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

Missed us this year?

Posted: 9:32 pm
November 15, 2009

OwnWebNow
Comments Off

2009 was an awesome year for Own Web Now and we spent like there was no tomorrow. We’ve attended more events, conferences, user groups and corporate trainings than ever in the history of the company.

With that in mind:

Did you miss us this year? If so, let me know where at vlad@vladville.com.

Our biggest marketing push of the year is underway but I’m already narrowing down our road schedule for 2010. We’re looking to spend more but spend less time on the road if you get my drift. This was our biggest year in marketing and we learned a few things:

Paid events are no longer worth sponsoring. IT industry is no stranger to liars but this year in particular people really relied on the “sponsored event” organizers for vacations. Events that pay or beg people to attend for free are off the road trip list.
Some folks clearly spend too much time traveling and too little working. We have a 3 figure deep list of people that have gone to 4 or more events this year.
We aren’t stupid – we actually track our ROI – you can coach your attendees to go be nice to blow smoke up sponsors ass but when no sales come up as a result of it the sponsorship money dries up too.

Our business is really firing on all cylinders and we want to keep it that way – so keep your eyes on your mailboxes (physical ones) through November and December. I’d really appreciate any help with the above. I hope some of you don’t misinterpret what this means to our partners – the less money we waste on the road front the more will come out the market development and business resource end. But not letting that one out the bag until you get our mail 🙂

Relax

Posted: 10:04 pm
November 11, 2009

Uncategorized
Comments Off

Relax. Slow down. Wait a minute.

It’s what I’ve been offering my folks that are dealing with a ton of questions about the launch of ExchangeDefender 5, Shockey Monkey, OWN Portals, OWN Configurators and all the cool stuff we’ve been working on.

“For news about Own Web Now products please keep a close eye on www.ownwebnow.com/blog for announcements and promotions.”

That’s the only response they are allowed to provide in portal and in tickets and over the phone. Now, naturally, if you know them – they’ll tell you more but allow me to explain..

For Santo’s Sake

A while ago Stanto asked for the Vlad-to-English dictionary so here is the translation of the above. For years, Own Web Now was a geek organization. To call it a business would be a compliment because it didn’t behave as a business, it behaved like a bunch of kids who got distracted by the latest coolest feature and just went for it.

Boy was it fun.

But somewhere along the path the company got successful.

That’s when it all went to shit.

At a point, features no longer become the thing that makes your product awesome but turn into a magnet for stupidity that you then have to document, fix, tweak and otherwise dumb down or coat in vinegar to keep people off.

Over the past year Own Web Now Corp went from a global geek empire to a corporation, with all sorts of evil roles and people that spend time tracking user satisfaction, peak performance, problem resolution times, etc.

Now that our flagship product is launching we’re not going to do what we did every single time in the company history:

“Hey, check this out! Doesn’t work? Try now? Works? Awesome! Yeah, I know it’s cool as hell!”

No.

On 16th of November we’re launching series of webcasts introducing you to the ExchangeDefender 5.

A week after that we’ll actually start talking about the feature set.

A week after that we’ll start a sales promotion.

You will know this product and love this product before we talk it up to high hell.

I understand that there is always that element of curiosity associated with a launch, and I promise you won’t be disappointed… but give OWN a chance to do this right. I did it my halfass way for 12 years which was fine enough to get us to this point. But the list of Ferrari collectors and enthusiasts is growing and I don’t want to be at the bottom of the order book anymore. Let’s focus on what’s really important here and why we’re all doing this to begin with. 🙂

Seriously – relax. We’ll take really good care of you. Those of you that have talked with us at ConnectWise and HTG know that there is simply no comparison for what we’re offering in the next wave and price point – so the two weeks aren’t going to kill you. I know you want it now, I feel your pain – I’ve endured months of bitching while this product was being designed and tested to a lot of personal and professional beatdowns – Dec 1….

The Importance of Guarding

Posted: 2:29 pm
November 8, 2009

IT Business
3 Comments

Over the past few months many people have complimented me on my weight loss and apparently more positive attitude. To all of those comments I have responded with the following:

“Heroin is absolutely AWESOME!!!!!”

Now I’ve never done drugs in my life but the above is just awkward enough to stop random dudes from complimenting me – you know how many women have told me I look good? None. Zip. Zero. But I digress.

Last week, after the ConnectWise Summit, I shared my little secret over a quiet conversation with Erick Simpson. The concept I would like to introduce you to is called:

Shit Guard

We were reflecting about how the other CEO in our community had mellowed out recently. The conversation went like this:

Erick: Hiring ____ has really been great for him.
Chris: Yeah, he’s really down to earth these days.
Vlad: Yep, he’s the shit guard.
(laugher ensues)

But I am here to tell you that this concept is very real.

When you’re the CEO of the company your daily life consists of interacting with two types of people: shameless weasels that blow smoke up your ass about how great you are because they want your money and disgruntled clients that want to take you down a notch for personal fulfillment.

As a CEO it’s a part of my job to deal with shit. When I walk in to work there is a line out my door and into the hallway, filled with shit. It rolls uphill. I sit in my Aeron and do my best to deflect all this shit to the people and processes that can best help and then I get on with my day. And thats from people that work FOR me. Can you imagine the river of people that *I* work for?

Everyone’s got problems. That doesn’t mean you, as the CEO, must become the corporate janitor in charge of cleaning up all of the organizations messes. So you get yourself a Shit Guard, someone who gets to deal with the clients shit day in and day out and consolidate what we really need to address as quickly as possible.

That way you can focus on creating and motivating resources to fix the problems and move the organization forward… not be stuck in the middle of river of complaints without a paddle.

So go on, get yourself a shit guard.

Ode to Ignorance

Posted: 4:13 am
November 6, 2009

Events
Comments Off

It’s 3 AM, I’m tired, motivated and enthusiastic by what I see.

Inside, I’m depressed and frustrated by what I hear and witness because it’s so hard watching people who know what they need to do ignore it because change is too scary. So they sit, look for comfort and try to avoid stuff that becomes more real with each passing day.

Over the past few days I’ve had a chance to talk to so many people that my voice has completely given away. Shot. In that time, I’ve discussed things with people that are growing and that are slowing. Let me sum it up:

The era of nickel and diming, tiering, layering and stacking is over. Really, I am happy you’re making a living at it now, I really am. But we all know that the money next year won’t come from the basics. So either give it up now and grow your share/client base, or watch your empire erode.

And as many of you have seen & heard in Orlando, and will soon be reading in the press, these aren’t just words my friends.

There is a reason janitors, door greeters and security guards with flashlights make minimum wage. Be IT innovators. Not IT janitors.

State of the MSP

Posted: 12:30 am
November 4, 2009

Exchange, ExchangeDefender
Comments Off

What a fantastic few days it has been playing a host to the cloud of MSP providers the ConnectWise and HTG conferences have brought to Orlando. I have three quick thoughts I have to share with you all, but given the extent of NDAs and confidentiality agreements I have to be a bit vague:

1. Thank you all for coming to Orlando. Having spent most of the time in hotels and on the road (vs. my new house) I am truly glad that I can drive ten minutes back to Windermere and just sink into my own bed.

2. It’s tough out there for a pimp. Most of the owners and managers I’ve been talking to are not doing well. As a matter of fact, a few percentage points of growth seem to be good news. Sales of hardware are down. Adoption of managed services is down. Overall climate seems to be decidedly down. People are making money but they want more. That’s capitalism.

3. Our new pitch of “cloud direct” is going well. The “ExchangeDefender 75 Cent Cut Throat Special” has been amazingly received by everyone I’ve talked to and the market share we will gain on the back of this is amazing. We are really going all out here because even a blind man sees the end of this tunnel: everything shall soon be free. That’s not good news for people that had hoped to make money selling software but the true definition of a business success is in the amount of the profits it generates, not how it goes about doing so (within law and reason of course).

The conversations I’ve had today, even with the rabid fans of other products, makes it clear that business people make business decisions. They don’t buy it on personal intangibles over how much they like the guy, we’re not Hannah Montana fans running around with glitter in our hair – bottom line is.. well.. what contributes to that bottom line. Profits.

And as I said in the previous post – game on folks. This isn’t the IT sector of the 90’s or 2000’s, fighting for every dollar and every penny is going to get harder. It’s your call whether you’re going to do it, or watch from the sidelines as others take it all over. Not sure what you’re going to be doing but I’m not stopping. Google isn’t stopping. Microsoft isn’t stopping. Yahoo isn’t stopping. Opportunity is yours for the taking.

One thing I heard the most this week: “Well, I’d love to work with you on that” when talking about the direct model. Looks like all the partner feedback built something good, eh? We’ll be at CW and HTG all week, track me or Shannon down and find out what it means for you.

ConnectWise Partner Summit – What I’d like to know..

Posted: 8:50 am
November 1, 2009

Events
2 Comments

ConnectWise Partner Summit starts in a few days and it’s one of the biggest MSP-centric events of the year that brings together all walks of IT life.

Last year the vibe was very positive, attendees were excited and everyone was “trying to move my clients to managed services” but since then we’ve had a catastrophic collapse of the banking industry, something damn near a stock market crash, record streak of unemployment growth and a slowdown of all measurable economic growth indicators.

Looking over the numbers that we track, pure play MSP’s have been hit the hardest. They led the pack in the percentage of closed shops and they were overwhelmingly the ones that lost the largest number of seats.

In the same time span, OWN has had an all time record growth in accounts, revenues and profits (unfortunately we’ve also had to do a lot of collections and longer DSO as economy spares no one). Today is our biggest $ day, ever. Our partners at MSP University, ConnectWise, Autotask, CharTec have also posted record numbers and the MSP solution provider presence at conferences and events is bigger than it’s ever been.

What Vlad would like to know is….

It’s obvious that the only people making significant money in the MSP industry are the software and outsourcing companies providing managed service providers with services that they use to manage end customers. MSPs aren’t doing so hot. Some are even losing out to their suppliers that compete for MSP business, such as Dell.

With the space getting crowded and the deliverable/value very difficult to differentiate and distinguish between MSPs.. which other lines of business are MSPs going into to actually generate profit growth?

So where is the money at? Let me know, we’ll have a booth at both HTG and ConnectWise events next week, would love to hear some really good MSP stories and ideas for a change.

Community Challenge (Important)

Posted: 6:12 pm
October 30, 2009

Deals, ExchangeDefender
2 Comments

Over the next two months we will be unveiling our grand strategy for the deployment and management of cloud services in SMB. We have been wildly successful with this model for years and it’s what’s attributed to the phenomenal growth of Own Web Now.

Note: This is being piloted through HTG partners first and it’s the only way to get it right now. It is not an exclusive arrangement by any means, it’s just that a lot of companies in HTG reviewed, guided and helped design this model for us. Later this year it will be available for everyone and through our alliances.

Ok, now that we got the messy part let’s get straight to the point:

We are going direct!!!

If you haven’t had a heart attack or a brief moment of blurred vision, congratulations. You’ve worked with me before, you know what I’m all about. No, Own Web Now Corp is not going direct. No way, no how.

But we have built a brandable (your label) portal, workflows, support and accounting processes to enable you to go direct and not incur the costs of supporting our own products. Here is what we’ve got:

Free branded portal secured with SSL (https://yourportal.yourcompany.com)
Free backend integration to ConnectWise and Autotask for service orders, service tickets, account configurations, inventory and statistics.
Free support services for all our products. Your users can open support requests either through this portal, or through your own ConnectWise or Autotask and automatically get delegated to us for resolution.
Free updates to inventory and configurations, when something changes on our end it also changes in your own home portal so you can always bill properly.

The big picture here is that you can now offer cloud based services backed by a SAS 70 – Type II audited company, with a full SLA, redundancy and history to back it all up.

So without the cost of supporting, or accounting or actually maintaining and managing the service… because hint: Users can make their own orders and changes for things like Exchange hosting… what are you going to do with the markup?

I’m buying a Ferrari or two. But that’s just me.

Most of you have seen this path a long time ago – there is no ignoring the consumer that wants a cheap cloud solution. But as so many of the HTG members said over and over again.. if we can’t make a margin, we can’t do it. Well, Own Web Now has always been behind the channel and now we’re doing it again.

Oh… and one more thing:

There has been a little company out of Cali that has for year been a giant pain in my butt. It’s the only one we lose to competitively. Why? Price. Always comes down to price. Well, we’ve optimized ExchangeDefender to the point that the new release (ExchangeDefender 5) runs in 1/5th the infrastructure the v4 did.

So for the first quarter of ExchangeDefender 5, all new accounts will come with a new price. $0.75. No minimums. One user at a time. Full feature set. Everyone you sign up at that price level will stay at that price level.

Oh… and just one more thing: Instead of launching the product and providing education, marketing and training after you’ve already grown frustrated with the product: We’re spending all of November holding webcasts, training and producing your direct marketing collateral. Bigger partners also get MDFs.

So when December 1st, 2009 strikes… I will have the biggest month in the company history. Vladdy needs a new Ferrari and a bigger market share.

Game on. I’ll be in Orlando pimping this stuff all of next week.

What’s left of the cloud after it’s done raining?

Posted: 11:58 am
October 28, 2009

ExchangeDefender, Friends
Comments Off

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

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

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

The one thing…

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

This in no small part is why ExchangeDefender exists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk it out… Talk it out…

Posted: 10:11 am
October 22, 2009

IT Business
1 Comment

I’m in Dallas at the MSPU event and I have to admit they have really brought out an impressive attendance. Quite impressive. I don’t really want to give Erick all the credit in the world for it, but it is very evident that the riffraff is gone. The SPF mentality that once dominated our industry (“Smaller is better, more caring and the future of consulting…” and “I am a trusted advisor, not a technology business”) is long gone. Who would have guessed, business fundamentals apply from the guy selling ice cold water on the Las Vegas strip all the way up to GE.

. . .

What is more interesting is that a lot of people are curious about my vendor tour and the new products that we have coming out of Own Web Now that I have hinted at, yet not talked about. I know that is quite unusual for me since there is very little secrecy about what goes on @ OWN but to be honest it’s more of a realization/admission that mine (and yours) time has passed. The more remarkably successful people in the channel I hang around the more I am convinced that we don’t have the skill set for the changes that are coming our way.

I grew up idolizing Billy Mays. I received my business education from 60+ year old professors at University of Florida. My business value set works like a 1980’s arcade “He who dies with the highest score wins!” and movies that said that “greed is.. good”. What matters in business? Money. What’s my job? To make a profit.

But how do you get out of bed each day and go to build something that isn’t measured on profits, where a win doesn’t come with a $ commission based reward?

It’s a new world out there. It isn’t just the economic recession/depression, Obama vs. Rush, Mac vs. PC or us vs. them anymore. The values are changing and it’s probably the most interesting time to be in the technology business since the .com days.

The Fresent

Posted: 8:00 am
October 18, 2009

IT Business
2 Comments

Exciting, exciting time… We’re on our final day of big time network deployments and upgrades to our network to prepare for two huge product launches that will carry OWN through the next 12-18 months. To say that we’re full in would be an understatement, particularly given my travel schedule over the next month: San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, New York, Chicago and a few trips up and down California trying to drum up some support for what we’re doing.

And what we’re doing is a bit of old mixed in with the heck of a lot of new stuff: that is now a necessity. Allow me to demonstrate this clearly because it’s typical of our industry:

That’s a free Windows 7 antivirus program. Required no registration.

It took 5 seconds to download. Another minute and about half a dozen clicks to roll out and for it to automatically download updates and start scanning.

Still think that your business model of running around installing RMM tools and marking up software licensing is going to work ~~in the future~~ today? Even when it’s free? What “services” will you manage?

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog