Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog | Vlad Mazek on IT, Business and Technology

Value of Leadership

Posted: 12:08 pm
May 22, 2012

Boss, ExchangeDefender, IT Business
2 Comments

I wanted to title this blog post “Why I smile on my way to work every day” but decided to keep it on topic and for those of you that don’t like long winded run-on sentences here is a quickie:

Business leadership is confined to leading your company. It’s different – and far more important – than the industry leadership of being at conferences and industry panels.

The opposite side of the argument is that you shouldn’t be working in your business, you should be working on your business. That argument is dead wrong and leads to unemployment or severe demotions.

And the guys that tried to argue with me with that bullshit no longer own their companies and are either unemployed or hold “management” jobs far from the decision making role of their new employers. Indeed, being full of shit and conference hopping while not going to work has it’s consequences. If you’re curious how some large MSP CEO’s are always at every conference – it’s simple: they are there to sell stuff. They are selling their peer group, their peer product, there as a favor to the management of the company (that may or may not be giving them MFDs in exchange for success stories) But successful people aren’t stupid. They are working.

So let’s set this one in stone please: If you want to successfully lead your business to the next level you’ll actually have to go to the office, talk to the people that work for you and be a part of the solution. There is no shortcut.

The other day I was reminded of this very fact while talking to my VP of Development who is in charge of design of everything we do. By the way, if you’d like to see what we’re up to please join this webinar but only if you’re actively doing a lot of business with ExchangeDefender:

Hank: So here is the UI..
Vlad: Why aren’t you just using the native Windows folder navigation?
Hank: I will on the backend when we map it to a drive letter.
Vlad: But why are you doing this then, seems like reinventing the wheel.
Hank: Because you will invariably want to do custom stuff like permissions, quota display, attaching notes and expiration and I can only build that in a custom control.

Now Hank could just be communicating to me that I’m an ass. Which is fair.

But the alternative view here is that this is a critical component of business leadership.

There are thousands of hosting companies, SPAM filtering companies, offsite backup and storage companies, email companies, VoIP companies, etc.

98% of all of those companies are exactly the same. You may like employees at one place more than the other or you may get a better deal at one over the other. But when everyone just crosslicenses each others stuff then there is no compelling advantage to pick them over one another.

They become commodities.

This is why MSPs so often fail. What’s the recipe for an MSP? Buy an RMM, buy a PSA, sign up with a helpdesk, Microsoft Partner Program, mix a garbage collection of Office Depot color copies with a combo of late night tv / junior college marketing and BAM – you’re an MSP! Then the rest of us have to explain why we’re better than that and charge more than the MSP you find on craigslist.

Business leadership is something different. It’s leading your company in terms of exceeding the norm of services, features, accessibility, performance – you name it.

You refuse to follow the same ol’ “best practices” as dictated by people who failed at being an MSP or haven’t actually run one in years.

I watch a lot of MotoGP on TV. It doesn’t make me a Ducati race driver.

And if I ever cut a corner at 45 degrees like Vale Rossi, my bike and whatever is left of me would fit into a matchbox.

Take pride in what you do, work hard at it and promote everything that makes you more awesome than the next guy with every breath you take. Or stop wasting time and just get a job because you can’t have it both.

This is the best time in the market for service providers. If you aren’t kicking ass you’re doing it wrong. If you are kicking ass… ABP brothers and sisters, ABP. And as always, thank you for your money – we’re just fueling up the rocket for ya here.

The only thing that disappoints me..

Posted: 9:47 am
May 7, 2012

IT Business, IT Culture
6 Comments

One of the reasons why ExchangeDefender is on a roll this year is because I’ve been able to stay at work for over 6 months straight and keep my top talent focused on what we’re doing. It’s not like we didn’t know what we had to do before nor were we lazy – it’s just that to move to the next step you need to have all the puzzle pieces fall into place (or push them together by force and all nighters).

In the past month I’ve taken six business trips and visited with a wide range of partners, vendors, competitors – everything from end users up to CEO’s of the companies you probably work with or rely on. Among vendors, the conversations are pretty much the same as they have been a year or two ago – threat vs. opportunity, consolidation vs. partnerships, etc. Among the partners, the conversations are the same as they have been for at least the past decade: Struggling to grow.

The only thing that disappoints me about people is laziness.

Some people are just stupid. There is no help for that. If you think you don’t need to know history because you can Google it and don’t need to understand physics because it’s not a part of your daily life and don’t care about geography or politics because it doesn’t matter to you – there is no hope for you. The problem with stupid people is that there is no way to explain to them why they should care because they wouldn’t understand it and it creates an infinite loop of stupidity that can never be broken out of.

The excuse for the rest – laziness. Laziness is not just a matter of not applying any effort (sitting on the couch watching TV and eating chips) but the unwillingness to break out of a circular pattern. If you’re working well past midnight and hate what you’re working on but are stubbornly unwilling to snap out of the comfortable pattern you’re stuck in – that’s just lazy. Problems do not get easier with time, they grow.

Most of my partner-centric conversations revolved around the move to the next level – but almost all of them were dismissive of all the innovation happening out there and unwillingness to consider a model or offering different from what is already being done all over the place.

Here is a little tip – if you do the same crap that everyone else is doing, and market it with the exact same crappy cardboard marketing stock you buy in a toolkit and pair it with the brilliant advice everyone else gets from a show that is only keeping you in place long enough to give away stripper bucks and pack the vendor hall – then you will get the exact same crappy results as 50% of the people there. And that’s assuming that the other 25% of the audience goes out of business and the rest accidentally walk out into the traffic during the break because that’s the level of ignorance that is required to keep on doing the same crap over and over and expect something different to happen. That’s the kind of business that will be certified by Microsoft as an SBSC (Small Business Stupid Consultant) and dispatched to unemployment after the last client is transferred to Office 365.

The rest – get creative. Add to your model. Add to your mind. Add to your portfolio. Instead of doubling up the effort – screw it – take your favorite client out to lunch and ask them what they would do if they ran your business.

I do this EVERY time I go on the road. In return, some brilliant people have built my business – for free – and I’ve managed to pay them back by giving them tools and resources that felt and looked as if they built them themselves. Which is exactly what happened.

Don’t lose perspective of who you are working for. It’s your clients – not Microsoft. Not your largest vendor. Not the vendor you like to go out and party the most. It’s all about your f’n clients. And what happens to the employee that does the same thing over and over, day in and day out? Business growth, like promotions and raises, comes as a result of overachievement and changing of the routine stuff.

What it’s really like to work for Vlad

Posted: 10:42 am
May 2, 2012

Boss
1 Comment

Warning: This is really how our creative process works.

Sometimes the Vlad from Vladville spawns off it’s entire fantasy land of what it’s really like to work for the real me. We’re cool. ~~It took like 50 attempts to write something about how the office is a constant insult festival but I can’t put it in the terms that won’t get us sued.~~ We have both public “Yo momma” jokes for one another as well as hidden stuff that the staff maintains in my absence.. There is the book of Valdisms and the Wiki site titled S#%@ My Vlad Says. I love the people I work with so hopefully it puts this post in proper context.

Few days ago Stephanie asked me to review a few suggestions for a new display board:

“I’ve been playing with a few designs since we’re going to Autotask and ConnectWise and I don’t want to ghettomask the Shockey Monkey section. Can you look over these and give me an idea of what you’d like?”

Now if I had something important to do, I’d probably just defer to her expertise and carry on.

But since I’m stuck on a plane for 5 hours I got nothing better to do than be creative and call out Alex Rogers for locking up a bunch of dudes in a small room and servicing them until they pay to escape.

Rule #1: Always provide more questions than answers..

I know what I like and what I don’t like. I just lack the capability to describe it.

So what I do is stumble around different ideas and hope that the more creative people will come up with what I’m actually after. In this case, the tagline for the trade show display. If you haven’t heard about ExchangeDefender by now you’ve probably been under a rock. What I need to do is give people that know us another reason to come and talk to us at a show.

So I came up with two terrible taglines. They are a mix of jargon and rejected Obama campaign slogans. I almost wrote “Cloud you can believe in.”

Rule #2: Always give them more work

This was supposed to be a simple headline for a trade show display.

But while I was brainstorming about it I thought of the next step (see rule #3) of what I would do once someone actually came to talk to me. How does this message transition me into making my pitch. I need to hand someone something, people don’t listen as effectively without holding something in their hands and I don’t want them to grab their cell phone or another distraction immediately after leaving my booth. I want you fumbling with crap for a while until you figure out where to stick all the useless junk that you’ll likely throw out once you get back to your room anyhow. But for that brief moment, you are formulating why you should consider my idea and what to do with it.

So here I am suggesting a flyer. After all, trade show is just a small component of it, there needs to be an explanation and a teaser as well. So she thought she was working on a trade show booth, now she’s working on a flyer as well.

Rule #3: Never make it easy for them to quit

If you just spell out what you want it leaves a lot to interpretation. It also leaves the door wide open to Excuseland – it’s too complex, too expensive and it will take too long to get it done.

Oh yeah?

Well let me draw it for you! I want this to look like this, that like that and oh can you also shoot a f’n rainbow through it?

Rule #4: Prevent Future Assignments

Whenever possible, include a highly inappropriate rap song verse. Today I went with Snoop Dog.

This accomplishes two things. 1) Sigh. I am not asking him anything else. 2) God help me translate this to something that everyone won’t find objectionable.

Conclusion

We’re hiring. Seriously, could you think of a cooler place to work? Smile

Creative process is more an act of negotiating the result than design. You don’t really know what you need to build, you just know the result you wish to accomplish. It’s where talentless people that can’t explain what they want work with talented people that have no idea what the product/service/customer needs and they somehow drunkenly (yes, it’s a word) stumble to a masterpiece.

You should see how we design software.

Not sure what I’m doing right but.. thanks!

Posted: 4:47 am
May 2, 2012

Misc, Vladville
4 Comments

Yesterday ExchangeDefender posted the biggest month both on revenue and profits. ExchangeDefender is booming thanks to Essentials ($0.50/user/month), the cloud is taking off with our premium offering that will include Lync (launch in May) and to be honest I’d love nothing more than to sit at home, stay on my diet and train for my Ironman. But instead (woe is me) I have to wake up at 3AM to go on a business trip.

This is somewhat a matter of perspective. Yes, I’d love to sleep in. But…

I am going on a one-day trip to Las Vegas. I will be back home in time for dinner tomorrow.

Over the next few hours I get to hang out with a bunch of our partners and figure out what we can do better. I don’t have to work. I don’t have to put up a booth or stand in it for hours.

I’m going to hang out with my Aussie friends that also do a ton of business with us. We’re going out to eat at a place that I hope looks like my garage in a few years. Then we’re going to see “O” at Bellagio. And somewhere along that way we get to figure out how to perfect our business down under.

This is my life.

Whatever the f I’ve done to deserve this.. I wish I knew it so I could do it all the time and never go to sleep.

Whatever it is that causes any of you reading this message to do business with us, thank you. We’re continuing to build kickass products and services and take them to the next level around the world.

Every day is a little bit better than the previous one. Every day I’m glad to open my eyes and go to work. 3AM or 9AM or noon.

I know we don’t say thank you often enough… so whatever it is that I do that you like and follow.. from ExchangeDefender to Shockey Monkey to Looks Cloudy to my Facebook or Twitter… Thank you.

RMM Design Contest & Data

Posted: 10:56 am
April 30, 2012

Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

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! 🙂

Lumia 900 Windows Phone

Posted: 4:04 pm
April 29, 2012

Mobility
1 Comment

I’m an iPhone user, it’s my personal cell phone that I use for pictures, Facebook and texting. My work cell phone is an Android and I’m not a big fan of it’s email application or Touchdown – which is my primary purpose for my work phone. So when the Nokia 900 was heralded as the savior of the Windows Phone platform I was really looking forward to replacing my Android with it. I’ll go into details but in the interest of saving you some time here is the synopsis:

Today I returned my Lumia 900. The phone itself is OK and put up against 1-2 year old cell phones, it’s actually quite nice. However, put up against the competition in 2012 and the experience you’d get with any new phone, you’d either have to be an idiot or employed by Microsoft in order to buy one. Almost any other device on the market should be able to shame this device on usability, apps and battery.

Good

Battery Life – It lasted way longer than any Android phone I’ve ever used. It was even better on phone calls.

Task Switching – Probably the best part of the Windows Phone experience, it seemed as if the Windows Desktop experience got ported to the phone and switching from one thing to the next was great. If the copy & paste worked any better I suppose this would be the killer feature.

Keyboard – While arguably better than the iPhone, it’s not even close to what Android and others offer. Compared to older versions of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, the new keyboard feels smoother, more accurate and more reliable. I don’t think I’ve autocowrecked one word while having the phone 🙂

Bad

Brick feel – Phone feels much heavier and much larger than it appears. You never get that sense of the device disappearing and being immersed in the task as you do on the iPhone or Android. The key positioning and layout on the side / top of the device feels pretty unintuitive.

Swipe all day – Microsoft has tried to position the new OS as a way to get all the information you need right as you turn the phone on. Instead of opening apps up to see updates you could see them right away. Sounds great but that’s not quite how it worked out: I found that the social apps always showed outdated and useless information. For example, my Facebook was great at following people I don’t care about (full stream) but in order to update my status or dive any deeper on other folks timelines requires swipe after swipe after swipe. Almost all other apps worked the exact same way.

Microsoft advantage is barely noticeable – The selling point of using this phone in business (and we’re a Microsoft-powered business) was key, and the OS disappointed on that front. The whole experience feels like you’re messing around with notepad than an Office application.

Ugly

Browser – Somehow, it’s worse than the Android. Almost every site I pulled up rendered the view as if it was running on a 24” screen not a 4” one.

Email – It felt like Outlook was taken over by Pinterest and then half way through decided it should look like a text message.

And the worst part, the reason you shouldn’t even think about this phone: Apps. The selection is terrible. The apps that are there look like trial versions of similar apps available on the iPhone and the Android. This of course is only when they aren’t freezing and crashing.

Summary

I feel too bad for Microsoft to be honest about how terrible this thing is. So I’ll try to be nice. It beats Palm Treo. It’s even better than Windows Phone 6.5. If you work for Microsoft or have to like them because you’re mooching off their ecosystem – you’ll love it – you have no other choice really.

If you’re on Android or iPhone that was built in the past year or two, you will find the upgrade disappointing. If you actually use your smartphone as a smartphone and depend on apps for both business and personal stuff (think photo taking/editing, tracking of your exercise or finances or notes or sports or..) you will be returning your phone as well.

If you’re a gamer.. Well.. I hope you have a nostalgic side for the Atari quality and experience. It was a nice throwback.

If you use your phone as a phone only and barely scratch the surface of the apps, I suppose it’s OK but there are many other phones with better battery, better price, better screen that are lighter, faster and even cheaper. With a 2 year contract the Lumia 900 costs –$50 (courtesy of a fumbled launch / bug) and if that’s the part that appeals to you get ready to be disappointed for the next 2 years.

I could not find one thing – from camera to keyboard to apps to voice quality – that distinguished this phone above and beyond all of it’s competitors. When you considered the Apps (the very reason for buying a phone) and the fact that there are practically none – what is the sense for purchasing the device?

Love

There is still a chance that you’d love this device.

I love my 1975 Corvette Stingray. Despite it’s rust, lack of ABS or airbags I truly enjoy driving it. It has worse gas mileage than my Corvette Z06, it’s slower, it costs more to maintain and more to insure. Yet, I love it. The look, the feel and the noise is thrilling. Now if I could get a ‘75 Stingray with an LS7 engine, ABS, magnetic ride control and I still bought my rusty coffin powered by a LS82.. well, I’d be an idiot.

This is the choice that you have with Windows Phone. You can either get an iPhone and Android device that is far above and beyond where Windows Phone is.. or you can go with your heart instead. You like what you like, can’t argue that.. but apples to apples and android to iPhone to Lumia.. Hope you’ve got a big heart.

Change of Scenery

Posted: 5:46 pm
April 23, 2012

Vladville
7 Comments

I’m not about to share anything worthwhile. Tomorrow you’ll find out what I’ve been up to for the past year or so, I hope you join us for the webinar at noon. ExchangeDefender as a company has roughly another year of blueprint to execute and truth be told, it won’t need me for it. The business is very mature, not overly exposed to any particular product (we don’t make 90% of our money off one product with venture capital vultures circling our business like so many out there), the people that are in the VP roles have been here for at least 3 years (which is an eternity in the fast paced software business) and I trust just about all of them to run the core business lines and some have already been doing that for a while. I’m very proud of what we’ve built and where we are going and how many folks we’re going to help build their businesses. In a way, it’s the ultimate thanks for helping us build our business.

But this post is really more about me.

I have a billion different ideas on all the cool stuff to do next.

I also have a tremendous amount of resources and free time.

Unfortunately, none of it is easy. None of it will materially or significantly impact the bottom line, at least initially, which in general means I am not going to be very driven to do it. Not that I won’t be super excited about it – but if something blows up or if I find something else that can distract me for a few hours (“Hey Vlad, I have a guy who wants to get rid of his Ducati and I thought it would be cool to build a café racer”) I typically will. So if I stay in my Corse Rosa office at ExchangeDefender, I probably will not do the work at my fullest potential.

Ultimately, a lot of my ideas have a common theme/agenda but I need to draw them up and connect them and explain them in a really simple way (“We kill SPAM for a living”) type of a thing.

I need a change of scenery..

Here is where I ask for the free advice. Considering I typically offer free advice so help a brother out.

I’m considering going somewhere for a month and working in a bit of a mental vacuum ala Henry David Thoreau.. Except instead of going to some god forsaken cabin in the woods I want to be near a 4G network, Diet Coke and girls in thong bikinis. Mexico comes to mind but I don’t trust my entrepreneurial side not to start some sort of a drug distribution business with all of your credit cards and stolen identities.

Here is the problem / list of requirements:

1. I want to go somewhere relatively warm. Since it’s almost summer that won’t be hard to find.
2. I want a big city. Ideally, London.
3. The problem with going to UK or Australia is that we do huge amounts of business there and that would create an easy distraction.
4. I’d like something where I could bring my son along – so some sort of American school / camp for him to be around other kids would be great.
5. Considering Hawaii.. but it’s too far behind to stay in touch with the wifey.

Then there are logistical issues. I would need an Internet connection, not necessarily 4G, since I’ll be out for a month I’m sure I can find a place with an ethernet jack. I don’t want to be on the opposite side of the earth from my family.

If you’ve ever taken a break from your professional life of micromanaging your business to focus yourself on what you need to do next in your career… I would very much appreciate any advice or suggestions you may be willing to share.

Things are gonna get easier

Posted: 10:45 am
April 20, 2012

ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey
Comments Off

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.

The second dumbest thing I ever did

Posted: 10:32 pm
April 10, 2012

ExchangeDefender, IT Business
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One of the biggest failures you can have as a software business is not offering a product that the market demands. This is quite possibly one of my biggest mistakes and I’ve written and deleted thousands of words in this blog post to sum it up simply with: I was wrong. It was stupid not to offer an affordable product. But fixin’ stupid is what I do:

We have been offering ExchangeDefender since roughly 2001 and we’ve kept a pretty simple goal in mind: keep the users secure. My mistake was in the difference between the users and the business owners. Users are stupid, they will click on anything that comes into their email, provide sensitive/private information to a complete stranger and at times demand to be placed in danger (“I absolutely must receive .exe attachments, we ship everything through UPS and they would never send me anything dangerous!”). Users need a shutgun when they could be easily defended with a toothpick. Business decision makers, however, only consider business factors and try to guesstimate the cost of a security breach and data loss based on prior experience (which is typically none as most companies without a security plan tend to be gone within a few months of the catastrophic loss).

For years I refused to compromise on the price and features, for years I had one product and that one product was at times more expensive than the market competitors although the depth of the offering was far greater – but in realistic terms only the invoice amounts matter.

Last year, after we have gone through our growth pains, I approved the creation of ExchangeDefender Essentials and licensing of our technology (primarily through CloudBlock).

We built a good product that matched base offerings in the marketplace – spam filtering, virus protection, 1 week of realtime email archiving and business continuity, DDoS protection, partner branding and so on – and absolutely crushed our competitors on the price – At $0.50 per user per month it’s by far the most affordable mature email security solution.

This brings me to the other thing I was wrong about.. I assumed this would be a sideshow product that would only appeal to budget conscious providers that did not want to profit from ExchangeDefender’s immense solution stack. Wrong again. It’s the most popular product we have today. While this is in part due to our partners migrating from other solutions, it’s also the reality that marketplace is always right – people would rather buy what they want than what they need. I confused the two and I’m sorry.

Revisionist history – While I do wish I wasn’t stupid.. live and learn. Looking back though, we couldn’t have provided this product years ago. Not with the level of infrastructure, not with the product maturity, not with the technology we had at our disposal and certainly not with the organization as it was structured back then. Today, we do. What’s even more relevant is that this is the first and only product that anyone can buy at any time for whatever purpose directly at www.ExchangeDefender.com – and we’ll even help support it over the phone, web, support portal and live chat.. around the clock. With reduced complexity come easier deployments, with easier deployments comes less support and when my partners looked at Essentials, they looked at something they did not want to be on hook to bill or manage.

Fragmentation – So now that anyone can purchase ExchangeDefender Essentials, how soon are Exchange + SharePoint, Offsite Backups and Web Hosting coming along? They aren’t. We have a phenomenal amount of data on who sells what and how – thanks to Shockey Monkey and our ridiculously successful partner program. I think the MSP and VAR community is at an interesting injunction. You can either sell a commodity product and make it up on the volume or associated sales or you can make a killing on an implementation.

When I talk to partners I always ask this question: Are you making money with our stuff?

If the answer is no then why are you doing it? If the answer is yes, pimp on player. Pimp on. Because here is what I know about my partners – nobody charges less than $5/month for ExchangeDefender and most make far more when they integrate things along with it. Don’t forget that ExchangeDefender comes with web filtering, web file sharing, encryption, and a year worth of business archiving. Top that off with compliance archiving for 10 years (at under $4 a month) and you can pull revenues off the flat fee product in dozens of ways. I have partners that have built entire business lines off what we do and storage and social enhancements we’re building into the product are going to knock your socks off this year!

The biggest development in 2011 is flexibility – can you offer multiple things at multiple price points and make money? You can no longer go to clients and offer them ultimatums. You need partners that give you the edge.

To those of you reading this, I hope you choose us as we’re undoubtedly giving you plenty of options on how to best reach the massive marketplace out there that may not fit a simple filter. I have built the company on the premise that you can have any color you want so long as it’s black. Now we’re adding a rainbow.

The game of IT monopoly is picking up and large manufacturers and software companies are done with buying properties – now they are buying houses and hotels and patents and SonicWall’s and MSPs. You have to make a decision now if you’re going to walk away from your business for 3 months of rolling revenues or build something that can sustain itself for years.

Take it from my stupidity – and luck – even when you’re wrong you do get rewarded for making the right choice in the end.

Final day to fill out the Shockey Monkey RMM Survey

Posted: 3:40 pm
April 5, 2012

IT Business
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Today is the last day to win some beer money from me, just hit this link:

Vlad the Imp Aler Survey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/smrmm

We’ve gotten a lot of responses and some really surprising data and every little vote and piece of feedback counts.

Now there is a lot of speculation over the Shockey Monkey RMM and I have certainly spent a lot of my time talking to my partners about what we are doing and how things fit into the business model. Some less informed people have suggested that we’re building a free RMM and I think that conclusion is somewhat misguided so allow me to lay out my cards on the table and let you figure it out.

First, we owe our business to our partners. Every dollar that comes in comes through our partners and we have constantly put money back into the products. Yes, I know some of you have been burned by ExchangeDefender bugs or delays or issues in the past but one thing we have always done is taken as much money as we can and spent it on commoditizing stuff within ExchangeDefender while other solutions outsourced and made you pay through the nose for things like encryption, business continuity, compliance, web filtering, etc. With us, those pieces are free. That represents an ongoing investment back into the company.

Second, the dynamics of our partners businesses are starting to change. Many service providers out here wouldn’t have a cloud solution if it were not for us. We’ve spent a lot of time building, scaling and reassuring server rollouts over the past few years. Now we find ourselves in a spot where we can help a lot of our partners scale their business by just having us as an entire independent unit in their organization. As in, we’re pluggable. If you want to offer Hosted Exchange you need to read manuals, create agreements, manage billing, manage support and the pain of migrations and data imports. Don’t get me wrong, none of it is rocket science but it’s time consuming and we’re can take care of the whole thing for you, down to answering the phone and connecting to the remote PC and helping your client.

Finally, service providers are starting to reevaluate their business models. I’ll leave this part of the explanation up to you, answer it according to how you see the future.

Finally, where does this put the Shockey Monkey RMM

First, there is no such thing as the Shockey Monkey RMM. We started the survey so we could figure out how you rely on your RMM software and what you primarily monitor, how many alerts you generate, what kind of reports you expect out of it and how they are used. For two reasons:

1. Research helps us identify what is relevant in the sea of data that RMMs collect. By being able to extrapolate this data inside of Shockey Monkey we can give better integration experience for the RMMs that chose to sponsor Shockey Monkey.

2. As we offer the managed services on top of our cloud offerings, we still need a way to get to the users desktop. So we could either build the thing ourselves or we could risk offending one of our integration partners that sponsored Shockey Monkey by signing up with their competitor. Not a good recipe for success.

Will the real Shockey Monkey RMM please stand up?

First of all, there isn’t one. Not saying we’re not working like crazy on a monitoring solution but it’s not something you’re going to put neck and neck with the RMM industry.

The remote access, logging, inventory, desktop and screen sharing tool we are developing is for our ExchangeDefender partners. Yeah, those dudes and ladies that helped us build this big company. It’s payback time! We are playing with a concept of offering a free RMM-like product that our partners could go and deploy in their clients offices or prospective leads/clients offices. “Here you go, just install this on your network and it will give you all sorts of useful info and ability to look at your employees desktops, interact with them and get alerts when something goes wrong. It’s free and it’s on us.” What happens next? Well, when something breaks, you can pick up the phone and give them a call. You can alert them when their warranty is about to expire, when their systems aren’t patched, call them right as they are failing to print because their print spool service keeps on crashing, etc.

We are looking at a way to take this commodity of IT, connect it with the efficiencies gained from Shockey Monkey, and tie them together into one massive, inexpensive, overly efficient IT service demand generation engine.

Shockey Monkey + Sponsor Solutions + ExchangeDefender = $$$ for everyone.

It’s really that simple as far as I’m concerned. I want to make it dead simple for you to generate profits from solutions and stop wasting all of your time trying to figure out what your business is going to look like and how little bits and pieces of it are going to connect. Because if you are a business, wasting time managing your vendors crap all day is a profit sinkhole. You should be spending time on your clients systems and getting paid, not being your own janitor.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog