It’s January 25th, 2009.

Remember that big New Years Resolution you made to improve your business?

How’s that coming along?

Are you at least 10% there? Are you 90% towards meeting your objectives for January?

. . .

Big goals do not get accomplished in a day or a month. But accountability counts every day – What are you doing? When will you be done? Who or what would help?

Every day of every month of every year is the opportunity to work towards what you want. If you aren’t working for it, you’re probably not going to get it.

People love to congratulate me every month I post how well we are doing. Do you think I do that to rub it in your face? To gloat? No, I do it to point out that a measurement is taken every month. Every minute of every day of every person here counts towards improving things. It’s not easy. It takes sacrifice. If you’re not where you need to be it’s time to stop reading this blog and get to work.

If you are… thanks for visiting!

Welcome to F**k Me Friday. Internal support ticket:

Vlad,

I attached a spare power supply to your server and noticed after I attempted to power it on smoke rising from one of the components on the motherboard. I quickly disconnected the power from the unit, the power supply used for the test still tests good, although I think the motherboard may be the source of your problems.

Followed by:

“The deceased server has been laid to rest in your spares..”

Reverse midas-touch this week with Dell. I don’t know if they have disgruntled people in their QC department or if we’re just down on our luck but this is just funny.

I think the source of your problems may be that your server is on fire….

The official announcement is on our official blog. Please subscribe to that feed and join the other 8 people reading it on an annual basis. That’s the official story, however, in the interest of honesty to our partners I have to optimistically apologize for things taking to long to get to this point.

You see, as ExchangeDefender (and I) grew up, the product matured as well. I’ve always embraced the development cycle that primarily served 90% of our users, with lower priorities assigned to the needs of the admins, MSPs, IT royalty and power users. Why? Well, the ExchangeDefender service is first and foremost a protection mechanism for people that are not INFOSEC hobbyists. That’s the customer that spends the money on the service, that’s the person I need to secure and so long as I please them, we get to keep the client.

Always (always, always) take care of your customer first.

This is why ExchangeDefender has some of the highest retention rates around.

I think we failed to stay true to that mission in our objectives. Basically, we dictated some features for the sake of simplicity and cornered ourselves into a position where users have become so dependant on the logically broken process because they have conditioned to it, and will not consider something better.

The most hated (and most beloved, and most pleaded not to be removed) feature in ExchangeDefender are the daily reports. People loved this stuff in 2002! It provided archival data for the SPAM past 7 days, daily reminders and stats, ability to release SPAM if it ever gets in there, etc. Fast forward a few years and the report is stacked with some of the most vile stuff anyone has ever written. Laced with stuff that would trigger even the worst of antispam software. But users are conditioned to expect the report. They bitch when they don’t get it. Most don’t read it – it goes straight to trash.

It is in our (OWN) best interest for our users to better interact with the service because it can learn to protect them better. I think I said something in one of the interviews today regarding the value of client installed software for a pure off premise solution. We aren’t just fighting with external threats, we are fighting with our users stupidity and naivete. When stuff breaks the cost of the product skyrockets if everyone in the technology chain has to be involved in fishing or tracking the email through the system. We can do much better than that, but we need to offer something that lets the user take a chance on the new solutions.

So after months of hard work, ExchangeDefender Client Suite is out. We’ll add file sharing, web filtering and a few other things throughout 2009 because we are no longer able to protect the user with just the SMTP filtering alone. Much like we can’t offer them business continuity with only 5 days of retries – where LiveArchive thrives in the enterprise contracts and SMB shops alike.

I hope you enjoy it. And to the slimy ones in the audience, I hope you can make some profit off it. Differentiation demands premiums, pimp on!

If you’re unfortunate enough to have chosen a Mac for a business computer you are no longer bound to the crippled enterprise mail experience. Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit has a new beta available which let’s your Entourage talk to Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 UR4 via Web Services.

This means you now get sync for tasks, notes, categories, autodiscovery. Bye-bye WebDav, hello rich integration.

It’s beta, so you have to ask for it politely. Good luck!

P.S. All our Exchange 2007 servers are on UR4 so you’re welcome to use it with our ExchangeDefender Exchange 2007 infrastructure. However, unless you work with me over IM frequently you are on your own because our official stance on beta software is that it’s someone elses problem, not within our ability to test/troubleshoot/assist.

I know many of you may not have gotten your pick and if you chose to ignore the inauguration you’ve missed a hell of a speech. At a time of great uncertainty and everyone pulling back and fearful for what may be coming down the road… It sure sounds like we’ve got at least one guy optimistic about where we are going. Thankfully, he has the biggest office in the land. Oh, and a new web site:

Good luck President Obama! Looking forward to the next 4 years.

As for comments… how we vote and how we view the world is personal to every one of us. The beauty of this country is that we are allowed to disagree and have different opinions without killing one another. If you’re offended by your inability to respond to my political views do it in a way that counts – vote, volunteer for a campaign, get involved in the local government and community service.

President Bush, thank you for your service to this country. I’m sure it wasn’t easy and I definitely do not agree with most of your policies but I thank you for leading us through the rough times and all you tried to do to guide this great country forward.

Let’s hope this starts a bright new day for America and let’s hope our kids and the rest of the world will forgive us for the past 8 years.

Break out your competitive knife set, start the grinder, it’s going to get interesting. Here is what Cisco is up to:

Cisco’s diversification into the server market is fraught with risk. Cisco boasts gross profit margins of close to 65 percent, while companies selling basic servers tend toward gross margins closer to 25 percent on those products.

…. 

However, Cisco may have little choice other than to invade its rivals’ turf. Its core business is slowing, and for the company to meet Wall Street’s demands for growth, it must look to new lines of business.

Cisco needs to grow because investors demand rise in growth. Growth is not enough, it also has to come at a hefty profit margin in order to pay great CSCO dividends.

This is the ugly side of competition. When everything is on the up and up folks refer to one another and try to bring all the solution from a bunch of people. But when things turn a little south it’s all rats to themselves running for the high ground.

In this case, HP has it’s own switching gear. Ditto for routing. So, in order to get deeper into the data center and deliver the data center in a box, Cisco wants to bring in a server and the entire DC in a box. HP too. So they will butter up their plastic knifes, posture for a little while, and then bam….

Whenever companies in established partnerships go at it they not just screw themselves but their customers as well.

Today was the supposed half-day at OWN Atomic Tangerine office. Or so we planned.

Things I’ve learned:

1) Don’t do a half day by saying “Let’s start early..” because by the time noon comes along you won’t want to do anything.

2) Don’t fall back 5+ years in terms of organizing yourself. I’ve literally gone through documents and papers that have been addressed to OWN in Miami, Gainesville and way before I moved to Orlando. I even found my original incorporation paperwork from 1998!

3) Get a secretary.

One thing I’ve really mastered in my years in business is how to hire really good technical and business people.

One thing I am not confident about is my ability to shovel the amount of manure required to find me an executive assistant. Even if I did my finest to gloss it up the job description would be:

“Follow me around and figure out what I do (poorly) and tell people to “email me” about. Figure out a logical layout to my missteps so I can automate them and put you out of work gradually.”

How do you sell someone on that kind of a mouse trap without a six figure salary?

If I die, you’ll have enough knowledge to help manage this company and your promotion path is from administrative assistant straight to VP.

Now, assuming they are really stupid they will fail. Assuming they are really smart, they will kill me at the first plausibly deniable opportunity. If they are mildly intelligent, I fully intend to fake my own death and make them answer the phone as “Vlad”

I know a lot of big CxO’s read this blog so if you’d like to drop me a tip I really would appreciate it. If you’d like to fake your identity, use the Contact Vlad form on the web page

What I am particularly concerned about:

• What are the critical skills of a good administrative assistant?
• What do you look for as far as relevant job experience?
• What do you offer in terms of perks? (Geeks and Bus people have different motivating factors)
• What do you offer as the sales pitch for the role so they are motivated to learn and help move the company forward?

Put in a full day today. Barely on my two feet.

Tomorrow morning we’re starting early and likely making it a half day, spending the remainder of the day with the family. I’m planning to use the morning to organize a few more things, set the schedule for this week and fit everyone in my schedule.

This week I will be asking two questions: 1) How is business and 2) What are you doing to grow it and why?

Our numbers for January are way ahead of expectations so people are definitely spending money. Now, whether the folks that are doing so well are willing to talk about what they are doing that is so right is a different question but you know the old saying… if you want something, you have to ask.

I however feel this cycle is going to play out for at least 24 months if not longer – people are looking for more affordable and more efficient technology. Whether we’re helping them get a nicer inbox environment with ExchangeDefender or not worry about tapes thanks to our Offsite Backup, the opportunity here is to replace expensive labor with relatively inexpensive services and I’m betting my business plan on the fact that at least for the moment it’s all about reliability and affordability.

When (or rather if) we get out of the doom and gloom people will return to custom deployments and may again become concerned about security, control and deep business integration. For the time being, it’s all about getting the technology out of the way of doing business and that means big money for infrastructure management, projects for modernizing and updating aging IT relic systems and cost saving measures.

I’m very interested to hear what my partners think. The response and amount of data I can gather is going to be the beef of V… #2 (Vladville Newsletter, sign up. If you think you signed up and didn’t get it, odds are removed because you didn’t fill out the form completely; If I didn’t want your address, I wouldn’t have put a form field for it there, don’t waste my time, serious folks only.)

Spending a week remarkably focused on the agenda has really left me in the dark about the apocalypse of capitalism that is going on outside my atomic tangerine walls:

Circuit City, after 60 years in business, is going out of business shutting all 567 stores and leaving 34,000 people to find a new job. Retail figures for December, which were expected to be terrible, were twice as bad as expected. Tradeshows are either dead or dying. Even Google, where dreams are made, is killing projects.

Oh my.

So here is some good news:

I spent close to an hour recording the first OWN Talk Show. Not sure yet what it’s going to be called but I can tell you that it will be available for our partners to download on Monday. Mark Crall, Stuart Selbst and I talked about the stuff that happened last week. Windows 7 impact on Small Business, Google Apps Reseller Program, Cloud Services, Kaseya NOC, Autotask and then some. While I do some business with these guys, they are friends first. And the show is all about just that, chatting with friends about our industry (and will be featuring my other buddies, Erick Simpson, Karl Palachuk, Dave Sobel) in a Friday mashup of the threads we bounce back and forth as they come up throughout the week.

Ok, so what?

Well, the bigger and more diverse my business becomes the less I am in tune with every single thing and every single interaction that business has. I need friends that I know aren’t going to blow smoke up my butt and since I don’t have the luxury of researching and considering every single development from every possible angle it’s nice to know I can talk to folks that do.

We all talk to a lot of people. But have you ever noticed how few people are into podcasting, blogging, etc? It’s like learning is treasure hunting and whoever dies with the biggest pile wins?

Which brings me back to the apocalypse. How many of the retail segment employees saw the writing on the wall and changed their jobs. Circuit City has been under Chapter 11 bankruptcy for a while, how many of their “associates” took the benefits to earn a certification or start training/volunteering for a new gig?

How many of those retail personnel who are still employed are right now thinking about where their income will come from 12 months down the road? Or would you bet that they are out on the town, partying, thinking everything will be alright? Maybe they are just not going to participate in the down economy, eh?

Point is, change is happening.

You can ignore it, you can question it, you can resist it…… but you will be affected by it.

The only question remaining is if you’ll be the one to spot and take advantage of the opportunities that are presenting themselves when everyone else slows down, or if you succumb to fear and ignorance until you run out of clients/employment.