Karl Sideshow Notes & Cloud Tips

Posted: 11:44 am
July 7, 2010
Exchange, Friends
Comments Off on Karl Sideshow Notes & Cloud Tips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certification Path

Posted: 1:20 pm
July 6, 2010
IT Culture
8 Comments

Philip tagged me in his blog post about IT folks going obsolete so I figured I might as well chime in on the technical side of the things as I typically discuss only big picture industry trends here.

Check out the advice Philip Elder gave to a guy who was considering industry certifications. In a nutshell, I agree with all of his arguments.

I’d add two more:

1. Follow the money. When it comes to certifications, invest in the ones that have companies (or industries) that are growing rapidly. This used to be Cisco, but these days Cisco competes with so many other router / firewall / UC companies that their pool is getting diluted. Expertise with Cisco is still compensated very well, but the number of those opportunities is dwindling. Once you figure out who is selling a ton of stuff that would require IT personnel, visit your favorite job board – how many resumes list that as a requirement. How many of them pay well? Sure, you can find a truckload of requests for someone with the A+ certification but they all pay in single digits or low double digits – not worth the time in my opinion.

2. What can you do with your certification if your labor is not in demand? Many of us in the IT field (that don’t have diversified businesses) face the extinction dillema – what do I do when I grow up? Am I a system administrator or a developer? Am I an architect or am I a code monkey? Am I an engineer or a tech? Different disciplines lead you into different career development paths and different skills and experience you can put on your resume. But assume you made the wrong choice – could you start a business solely on the skills you have and earn a decent wage being an expert contractor for someone that has a diverse business and just needs you on demand?

I’ll be honest that in my hiring, the one thing that stands out the most is progression. I want people that have been involved in all things that have come to the front of the technology because I know that the skills you have now will soon be obsolete. Are you  table to quickly learn the new material? Are you someone that can figure things out, or do you need solid documentation and training before you can manage?

If you need solid documentation and training, stop reading this post now and go straight to www.careerbuilder.com and get yourself a new career. Immediately. Go. Now. Any idiot can follow a checklist and idiots work in the fast food industry.

Otherwise, the opportunities will always be there for smart people that can figure things out and implement both cost saving and revenue making processes. It only takes a lifetime of dedication to your career and craft. This is true for virtually everything you want to be successful at so don’t let the certification choices slow you down, nobody ever got penalized for too much knowledge – only for not applying it. So get a job and get to love learning.

Bittersweet

Posted: 8:54 am
July 3, 2010
Microsoft
4 Comments

About a week from now I’ll be heading to Washington DC to the Microsoft WPC event.

I really, really, really don’t want to say anything negative about MSFT, but..

I also really don’t want to beat a dead horse – let’s just say that I hope Microsoft has something to show for itself this year and doesn’t retreat to what it’s already become: a depressed cash cow munching on the proceeds from Windows and Office while playing Xbox on the couch.

Bah.. Microsoft WPC used to be the event of the year. Now, having killed it’s partner program, my largest partners will not be heading to WPC at all. Partners – few and far in between, pretty much the same guys I see at all other events. What is sad is that Microsoft did this to itself, and I can pinpoint the exact moment at which Microsoft stabbed itself. Sadly, it was on the top of the game when it decided it no longer needed it’s partners.

Mistake #1: Microsoft decided to fight Google with an enterprise product. Gmail, even today, is a crappy AJAX webmail. It’s better compared to Hotmail than Exchange. Yet, Microsoft decided to position Exchange against Google Apps – thereby destroying any chance it’s partners had with Exchange in the SMB market to begin with. It’s clear (through many, many, many memos and messages) that Microsoft is OK just getting a $1 or $2 per subscriber with BPOS is better than getting $0 in the eventual fear that everyone will be on Google Apps.

Mistake #2: Microsoft decided it didn’t need the partners anymore. For all the time they spend trying to create all sorts of partner perks and engagements, it’s product & business divisions certainly stiffed it’s partner base: by setting their profit margins from them, by taking their clients on direct, by eliminating core products that the partners were excited about and finally, becoming extremely inconsistent with the business direction.

Who would have thought that the Microsoft mantra of “we will compete with everyone, everywhere, with blood on every table” would be the eventual samurai suicide presented as a spectacle through WPC keynotes from Ballmer to Turner?

Don’t get me wrong – Microsoft is our biggest partner. We want them to succeed.

However, we are not developing anything for the Microsoft platform. It’s all about iOS, Android and the web. We are spending more time working on development efforts with Google than we are with Microsoft. Our business is diverging from our largest partner, not by our own choice but by the market demand.

It’s sad to see such a rich and successful company so thoroughly mismanaged and misguided. You always need friends and partners. Every year, there are fewer Microsoft partners at WPC, and in a week I hope to see a reason to remain one. I really do.

This is how I want to go..

Posted: 1:49 pm
July 1, 2010
Awesome
1 Comment

Today Woot.com announced it was being acquired by Amazon. I have to admit, this is the funniest takeover announcement I’ve ever read in my life.

And since I know most of you don’t like to read long paragraphs, I’ve taken the liberty of boldfacing the really funny stuff 🙂

Date: Weds, 30 June 2010
From: Matt Rutledge (CEO – Woot.com)
To: All Woot Employees
Subject: Woot and Amazon

I know I say this every time I find a picture of an adorable kitten, but please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email. Today is a big day in Woot history. This morning, I woke up to find Jeff Bezos the Mighty had seized our magic sword. Using the Arthurian model as a corporate structure was something our CFO had warned against from the very beginning, but now that’s water under the bridge. What is important is that our company is on the verge of becoming a part of the Amazon.com dynasty. And our plans for Grail.Woot are on indefinite hold.

Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say “Matt Rutledge revealed to be monstrous pseudo-human creation of Jeff Bezos.” You might even see this photo making the rounds. Rest assured that these rumors have nothing to do with our final decision. We think now is the right time to join with Amazon because, quite simply, every company that becomes a subsidiary gets two free downloads until the end of July, and we very much need that new thing with Trent Reznor’s wife on our iPods.

Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot – with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.

We are excited about doing this for all sorts of reasons. One, our business model is so vague that there’s no way Amazon can possibly change what it is we’re truly doing: preparing the way for the rise of the Lava Men in 2012. Also, our deal means that Jason Toon will finally be released from that Mexican jail owned by Zappos honcho Tony Hsieh. No, don’t lie, Tony, we’ve seen the paperwork. And we need a powerful ally in case Steve Jobs finally breaks down and comes after us for all our Apple jokes over the years. Don’t think of it as a buyout; think of it as NATO!

I will go through each of the above points in more detail later, but first, let me get to the top 5 burning questions that I’m guessing many of you will have.

TOP 5 BURNING QUESTIONS:

Q: F1RST!!!!
A: Okay, that’s not a question, but it is a good place to mention that our forums will still be policed by a team of moderators, as before. And also, Woot’s previous and always-in-effect privacy policy will still be just as always-in-effect, so don’t worry, there are no plans to suddenly give up or merge your forum data.

Q: Is Snapster leaving?
A: Are you kidding? He’s out the door about ten seconds after that check clea- that is to say, Snapster will continue as Woot.com CEO, just like before, and the rest of our staff’s not going anywhere either. Woot and all our various sites will continue to be an independently operated company full of horrible, useless products and an untalented jerkface writing staff, same as it ever was.

Q: Will the Woot culture change?
A: Amazon is interested in us because they recognize the value of our people, our brand, and our unique style of deep-tissue, toxin-releasing massage. And they don’t want to start changing things now. Amazon’s hoping our nutty Woot steez continues to grow and develop (and perhaps even rubs off on them a little). They’re not looking to have their folks come in and run Woot unless we ask them to, which incidentally you can do by turning off the bathroom lights and saying the word “Kindle” three times; a helpful Amazon employee will appear in the mirror. That said, Amazon clearly knows what they’re doing in a lot of areas, so we’re geeked about the opportunities to tap into that knowledge and those resources, especially on the technology side. This is about making the Woot brand, culture, and business even stronger than it is today, and we expect that any changes will be for the better or we wouldn’t bother with this endless paperwork.

Q: Where can I get one of those vuvuzelas?
A: Are you even paying attention?
Several months ago, when we were all sitting on Jeff Bezos’s bumper drinking orange Mad Dog and trying not to be noticed, we heard a voice in the distance yelling “You kids better not scratch my Mercedes or I’m calling the cops!” We ran. It was later that night when Amazon came by the house and said they liked our style and also wanted to get that money we owed them for messing up the chrome. We like to think that our relationship with Amazon will continue at this level for many, many, many years to come.
But we here at Woot are still a thoughtful company, so, at the end of the day, I watched the sunset, and its golden-hued glory made me think about two questions:

1) Is there really a universal deity?

2) Does such a thing preclude free will or are we humans in control of our own destiny?

After spending a lot of time falling asleep at the library while facing the philosophy books, I determined that the concept of destiny is a construct that allows man a gentle release from facing the terror of his existence, and that a Hyundai full of twenties would pretty much offer the same benefits. And so, I ultimately said YES!

This is definitely an emotional day for me. The feelings I’m experiencing are similar to what I felt in college on graduation day: excitement about getting a check from my folks combined with nausea from a hellacious bender the night before. I remember fondly that time when an RA turned on the lights and yelled “WHO OWNS THESE PANTS?” Except this time, the pants are a company, and the RA is you, and the sixty five hours of community service is a deal that will ensure the Woot.com experience can continue to grow for years and years and years, like a black mold behind the Gold Box. Join us, because together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Also, there will be six muffins waiting in the company break room, courtesy of the nice folks at Amazon.com. Welcome to the family!

Matt Rutledge
CEO, Woot

Introducing Vlad 3.0

Posted: 9:39 pm
June 30, 2010
Awesome, Friends
8 Comments

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

vlad3

Dare to dream: You’re all fired.

Posted: 12:42 pm
June 29, 2010
Uncategorized
Comments Off on Dare to dream: You’re all fired.

Greetings from beautiful Southern California and Mickey Mouse!

dream

Here is what I want you to think about: What does the technology landscape look like without you?

Dream. Think. Share. vlad@vladville.com

Most people that read Vladville are in IT industry at some level (service providers, consultants, SPFs, LARs, VARs, MSPs) and our industry is rapidly consolidating more of us out of a job. How do you see the landscape of technology in a company when you’re out of the picture.

What does IT look like without you?

Who pays the technology bills and whats billable?

Who renews the service contracts?

Who buys the contract and what does the contract cover?

That should get you started.

Get creative. It’s the subject of the 2nd Vladville newsletter! Email me your responses please.

P.S. I don’t care what your thoughts are if you’re still employed – it’s a given that the IT support teams will never go completely extinct. This is not what this is about. What I’m curious is what everyone thinks is the next major area of consolidation and how we can make revenues if we are no longer in the picture – the service doesn’t disappear, but the serviceman will. So how do we get paid in a world where we don’t exist?

Please share / blog / tweet and ask your peers. 

Beyond thanks – deep gratitude to everyone I work with

Posted: 3:13 am
June 26, 2010
Vladville
1 Comment

This blog, for all intents and purposes, is community service. You’re by no means obligated to subscribe to it, or support it’s sponsors, yet many, many, many of you do. I’ve thanked many of you in person and on the blog, but the words thank you are these days just a matter of politeness, not necessarily something that expresses ones true gratitude. 

So allow me to do the latter: Today I drove an unreasonably expensive car to the airport where my son and I got on a plane and flew to Disneyland for a few days. He watched a few movies on the iPad, played a game on the iPhone, looked at pics of his mom and his dog. Right now he is standing in a window, watching Disney’s World of Color. As a father, this is perhaps the greatest gift I can ever give my son: that of utter amazement and happiness. When all the problems in the world melt away and you’re left with your mouth open gazing at something that just seems unbelievable.

timmycolor Every day a ton of you choose to part with your money and build your business at Own Web Now. There are far more of you than I’ll ever get to meet or thank in person for enabling me what I am able to do for my family. Likewise, you will never meet the many people at Own Web Now, whose families are supported by your business. I do want you to know that we wake up each and every day and go to work to make Internet suck just that little less – be it by killing SPAM or making Exchange do the impossible.

I just want all of you who don’t actually know me (and only know of the Vlad’s Ferrari Fund) to know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me personally by trusting us with your networks and giving us your money – and what I, as the CEO, do with it. For the most part, it’s making the little guy in the picture above happy.

The 2010 so far…

Posted: 9:12 am
June 23, 2010
IT Business
Comments Off on The 2010 so far…

With first half of the year coming to a close it’s time to look at the agenda & numbers and figure out where we’re at and where we’re going. Everyone should do this as a part of their business because that’s the only way to know if you’re actually going somewhere – and the smaller you are the more critical it is because you don’t get to make many mistakes. The bigger you get, the more relevant this exercise becomes because it takes a while to steer the ship and change things up to stay on the right (profitable) track.

For us, 2010 has been awesome. The gamble on the cloud is still paying off with us growing like crazy on every continent except Europe. We’re still posting positive growth in EU (on the back of UK) but it’s clear that the financial crisis around Greece is no joke. On the positive side, it’s getting more affordable for us to do business there so we’re investing heavily in the new infrastructure in UK.

ExchangeDefender 5 has been phenomenal for us – it took us out of our funk with the previous generation of the product and the new features have been a competitive slam dunk. We keep on winning against all our competitors and now we’re even attracting some big time licensing deals again so I can’t say enough good stuff about that. Anyone @ UCF want a jquery gig? We’ve been looking for over a month!

Exchange + SharePoint has been absolutely insane. Last weekend we rolled out the gear for the new low-cost BPOS-like consumer alternative to our corporate partner-only products at OWN and this business keeps on growing beyond every imaginable metric. At this pace, our cloud business will be bigger than our ExchangeDefender business by 2011. Love it!

Offsite backups, dedicated servers, virtual servers – crapshoot. The era of steel is over. I’m pretty convinced we’re Dell’s only customer 😉 Love ya guys! 🙂 We’ve gone from waiting a month (at times longer) for delivery and now we’re back to the same week shipment.

All the other stuff is doing great.

What’s really amazing is that we’re launching four new things this summer that I believe will be just amazing for us. We’re also changing our pricing and adding some of the features our partners have been begging for (a retail-brand offering for partners that don’t want to be in the billing & bidding war with Google & Microsoft but don’t want to sign up a client with them and lose them forever; a social media play; a book on a successful cloud business model; a PSA with the release track record that puts Duke Nukem to shame) soooooooo… Really looking forward to the next few months.

Towards 2011 and beyond, things don’t look good. The good news is that the bad stuff is largely fueled by economic uncertainty in Europe, the oil spill in the gulf, the death drop in housing sales in USA and the overall financial funk and uncertainty. So yeah, it’s going to get ugly. But much like the previous two catastrophe’s that I’ve had a joy of running this business through (.com bust in 2000, George Bush) it’s all about listening to what people want to buy and not really caring whether I’m right or wrong about what puts my butt in a Ferrari. And the same to you. 🙂

How come there aren’t more “honest” SMB blogs out there?

Posted: 3:05 pm
June 22, 2010
IT Business
1 Comment

I get this question often..

My standard response is to just shrug and say that most people that are willing to put serious effort into something expect to be compensated.

For the rest, there is a significant penalty for being open – no matter what you say, someone will be offended.

So somewhere between the cost of time and lack of pay, there are a few popular blogs. Followed by half a billion whore blogs that spend half the time on self promotion and the other half pounding Google Analytics trying to figure out which comment spambot just landed there and if they can justify writing another blog post nobody will actually read 🙂

These days everyone is concerned with the eyeballs:

You know how I know if people read my blog? I ask if they know who I am. Yes? Have I offended you?

If I haven’t, you haven’t read this blog 🙂

There are three types of blog posts:

  1. Bashing someone or something. Popular, everyone loves to watch a train wreck.
  2. Top 10 list. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they think they are right.
  3. Boring crap nobody reads.

Most of your blogging fits in category #3: helpful posts, insightful thoughts, self-promotional posts and announcements, product reviews, etc. You know how I know I wasted an hour of my time? When someone comments with “That’s helpful, that’s insightful, that’s cool!” – it’s a packrat response – post bookmarked to be lost in a workstation reimage later.

You know how I know I’ve spent an hour on something useful? When someone who has never met me starts talking to me like they know me at a conference and I ask them what they use for spam filtering..

And you know what’s just friggin awesome? More people have read this post and clicked on that link than our own newsletter.

Always. Be. Pimpin.

Intuit, when cloud hits the fan

Posted: 9:15 pm
June 16, 2010
Beta
Comments Off on Intuit, when cloud hits the fan

First of all, we are a happy Intuit client. As much as I hate Quickbooks and everything Intuit produces, it pales in comparison to dealing with a CPA, IRS, Florida DOR, Dallas Tax Appraisers office, anything in California, and of course the VAT overseas.

However, the sketchiness of cloud operations is something that has to come to an end. In the past 24 hours we’ve seen huge failures in privacy at AT&T and it’s been nearly 24 hours since anything @ Intuit Online has worked. For the past day or so we’ve been trying to figure out why our employees @ Own Web Now have not been paid and have been greeted various Apache errors and then finally this:

intuit

You can see further outrage at the Intuit Community.

The Difference Between Cloud and Vapor Promises

The organization I run delivers cloud services.

We have done so for longer than most people and I can tell you, without a slightest shade of pink on my cheek, that everything crashes.

Everything.

We boast about redundancy, and failover, and clustering, and enterprise software – all of which works – until it breaks.

When it does break, there needs to be a safeguard. I don’t care how much money is spent on redundancy, there always needs to be another system to take over in the middle of a disaster. For some things, you can’t expect it – there is a reason you pay $10/hosting or a few pennies or dollars for a gig of offsite backups. It’s a risk you take.

When you get Exchange 2007 and 2010, or ExchangeDefender from OWN, you know it’s fail tested. It’s been broken in more ways by more people in more countries than anything else. For petes sake, it protects Exchange, the worlds most unstable and outrageously overcomplicated mail server software on the planet.

We know it will fail. So we have LiveArchive. Powered by Exchange 2010. Which itself has failed a ton of times.

But overall, our network has a 100% uptime. If the Exchange hosting fails, ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is there. If the LiveArchive fails, Exchange hosting is there. We do it because it is mission critical.

If you buy or sell network services, the difference between mission critical and everyday software is indistinguishable – you have no idea how much you rely on something until you’ve lost it. So take a moment of sitting in your despair and anger and plan for what happens the next time you see the cloud vendor take you down.