Over the past few months we’ve been running Vlad the Imp Aler survey to find out what you manage, what you consider to be important and what your clients tend to pay attention to when you try to justify your value to them. The goals behind getting such information are two-fold:

1) As ExchangeDefender becomes a more direct part of your solution offering we need to put up meaningful data and reports and

2) As we invest in development of tools and services to manage our own offering we’re going to put as much of that as possible to work for you as well.

To sum it up, all ExchangeDefender Security and Hosted Exchange partners will get a free RMM tool to use either on your network or for a marketing activity. But I do want your help with the design and it’s a lot more lucrative than the $10 beer budget 15 of you won for giving us some market intelligence.

There are four prizes.. $1000 for the winner, two $250 prizes for the runners up and a $100 one for something that we really like. The contest is open to anyone in our partner program, whether you’re selling anything or not.

We are looking for two things:

1) Dashboard for the RMM inside Shockey Monkey. This is the area that your techs and staff will have access to in order to get an overview of the current issues.

2) Reporting. This is more tricky – (see below) – We’re after a perfect report to present to the business decision maker or any client in general to explain why they are paying you.

Please take a look at the contest for more info, we will open it up officially later in May once we’ve completed the launch of everything discussed during the quarterly webinar (which you should really, really, really watch btw)

Vlad The Imp Aler Survey

I promised that we would share the results of the survey. To be honest, they were quite surprising to me and I honestly did not expect to see what I saw so I will share it without my commentary first:

RMM alerts: How many are acted on by your staff on a daily basis (responded, escalated, dispatched)
37.7% said: We act on less than 25%

What sort of device do you primarily monitor?
65.8% said: Windows Servers. Less than 1% combined! said Macs, Printers, Switches or mobile devices.

What is the most important feature of your RMM?
58.1% said: Monitoring & Alerting

How do you feel about VNC?
43.4% said: I’d pay for something better for ALL my managed desktops

To be honest, I was also surprised by the tool selection. The partners that I speak to most often are working their way into Labtech or LPI – but the survey said that Kaseya and Zenith still held an overwhelmingly large user base. I was also shocked to see that monitoring and alerting won out because that is definitely not what the RMM guys want to hear – every $ they spend in marketing seems to talk about the really advanced stuff which is seemingly not leveraged a lot. I guess the reality of the “environment” being managed is that clients are on all sorts of hardware and software versions so “scripting” things a lot would almost break even on the efficiency after a while.

The interesting part was that an overwhelming majority of you said you only provide RMM reports through your PSA – which is great news for Shockey Monkey. Originally we only ran this survey to figure out how to structure our reporting and consolidate all the RMMs that are tying into Shockey Monkey – so I feel good that we at least are on the same level as far as expectations go.

Road Forward

Final beta releases of the RMM will be available in May. We still don’t have a name.

It will include VNC by default for free and will have a more advanced remote desktop software for an additional fee if you want all the fancy stuff.

It will only be available for ExchangeDefender partners. It will be free. This is subject to change and I’m really open to feedback as to what this would be worth to you if you’d like to purchase it on a monthly / annual basis as an additional/backup reporting tool. Here is my dilemma: There are already tons of RMMs out there and perhaps there is room for a free/near-free option as well – my commitment is to develop something we can use to manage our growing solution and to give our partner base a free tool to build up sales of both MSP contracts and break & fix hours. Here is what I’m after:

Client: We need someone to manage our network.

Vlad: Great. Here is a proposal, it’s $4,000 / month and ..

Client: Great! Thanks. We need to think about it.

Vlad: Of course, you need to review this carefully and make sure everyone is on board with us becoming your CIO.

Vlad: Now.. in the meantime, as a token of goodwill and appreciation of local business, I’m going to hook you up with something special <sliding the USB drive across the table>. On this drive is our network management software, feel free to install it on your PC and all of your employees PCs. Every day it will send you a summary of all the stuff that is going on with your network that we’d be able to address for you as we manage your environment. You’re too busy and have better things to do than deal with it but it will at least give you an idea of how much better your network could get.

Vlad: Oh and one more thing.. What this tool will also do is give you a realtime look at what your human resources are doing with your IT resources. You can see their desktops, live, and see if they are working or on Facebook. Like myself I’m sure you do rounds in the morning and catch up with everyone, think of this as your daily free/busy calendar and again, another view into how we’re different – we look at giving you total return on your technology investment not just bits and pieces.

Once they install the software it reports to them – and to you. After 30 days, it only reports to you. So if they don’t have a signed contract in hand, you can call them as the issues pop up offering to help them fix it… at a premium rate of course. I don’t think there is a faster way to get those contracts signed and if the saving grace is that the checks are being signed for adhoc visits who are you to turn down money?

So to sum it up.. help me build a better tool that is more useful to you and in return you get something that is free and builds you business or makes you better. We wouldn’t have gotten to this point without our partners and I’m spending more than ever on making my partners more powerful – the better off you are, the better off we are. ExchangeDefender Essentials is killing my competitors and I have you to thank. Our Managed Messaging product came out to incredible reviews and I think it starts putting more money in your pockets faster if it fits your model. The big players are distracted fighting with each other over consumers – and the venture capital backed solutions in the IT space are starting to show you can’t partner and fake your way into long term profitability – you have to innovate and actually build something. My challenge is simple – forget all that drama and let’s focus on hitting the business computing. My value proposition is quite simple: Affordable and designed to help you build volume fast. Help me help you!

If you haven’t signed up for this meeting yet, you should now. It’s our quarterly meeting and it’s also going to lay out the year ahead in terms of how I’m spending our money to make my partners more successful. If you work with us, you need to hear me out.. if you don’t it still might be somewhat insightful because I happen to talk to everyone – from the smallest to the biggest – so I do have the benefit of seeing the trends that your typical “bigshot I only talk to 8 figure accounts CEO” doesn’t.

What we are up to is certainly no secret, and I have talked to a lot of people about the potential that’s there. There is no size fits all solution and there is certainly nothing that is simple or easy – or everyone would do it at which point only the most efficient ones would survive (see Walmart, P&G, etc).

A few years ago I remember debating people over the clouds potential for small business. I don’t have those debates anymore because those people are no longer around to debate. Ditto for the Novell guys who thought Windows NT is a hobbyist networking system. One thing to remember about our industry is that for the most part, we’re smarter than most others out there. So everyone isn’t sitting around trying to maintain status quo and protect their turn – most are trying to build, innovate and solve problems. As they do, they change the business itself and transform those around them because fundamentally, people do not like to pay to prolong indecision and problems (government aside).

That said…

You’re all very wrong about the cloud.

And I say this in general terms when I hear you bitching and moaning about the cloud issues, not as the smartest man on the planet. When I hear complaints about the cloud it sounds like a support issue – latency, bandwidth, uptime, SLAs, change management, etc. Respectfully, those are the issues that have a lot to do with technology in general and where would you rather be – selling people what they want (cloud, services) or trying to figure out a good lie for why a business needs to upgrade their PCs to Windows 8? Microsoft is advertising Internet Explorer 9 right now, burning millions of dollars advertising a product with 0 competitive advantage and 0 recognizable technical differentiation from all other browsers out there. Is that really what you want to bind your value proposition on? Come on.

Here are the real cloud issues:

- It’s still too much work. Some partners spend days to close deals and then take weeks to do rollouts.

- The point above makes the cloud solution too expensive. By making it look like a server purchase that just doesn’t happen to be in their office you’re eliminating the single biggest economic advantage the cloud provides.

- Many find it hard to surround the cloud with their services because the IT space is still stuck trying to move worthless hardware. For the love of god, stop.

- Biggest challenge is credibility. It’s hard to be a middleman with no control over the solution. You get absolutely no praise because it’s someone elses service and you get all the blame when it blows up because you’re the one that recommended it. Talk to Aussies about how their relationship with Telstra is going and you’ll see reasons 1-10 of why you should never touch the cloud, ever.

If you only managed to read the bold faced text you’re good.

Now on a personal level, there have been many rumors about what I’m doing, how I’m doing it and blah blah blah. I’m surprised people still give any credit to the rumors considering how long I’ve been saying the exact same thing and how long we’ve ultimately delivered on what I’ve been saying. If we were going to (as I heard recently) kill our partners we would have done it long ago. I sure as heck wouldn’t be writing this blog to convince you otherwise.

We have to do something about the cost, complexity and onboarding.

Most importantly, we have to provide options. I cannot have ExchangeDefender running like turn of the century Ford.. there needs to be a variety and there needs to be a way and means for our partners to move on to that next step and figure out the long term value proposal.

For the moment… let’s just all get on the same page and figure out how to get each other into as many f’n accounts as possible.

To my ExchangeDefender partners: On Tuesday I will announce how I will make this possible. Yes, it’s going to piss off a lot of my competitors which will in turn launch a lot of backchannel smack talk about how we’re the devil and how I’m an ass and how what really matters is (something other than cash). You know what, fuck em – so I won’t win the Miss Congeniality contest – I’ll be fine. I don’t show up to work each day trying to make people like me, I show up to work to feed my family and the families of thousands of my partners. So yeah, I’ll commoditize anything and everything I see no discernable value in so you can get more business faster. We’re competing against companies with billion dollar marketing budgets and it’s time to stop bringing toothpicks to a knife fight. I know this is going to suck at first but if you stick with me and what I’m building – historically – you’re likely to have a really awesome product and far more $ in your back pocket.

See you on Tuesday, let’s go.

My phone has been on fire since the last blog post. I wanted to address the biggest question we get about Shockey Monkey (and really all of our solutions) and what that question means to me based on the track record, statistics and everything else I happen to know from dealing with the same issue:

Can I try it out for free?

There are several variations of this question: Can I have the Pro for free to see if it’s right for me? Can I host it in my data center? Can I have access to the source code and will you ship a developer to my basement so we can custom tune it to…

While I never say no (because just about all of those are on the roadmap this year) I tend to forward those questions elsewhere because it tells me that you aren’t seriously committed to becoming more organized.

It’s quite simple, allow me to explain.

Yes, all marketers are liars

If Shockey Monkey cost you $500 or $5,000 or $500,000 you bet it would have to sell you on the fact that it would rapidly transform your business to the point that you wouldn’t be able to recognize it and you could spend all winter skiing, all summer boating, all fall golfing and maybe you’d have to cut your spring break short a week to file your taxes. Cake!

Then there is the reality, in which most of the large ERP deployments flop or at best fail to deliver on the promise.

Why? The human factor. Humans don’t like change. Even if you’re in charge of deploying it, you will find a way to do things outside of the system which will slowly errode it’s day-to-day usefulness and when the whole organization is not in it, it doesn’t work. Unless they are forced to, like with Microsoft Outlook. Or for compensation, like with the punchclock. Either way, there needs to be a level of commitment and a level of resolute force at hand in order to drive adoption.

There is one exception – if you make it simple.

The reason folks do stuff outside of the portals is because it’s easier. It’s easier to write stuff down, it’s easier to make a quick call, it’s easier to walk over and ask someone a quick question instead of sticking it into the system.

Unless the system makes it easier to do stuff and makes it far more convenient. It’s easier to go ask someone a quick question and it might even be nicer to get away from actual work – yet people do it with SMS and instant messaging all day long. In the business concept, this is simplicity driving adoption.

We have our tools embedded into Shockey Monkey and it’s done tremendous things for our hosted Exchange and SharePoint, our ExchangeDefender and all the other stuff. Does it mean that our partners can’t just resell stuff from someone else? Not at all, they can sell whatever they want. We just made it incredibly easy and tied it with the rest of their stuff. So the monkey stays free because it’s a win-win for everyone.

There is a point at which you have to decide whether you’re just going to try to simplify your approach and just make a decision to get organized and process oriented.. or if you’re going to keep on trying different things all the time and never really getting what you want out of them. My job isn’t to experiment, my job is to make it easy so people will use it.  I head a good idea, I try to use it. But until you make the decision to actually commit to a process, the price tag or the “unknown” don’t really matter at all.

Besides, when I talk to my successful partners you all tell me you’re busy. If that’s the case, aren’t you far more likely to just go with something that’s ready to go right away (www.shockeymonkey.com) instead of trying to think down 3 years worth of customization efforts?

Keep it simple.

Hello community, Vlad here. I wanted to take a moment to openly write about some of the questions that I have received in private that I feel should be a matter of public knowledge. Things are going great, we’re enabling more of you to do more with your day and we’re working on some great features that you keep on suggesting.

We got some great and insightful coverage from MSP Mentor and SMB Nation last week and I encourage you to check it out for additional perspective.

As for mine, you can go through years of blog posts on the Shockey Monkey subject, or IT Business for that matter to figure out what I think. But this isn’t about me, this is about you – all of you: our users, our partners, our vendors, our competitors and generally curious technology employees trying to kill some time.

Here are some of your questions with as candid (as in “get me in trouble”) answers as I can provide.

Why would you even do this?

It’s better that I say what’s on my mind and deal with the consequences… than have my partners, vendors, sponsors, users or competitors get some rumored “oh my god, you know what Vlad is doing..” stuff that just puts strain on stuff. I can count the number of people I don’t like in this community on one hand – and believe me, they know it. As for the rest, I love you, let’s kill some drama.

What is the biggest criticism Shockey Monkey gets?

Shockey Monkey has, does and forever will be seen as Vlad’s side project.

This is kind of annoying considering that Shockey Monkey has been available since 2006 in various alpha, beta and commercial stages. Not sure what more I can do to say that we’re serious about it but I can tell you that we’re making (lots of) money with it so the opinion overall doesn’t bother me a lot. Software development is not like Subway, one sandwich artist can’t just go back and add extra lettuce or cheese on your sandwich, for every change we need to deal with review, documentation, marketing and involve multiple people in the process so big features will take a while to get. However, since 2010 we’ve been rolling out significant updates to the monkey on a monthly basis and at this point thousands of people use it every way.

It will always be an evolving process as we continue to build Shockey Monkey further into the IT business and use it to replace more and more components that we currently (over)pay for.

Can Shockey Monkey replace what I’m currently using to manage my business?

This is apparently the second most popular question with the presales support. The answer is obviously yes.

You can absolutely replace your existing solution with Shockey Monkey.

Now that assumes that you are willing to live with the sacrifices and compromises. Which of course you’d only know if you tried the software and embraced it completely. Which of course should be dead easy to do because it’s completely and absolutely free of charge.

But it’s free because there is a catch, I’ll have to pay for stuff eventually?

It’s free and it’s going to stay free.

Shockey Monkey users resell the heck out of our cloud services – ExchangeDefender, ExchangeDefender Essentials, Exchange 2010 + SharePoint Hosting, Exchange 2010 Essentials, Offsite Backups, Web & Email Hosting, Blackberry, etc. Not because they are forced to – but because we make it dead simple and easy to do so – and we’ve even opened up sponsorships for Shockey Monkey so other vendors and providers can also make it easy to get tools you can make money off of.

True story: A few years ago Arnie and I were sitting around at some HTG event and we talked about working together on a global cloud services push. “You know Arnie, I already have that in place.” He seemed very excited about tying the two systems together – that’s why you have such a kickass ConnectWise integration with all the ExchangeDefender services – with billing data and agreements available in ConnectWise YEARS before they made it possible through their API. You don’t have to push people down under the guillotine to make them sell your software, you just have to make it easy. This is the core value of Shockey Monkey and why it’s going to remain free.

I make more money with Shockey Monkey being free and being exposed to more people than I can ever make by selling it or by turning it into a display advertising model (see next section).

I am not sure so sure if I want advertisements in my portal.

I understand and I appreciate the concern. However, these aren’t your typical display ads where you’re going to click on the wrong thing and have to scramble to turn your speakers down. We’ve only extended a limited number of invitations (I haven’t even sent all of them out) to people that we feel fit well strategically into the Shockey Monkey business model.

If you don’t want ads, it’s only $29/month and $9/month for any additional staff you have in your company. If it’s the sight of an ad that bothers you, that’s an easy problem to solve.

However, consider the power that these sponsors will have with the platform. Not only will they be able to get their message in front of you but they will be able to position it when you’re having an issue. Say you’re dealing with a support request about an infected machine – wouldn’t that be a good time to know about a product you can use to fix the issue? How about your sales opportunity – selling a new server, what if there was a tool (QuoteWerks) that would make it easier for you to get the right pricing right away and push it directly into Shockey Monkey. Dealing with lost data – well Intronis will show up on the side with the info you would have otherwise ignored or saved for later viewing.

We as software vendors have an annoying habbit of always being there when you’re in a middle of something but never there when you need us – this is a complaint I have been getting since I started this business – well, Shockey Monkey changes that. Sponsors are not just embedded into the solution from the display standpoint, they are there from the solution standpoint as well.

For example, all of the sponsors get space and time not just on Shockey Monkey portal but also on LooksCloudy.com, the site I have dedicated to educating the channel. We can guide people along and deliver exponential amount of value to you and your staff – without ever having you leave your desk.

So you’re making money by pushing us to Pro?

This is another common misconception, folks are constantly trying to figure out how we’re going to make money like we’re some Silicon Valley startup – even though I’ve been very clear that majority of our revenues comes from our product and service sales.

Just to clear the air, I’ll explain the four revenue streams for Shockey Monkey:

Advertising / Sponsorships – Revenues from third parties that want their solutions featured in Shockey Monkey and LooksCloudy.com

Pro Subcriptions – Revenues from Shockey Monkey subscribers that want SSL certificates with their own domain name, advanced technical support and no advertising in their portal.

IP Licensing – Revenues from third parties that want a business management, helpdesk and customer relationship platform embedded in their existing solution.

ExchangeDefender – Revenues from our products and services sold through the portals.

There is no gateway drug inside Shockey Monkey, there is no hidden toll, limits on the number of users or administrators or your usage. It’s out there, it’s free and thank you for selling our software J

How is the relationship with ConnectWise, Autotask and Shockey Monkey?

This is the drama that some folks want us to play a part of and I’m sorry to disappoint but things are going great on that front. I can’t comment on who has chosen to sponsor Shockey Monkey but I can hint that you’ll see some of these relationships taken to the next level very soon.

There is no tension or problems and we’re committed to making a deeper integration with both platforms. There are just some things that they do better than us and then there are things that we will just never do because they don’t fit our MO.

But you know what’s interesting? We’re bigger than both of them. How is that possible? Well, drama focused MSPs and channel experts only look at the 10,000 or so companies or MSPs and don’t consider all of the other companies out there in the VAR chain that provide technology and support services (hint: it’s an obscenely large market, much bigger than the little MSP universe). By bringing those folks into the fold we make a transition to Autotask that much simpler – so the referrals will always outpace folks that may want to switch from Autotask to Shockey Monkey for example.

But secretly, they must hate you.

Listen, I’ve been to both headquarters. Neither one had a Vlad voodoo doll. My foot doesn’t suddenly hurt for no apparent reason every day at 11AM. I’ve never had my car spray painted nor has my house been TP’d.

The problem that we all have is that we’re aiming our solutions at a very limited number of companies and it’s natural to see us as competitors. However, it takes a lot of effort to sell the service and presale/marketing/support for something that may not pan out is ridiculously expensive and requires an investment on the side of the clients themselves.

With Shockey Monkey, we remove price as an objection. Here you go, use it and see how it fits. It’s clear to see not only why they wouldn’t hate me but why they’d pay for me to be their best friend and make sure those referrals float up to them instead of a SalesForce or elsewhere.

I noticed that ExchangeDefender is required. But we have Postini and..

ExchangeDefender is required for inbound mail functionality (email-to-ticket) and for advanced outbound mail stuff (mailing lists, marketing, etc). This will get more and more prominent as we add some cool new features to ExchangeDefender in 2012 J

Now, our API is open and another email provider can choose to write an API to replicate the email-to-ticket functionality in their product. As a matter of fact, ExchangeDefender has a free email-to-ticket gateway to Autotask.

I would love to have you resell ExchangeDefender compared to anything else, if we’re being honest, but the restriction isn’t in place to lock others out – others just aren’t interested. Don’t blame me J

We would like to host Shockey Monkey in our data center.

I know. We have Shockey Monkey running on an appliance and are going to be offering a HaaS and a VSaaS model later this year. Basically, you’ll be able to put Shockey Monkey on your network.

Right now, everyone is hosted and we have users on our databases in UK, Australia and United States. From the regulatory standpoint, you’re good. And once we make Shockey Monkey appliances and virtual servers available we’ll hit you up first. Folks that use Shockey Monkey most actively get the first dibs and we go down the list from there. So if you’re serious about using Shockey Monkey and want it in your own network, you better start using it now or it’s going to be a while before it gets down to you.

What is next?

Sponsorships officially kick in Q2, so April 1st. By that time we’ll know who our strategic partners will be and which solutions we’ll have to develop on our own and which solutions we will develop deeper and deeper integrations with to make them nearly seamless.

Beyond that, ExchangeDefender as a company needs to take a more active role in the cloud service marketing and deployment on behalf of our partners – we’re being pushed to offer billing, support and management services. Our most successful partners are slammed with work and they are letting opportunities slip – stuff that we will be able to deliver on their behalf. In order for this to happen we need friendly customer service staff that faces actual users, we need an RMM platform that can be used by our techs to provision the service, we need a more sophisticated training and service oriented process and so on. Expect to see all of those in Shockey Monkey in 2012.

Strategy-wise, like I said, Shockey Monkey will first firm up the few holes we have left as a technology tool and then expand the verticals a little and make Shockey Monkey an all purpose business operating system that helps you manage customer, vendor and partner relationships as well as human resources and overall social functionality that is a given. Big part of it is backwards integration with your email, mobility and service.

So there you have it. No drama. No catches. No hidden trojan monkeys – we’re giving you this for free and hope you like us enough to resell and use our services. If you need more than what we offer for free, we got you there as well with the Pro. If you need sales funnels and have issues with silos of chaos, I know a guy. If you need a quoting tool or a backup tool or an ERP tool, I got you there as well.

ABP. A Always. B Be. P Pimping. Who loves you?

Two weeks ago we sent out sponsorship invitations to a few companies we work with closely (if you haven’t gotten one please email kate@ownwebnow.com).  Shockey Monkey and I wanted to offer you the big picture of where things are heading. As you recall, we launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded (2.0) in November with the major news being that the entire solution is now completely free with all the features included free of charge. It is vendor sponsored so you will see ads in it (and yes, you can opt out of them as well as pay for support and onboarding assistance).

Now, here is some background that I hope puts it all into context.

We are still very much in the huge development cycle for Shockey Monkey. I have some very big plans for it that mostly center around how small businesses actually manage their businesses.

We’re a small business. We’re also a rather modern one at that – with iPads and remote workers and multiple offices and SAS 70 Type II audit / compliance needs and a global client base. We cover a lot of ground that costs a lot of money for very sophisticated stuff that we barely use. So we look at those essential components and we build it into Shockey Monkey. For example, here is what I mean:

If you’ve gone beyond scratching the surface of support and client tracking information you’ve probably discovered chat integration. You’ve also noticed the alerts system that allows every Shockey Monkey event to be discussed, tracked and commented by the whole staff. Now how is this useful?

Think of it as Facebook. People upload pictures, friends comment on it. People update their status, friends comment on it. Now apply it to your business. Employees update tickets, employees comment on it – Add it to documentation, bill them for the hours, escalate it to the boss or send them a thank you note. Every business event worth tracking is an event worth commenting on and driving towards the well oiled machine we all want our businesses to be.

This is why Shockey Monkey is so important and why it’s free. We want everyone to use it.

Now, by the end of 2nd quarter, all of OWN partners will be using it. That’s a given since that’s how everyone will be managing the business they resell from us. And we’re more than happy to cover that bill.

Now before you start thinking I’ve gone crazy and am just burning through what is a multimillion dollar business line on it’s own, slow down and think about it for a moment.

The money (Vlad’s Ferrari Fund money) is not in the software. The money is in the services that are sold through it and supported through it. The money is in end user / end business support.

Sponsorships

Last week we sent out a sponsorship package to a bunch of folks we work with. We’re looking at max of 17 sponsors with total revenue accounting for about $500,000.

That’s about a half a dozen developers and some support and marketing money.

As you can tell, it’s all about the product for us in 2012 and the low # of sponsors backs that. We do not want to turn Shockey Monkey into some sort of a free adult entertainment site with banners and spyware everywhere and sponsors are tied into our LooksCloudy.com site whose mission is event coverage and partner development. So there is more to this than pure sales as well. It’s about more effectively connecting partners with their vendors, in the same way that SM will better connect our partners to us.

Where this leads is sort of up to the vendors that choose to sponsor our solution. I sincerely believe that Shockey Monkey is a great stepping stone to some very mature solutions in the channel with a very advanced feature set. I think a lot of companies will choose to sponsor us to assure that it’s their solution you step up to, not their competition. What we’re pretty much guaranteeing is that Shockey Monkey will be the entry point for all aspiring and growing MSPs – because we aim to keep it free – but where they grow from here is up to the market to decide.

The future of the monkey is up to the users and to the sponsors, we have to please both.

Certainly the revenues are in the services and we run that business better than most.

With Shockey Monkey we have a unique opportunity to build a huge platform and expand it. Most of my investment is to tie Shockey Monkey further into the backoffice and the way small businesses run their operations. This means connecting the monkey to email, Facebook, twitter, instant messaging, payment services and more.

This is the point at which Shockey Monkey goes from being worth a few million targeting IT Solution Providers (now) to being worth a huge multiple of that to just about every small business out there that leverages social networking.

We all seemingly use things like Facebook, twitter and Gmail for personal interaction.

And the biggest trend in IT is consumerisation.

So connect the dots. Consumers using a social backend for business management.

Shockey Monkey.

So to sum it up: Shockey Monkey is free and it will remain free. The sponsorship opportunities are available in a limited amount because we want to make sure that ads do not interrupt your ability to work and give those that sponsor a solution good ROI. The roadmap for 2012 which will be released later will include two major updates and is aimed at tying more backoffice automation into the Monkey. The big picture goal is to build Monkey into a broader SMB process automation tool tied into the web, social media and email – which will help you expand your client base while also improving you own operations. Win, win, win.

Update: I just wanted to make it really clear that Shockey Monkey will remain free for the long term. We killed “Shockey Monkey Free” and “Shockey Monkey Fro” and all the features of Shockey Monkey Pro have been made available to everyone. You can still buy Pro if you want phone/email support, onboarding assistance and more.

So you know how you suck at being organized?

There are people out there that are perfectly organized in every way. They know where everything is, they can find it in a split second and you probably feel like they spend every moment of their time organizing their junk.

Personally, I like to stack my junk. Then pile it. Then push it around and every now and then toss it into a box to move somewhere where it can be less unsightly. I call that activity cleaning.

I designed Shockey Monkey for people like myself.

Helpdesks, PSAs, CRMs and SharePoint portals probably have a higher failure than success rate. Why? Because people spend more time trying to plan organization and processes that the first time something falls out of the process they fall back to what is more convenient – and completely untrackable.

We didn’t want Shockey Monkey to be SharePoint.

As a matter of fact, that was the design cornerstone.

You don’t have to plan onboarding yourself for months. Or weeks. Or days.

You don’t even need to spend the time talking to us. We actually designed Shockey Monkey so that it would be quicker to do stuff on your own than to call us and do the same.

Check out this 10 minute getting started guide to Shockey Monkey.

It will take you less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Setup portal settings. Step 2: Add portal address to your email signature. Step 3: Add your largest client company & contacts. Step 4: Upload your logo. Step 5: Customize the postcard and mail it out or hand deliver it.

The first four steps take less than 5 minutes.

And that’s all I ask.

For the love of god, do not try to figure out every status, every email template, every setting and every little nook of the system.

Baby steps.

Just start tracking your activities.

Start tracking your time.

Then start posting it to an invoice.

Then add other clients and start sending invoices to Quickbooks.

The more of the system you use, the more efficient you will become.

But don’t do it ackbasswards and try to build this huge process flowchart that you will never implement. All that activity serves to do is scare you with your inefficiencies and take time away from actually tracking what you do.

Start small. Build up. You can’t fail at that. Hey, it’s free get on it!

It’s been over a week since I said anything on the subject and nearly two weeks since we officially launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded.

Watch the Shockey Monkey Reloaded Launch Webinar

Since that time we’ve signed up nearly 1,000 new portals and you keep on coming in strong as is the interest for sponsorships, etc.

Most of all, I want to thank to the many of you that have taken the time to talk to my staff and work with our support and developers on the bugs you’ve found. We’ve been squashing them daily and all the development resources have been assigned to making it flawless which it pretty much is. Hank got a much deserved vacation (I sent him to Las Vegas) and he’ll be back in the saddle next week with the priority being new integrations and some of the incredibly useful features some of you have brought to me.

Again, I can’t say thanks enough… well, short of giving you a free portal to run your business and serve you customers. That’s a good deal right?

Next Up..

We will be holding a webinar next week to discuss some of the questions that we get often. We also want to talk about the “Getting started in 10 minutes” which we feel is kind of critical for everyone signing up right now. We’ve hired two new people in the past week to help deal with this. And we’ll hire more if it keeps on going this fast, so please tune in and hear what we’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

Tuesday, December 20th, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/236053112

Many of you are good to go and are set to use Shockey Monkey full on in 2012, if you aren’t yet the great news is that it only takes 10 minutes so what are you waiting for?

Before I forget..

The Shockey Monkey training video has been updated for Reloaded. It used to be 67 minutes. Now it’s 17 minutes. That is hopefully the evidence of the commitment we have to making this software simple enough for anyone to use – you, your clients, your clients clients and everyone that doesn’t have an IT experience. Why? Well, the reason why portal and CRM deployments fail (SharePoint) is because nobody uses them, even when forced to use an industry specialized PSA solution folks use less than half the features and that’s among the best of the best! The goal for me with Reloaded was to make you more efficient without having to do more to gain that efficiency. In street terms: money for nothing and monkey for free. (que Dire Straits)

Finally..

Listen, I know I get a bad rep out there due to the many (many, many) blog posts I’ve written about the shortcomings we as an industry get. I don’t tolerate rude people, under any circumstances.. but it’s the stupid ones that bother me more. Everyone reads this blog with their own opinion of me, OWN, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender and so on and I don’t spend much time putting lipstick on pigs.

Yeah, we’ve fucked up a lot over the years and we keep on chugging along, services get better, people get better, products get better. Everyone works on stuff.

What I’d really like to say is that we’ve got your back and we’re putting enormous resources behind this stuff because it’s important. I know a lot of you would rather see me spend it on Exchange or support or customer service or direct sales people so you don’t have to deal with any of the cloud stuff… and I understand. But it’s my money on the line in this company and I’m not running this company for the next month, quarter or year. I am looking to establish a portfolio that will make OWN relevant for another decade and that unfortunately (as some of you have put it) requires me to take an eye off the ball… in order to setup the next few plays.

P.S. As for the title.. I’m just going to keep on adding –ed to the subject as I go along with Reloaded. Kind of how people name their kids Erinn when it’s exactly the same as Erin. Why not Erinnn? While I’m on that subject, congratulations to my buddy Erinn Davis who got engaged this week!

Last Thursday (December 1st) we officially took the wraps off the Shockey Monkey Reloaded project, with nearly a year under development we believe we’ve built the best possible mix of features, simplicity and business model mix to help propel our partners forward and help you win more deals and more billable time.

Now I’m not going to say how many times I’ve gone to the bathroom the morning of the webcast but I’ll be honest in saying that I lost count. It was by far the most nerve wrecking experience on my professional life. The feedback has been tremendously positive. I know we’ve got a killer thing on our hands and I am so immensely grateful that I have no words for it. So I’ll stop my emo crap here. All I ask is that you take the following survey if you saw the presentation and let me know what you thought:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded Survey

http://www.ShockeyMonkey.com/reloaded

It will take you a minute, tops.

If you take an hour or so to go through the 10,000+ words I’ve written on this subject during the past two weeks, you know my opinion of where we are and where the SMB IT space is going. The best and most profitable days are ahead of those that think smart, move fast and consider the future instead of the past. Our industry has had to battle so hard because being “an IT guy” was so simple anyone could do it – and nearly everyone did. Now that there are some real challenges, things will be great for those that are serious about IT. And I believe that Shockey Monkey will be a core part of that solution. Yes, even if you use Autotask or ConnectWise or anything else for that matter, Shockey Monkey will be a big part of your future.

The Next Few Weeks

Shockey Monkey Reloaded upgrades have been rolling out all weekend and will be completed sometime tomorrow.

Once your portal is upgraded to Reloaded you will receive an email from the system. Get on it right away, we’re offering free Phone and Email support during this stage so now is the time to get excited.

We are spending the entire week doing bugfixes and working with you directly on any issues you find. That’s the top priority – only priority.

December 12-16, Documentation week. The whole team will be working on the upgrades to the site, whitepapers, marketing and new welcome paperwork. We’ll also make time for one-on-one.

December 19-30, we hit the ExchangeDefender partner base. Everyone will have Shockey Monkey created and linked back to our infrastructure.

January 1st – we rock and roll.

Announcements, Discussions, Opinions

Note that I haven’t linked to the webinar recording, nor am I talking about anything specific that has been covered in last weeks webinar.

If you were there, you know why!  

What we announced is no joke, this is the biggest thing we’ve ever done and we’re going to do it right.

Thank you all for your feedback, your emails, for following this blog and chatting with me. All of those lessons, put to work, is what brought together Shockey Monkey. I look forward to 2012 being the year where it becomes the defacto platform of the SMB IT space, no lie, I expect every single one of you to use it no matter where the heck you are. And yes, in Q1 we’ll have internationalization and Monkey will speak French and Deutsch.

Update: Monday 7:58 AM EST: In case you attempted to sign up for Shockey Monkey you were greeted with the note that signups are currently closed. This is true, we will resume signups once everyone has been upgraded which we expect to be later today. The signup protocol has actually been changed as well to remove the option of signing up for Pro or providing payment, etc (unless you hate the ads or want to use your own domain).

Over the past week I have given you my assessment on the state of IT in SMB and beyond, a look to the past and to the future. I appreciate all the emails and only wish I could follow up with them all.. but I don’t just make up stuff you read on Vladville, all of it is influenced by many of you that talk, email and chat with me every day.

The theory of small business IT consumerization and how modern service providers can ride the wave to the more efficient and profitable future.

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?

I’m also not putting this out for your enjoyment like some disgruntled English major that couldn’t get a real press job. I have a lot of money riding on me being right about things and the reason I’m right more often than not is because I have thousands of you offering me insight and different points of view that help me improve what I do.

But tomorrow, at noon, even more is on the line. It’s the biggest webinar I’ve ever done:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

Thursday, December 1st, Noon EST (max 1000 seats; will be recorded)

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640

It’s also a big bet on the future of IT. It’s a huge bet on the future of my company.

Right now, we (as in solution providers and their vendors) don’t have an upper hand in the marketplace. We sure as hell don’t have the marketing budgets and sales staff headcount that the big boys do. We also lack resources, economies of scale, farms and farms of slave labor in third world countries, tools and plenty of other excuses.

What we do have is flexibility and the size. There are way more of us than them and we can move faster when there is an opportunity.

Join me tomorrow, regardless of what PSA or CRM or stack of papers you use.

I promise you one thing, after you hear me out… I will be your best friend. The single greatest thing about Shockey Monkey is just one word… and I hope you like it when you hear it, I know I do!

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.