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.

Yesterday I wrote the first in the Reloaded Shockey Monkey articles covering the grand scheme of consumerization of IT and how the business models need to evolve as we transition from the world of IT to the world of the cloud to what’s coming next. The argument I’m making is not that IT will become irrelevant, that the cloud will obsolete things or that you need to abruptly change your business model today:

All I am pointing out is that technology purchase cycles in business are long and there is an immense advantage to being first. To read about the rest consider these articles:

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?

What is an RMM?

RMM is quite simply a tool that has made unskilled IT staff obsolete. Prior to IT task automation, a human being of questionable hygiene and even more questionable IT certificate trail would walk to a computer / server and perform maintenance, repair, helpdesk functionality and so on. As businesses started using more technology the IT departments grew in size and influence within organizations because things were far from perfect.

RMM software – the likes of nAble, Level Platforms, Kaseya, Scriptlogic, Labtech and so on allowed IT departments and MSPs to centralize and “remote” a lot of the functionality. One person could now roll out software to thousands of workstations across multiple companies. They could keep an eye on all the software and act on problems before significant damage occurred – are backups running, are we using the latest antivirus definitions, are we running out of storage and do we have the latest security updates applied? If the answer to any of those is no, we could address it remotely.

This in fact is how ExchangeDefender manages to run a global network without ever setting foot on some of the continents that we have infrastructure on. This technology has been behind the outsourcing of IT management and massive reduction of IT force needed to manage this immense growth in IT infrastructure.

What’s next?

RMMs are here to stay. No argument there.

However, if you believe that the consumerization of IT is real and that end users and business owners are capable of managing their own phones, tablets and gadgets then you seriously need to look at the opportunity you have here. The current and future workforce isn’t out of Mad Men, it’s not your grandma with the flashing 12:00 on the VCR or an old guy who can’t see his smartphone much less use a keyboard. People showing up in workplaces today have been on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter for years and they may even know some HTML. Yet none of them will be impressed by SNMP traps or VPN advantages over SSL.. because the low level geek stuff we’ve built our companies on is largely too geeky to be relevant.

Last week we caused a minor controversy when an NDA survey made it’s way into the public with the title “Is Vlad building an RMM?” – for those of you that haven’t seen it yet, here is what we asked:

Love the writein comment.. Click on the image for magnification.

If we can all agree that virtualization, cloud and mobility are the future..

If we can all agree that the IT decision power and management is going from the IT department to business leaders and managers..

If we can all agree that devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks are replacing traditional workstations and offices..

.. Is it really that much of a stretch to say that the monitoring of those resources changes radically as does the importance of the data being monitored?

In the long, long ago when I started Own Web Now, everyone had a PC. The select few important people got laptops. When those computers went down, people stopped working. It was not the end of the world because most business was still conducted over the phone, fax and mail.

Over time people got cell phones, laptops, netbooks, tables. We’re living in the Star Trek world talking to our computers about where we’d like to eat and asking them to remind us to do something tomorrow. With the exception of asking Siri to make you a coffee we’re only short of a replicator.

Once upon a time it really mattered if a hard drive was filling up and the client couldn’t send mail. Now if their computer literally explodes they have several devices that can do the same thing.

So let’s think about where we are, not where we were..

Reality of Today

If you talk to a business owner today his IT concerns are significantly different than those of an IT department. It costs me $300 per month to have an employee park in the highrise office that ExchangeDefender is in. That is the cost of renting the spot, not buying it by the way. The overhead of the office space is even higher as is virtually everything else associated with a real business.

Your “real businesses” of the future will have better ways to spend money than overpriced office space and parking spots. Most of the work will be done remotely. You may not have 100% say which device that work gets done on – if the VoIP server is down they will pick up the cell phone, if their computer is down and they need to send a quick email they might have to wrestle an iPad from their kid. Your future workers come with built in Internet redundancy and several business disaster continuity sites (Starbucks, McDonalds, Moes).

With a workforce so mobile what is the key monitoring objective? Making sure their infrastructure is working or that their employees are working?

Business owner in charge of an unRMM

As a business owner that manages people working from home, out of the country, or at 2AM there are different metrics I care about that transcend infrastructure. Your laptop got a Gatorade bath because your kid celebrated while watching a football game on it? It happens. $350 later, you’ll get a new one by tomorrow. It happens.

What I really want to monitor as a business owner and manager is performance. I want to know that 480 minutes of the workday I pay you for go towards something that makes my business move forward. I know, I know big brother, all employees already put in way too much overtime and work to the bone every minute of the day. But when you look at the data you see they catch up with their friends and family at work, have discussions with folks on the forums and endless chats about stuff over IM. In between banking sites, youtube or my favorite Office Space moment: “Sometimes I like to just sit here for 15 minutes and zone out.” 

As a business owner, you have no insight into what your employees are doing with the technology and as much as they feel you’re not paying them enough you know they aren’t spending all of their time working. So you do this little dance of trying to pin down one another – you make them produce endless timesheets and reports, ask for status updates and try to document every inappropriate non-business site they go to. What all this amounts to is more useless meetings, more time wasted on analytics and the staff is now even more pissed off that you don’t trust them that it adds even more work to the scarce time they have between managing their sports fantasy league, uploading and commenting on Facebook pictures and staying on top of tmz.com

Sounds pretty bitchy, right? What if you could just trust each other?

OK, joke aside, here is what I want. I want something that would help me both trust everyone, keep them more accountable and let them experience at least some workplace liberty that the technology we have guarantees us: I don’t mind if you work from home but keep in mind that I have a tool that will tell me when you started working, when you went to lunch and how long you spend inside Outlook as opposed to Facebook. If you run into a problem, I have a remote desktop tool that will let someone assist you. I don’t have to ask you what you’re working on, I can just see your desktop no matter where you’re at. If I just walked into the office I don’t have to wonder what you’ve been up to or waste both of our times with a status report, I can glance over your browsing history and searches today in a few seconds. I can see screenshots of everything you’ve done today and play 4 hours worth of work in under 2 minutes. Our IT guy will get an alert whenever something weird happens to your PC or laptop or smartphone and handle it so you don’t have to waste your time.

When I talk about an RMM, I want to think about a remote employee monitor and it doesn’t matter to me if remote is Australia or if I can see you from my office.

The key metric of the modern mobile workforce is productivity. Not the technology that once upon a time was far from perfect and needed a 24/7 janitor.

The Opportunity

Admittedly, while this is something all Shockey Monkey users will have in a matter of months, the commercial opportunity isn’t in trying to sell yet another tool. There are plenty of tools that do employee monitoring, activity monitoring, remote desktop help, etc.

The problem is that they are written for geeks or HR staff and they cost way too much money!!

Imagine an environment where this tool is something the businesses you manage get for free. Yes Mr Business Owner, I’ll give you all of this for free if you let me manage your IT infrastructure you’ve invested so much in. All these servers, workstations, desktops, printers, smartphones and tablets need to be taken care of and it’s cheaper and more effective for us to do it than for your VP to be on hold with some third world helpdesk script reader.

While they are leveraging their business remote monitoring tool, you can leverage your remote monitoring tool to generate revenues at a higher rate than others.

Business owners and decision makers know they have to have competent IT professionals, they just don’t appreciate all we do all the time. But arm them with the right tools so they can understand how much of their money goes to waste and they might consider their IT as a far more strategic asset instead of a disposable piece of the electronics it really is.

In a world where users will manage more of their IT, the cost of managing the IT they can’t figure out will rise while the amount of it goes down. I believe Shockey Monkey unRMM will enable our partners to get into those opportunities in a way traditional marketing and networking will simply not be able to.

That’s my story and that’s what I’m investing in.

It has taken us more than a year to get Shockey Monkey right. At this point, I would like to encourage you to read the following five posts about Shockey Monkey regardless of what you think of it, me or what you may be using to run your business.

Mostly because if I’m right.. it will fundamentally change your business.

Several years ago I wrote a series of articles called Lucy’s Sail. Go ahead and Google it, at the time it was not a popular topic but everyone could see bits and pieces of it made sense. I’ve made many of you millions of dollars in the cloud while many that argued against it now work for someone else and perennial powers of HP and Dell are scratching their head about what is next. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they don’t know what’s next – they just have a hard time trying to figure out how to sell what they have into the future where people don’t want old technology.

We’ve undergone a massive consumerization of technology over the past few years, a movement that has taken decision making power away from IT departments/people and placed it in the hands of business people and end users.

Over the next few posts I would like to outline the goals behind the Shockey Monkey and why I’ve turned down millions of dollars to lose money pursue investing in it myself.

Please tune in each day for the following Shockey Monkey breakdowns:

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?

The Past

Once upon a time I wrote Shockey Monkey as a combination of helpdesk, CRM and shopping cart for small business IT shops.

Step 1: In order for the cloud solutions to be profitable, they first had to be sold – so the IT Solution Provider needed to have a mechanism to efficiently take the credit card, accept an agreement and collect revenues each month (you’d be shocked to know that this is still not a baseline offering in any of the professional CRM / automation suites).

Step 2: Once you have the subscription and revenues rolling in each month, everything beyond the cost of service should be your profit. The only way that happens is if the end user is in control of their cloud services. If the IT Solution Provider has to pick up the phone, log the ticket, login to the control panel, find the user, etc just in order to reset the password or freeze a mailbox or add another user to the distribution group several horrible events are converging. First, you’re wasting time performing an automated task that the user should be empowered to do themselves – and time is money. Second, while you’re wasting your time talking to the end user about the weather as you try to find the passwords, etc – you aren’t doing anything that contributes to the growth of your business or the techie isn’t working on a more profitable project. Third, it’s not just your money that is going down the drain here, how can we say that the cloud saves people money if the users that leverage that cloud are spending time away from their jobs to deal with the outsourcing company for mundane tasks – how can we call it outsourcing if we’re still doing the job? Fourth, the one nobody wants to talk about: security; interjecting social inefficiencies of account management to override actual access credentials, logging and so on is a recipe for disaster – what would be your response to a subpoena for information that you helped someone destroy inadvertently because your tech got beaten up on the phone? The system needs to deliver efficiencies, security and ease of use in order to be used as a benefit instead of a deterrent.

Step 3: Once everything is covered in steps 1 and 2 the real business can begin. The days of living as a gatekeeper or an IT troll of necessity are over – you’re not a lawyer, you don’t get a paycheck just because we want to protect ourselves from the dangers that lurk around in the dark. These solutions need to be seamless and they need to reach into the everyday technology usage. They need to integrate together to deliver a real benefit. When they don’t you have billions of dollars burned in an effort to make people use a company whiteboard SharePoint that nobody can remember the location of.

Over the past few years we’ve helped thousands of Shockey Monkey users establish a process driven IT business and leverage cloud offerings to establish predictable revenue models.

When we launched Shockey Monkey we called it the unPSA. We don’t compete with the likes of Autotask or ConnectWise and have maintained a great working relationship with them because we have the same goals (taking IT staff and organizations from notepad and Excel into a process driven system). Any smart person that can look beyond the obvious similarities can tell that these are in fact great complementing solutions.

If you stick with Autotask and ConnectWise, you have a shot at becoming a great IT company. My goal with Shockey Monkey is to make sure the loyalty of your client base is sticky because it connects your company to the solutions you’ve sold them. You need a great tool to manage your business. You also need a tool to connect your clients business and technology back to yours. That is where your value is multiplied.

Here is something I want you to think about: Imagine if your tools (PSA, RMM, Backups) were not built for you but were designed for your customers… what would they look like?

If we are indeed in this massive consumerization of IT that everyone believes in and the IT becomes something that users do instead of IT staff, what do those applications look like? Who pays for them? How do they meet the regulatory compliance requirements? Who does the cleanup work when automation fails, what is the business continuity scenario and what level of data portability do we have?

Now, I do want to be mindful here and play the devils advocate for a moment: If those concerns are truly real, as they certainly would be in any real business that has to deal with them, how can that possibly ever spell the end of the IT as we know it? Making slight adjustments in course as we go along and as these technologies mature will keep us in place and evolving right along with it. Right?

In my opinion, there isn’t much difference between obscurity and failure. It could be that I’m just an extremely aggressive and competitive jerk but if you give me an option to earn a million dollars and I’m OK with taking home only $40,000 that doesn’t make me feel like much of a winner. We had these arguments before the cloud and some people bought it, some didn’t. Many that didn’t are unemployed and working somewhere while the lucky ones are maintaining the same levels or maybe growing a little. On the other hand, I have plenty of 1-3 man shops with thousands of Exchange mailboxes, massive amount of storage and other cloud services that they only sold and did the hard work once. How do you explain the discrepancy? Ultimately, is it really a discrepancy or is it the reality of the small business IT – there will be far fewer of us but we’ll be doing a lot more for our customers because we won’t be a part of a perpetual IT problem? This is something that Microsoft, Google and Amazon recognized early on and built massive cloud operations without an IT channel or staff involved in any major way.

But let’s not dwell over the past or sink ourselves in the problems of the present.

Let’s figure out a way to be a part of it and a massively profitable at that.

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

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

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

Look forward to showing it off then. In the meantime, I’ll explain on this blog.

As I have mentioned before, Shockey Monkey Pro is going away, as is Shockey Monkey Free and Fro. With Shockey Monkey just over a year old, we’re stepping up our game – as a matter of fact today we got our GFI Max integration figured out. But more about that later, allow me to introduce you to Arnie:

Arnie is a Windows desktop application (“fat client”) for Shockey Monkey.

You can download the beta here.

What? It’s a fat client giving you fast access to your tickets, contacts and companies.

Why? We got a lot of users that were used to and wanted a fast desktop application where they could open a ton of tickets and work without the distractions of a web browser.

How much? Free.

Now, this is not a beast of an application that is going to take a lot of horsepower or replace the ShockeyMonkey web portal – and that’s the point. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s local and it’s meant for the folks that need to close tickets down fast. (You doomed, doomed sons of bitches. Quit now while you’re ahead and go to ITT or DeVry and learn how to do something…anything but tickets.)

Download it. Use it. Remember it’s broken beta so if you find something that’s not working please log the bug at https://support.ownwebnow.com under Development > Bugs.

P.S. That’s not really the name; It’s just us paying homage to the pioneer of the SMB PSA’s who helped me figure out the strategy behind the next Shockey Monkey.