As I’m sure many of you have already seen, we’re really beefing up the ExchangeDefender Essentials lineup before we announce the final move in the 1-2-3 punch that will carry our partners up in 2012. This time, we’re adding an ExchangeDefender LiveArchive-like feature to ExchangeDefender Essentials, our budget-friendly solution.

Now on the corporate blog I have to be friendly and make it seem like sometimes you need to make tough decisions with tight budgets and make calculated compromises.

On here I don’t.

Now that little fact in itself makes some of my friends, employees and partners cringe because they try to imagine what’s it like to be on the receiving end of this. Those folks, fundamentally, do not understand how social media works. The main goal of this blog is not to beat down MSPs. It’s also not to pump up products and webinars. When you do that stuff too much people tune out in the most worthwhile way – they stop talking back. Feedback is the primary reason I write this blog – it gives me the opinion, insight, marketing research and everything else I could ever need to get the perspective needed to run my business. That’s also how we stay ahead of our competitors and why our products find so much success, as if they were built to order. Because on a really fundamental level, they are. Even when they conflict with one another.

So with that in mind, let me explain the Essentials, Emergency, all of ExchangeDefender and how it fits and where it fits and why even bother doing it.

The Basics

Typical abusive opinion should be written this way:

If you’re an MSP running a clients server without a failover like ExchangeDefender LiveArchive, you’re a fucking moron. Do you really think saving pennies and dimes is going to come even close to the losses you’re about to incur when the Exchange server goes down – and it will go down – and the client blames you – and they will blame you – and ruin both your reputation at worst and your ability to sell them additional products and services at best? Seriously? The business that is sitting there deciding whet her or not they need to be put out of business temporarily or permanently over a few bucks a month is a business that is gambling with it’s existence, do you comprehend the level of risk you are undertaking by trying to play into their nickel and diming games?

Now there are grains of truth in the above paragraph (I’ll get back to them in a moment) and to an aspiring IT industry sociopath writing a blog post like that would be incomprehensible. Oh my god, who would do business with someone that speaks in such a way? Turns out a lot of people – because the fact is that we don’t necessarily do business with people because we like them but because the product fits. When it comes to business all that personal stuff goes out the window.

I wish someone had told me that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief.

Eventually I figured it out on my own by accident and it’s what’s brought you our cloud services, expanded ExchangeDefender, LiveArchive, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy, etc. In order to be successful you either have to be the best (the odds are against you on this one) or you have to work the hardest (this is really just a matter of choice). 

The Essentials

Technically, I held back on approving the buildout of Essentials product for years mostly because the profit margins in the high end product were great and I didn’t have the resources to support more than one product per category. There were also a shitload of problems and scaling issues that took years to resolve, but those are minor details.

Emotionally, I also grew so tired of people who had to sit and think about whether or not a $2 hit to their MSP bottom line would be worth it. I also grew tired of explaining how my $2 product did what my competitors charged double digits for.

Insecurely, I felt that introducing multiple products per category would lead to cannibalization. Surely most people will just switch to the cheaper solution from the more expensive one if they are not using it completely. Right? Right? Wrong. I was wrong about this.

Finally, the essentials product came about because it was a fundamentally different product (even though it is built on the same base with same features at the core) because it appealed to different kinds of partners/clients and it had an entirely different marketplace.

Initially I felt quite dirty about the Essentials product because I felt like partners were selling a product that would ultimately serve as a death trap. I spend millions of dollars building redundancy around redundant systems and really am consumed around making sure things never go down. Yet there were tons of people knocking down my door saying outages were not an issue.

Well, which is it?

Turns out, it’s both. There are just different requirements. And over time the products pick up critical mass and create a profit margin that allows us to include additional features without an overwhelmingly large cost structure associated with it. For example, the Essentials Emergency will cost us less than what it would cost us to sponsor a conference circuit aimed at low end and startup clients. In fact, it will cost less than a half.

Now quick question – what do you think will sell more products: word of mouth and referrals or me in a white suit in a hotel in Baltimore?

The way I see it, ExchangeDefender will continue to appeal to high end partners and MSPs worldwide. The Essentials product will appeal to those who only need the very basics. But with both, our entire team will be able to sleep at night knowing that we’re doing everything in our power to deliver the feature set that backs people up even when they make a decision that doesn’t make sense – because you know what, every software developer feels their features are the most important.

So I’ll introduce you to ExchangeDefender Essentials punch #3 shortly and I guarantee you’re going to like it. My opinion (and that of OWN) is that the MSPs will continue to grow in the cloud – and that the old infrastructure business support services (filtering, security, backups, management) are up for grabs and prone to more consumerisation and consolidation.

For years, I only chose to do my business on the high end. And for years, Postini kicked my ass simply by offering a barebones product for a $1.  But if the clients chose a competitive product based on cost, how loyal would they be to it once they could switch to a product to boost their margins? And at what point is a switch no longer worth the effort?

Ah, the fun of running a business. Here is to an awesome 2012!

Some of you that are my friends on Facebook (www.facebook.com/vladmmd) have heard me talk about us intending to drop a nuke on the antispam industry. Since we’re way ahead of schedule at Own Web Now, this is getting to market sooner than expected. Here is the basic idea:

In the past year, volume of SPAM to be filtered has gone down over 60%. How about your antispam bill?

Vendors make an excuse that most of the cost in providing the service comes from support, marketing, management and maintenance so the impact to the price you pay cannot be changed.

If you’re an idiot, go ahead and believe it.

The smarter ones among you know the reality of the situation, if the client is not complaining about the price why bother lowering it? Even if you are pressured to do it by the client, it makes no sense to do it because you’re technically better off letting them go through the pain of switching than consider lowering your pricing. What are the odds you lose all of their business, right? Correct, unless you’re building a growing company.

We’ve always operated ExchangeDefender as a growing business and the ExchangeDefender as a antispam product has continued to get additional features that you get charged huge premiums for at other companies that don’t write their own technology but instead partner and license someone elses. So things like LiveArchive, Encryption, Web File Sharing, Web Filtering and so on are incredibly expensive addons everywhere else… so sometimes comparing ExchangeDefender that gets all of that for $1.50 to $2.00 depending on volume with something that just does antispam/antivirus can become a losing battle.

So I should offer just the basic (“Essentials”) product for $1.00, bring it to apples and apples, and call it a day?

Where is the fun in that?

If you’re currently reselling our ExchangeDefender Essentials product, or if you are currently selling the full ExchangeDefender product and facing questions about the pricing… I’d like to talk to you. You know where you can find me – Facebook, email, etc.

We’re about to drop a nuke on the antispam business and clear out our competition in this space because honestly… $1.00 for the basics is way too much.

Thank you for joining me in the third post in the series pondering the future of IT and how it will be utilized, at least in small business. If there is one trend line in the technical evolution over the past decade, it has to be the focus on simplicity that is making it possible for users to leverage technology without a ton of expertise. All hardware manufacturers and software developers want more users buying their solutions so everyone aims to make it as easy as possible for their good / service / product to be enjoyed.

So what is the end game of business technology as it removes a need for constant support and upkeep? Will the businesses stop caring about backups, about the security of the information stored on their users devices, access control or management of all these new vendors that they interact with?

In my opinion, the CRM side of a small business will grow a new complement: The Vendor Relationship Management.

If consumerization of IT is real and business owners and managers are the ones managing a wide portfolio of subscriptions, contractors, services and devices.. how do they track it all?

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Where have all the IT jobs gone?

After the .com bust and subsequent automation across the IT departments, many IT Solution Providers complained about the levels of competition they were seeing. Suddenly, everyone was an IT consultant and anyone that had ever touched a PC was a techie. Smaller technology companies saw a huge influx in labor as IT departments of large companies continued downsizing.

Towards the middle of last decade, same fate awaited SMB tech workers as well – managed services providers (MSPs) solicited small businesses into letting them take over the entire IT department under the premise that the cost of the overall technology management is lower than the salary of a single skilled IT worker. It worked! Throughout the decade the pattern of eliminating complexity lead to elimination of overhead which meant fewer people working on keeping the infrastructure up and running.

Then everything changed.

Someone at Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and virtually every other software company asked “Why do we need IT people involved anyhow?” On the hardware manufacturing side the battle of “specs” (speed, memory, storage) was already becoming irrelevant so they started focusing on user experience more than trying to sell a stat sheet to a CIO.

What really fundamentally changed in the process is the cost of doing business. Back in the 90’s it was not uncommon to work for a very large six figure salary managing technology. Computers, network routers and switches, servers – all cost thousands of dollars. Asking over a hundred dollars per hour for consulting that would help even the smallest of businesses avoid wasting thousands of dollars for something that wouldn’t fit their need became a sound investment.

But then the cost of servers went down. Cost of computers plummeted – exponentially so for components such as memory and storage. The reduced complexity of technology meant anyone with a slow weekend and a good manual would become indistinguishable from an experienced tech.

Once upon a time a skilled engineer could charge thousands of dollars for consulting, implementation and maintenance of a large mail server farm used for newsletter subscription management and distribution. But when the company outsourced it to ConstantContact or MailChimp for less than a few hundred dollars a month things changed.

What changed?

The economics of technology.

When technology cost thousands of dollars it was easy to ask for 10-25% to help broker it and still make a significant revenue.

But when the same technology got obsoleted by a more affordable, more efficient and more simplistic product – consulting fees nearly disappeared. Remember how much work was involved just four years ago when you wanted to sync your Microsoft Windows Phone with your SBS Microsoft Exchange? Same company, same technology – tons of nightmares. Enter iPhone: Now they’ll configure it for you at the point of purchase.

The line between business technology and consumer end user technology has blurred.

More importantly: The difference between a small business IT provider and a small business owner / manager continues to slim down as the technology becomes simpler to use and manage, technology developers continue to market and sell directly to the small business and technology becomes a common thing in our lives. Suddenly, updating status, content, marketing campaign or a newsletter is not a technology job.

Yet, we use more technology now than ever before. So who is actually managing the business technology?

Managing Change

Allow me to introduce you to my thesis on a consumer-centric process service automation.

The easier the technology gets the more people will use it.

The more technology dependent businesses become, the more technology they will buy.

All of a sudden we’re outsourcing our newsletter design, newsletter distribution, VoIP, cell phone plans, payroll, water delivery, Internet connectivity, email hosting, web hosting, our blog and the content on that blog, our lead generation and all our phone infrastructure is now done by someone else.

We don’t need “an IT guy” for any of it.

When something breaks though, who is going to fix it?

You want to know the really ugly answer to that question? It’s usually the very top of the company. Employees rarely take ownership or associate themselves with anything that looks like a problem. At best they will try to find someone they don’t like to point the blame.

So higher technology usage leads to higher technology dependence which ultimately increases business inefficiencies because it’s no longer technology management done by an IT guy but business management done by a business owner / manager.

Simple enough, just give folks a tool that can manage their business and vendor relationships efficiently and plug yourself in the middle as the IT outsourcing facility to help eliminate business problems at a lower cost. Simple..

The only problem is, consumer-centric service management applications are extremely expensive. Cost of Salesforce for a single user is higher than the cost of Windows, Office, Hosted Exchange and the Internet connection to get to it all.

The Shockey Monkey Trojan Horse

If there is a problem but it isn’t properly documented and reported, it cannot be efficiently escalated. The vendor, client, company and technology/business management needs to be front and center in front of all the employees in order for it to have a full resolution cycle.

But what if you gave them all that.. for virtually free.. and were just available at the right time when they face a problem that you can help them with?

Small business owner and managers have little incentive to use an RMM as I discussed earlier or a CRM – which is why everything prior to SalesForce was for the most part a complete failure. The only reason SalesForce got so much buyin is because it provided an accountability layer on top of a profession in which lying and lack of morals are marketable skills – sales. If you wanted to track relative efficiency of professional liars, there is nothing more beautiful than SalesForce.

But what if that were extended to the ordinary course of business.

What if there was a service ticket or issue category for office equipment requests. For tracking building maintenance issues. An in-office Twitter that kept the entire company in the loop (those of you using Shockey Monkey today know what I’m talking about here). Here is how one of my partners, Randy Spangler, recently explained this trojan horse to me:

So here you have a random white collar employee and the light bulb above his head dies. What does he do? Goes to his manager and tells them. What does the manager do? He calls the building or office manager. They change the light… but it’s the socket that is actually bad so they promise to call someone else. This process continues endlessly.

What if it was a computer issue? They could enter in the issue, manager could approve it and escalate to us.

There are tons of functions in every business that could benefit from process organization and escalation – not just for the sake of efficiency but for closing the loop and making sure problems are actually resolved.

In my opinion, Shockey Monkey is that trojan horse.

It is a process management tool that can be used to implement layers of management and expertise where slim profit margins can be effectively collected from a very large set of customers.

Sounds great in theory?

Except it’s not a theory.

Shockey Monkey has enabled thousands of ExchangeDefender partners to resell Exchange, SharePoint, Offsite Backups, Web Hosting and server offerings to their customers without managing any of the backend server resources. In effect, they were just transaction brokers that provided a layer of escalation between the end user and us when there are problems or us and the end users when new features are introduced.

In that whole process the partner has their own Shockey Monkey portal that they use to freely manage all the other vendor and partner relationships but our offerings are front and center as the cloud backoffice.

Who is to say that the partner shouldn’t also take Shockey Monkey and deploy it for the end users business and let them manage their own clients, vendors, invoices and issues?

Now the only challenge is tuning the monkey to be friendly to different verticals… but fundamentally, most white collar jobs have more in common than they have in terms of uniqueness.

We will likely never build a perfect information solution.

Even Starship Enterprise with all it’s iPads and Siri’s had dozen of selfdestruct sequence initializations. That means we got at least 300 more years of this business model to go and as soon as they invent the replicator that creates gold out of thin air we can call it quits.

In the meantime, this is the evolution of technology providers coexisting with the end user technology. We gotta make the management more affordable and more seamless but collect revenues on it when things break. Nobody wants to spend hundreds of dollars on top of things that cost $10 / month. But when they break and result in potential thousands of dollars in lost revenue when they are down… businesses will still part with hundreds of dollars to get back to status quo.

Stay tuned. This is what I’m doing.

One of the biggest challenges in running a software/service company is communications. We have technical users who need to implement our software to fit different business requirements and we also have business users just reselling cloud solutions. As these companies grow they end up looking pretty much the same. Guys at the top stop dealing with the nuts and bolts but still lead the organization in terms of selecting who they do business with. Their staff then has the task of figuring out the nuts and bolts. If you suck at either your company is going nowhere fast.

Marketing and sales collateral without technical articles may lead to a sale but the service deployment will flop. Best product on the market will never go beyond grassroots and word of mouth if it’s not backed by professional looking marketing.

You can’t run a one-dimensional business.

This is something that everyone struggles with.

One of the ways we have been able to excel through the years has been on my back. I was there to shake hands, answer phone calls, help with Exchange in the odd hours of the night. You can do really well with great personnel but it doesn’t scale.

As my business started growing I still maintained the role of the communications quarterback – someone else generated the content but I was the one delivering the message and also one getting the feedback. It’s not easy to grow when the process goes just one way.

Step 1: Share the expertise

Put people in your organization in charge of delivering the message.

If you take a look at http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog you will see almost daily updates from the VP in my company. Everything from support to marketing to network operations to development to strategy and consulting.

These aren’t quickie posts. The chances of them being read by the majority of our partner base is slim. But folks that will read it will be the ones that care and want to know more about the topic than just the highlights.

Truth is, you can’t write blog posts for skimmers. People that dive into the post need to get some substance out of it.

This is almost exactly opposite from what you see in commercial blogging endeavors. The idea there is to create as much noise with as few words as possible so people will keep on clicking through and running up the view counter on the advertisements.

Do not model your corporate blog after the trade blog junk. The goal is to get the people to read, not accidentally click on an ad.

The big problem is that people may not care of have the time to read your posts.

The biggest problem is that they will definitely not have the time to read it when you post it.

Solution: Write valuable posts that will be shared, saved and read later.

Step 2: Promote

Remember what I said about who chooses to do business with you and who actually has the task of doing the real work? It’s typically not the same person. Same goes for blogs and documentation and any kind of content you make available. It could be that the person that follows your blog is in sales or marketing but if they are reading a blog post about the technology it won’t go anywhere.

You need to make sure everyone reads your blog. Good luck with that.

First, make sure you do the initial promotion – post it on Facebook, on Twitter, include it in your newsletters and mailers, make it a part of your signature and every piece of email your company sends out. That’s the easy part.

Second, make sure the content is available on demand – when someone asks you about a topic, make sure you link them to the content instead of answering the question. Now some will argue that this is horrible customer service but the truth of the matter is that there are no quick questions and quick answers, you have to consider some background in order to make the right decision.

“So the answer kind of depends on what you are doing but let me point you to a post on our site that gives you all the details instead of me guiding you in the wrong direction.”

The goal of written communications is for it to be complete.

Step 3: Consolidate

Finally, get to the point.

Once you have awesome documentation and a ton of content your most attentive listeners may not be your intended audience. Or vice versa.

The problem with the white collar economy is that you no longer get to choose to decide what is your job and what isn’t. If you can’t stay on top of everything you’re soon to be out a job. We all need to do more.

The problem with doing more is that folks that do more get promoted and have less time to stay on top of things. So you have to make it easy for them to delegate the communication to someone else.

At ExchangeDefender we have started producing ExchangeDefender Executive Podcasts.

10 minutes, ~10 megs, covering everything you need to know about what we’re doing. We talk about support issues, network maintenance, development progress, marketing and everything else.

You can listen to it in your car and when you hear something that you need to know more about you can just ask your staff to look into it for you at http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog or go get it yourself.

As we and our partners grow it becomes more important to stay on top of stuff and work closely with one another.

When we don’t, the profitability of the solution falls apart. If you’re spending too much time to support the product or don’t take advantage of the stuff that would make you more successful we both stand to lose.

It’s in our best interest to create a better message. It’s in your best interest to do something with that message. But it can’t be one sided.

Step 4: Focus

Since I know I’ll be punched by those of you that have listened to it so far, let me say it up front: Yes, we ordered better recording gear. This was one of those ideas that looked good on paper so we decided to record it and see if anyone would listen. Lot’s of people did and we just didn’t have the time to get the gear in for recording #2.

Two weeks ago I wrote about our decision to dramatically cut down our conference schedule. That post kind of got a life of it’s own but my main message was that in order for us to become more valuable to our partners we need to put the focus back on our partners. The goal of going to conferences is to test ideas, touch base with existing partners and more  – but the primary goal is to get new partners. As big as we are, should we spend money to get new partners or just work better with the existing ones?

Truth is, we can become far more successful by working better with our partners.

Every day I am being asked to take over billing, take over support, take over implementation/migration/deployment and so on. You can’t take on new business if you’re not going to be good at it… and we can’t get good at it if we’re on the road.

So here we go. This is just a piece of the whole ExchangeDefender puzzle we’re putting together for 2012. The better we serve our partners the better you’ll serve your clients and more successful everyone will become. At least that’s what we’re working on

It’s been almost a week since the last blog post. I’m ashamed not only because it’s been a week since the last post but because I’ve written dozens of them in that time but just haven’t hit publish… yet. On a certain level I’m starting to wonder if certain things need to even be said anymore or if anyone is listening. So if you are, feel free to scroll down to the part that says ConnectWise. Otherwise, here is some stuff that I can’t figure out.

1– Screw Karl Palachuk. Not the guy himself, he’s awesome and I’m proud to count him as a friend that knows the real Vlad. But his work pisses me off at times, particularly Relax Focus Succeed. I’d say go buy the book and read it but I know you won’t. I did. The big idea is that workaholics tend to be less successful and probably cause a lot more problems for themselves but not being able to distance themselves from their work or enjoy their life. What pisses me off is that he is right – or perhaps the fact that I’m just not like that. I don’t “relax” – I just think of something else I could occupy all my time with. Then I look at some of my friends who seem to be on vacations more often than they are at work and how their businesses are crumbling.. I just haven’t found a substitute for hard work (and lot’s of it) and the suggestion that relaxing instead of cramming is better just bugs me.

2– Things sure seem easier. I don’t really have any posts in the queue or additional thoughts on The death of a MSP salesman or where the VAR/MSP businesses that focus on dying infrastructure are going. I have less and less of those discussions with partners these days and things played out pretty much exactly how I wrote they would play out here for for years. My day-to-day is about taking great ideas and figuring out how stuff we’re already doing fits the mold, there is no massive paradigm shift.

3– I have run out of people to be angry at. I used to be disappointed when we lost business to a competitor or when partners told me about how much better solution X was than us. Now I just kind of feel sorry for them all. I think a major factor here is just how successful we are and how much money we are making – individual features and lost deals are so small in context of how big everything has become. I used to talk to folks that just didn’t get it or never acted on something that would be great for them and their clients – now I just feel bad for them. I feel even worse for my competitors – from seeing just how hard they have to work and travel and how many stones they have to turn to find that next person… to the ones working for my large nameless competitors that seem to have figured out they want to kill each other on price but all they seem to have managed to do is completely dishearten their employees. I no longer work on the guts of the solution so I don’t take it personally; I no longer face competition that isn’t a step or two behind us and that is making it difficult to be mad at someone and work with incredible passion that comes from competition. I’m only focused on making everything I’m making better every day – and that generates a lot less blog therapy.

All in all, I am feeling pretty good and extremely fortunate and thankful for what I’m doing, where I’m at and all the awesome people and partners we have in this business. I don’t really feel like I need to put up Vladville scarecrows up and make scared partners talk to Andy Goodman first

Now.. ConnectWise

I’ll be there next month for HTG and for ConnectWise when the big show kicks off at the beginning of November. ExchangeDefender will be there officially as a sponsor and we’ll have a booth and a golf hole and all that usual stuff. Be nice and don’t ask about Shockey Monkey, my team will have a lot of stuff to talk to you about when it comes to our new ConnectWise integration. As a matter of fact (and respect) we won’t even discuss all the changes with Shockey Monkey until the ConnectWise IT Nation is over. I know you’re curious but if you can’t find enough stuff to be excited about at the IT Nation there is something wrong with you.

I probably will not be at the event in a very official role.

Last year I wasn’t scheduled to be at ConnectWise at all – my second kid was about to be born and I didn’t even bother asking for a show pass. But whenever I could sneak out I would go and spend a few hours at the bar talking to partners about what we are doing. It was the absolute best thing I ever did.

I showed up at the event and sat at the bar. I sent out an email to our partners and asked them to send me appointment requests.

Then as they sat down I handed them a cheap xerox copy of the features we’re thinking about working on and asked them to rank it in the order of priority. It had everything from stuff we had nearly finished to the sci-fi features we didn’t even have on the drawing board. I sat there, chatted with my partners, got a sense of what we should focus on and for the most part just chatted about business in general and where we’re collectively going.

Now don’t take the “sci-fi” to mean things that we had no intention of developing. Some (honestly – most) of my more ambitious plans are really just good and well intentioned ideas – but without pitching it to people and getting the feedback and ideas and help I don’t really know how to go from point A to B to C and so on. We figure it out collectively.

I’d like to say just one thing – A year after that initial survey, all but one feature that was on the list has been finished and by IT nation, 100% of that feature list should be done.

This is why I always talk about the importance of our partners to our business. I could take that list and give it to the people that work on these products and services and tell them – Hey, I know you’d rather get A or B or C done. But our partners need K sooner, shift gears and work on that – and as much as everyone that works for me likes to argue with me and play me out to be an idiot with a thick accent, they take your opinions and demands a lot more seriously. It was evidence of what we needed to do – and I look forward to doing that again this year!

So there you go folks. Life is good. We delivered. You made us extremely successful. I don’t even feel compelled to link to the partner application or pimp anything in any way – just thank you from the bottom of my heart and my money bin, look forward to all the awesome stuff that’s coming.

P.S. I’ll be in Scottsdale, Arizona this week for the nAble conference. If you’d like to meet or have a drink or see any of the cool stuff that we’ll show off next month – drop me an email.

Boy am I happy to see September! Oh, and check this out: www.exchangedefender.com

There are still a few bits and pieces along with the documentation / training collateral coming together slowly. But it’s a step in a new direction leaving the platform of a software company catering to IT providers to one trying to help consumers and business decision makers get their stuff together. (in case you’ve misread that let me make it clear: NO, we are not going direct or competing with our partners).

Epiphany

The cloudpocalypse of August 2011 has been godsent. It, along with the soul crushing conversations that I’ve had with many of you and some of your clients, gave me the resolve to finally push in this direction. Hiding behind the partners is just not working anymore.

First: You can’t blindly point at someone else for the problem because that makes you look incompetent. As I recently told my staff, “I am not paying you to tell me who broke it, I’m paying you to tell me what’s being done to fix it”.

Second: When we talk to your clients in the same manner we talk to you, it doesn’t come off right. There is a different language shared between IT professionals and ordinary humans and even this description is borderline insulting.

So the obvious question becomes – why the hell are you talking to end users anyhow? The answer is equally blunt – because you aren’t doing your job.

That is something I wanted to say to everyone I talked to in August but I couldn’t. I dropped the ball. I know. I’m sorry. But when I took the time to talk to people below the CEO level and to the end users few things became apparent:

• Your staff is either unaware, uninterested or uninformed about the solution, they only know the bits and pieces they were told or stumbled upon accidentally.
• End users are even more confused about what you do, what they are paying for and what their alternatives are when things go down. Not one of the users I spoke to knew about LiveArchive. Not. A. Single. One.
• There is no incentive for staff learning or end user training, roles are seen more as a fireman than a solution provider (hint: put the effort or stay at the same pay level forever; do your job only and you might not be replaced by someone else).
• End users #1 complaint: IT provider communication.

Now it’s going to take some time to address all of the above but I have to admit that I’m a large part of this problem as well. I deal with some really, really smart people that have their stuff together. So when I get feedback (“Vlad you suck.”) I both take it personally and am very passionate about our product and the approach. My job has been to make sure things are perfect here without bothering with what you do.

Well, over the past month I’ve been confronted with the fact that your users want and need more than that from the solution they rely to. We’re here for our partners, always will be.

But.. we’re going to spend a lot of money on the user facing stuff going forward too. There are two things you can do. 1) Ignore it completely and take a chance that they fire you. 2) Figure out a way to offer some of this stuff and risk the client knowing that a 2 person IT shop isn’t managing thousands of SPAM filtering and Exchange servers out there.

Looking forward to showing off what we’ve been building over the past 2 weeks over the course of the next month or so. I hope you like it. I know you need it. Your clients are asking for it. Are you going to give it to them?

MSPs and IT Solution Providers have an inherent business model flaw: They can’t compete on both price and performance at the same time. Your solution cannot simultaneously be the best and the cheapest because the cheapest is always getting cheaper and the best is exceedingly difficult to accomplish.

So how do you compete? I don’t know, and I know exactly. Allow me to explain I recently got an email from a long time ExchangeDefender partner who was asking for further volume discounts of our product:

“Can you also look at my account and see if you can do anything about the pricing – we continue to bring on more ExchangeDefender accounts and I don’t want to have to downgrade the accounts to the lighter versions to help us maintain our margins in the face of more and more competition.  Thanks.”

Sociopath Enterprise Architect

To succeed in this business you need to be able to wake up each day and shift mindsets quickly.

I myself had to face the line above – many times. As a matter of fact, I and other OWN sales folks have been approached about meeting BPOS pricing – which we just cannot do. I think we lost most if not all of those deals because quality of service doesn’t matter to many – only price does.

So my options are cut all the vendor sponsorships we have, kill all the partner programs, stop answering my phone and try to compete with BPOS until Microsoft realizes they are doomed against Google and give it away for free (and run me out of business in the process). That’s one option, but I honestly would not wake up and drag myself to work each day to build a crippled product.

So we launched CloudBlock – You can now buy hosted Exchange with more storage than Own Web Now provides for $2.95 / month.

We’ve also been approached time and time again to compare our ExchangeDefender product with Postini, AppRiver, MX Logic <insert antispam product here> and asked to compete on price for their lowest tier antispam solution. Now, when you look at ExchangeDefender it’s $2 a month. For that you get the base antivirus/antispam but you also get 1 year of LiveArchive on Exchange 2010 with no storage limits, you get web filtering, web file sharing, encryption, integration with your PSA and RMM tools and even a free version to use on your own stuff. But after hearing “I just need antispam” a billion times, I allowed the team to create an ExchangeDefender Essentials offering for $1 a month: spam and virus filtering.

Do we spend a lot of time thinking about the Essentials offering? Not at all. There isn’t even a product ID for it in our billing system – all 5 people that have ordered it just have ExchangeDefender with a 50% discount. The offering has been as successful as a flying brick.

On the other hand…

When we decided to publish Shockey Monkey as a commercial product, we decided to give it away for free. No restrictions, no catches, no limited time trials, no approval process at all. You just fill out a form and 60 seconds later you have a full blown client management portal.

If you want some of the advanced features, you can sign up for the Pro.

This is the exact opposite of the ExchangeDefender and OWN business models: of writing really, really, really great and profitable stuff.

Why is it different? Because there is no “markup” on a solution that you’re going to use to run your own house. But I don’t know a single MSP that doesn’t charge at least $5 for ExchangeDefender. Either all of my partners are total crooks, or they are great at sales.. or there is a valuable addon that comes with deploying these solutions, one that (when managed properly) businesses are willing to pay for and support their business on.

Skitzo enough for you?

It all just comes down to what kind of business you want to run, what kind of solution you want to offer and what motivates you to work to please your clients.

For me, it’s all about ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, OWN. But I’m an entrepreneur and I’m willing to take anyone’s money with CloudBlock, ExchangeDefender Essentials and anything else from folks that are willing to compromise. I would never sell those to a client but if that’s what you need to build your business that is your decision to make.

Do you want it good or cheap?

That is the only question that matters.

When you build your solution stack, do you want a good one or cheap one?

My name is all over ExchangeDefender. I go to trade shows all the time. If my solution was terrible there would be a line of people waiting to beat my ass. I have seen CEO’s that have since stopped going to shows for having their butt chewed out by their clients. I never want to be in that situation or put my people in that kind of a position. That is why all of my VPs go to these events, answer the phone and work with our partners. That is why our partners sell our products and know someone is behind them.

But if you need to cut costs to remain competitive.. That is a race that goes in only one direction. Whether you have your successful business model figured out (like Shockey Monkey) or are just serving a wider market (like CloudBlock).. I hope there is a method to the madness.

And to answer the original question.. No, ExchangeDefender price is not going down. It’s going up. If that’s not for you, I understand and I got options. You can have Essentials for $1 or you can have CloudBlock Antivirus/Antispam for $0.35. Just remember that there is only one solution I stand behind, and while I will feel sorry for you when the 35 cent one doesn’t work out, I’ll only offer 35 cents worth of compassion. Now.. roll the vartruth video.

ExchangeDefender Web Share has been one of the most popular ExchangeDefender features in the 5.0 release and we’ve improved it quite a bit in 7.0 – with the biggest request in all of ExchangeDefender platform:

We need to allow our clients to send files to us.

It’s simple: Files sent to your company come from external sources (clients, vendors, contractors) that do not have access to your internal infrastructure. They may not be protected by ExchangeDefender, the organization may not want to spend $ on licenses or maintenance of complex SharePoint sites, management of FTP servers is cumbersome and unintuitive. Exchange of files is one of the most difficult things for the company to manage because the sharing is unique and often not centrally managed by the IT department but one-on-one between employees and external contractors.

Since the problem is so complex with so many different requirements and decision makers, we had to make it really, really simple. Here is how we’ve done it:

WebShare Upload Address:

https://webshare.exchangedefender.com/upload/superlos.com

Every domain protected by ExchangeDefender has their own upload address. Management can of course enable or disable this feature entirely. This URL can be embedded in email signatures, in the company’s web site, anywhere the clients are directed to upload the files. When they click on it, this is what they’ll see:

Contact Information – Clients uploading documents are prompted to provide their name, phone number and email address.

Webshare Library – Clients are asked for the title of the library they are about to create as well as a brief description. This will be emailed to the intended contact.

Contact – Select a user from the dropdown to whom you’d like to send files to.

Simplicity is the beauty of the system. There is nothing to download, nothing to install and nothing to configure. All the client needs is a web browser – and the entire transmission is encrypted with SSL making the exchange secure. Every file and access is logged and available in the audit log for both the user, admin and the MSP. Files are password protected and not available for third-party download so it meets the compliance requirements. The files do not get emailed as attachments – they are securely stored on our servers – so in the long term the cost of storing those files off the servers is extremely affordable. But neither the client nor the recipient need to be concerned with all this, it just works.

But how do you control it? Simple, from the admin control panel at https://admin.exchangedefender.com you can enable and disable the Public Upload function.

ExchangeDefender is not the first company to offer such a feature. We are, however, the only one offering it to you for free – with your brand and your name on the application. With similar enterprise class solutions ranging from $20 / user / month and more, you can see why so many people love ExchangeDefender and build very profitable business lines on top of it. For many service providers, ExchangeDefender is the most profitable solution in the stack and it helps us differentiate our Hosted Exchange business tremendously.

The only thing you need to do is educate your clients about the solution they are already paying for. It will make you irreplaceable.

Nearly three years ago I wrote series of articles that I called Lucy’s Sail (Google), about the change of OWN’s business direction and our focus and commitment to the cloud. It almost instantly made me the SMB community public enemy #1 but after thirty-something straight months of profit and revenue growth during the implosion of the US economy there are few people out there that doubt the cloud. That debate ended a while ago and even today the perennial powers of HP and Dell are both reporting lower demand for steel.

Imagine a crowded room full of people that love to talk and everyone has a microphone. Sometimes in order to get your message out you have to either be louder or just make the most extreme comment you possibly can in order to get people to start paying attention. I believe I went with “You have to redesign your business around the cloud or face career choices of a used car salesman or Geeksquad handy man dusting CPU and case fans by day, installing TVs at night.” I went on to hire Andy Goodman as my personal body guard and during one of the MVP meetings in Seattle sat down with Paul Fitzgerald and Kevin Beares to talk about their Aurora concept.

What I actually do for a living

I am in the business of making money. So while at times I may say stuff that makes you scratch your head, polar opinions rarely make it into contracts and into checks – there are no absolutes. So when it comes to the cloud – yes, it is and will grow as an even more dominant technology. But does that immediately or ultimately signify the death of all desktops, servers and client owned IT infrastructure? Only if you’re suicidal.

When I first spoke to Paul and Kevin about what I was working on, I explained that I have been doing the “hosting” business for a long time and actually worked with clients directly in the late 90’s on helping move things to the data center. One thing I learned early on is that in a utopian IT deployment, the client would retain all the control and data storage but outsourced all the nightmares: licensing, security, patching, upgrading, backing up, planning for capacity upgrades and general maintenance. Your typical small or medium business cares extremely little about their IT overall – but they care a lot about their data. Even the more IT strategic companies that buy the latest and the greatest will cringe and think about the TCO and costs associated with keeping everything moving. Here is what the SMB IT needs to look like:

Your small business owner does not want you to build a chicken coop, get bird feed, install a solar power array or a wind turbine to power the kitchen and then make them slaughter a bird every time they want a chicken. Ron said it right: “Set it and forget it.” –  they want you to set their IT up and they don’t want to think about it, hear about it, meet you to consider projects or plan to eat a roasted chicken 18 months from now.

Your typical small or medium sized business loves the cloud because it’s simple, efficient and easy. But if they knew the risk, they would take their data control a lot more seriously.

If you Google for “cloud downtime” or lost data you will see that cloud is far from bullet proof or immune from problems. Stuff goes down. And when it goes down it’s not like an eMachines box that comes back after a reboot – it’s arrays and arrays and arrays of clusters that need to be brought back up. Some cloud providers have even lost their clients data – permanently.

So what’s the competitive advantage to the IT Solution Provider who wants to fulfill their clients need for a simple and manageable IT but wants to give them control over their data? This is a long conversation Kevin, Paul and I had in ‘07/’08 and those guys delivered their vision in the form of Aurora aka Small Business Server 2011 Essentials. Here is mine:

ExchangeDefender for SBS Essentials

ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange now directly integrates in SBS 2011 Essentials for account management, control and maintenance:

Built in directly into the SBS 2011 Dashboard, you can manage your ExchangeDefender cloud services and see any service alerts, service status, link to the documentation and all the relevant stuff without all the complex things your typical user does not care about.

It ties back elegantly into your Shockey Monkey portal which is already branded with your logo, company name, your pricing scheme and backed by a company that doesn’t compete with you. The authentication isolates accounts and change management to the accounts owned by this company and gives them the full management power without having to remember passwords or hop from service to service, site to site.

Account management is dead simple and gives the business control they want without the mess or complexity they don’t want, don’t need and can’t afford.

Tie that in with the Outlook 2007/2010 integration between ExchangeDefender and their desktop, Shockey Monkey backoffice management that gives you support and integration back to your PSA, ability to link in your existing business model with a cloud service provider that delivers seamless integration across Hosted Exchange/SharePoint, Offsite Backups, business continuity, hosting and everything else you need in the cloud where you call the shots, name the price and keep control of your client? How’s that business model looking now?

Oh, one more thing…

Wouldn’t it be cool if this thing also took all of the data your client stores in the cloud across Exchange, SharePoint, ExchangeDefender and so on… and created a local backup / snapshot / cache on your SBS 2011 Essentials box? Turning the local server into a secure storage locker for all your cloud stuff that you don’t want to build yourself? I hope that got your attention and I’ll get it to you later this year, but everything else you can have starting tomorrow after the TechEd launch. If you see my guys there, make them show it to you live.

Anyhow, my name is Vlad and I just built your business model and support tools for the next few years.  Click here and then give me a call.

Back from Bahamas, had a great cruise. Wife, kids, 6 course meals, 5K run on the island and crystal clear waters. I highly recommend it and just for the ladies, enjoy:

Now, since somehow a picture of me without my shirt on will draw more eyeballs than a blog by a multimillion dollar business site that many of you depend on for your livelyhood… I’m going to take a break from the usual shenanigans and give you a heads up on what’s going on:

Monday

Late in the day we will be publishing technical and business collateral for ExchangeDefender 7. It goes live in two weeks and the code is frozen – no changes or additions are being made, we’re pretty much just standing in place and doing training, business development and marketing efforts.

On Tuesday, you’ll want to go to http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog and download the items that will be made available there.

Why? Because if you don’t give your clients a heads up on what’s going on, or don’t take the time to figure things out, you’re not going to be a happy camper. The collateral will be brandable – you can upload it to your web site, customize it, email it to your clients or just reuse it as is. But whatever you do, use it.

Tuesday

We will start talking about something new in our cloud infrastructure – to my knowledge we are the only provider out there to be doing this so you’ll definitely want to pay attention to what’s coming from Own Web Now. Those of you that follow my twitter probably know already but I can’t blog or talk about it until the official unveiling at Microsoft TechEd. 

What I can say is what I’ve been saying for years – the cloud has undoubtable advantages for SMBs. That debate is over. However, cloud without backup or failover is simply foolish. We’re designing a unifying effort that combines the cloud with an on-premise something as a local caching/backup infrastructure. You won’t be spending thousands of dollars on it but really anything beyond a microbusiness will need one of these and as usual we are the ones leading the way.

Wednesday

I will be in the office, if you’d like some of my time or if there is anything you’d like to discuss with me, please let me know.

Thursday/Friday

We will be doing a large scale maintenance event that involves power, servers and deployments. Again, since nobody reads the blogs, make sure you’ve got LiveArchive ready to go in case you have an emergency and you have to rely on Louie during the early morning hours on Friday.

We’re deploying a new Exchange 2010 infrastructure at the same time so there might be a sale some time soon. Though with ExchangeDefender at $1 and Exchange 2010 / SharePoint 2010 at $10 you’re really starting to split pennies at this level.

Sunday

Autotask. They have been on a tear the last few years and their parties are getting better and better. While I look forward to showing off ExchangeDefender 7, I’m going to do my best to be around later in the evening as well.. it’s Miami after all.

That’s all – stay tuned, keep on reading, I look forward to seeing you guys soon.