could be done by a well trained monkey. About the only thing we cannot automate at this point the the shockey stick to tase the monkey when it stops paying attention to the stuff on the screen. I am hopeful for X10 and Lego Mindstorms but in the meantime the best we can do is shell scripts…

Real Life Example

Last night I was sitting down to finally document one of the many, many, many things only I know how to do at OWN because at some point in the past I was the one stuck making it happen.. and as with everything I do, I probably had 2 minutes and used the Vanilla Ice method: If there was a problem, yo I’ll solve it. Solving problems without planning or process or consideration… almost guarantees that down the road the whole thing will either require cloning or serious training on everything I knew at the time so the problem can be prolonged.

So after an all nighter and a few really long days this week, I started my journey of 825 steps to publish enclosure content. It involved getting the bit size of the file, editing XML, updating 4 or 5 pages… and somewhere around step 18…

“What if all of this was simply rendered by the MYSQL Script? do it in AM”

This AM.. took 10 minutes to write.

This fall/winter season for OWN is all about moving to that next level as a company and getting rid of all the little crap processes I created on the fly. While it’s hard to face the daemons of past mistakes, it’s nice to think to the day when it’s not my fault everything around here is s@#.

Till that day, bzzzt, code faster monkey!

Do likewise gents, good luck!

Let’s do it tomorrow…

Posted: 12:23 am
September 22, 2009
IT Business
2 Comments

I read a lot of self help books.

Not because I really need help, mostly because deep down inside I’m pretty sure I’m an idiot. Just not quite sure about the extent of it. So it’s nice to have it pointed out.

I also happen to work between 12-20 hours a day. Not because I don’t have any other employees here. Not because I’m a sociopath. Not because I’m not focused and watch Youtube videos all day long. Not because I’m a control freak and can’t trust anyone round me. Not because I hate life and everyone around me. Simply because I like to make sure we do our very best.

So… let’s try to defeat everything with random objections and arguments:

If you don’t focus, you’ll never get anything done. But if you just focus you won’t take the time to consider things thoroughly and the end result will likely flop. Your career/job/company has a shelf life so you have to move quickly! But move too quickly in the wrong direction and you just might bet on the wrong horse leading you to doom. If you just got organized there would be no stopping you. But if you spend all your time organizing things and filing them properly, you’d have no time for anything else (same applies to developing procedures, measuring activities, any analytical work of any kind that doesn’t directly result in you getting paid).

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!

So, the point of this whole thing isn’t to show that cynical people never get anywhere. The idea is that the evaluation process is continuous and that you really have 3 options: 1) Settle for mediocrity / gamble / wishful thinking, 2) Work and hope that effort somehow trumps talent or 3) Try to make #1 sound a little more sophisticated.

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like option #1 isn’t successful. It is! For everyone from professional athletes to lottery winners and even curiously deformed rappers. Unfortunately, you probably don’t belong to that pile.

Yet, most people are in group #1..

How do you go from the first to second? Stock up the fridge with Mountain Dew and take up heroin? How about… try to think outside the little box you’ve got yourself stuck in? Ask questions. Ask followup questions. Share ideas. Ask for ideas that people get while listening to your ideas.

Here, I’ll get you started with something.

You work in an office. Or at least interact with clients. Right? What’s your policy on working from home? Tough you don’t have one, come up with one now. Why not? Oh, you don’t think you’re affected? Two of my close friends got taken down by the swine flu bug. One in Australia, likely chasing down a Kangaroo.. Other in Dallas, cornered by a client in a small server room and then told an hour later that he had to go visit his wife in the hospital because she is down with the flu.

Consider all the ways getting the swine flu would impact your business and career. Write down your objections. Write down your recommendations. Ask all your employees and clients to do the same. Even if it’s black and white, will never change your mind in a billion years, write it down. Come up with a strategy.

Apply above to everything you do, or should be doing. Even if you can’t have it implemented today, time has a way of helping you perfect what you really need to do.

This self help book is brought to you by me taking a moment from the crap I do to consider and share what’s on my mind because it gets me attention. Lot’s of it. And that attention constantly feeds back information and insight that fuels Own Web Now. Yes, without a single ad to it, or a fire sale, giving away a thought materially impacts the Vlad’s Ferrari Fund. But hey, you can always do something tomorrow right?