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.

Over the past few weeks my phone has been blowing up with txt and email inquiries about the ExchangeDefender 7 and the future of the product. Let me ease your mind – over the last few weeks we’ve been buying up a lot of hardware and a lot of space for the 7 release – We’re bumping up network capacity by additional 100% and bumping up the hardware capacity by 30%.

Our Dell team is very happy. And kudos to them for being able to fill such a large order so quickly.

On Wednesday at 1 PM EST (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/120736520) we will be officially launching ExchangeDefender 7 beta and it should be in everyone’s hands within the week – most folks by Friday depending on demand.

Now on to the rumors, changes, general fear – folks, if this wasn’t going to kick so much booty, I wouldn’t be spending so much $ adding capacity. Those of you that have worked with us through the years remember the rough spot we ran into with the billing system change in 2009 and growth pains where there were some delays in delivery at times – things sure have changed through the years.

This is the biggest change to the product since it’s launch.

Naturally, there are going to be rumors when you make a statement like that. One area that confuses a lot of folks is the mentions of Shockey Monkey and what that means for those of you using Autotask and Connectwise, etc. First of all, the integrations with the two are only going to get better the more solid their API’s get and the more functionality they extend and introduce in their product.

Second, and most important in my opinion, is what we have learned with Shockey Monkey. For your sake, what have we learned from it that we can deploy within ExchangeDefender to make you more successful? Shockey Monkey launched in August of last year with less than a thousand “legacy” portals and by the time Shockey Monkey turns 1 year old we’re on pace to be bigger than Autotask and ConnectWise, combined.

You might want to go back and read that paragraph again. Then think, what could you learn from that experience to make your revenues and profits grow like Own Web Now’s have since last year? In the first 5 months of 2011 we would have attended 0 trade shows, launched 0 new products yet our growth has already beat all of 2010.

The dynamics of the software business are changing rapidly and if you’re depending on software solutions and their maintenance to grow your revenue, you have to change along with it. Today the big news that nobody cares about is that Epsion got hacked and to make a long story short: your clients will be getting a lot more SPAM. But is that the future of email? The mob business model, where the product is nearly free but the “protection” is gonna cost you? No, it’s not.

The main message I hope to make in the beta launch on Wednesday is that people hate to work with the mob. But they love to buy stuff.

About an hour ago I wrapped up my ExchangeDefender preview of everything we’re doing with the “7” release. In a lot ways this is a huge change.

First of all, this is the first release ever to not have a single line of code written by me. I think it’s very fitting because the world that ExchangeDefender was written for and that I designed it around no longer exists – IT solutions providers are building sites and services, not LANs and servers.

Second, it’s a huge change of business for Own Web Now. Namely, it’s no more. We will soon be rebranding and all our solutions from Shockey Monkey to Offsite Backups, will be known under one brand – ExchangeDefender. We are changing our model from a company that provides the building blocks to MSPs into one that delivers the entire service – through MSPs under their brand. The complexities behind these products are getting to be so broad that anyone that doesn’t specialize in messaging will soon be at a major disadvantage: we hope to provide that specialty to our providers while still providing them with the tools if they want to build something custom.

The changes – of ExchangeDefender core and apps – will significantly improve our partners margins, provide more functionality in our products and hopefully make the entire ExchangeDefender chain a lot more profitable. We’re not going at this alone, lot’s of our friends are playing a huge part in it all, and I for one look forward to it.

To everyone that got us to this point – thank you. Being able to deliver this today is the best day I’ve had in this company.

As some of you may know, I have been out of day-to-day operations of OWN during the last two months welcoming a beautiful new baby boy, Sam Mazek, to our family.

Today, I officially come back full time (and then some).

Now here is the really cool part: We’ve already announced what our gameplan for 2011 is going to be. Messaging: easy, cheap, managed, any way you want it we got it.

We’re going to make a lot of people a lot of money.

My part? Starting today, I will be working the next 90 days straight.

No weekends off.

No events / shows / road trips / seminars.

I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am about this. As many of you may be able to relate, running a small business is rough. You’ve got one or two good products and you’re trying to groom the rest and get them to catch up. I’ve spent a lot of time on ExchangeDefender, a lot of time on Shockey Monkey and a ton of time organizationally building up the bits and pieces like training, perfecting the partner program, perfecting our process and execution. Now I can count lines of business on both hands and the most exciting part – in 2011 I get to hook them all up together and deliver them in one complete package.

I.. am.. pumped.

Write. This.. Down… (407) 536-VLAD. I expect you to call me. I am focusing 100% of my efforts on executing the plan we’ve announced and I’ve got an agenda to roll behind ExchangeDefender too. I’m calling it ExchangeDefender 500 but more on that in a bit.

Happy New Year! Now let’s get to work!

There are few business decisions that I look back at and think.. man, this is dumb. But hey, if the market demand is there who am I not to take their money.

Introducing ExchangeDefender Essentials.

What is it, Vlad?

ExchangeDefender Essentials is the core of ExchangeDefender – security, SPAM filtering, Virus filtering, corporate disclaimers, outbound mail relay, malware protection, mail queuing / bagging, etc.

All the coolness of ExchangeDefender without all the other stuff you don’t need – for half the cost! Still under your brand, still supported and centrally managed. Now go get paid for it!

What is it REALLY, Vlad?

Well.. So a lot of people don’t know how to sell or how to read product feature sheets or.. yeah. So we get a lot of calls that start with “Well how come this product is more than this other product that doesn’t include half these features?”

I burn money pay someone in my company to answer questions like that all day long.

There really are two parts to this story: 1) Partners are not capable of effectively selling the product and explaining how the additional benefits are necessary and 2) Some of the technology is redundant with what is already available in the business.

We have gotten a lot of feedback about how #2 helps partners close bigger MSP deals because ExchangeDefender eliminates other services and makes the managed service plan get signed fast.

But we’ve also gotten a lot of feedback from partners who are being asked to compete against lower priced alternatives and provide a barebone solution.

Obviously, I think that CloudBlock is going to be the perfect fit for the price shoppers and those that don’t understand the MSP sales process. But, we need to be able to compete better.

With over 50% discount off ExchangeDefender, this makes ExchangeDefender cheaper than Postini and all it’s other competition out there. It also keeps it under your brand, gives you PSA integration that no other antispam/antivirus can match as well the ability to mark it up.

Few important caveats: new accounts only, no minimums, no contracts, no volume discounts, no community discounts and not available against any of our cloud services (we know better than to have something on the Internet without LiveArchive).

You asked for it – and despite my objections – you’ve got it!

Yesterday I held a big webcast to announce our big plans for 2011. To say it went well is an understatement. But in January we start offering all of these services and I want to make sure we are completely on record with everything that we are doing.

If you missed the webcast and would like to check our the official announcements check this out:

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

Read the official announcement of ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging and CloudBlock over on our Own Web Now Blog.

So what’s CloudBlock, Vlad?

It’s three different things:

1. It’s not a solution designed for the channel. It’s a solution designed for the end users that want the bare bones commodity email solution.

2. It’s “Mail” solution starts at $2.99/month and includes Exchange 2010 mailbox (5GB Mailbox, upgrade to 25GB available), optional mobility, built-in security. It’s your typical Exchange hosting available from tons of vendors around the world.

3. It’s “Security” solution that starts at $0.35/month and includes SPAM filtering, Virus filtering, malware scans, DDoS protection, address harvesting protection and business continuity (mail queuing). Unlike the hosting product, this solution is designed to protect your existing email server on-premise.

Most importantly, CloudBlock is not Own Web Now. It’s not ExchangeDefender. It’s not my people. We have licensed pieces of our solution stack for a project that we believe can be profitable.

How does it make sense?

Let me Vlad-ize it for you.

Customer: I want a Ferrari.
Vlad: Fantastic. I have a few!
Customer: So I spoke to a guy at a Hyundai dealership, what kind of a Ferrari can you sell me for $8,999?
Vlad: I can sell you a 1:43 scale model along with an F1 poster signed by Michael Schumacher.
Customer: But I won’t be able to drive it at 180 mph?
Vlad: Relative to the ground? Only if you’re driving it on your tray while an airplane is taking off. Which is against the FAA safety policies.
Customer: So I can’t understand why a Hyundai is $8,999 and a Ferrari starts at over $200,000?
Vlad: [ 2 hour speach ]
Customer: I get all of that with Hyundai according to their sales people.
Vlad: Guess I’m going to lose this sale.

Translate the above to all the conversations you’ve had and all the deals you’ve lost to Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS. In light of all the outages they have had, you lost. In light of all the inconsistencies among the products and Microsoft’s inability to even roll out their latest Exchange and SharePoint releases, you’ve lost. In light of endless fears about the privacy and security, you still lost!

Why? Because when the client is making a decision on the price alone there is no amount of features or business fit that you can talk about, they only care about the lowest cost.

Emphasized enough? It’s true. While you can excuse some of it on clients just not understanding what they truly need – or your inability to explain it, when something is seen as a commodity it’s only compensated and valued as a commodity. Which means cheapest thing wins.

So why did you do it Vlad?

Because I’m a CEO of a for profit business, not a CEO of a religion. Look, it’s obvious from all the pain out there that there is demand for this type of a solution. If people are willing to pay for the bare essentials, who am I not to take their money?

That said, this is another weapon in our partners arsenal. If you are facing a stubborn client that is not willing to listen to your recommendation for what they really need, and they want the cheapest damn thing out there – you now have something to recommend. And when they need more, you should be there to deliver it. We partnered in CloudBlock because we felt it had a unique value that doesn’t exist with BPOS or Google Apps – it doesn’t have a VIP partner list or another business model. So you don’t have to worry about your customers being introduced to the competitors of yours that we like more or being gamed to sell more advertising.

You now have a competitive chip in the commodity space.

Won’t this kill OWN, ExchangeDefender, etc?

There is a certain kind of client that only looks at the cost. So yes, that kind of client wouldn’t consider OWN or ExchangeDefender anyhow.

Will some of the existing clients/partners go to this? Yes. And we’ll make slightly less margin on them. But what’s our margin if they switch to a competitor? Now does it make sense?

If you can’t explain the difference between a Ferrari and a Hyundai then let them buy a Hyundai and when they become to depend on it and want to drive it at 180mph – you’re right there.

Remember: If you don’t have alternatives, your clients will find them on their own. Not everyone is looking for a Ferrari, either.

More details on this in January. We think this is huge for the channel even though it wasn’t built for it. Differentiate, differentiate, differentiate.

Earlier today I held our final webcast of 2010 – in no small way it’s the biggest, most ambitious thing we’ve ever done. And we’ve spent entire 2010 to bring our organization and our relationships to the level to actually make this possible.

I’ve posted my professional thoughts on the subject as the CEO of Own Web Now here: ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging. Here is the more volatile angle:

In a nutshell: I’m tired of bitching, moaning and excuses for not building a business model around the cloud and the messaging platform. I know there are plenty of real business concerns that are hard to make but try to think back to when you started a business and the faith you had in yourself and your solution. Were you immediately profitable? No. Did you have a winning combination that was fool proof? Probably not. But over time things get perfected, details get ironed out and you build a successful business model on top of it. Yes, it took a ton of sacrifice. But look at you now!

Many are looking at the cloud right now and the margins make the sacrifice component less and less tasty. Nothing good happens while standing still in an ever changing world. Not for you, not for me. So considering how well we’ve done through the years, we owed our partners this one. Here is what it is:

Completely managed end-to-end messaging solution built and supported by one vendor with your brand name on the front. When I say completely managed, I mean it: We’ll configure it. We’ll install Outlook. We’ll migrate the mail profile. We’ll support the end user. We’ll bill them. We’ll collect money from them. We’ll cut the commission checks.

This is a culmination of all the bitching, moaning and complaints feedback we’ve gotten about the cloud. Some of it is very legitimate: It takes a lot of time to run the business side of billing, collections and accounting. It takes a lot of time to do the setup and migration but clients hate paying for it. Some of it is not.

So what did we actually do?

First of all, we changed nothing. Our packages are still the same packages with the same pricing, same offering and same specs.

We added a new tier at the top of our offering that includes everything. Everything. Trust and believe that. Because if it breaks, we don’t get paid.

It starts on January 1st.

Initial response has been amazing – and I hope we help a ton of people build a great business in the cloud. This is, pardon the self high five, huge. I don’t know of a time that someone decided to do all of the work – end to end – under your brand and even give you control of the account.

One question did stand out: “So wait, you’re going to set the price on this?* Cause I can sell it for $75/month easy.” Slow down. First, the price has to be set in order for us to actually bill the client – and it gets really messy very quickly so it’s not something we could answer right away. Second, we kept it relatively low because in order to make money in the cloud you need volume. Scratch that – in order to make any value on this as an MSP/VAR you need volume – you need a ton of clients to farm and deploy your existing MSP solutions into. If you’re looking to get rich on a few uninformed clients you’re really cheating yourself out of building a huge market presence for yourself.

I’ll explain the reasoning behind the rest of these moves throughout the holiday season. I’m sure the more cynical in the bunch would doubt the sincerity of what we’re doing and I have two things to say about that: 1) Check our track record, we’re always behind our partners and 2) Sitting around and doing nothing will always lose to us actually doing something to help.

Looking forward to a great 2011 with all of my readers and partners. Thank you for your support and attention, as always!

* I am not providing the actual pricing structure in public because this will only be available through our partners. Want to know? Sign up here.

On Tuesday, I will be presenting our roadmap for 2011.

It’s basically the biggest show of the year.

Last year we used it to launch ExchangeDefender 5. This year, we are announcing our new business plans.

First of all, a disclaimer: There are no changes to what we are doing or to our products. Your pricing, service and support will remain the same.

Beyond that, lot’s of new stuff. Here are a few hints:

1. Lower cost version of ExchangeDefender.
2. New third party company offering Exchange 2010 and on-premise SPAM filtering solution licensed from OWN (think BPOS, cheaper)
3. New “managed” solution.

Of course, the devil is in the details and I will share those with you on Tuesday at 1 PM. We are responding to the demand from our partner base. There are basically two new types of partners that have come out of this entire cloud shakeout:

1. Those with really solid business models – that want to add on the cloud but don’t want to manage it. This leaves room for our premium offering that will be managed and billed end to end under our partners branding.
2. Those that think the cloud is a commodity and are willing to ignore it but don’t want to lose their clients to Google or Microsoft. This leaves room for a bare bones Exchange offering to move the more essential messaging to the cloud while everything else stays in place.

We are kind of at a point where the cloud is no longer a discussion point at all, it’s a part of business model and partners have to choose what to do with it: ignore it (and lose), embrace it (and take their chances), embrace it somewhat (and try to live on smaller margins) or embrace it shoulder length (and just keep the clients).

In the end, it’s all about the clients needs, and you’ve seen what I’ve done in 2010. We’re built a world class CRM platform with Shockey Monkey absolutely free to help people manage their cloud services under their name / brand / pricing. Then we added Looks Cloudy, a blog to cover the cloud deployment strategies and considerations. We also rolled out Monkey Remote to enable remote support and monitoring.

Next, we introduce the actual support and service no matter where you are on the scale.

Our business model for 2011 is simple: We will only focus on messaging. Yes, we do a ton of backup business, a lot of security, virtual servers, dedicated servers, SharePoint, etc. At this point though, it’s make it or break it time and with the economy still struggling and record unemployment we can bring in the rest of the services later. But if we cannot address the most critical part of their business immediately, we may as well just close the doors and try to tell ourselves that being an Apple Genius still makes us an IT professional and not a slimy 201X version of the 90’s beeper salesman.