About 18 months ago I started blogging more extensively about business, trying to offer some perspective about what is going on in the SMB space, emergence of cloud services and eventually the unfortunate recession. If you saw it early enough, and listened, I hope you are as lucky as I have been. As I have said on a number of occasions, this stuff is not easy but there certainly are payoffs for hard work.

As for what I’m up to next – I’ve blogged about it before – I’ve assembled a little team in Central Florida that can help bring consistency to the things I’ve done over the years in the areas of community contributions, education, support integration and a few other cool projects. It also means we will be more proactive in seeking out feedback and fixing things that go wrong. This year, or rather the 3 quarters of it that are left, we will:

Eliminate Type Qualifications – For years we’ve made an expensive and extensive qualification process to make sure that we are not working with end users but IT Service Providers. Over the years, that line has blurred and has affected both us and our partners. On one hand, we’ve diluted our support and our reputation by doing business with people who were IT providers on paper but far less than that in reality – all while we turned away businesses that would have been great leads for our partners if we had brought them in our system. Starting soon it won’t matter who you are or where you come from – if you can understand the technology we’ll hook you up – and when you stumble we’ll have thousands of partners there for you. On the other hand, if you are a Gold Certified Partner that can’t figure out what the MX record does, look at the next paragraph..

New Low Cost Airline – I am going back to product design with the objective of pushing our products further into enterprise and growing our worldwide presence. I believe enterprise grade quality of software and services is paramount to the performance and success of any business – and have made a career out of making those services available at a reasonable cost. However, we are a business and our business is making money – so if there are idiots out there willing to take on a crappy substitute just because it’s dirt cheap or free, who am I not to take their money? People want quick, cheap and direct – and they can go down swiping. A new organization that has been built under OWN will make this possible.

So, so much for business. I hope you learned something, it has been a true pleasure helping so many folks through this process.

Looking forward to talking about the new stuff. The reality of this business is that it’s always changing and we always have an opportunity. I’ve probably caught more lucky breaks than anyone out there which motivates me to work as hard as I do. What you read here isn’t just Gospel according to Vlad, it’s letters emails and opinions from a worldwide audience that I’m happy to give a voice to.

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