Every now and then I get emails that are so well thought through and written (unlike Vladville) that it’s a damn shame to keep them to myself. So with permission (and removing their company / name) I am reprinting the email to offer everyone additional perspective. No, this will not be the subject of a vartruth video and no, I’m not him.

I wonder where you stand. When you finish reading the post, vote here.

Vlad,

Just read your latest blog entry about “Have MSPs jumped the shark?” I have also read many of your earlier articles and you keep alluding to the fact that the MSP model is going to self-destruct in a few months and we are all going to be standing on the street corner with a tattered cardboard sign saying “Will remove spyware for food”

I respect your success and the fact that you have been able to pimp your products to hundreds of my peers (including me.) I further respect your release of S-M (was the acronym a mistake?) as a free service. Unfortunately, I am earlobe deep with Arnie, so it doesn’t make sense to change at this point.

What I don’t understand (and thus the request for the decoder ring) is what in the hell are you implying that we all should move to, but aren’t smart enough to move away from the oncoming light in order to get to?

Even in this shitty economy, I had my most profitable year last year and this year looks to be even better (in spite of (or because of) losing two $7k/mo clients. Am I a classic MSP? I don’t know. Every single solitary person I speak to in New Orleans or Atlanta or Orlando or Vegas or Philly or Nashville or any other conference I go to do things differently. Way differently in most cases. Different pricing model, different limits, different services… on and on.

XXXX is my own mix. I use Connectwise and Kaseya. Yep, drank the Kool-Aid. I have even started using Kaseya IT Services to do monitoring of some of my servers. My techs are good, and we can fix just about anything, but we really stick to the basics. We don’t do custom programming, strange server systems, thin verticals, etc. and we stay very busy.  We are not experts with Exchange but we can fix it. Same with SQL. I guess you could say we are General Practitioners.

Today I came up with these three things to describe our business:

Over the past year or two, we have pushed out to third parties things like email filtering, anti-virus, backup, server monitoring to the point where most of our day is devoted to problems that are either a pain in the ass, someone’s hair is on fire, or we are doing projects.

I am doing my VCIO function based on my experience. Clients are calling about dumb things that mean the world to them (accounts locked out, mouse is moving around on its own, popups galore, printer won’t print, fax won’t fax, email won’t email), crashes (Exchange edb shit the bed, RAID failure [ironic isn’t it?], capacitors blowing out on motherboards, etc.) or we are upgrading and installing stuff.

But what is wrong with that? Should we be making reservations for dinner and a show for clients? Honestly, I think that the way we are working on the extremes of the spectrum is the way it will be for a while until the whole shooting match can be replaced by some Japanese robotic humanoid.  There are enough f’ed up people out there for the foreseeable future that will need help, that I don’t see the need changing significantly. One day, I will start getting people that want to spend $10/mailbox/month in perpetuity and also don’t mind running their business with programs scattered about the internet. I am not naïve enough to think it won’t happen, but this will probably be the people in your age cohort (or younger) that implement the business model.

So, yeah, change is coming and I am all for it, but maybe that light you see is really others with a flashlight searching for a clue…

XXXX

PS I still want to know what you think MSPs should be doing… cut to the chase and fill me in.

Vlad: So where is most of the marketplace at? Click here and let me know, I’ll publish results in a week: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8CW77CH

Today I’ll be joining Karl on his Cloud Services Podcast to talk a little about what has really made us successful at Own Web Now through the years. If all goes according to plan, we’ll talk a little more about the technology than business (because the business side of this is remarkably simple) when it comes to the cloud.

Here are a few concepts that are slightly more difficult to visualize so I will outline them here:

LiveArchive – Everything fails. Every time you read something covering the cloud you will undoubtedly read about stuff going down. That’s a given, there is no amount of marketing fluff that can cover it up. However, this is a problem that we solve with technology.

Each ExchangeDefender subscriber is enrolled in LiveArchive, an Exchange 2010 powered failover system that is always on. Because we scan all inbound and all outbound mail, we create a seamless copy of the message that gets delivered to our Exchange 2010 infrastructure spread across our data centers. This way when there is an emergency maintenance or downtime or a scheduled maintenance window smack in the middle of your critical business event, you can just open up a browser and open Outlook Web App from any PC or any mobile phone (yes, Microsoft has made OWA seamless across devices in 2010, no more “light” versions)

You can read more about it at ExchangeDefender LiveArchive. This feature is a part of our ExchangeDefender product, so it doesn’t matter if you have your own Exchange server or any other mail server for that matter – it will work.

Split MX Migration – There are a ton of ways to migrate between Exchange deployments – and nearly all of them suck. The Microsoft method will upload the mail from your Exchange server but once you setup your BPOS profile, it will download all that mail right back down. Other providers have different methods, all of which fail in one way or another – some only sync mail and forget about the calendars and contacts, others do it one way, some have a time restriction. Let’s face it, Exchange is an enterprise product that was not designed to be portable.

With ExchangeDefender, we have a seamless delivery protocol called Split MX Migration. You point your domains MX record at one of our ExchangeDefender servers and we simultaneously deliver mail to your old system and to the new Exchange 2010 mailboxes in our data centers. This way you don’t “lose” mail between the time you start the migration or decide to export mail… which leads me to the next component

PST Seeding – If you have a lot of users, you have a lot of mail. Uploading tons and tons of mail over a DSL or Cable connection found at most small businesses can take hours or days. It’s much easier to just dump it to a USB drive and overnight to us. What’s even more impressive is that our import speed on the server side is 7x faster than the Outlook MAPI/RPC. Can’t beat that.

Split Domains – With ExchangeDefender, you get the enterprise product. But not everyone needs an enterprise product. Or more importantly, not everyone is willing to pay for it. Well, we have two options.

For partners who have clients that need to control their costs, we can split the domain between Exchange and POP3/IMAP/Webmail/SSL hosting. The mailboxes on Exchange cost more (10 times more) than the regular mailboxes due to Microsoft licensing fees and the hardware requirements – but if the users aren’t going to be using SharePoint, Public Folders or shared calendars, should they be paying 10x more? Probably not. So we can fix that problem with Split Domains.

Some partners are washing their hands of the email infrastructure all together. We can help there too. In August of 2010, one of our partners will be launching a new Exchange 2010 offering focused on the consumer space (think Google Apps experience in self service and self management) at a far, far, far lower rate than even the BPOS. More details on that later though

FailPOP – Finally, as everything fails, sometimes ExchangeDefender LiveArchive isn’t the best solution. We’ve been involved in a ton of disaster scenarios with our partners and sometimes connectivity is an issue.

FailPOP is a built-in ExchangeDefender process that allows us to stand up a secure POP3 infrastructure in place of your existing server if you know you’ll be down for a while. This way mobile phones and laptops can be configured with a more permanent server on the Internet that allows for free collaboration without being tied to an Internet connection.

If you have any questions, please forward them to vlad@vladville.com. If you have a technical question as an Own Web Now partner, please use https://support.ownwebnow.com. If you’re not one, go to http://www.ownwebnow.com/partners and check us out.

Finally, register for Karl’s podcast http://dld.bz/k94T and listen to it free (in about ten minutes) or buy a subscription and listen to it anywhere anytime.

Currently in development, expected release date: November 19, 2010.

If there is anything I’ve learned in my 13 years in this industry, it’s that when you do nice things for people they tend to repay you more than you ever expected. We’ve been fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of that equation for years, which in part is why we’ve done so well – but in the past year we got to give back to our partner community as well as our strategic partners.

Case and point: Autotask. Trying to create an integration point in the IT space is not very easy. A little over a year ago, when we first started designing our Autotask integration points, we anticipated a very painful process and just hoped to have some basic stuff in for the product in time for the Autotask CommunITy live. We asked for a conference call to help us with some initial issues – Autotask and Brian Sherman (who ran the industry alliances at the time) agreed to help us out and we expected the usual type of a meeting – an apathetic developer, a clueless marketing person and a random person stumbling over promises that won’t be kept. What ensued, shocked and surprised us.

Autotask brought in 11 people in that conference call, all eager to help us out.

The first, and only, time we had an issue the CEO called Steve Noel into his office during the call and we had the documentation in the email within the hour.

Finally, and this is the catalyst for what you will see in the next 24 hours from us, every chance Autotask got our integration got promoted. At every event we went to, Autotask promoted us and talked about our integration. And after every one of those presentations/calls, we had a line of new people ready to sign up.

I assure you, hand on the pile of money we spend on marketing, you can’t buy that kind of publicity and endorsement.

The Payback

In 2009 we spend a record amount of time on the road and started a very aggressive marketing campaign.

In 2010, we quadrupled that effort.

So when it came around to pay back Autotask, we did what we’re really good at: We asked our partners what they would like to see in the solution that wasn’t there already. Over the next 24 hours, I will share with you the details of two solutions that our partners asked for.

Email – to – Ticket Gateway

The biggest gripe among Autotask users has been the difficulty of getting emails into the Autotask portal – there are some commercial solutions, there are Outlook plugins, there is even a commercial Exchange plugin.

But we’re in the cloud age, right? Everything should be free, right? Things should just work in the cloud, no purchasing, no downloading, definitely no server plugins, right?

Right. We’re proud to announce the first free, transparent, secure and cloud based email-to-Autotask ticket interface built right into ExchangeDefender (which is free to our partners and Autotask patners). With our solution you can pick an email in your domain to function as a gateway, everything sent to it will create a ticket in the Autotask system, assign it a priority and even a specific queue. The deployment is dead simple:

Just provide ExchangeDefender with the credentials to your Autotask portal. Important: This is the primary competitive advantage over anything else out there: ExchangeDefender is a secure network, with the current SAS 70 – Type II audit and a ton of people managing, developing and monitoring the network around the clock. Your credentials don’t sit on a random leased server in a colo, you can trust the security behind this system.

Next, pick the default email address from your domain to function as the Autotask gateway. Anything sent to this address will create a ticket in your Autotask portal.

Assign the default Queue, default person to assign it to, etc. This is huge because it now isolates Autotask as the sole SLA engine – if it’s not in Autotask it doesn’t get an SLA and it gives your personnel the ability to only have one place to check. No more looking at portal, or waiting for the service manager to assign tickets – this becomes a part of an automated workflow.

Now for the real kicker: Let’s say you have a real PITA client for which every issue is always urgent. We all have clients like this. Well, now you can offer them a real VIP service. Program their email address into the Autotask gateway, assign a queue and bump that priority up to Urgent (or whatever your highest priority happens to be, the gateway will automatically pull down all of your queues, priorities and contacts during setup).

Another way to think about this is as an extension to every unmanaged/unintegrated peripheral and service you want to monitor through Autotask. If it generates an email alert, it now integrates into Autotask. You’re welcome

Business Strategy

OWN is a channel only company and much like Autotask, the longer we keep you in business and the more efficient we make you, the more money we make. It’s a true partnership.

So this is free. No questions asked.

I hate to channel Billy Mays here, but we’re not going to be shy about saying that we have the most hardcore integration of cloud services into Autotask, bar none. If we can make it easier and more effective for you to use Autotask, you’ll spend more time in our software and more time in Autotask – which will make the value behind each solution jump. So yeah, it’s free and it will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on what 3rd party solution you may have used for this in the past (or the most expensive one: nothing at all) and it’s a true win-win-win.

So Autotask, partners, thank you for working with us and continuing to do business with Own Web Now. It’s a pleasure to be able to make this kind of a contribution back to people that pushed us so hard.

How do I get it

It’s free. It’s in ExchangeDefender. Just login, hover over Configuration button, setup and give it an hour to do it’s initial rollout.

Next up

Stop by our booth, drop your card in (for a chance to win a free iPad) and we’ll bump you ahead in the queue and hook you up for free with the solution we’re launching at Autotask #CommLive tomorrow. (sorry, trying to pace my pimping)

Little bit of a background: I met a partner at xChange (Brian Rosenfelt) who was thinking about switching away from Autotask. Why??? He didn’t like the web app feel, the lag between page loads and refreshes and wanted something that he could just manage – online and offline – and quickly add ticket notes and track time spent on each.

Well Brian, check back here on Tuesday AM

P.S. This blog post is brought to you at 4:30 AM by my friend, road insomnia.

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

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

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

The one thing…

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

This in no small part is why ExchangeDefender exists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to register

Thursday, October 1, 2009: 12:00 pm

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

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

In other news…

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

Way to go Mark!!!!

Amy’s kingdom at Third Tier keeps on growing:

Yesterday Third Tier announced a formal relationship with Calyptix for support services. Calyptix has found that in working with partners that often times the project involves areas outside of the expertise of their support staff. Calyptix core competency is their Access Enforcer product. Third Tier provides the Calyptix partner access to a wide variety of technical experts that can work in a holistic manner across technologies and products to get the project done or the problem resolved.

Amy and Eriq are good friends and I am not sure what more I can say other than to make a point to check them out. With foaming at their mouth about NOC services and outsourcing their helpdesks, there is still a ton of really complex technology out there that is eventually going to blow up regardless of the tools, gear and monitoring in place… and it’s nice to know there is someone you can call when that happens.

So while I can’t recommend you ever look at Calyptix, Amy and Eriq definitely need to be on top of the speed dial list.

Today is “Beat Vlad” day at Own Web Now, where everyone brings me their problems and I solve them. I haven’t really booked anything else so I’m at my desk just answering questions. I made a mistake of opening the public IM client and the following ensued. Basically, client asked for help with the FTP permissions.

Vlad Mazek says:
  ok
Vlad Mazek says:
  fixed
Bob says:
  It wouldn’t be such a big deal, but he tells me he has a 30,000.00 deal riding on this.  I don’t know how you sell that much in pictures.
Vlad Mazek says:
  porn
Vlad Mazek says:
  by the amount, I’m guessing it’s specialty porn
Vlad Mazek says:
  midgets and such
Vlad Mazek says:
  anyhow, I’m gonna go work on your Frontpage now.

Another day, another satisfied customer

My buddy Schrag is noticing that the latest bit of self-inflicting gunshots to the head that Microsoft calls it’s marketing program is not terribly inflammatory towards him. So he says here: http://davidschrag.com/schlog/413/with-partners-like-this

“What’s that, Microsoft? You’re saying I can be replaced by college students!?!?!?!”

Personally, I think you could be replaced by a monkey, jar of peanut butter and some software but let’s not get into name calling.

Microsoft flourished in an environment where it had a ton of friends and at times only one or two enemies. Apple. IBM. Corel. Netscape. In the new world, which Microsoft has scorched by entering every market imaginable, the old rules don’t apply.

When will Microsoft realize that it is not Google, that it cannot behave with google because at the end of the day Microsoft software is too damn expensive, cumbersome and complex – and it requires a technology expertise to use because Microsoft made it as such!

And then they wonder why they are failing….

Here is something to brighten up your weekend.

Last week I chatting to my buddy Erick in passing on IM (apparently both of us need clones and secretaries but if there is a problem with a hotel reservation or ExchangeDefender both of us waste our valuable time instead of sacrificing the underlings). A while back one of Erick’s star employees moved to Central Florida and was looking for a gig but my schedule has been all over the map and I just didn’t get a chance. The following conversation ensued:

Erick: You gotta talk to him.
Vlad: I know man, I’m sold, I just need to find some time.
Erick: He is loyal, dedicated, really cares about the customer.
Vlad: Oh. He won’t fit in here at all.

You see, Popcopy skit from the old Dave Chapelle show is one of the staff favorites at Own Web Now. I have to admit that it is about the only thing that can resurrect my day after I’ve had to spend ten minutes on a phone apologizing for stuff that is not our problem, trying not to get straight to the point and as my Beverly Hills guys say: “Go all Vladville on him.”

There are days that you just want to grab the computer from the customer, hand them classifieds and say: I don’t know who lied to you but this computer stuff is not for you. Look for a career that doesn’t involve reading comprehension.

Alas, can’t do that.

So I indulge in the guilty pleasure of living vicariously through the skit. Click below to play it (if your reader is not showing the video preview please visit vladville.com directly)

Occasionally you may get snagged by one of these customer people.
Your job is to frustrate them and make them feel unwanted.

You know, a lot of people ask WHY? WHY treat a customer this way?
Why? Cause fuck em, that’s why!

And should you ever doubt yourself and treat a customer with respect, just remember this: you’ve graduated from grade school and you don’t have to take shit from anyone!