Geek Speak

One holiday I always get excited for is Small Business Saturday. Admittedly I have to overlook it was started by a credit card company (American Express) in its own self-interest but I think they’ve been as kind as possible with the branding. It follows Black Friday (the shopping holiday) and is being held on November 26th this year – its seventh year. While you can read the history, I want to point to the future but click here for the past.

Back in the early Windows Small Business Server (SBS) days, Trend Micro made a significant commitment to developing solutions and branding around SBS. In no small part it contributed to the multi-fold growth Trend Micro has experienced over the past 15-years. I certainly appreciate its community commitment because year-in and year-out, community members could depend on Trend Micro to suit up and show up.

Now it feels like déjà vu. Trend Micro is going big in the Office 365 community this year. It starts with strategic direction at the top management level. Seeing the momentum of Office 365 growth at 70% year-over-year in Microsoft FY2016 it’s easy to see why Trend Micro is placing bets on this community.

Here is what you can expect from Trend Micro’s Office 365 push moving forward.

Recently, Microsoft announced that it is launching a new duo of artificial intelligence and CRM: called Dynamic 365. Dynamic 365 promises to deliver powerful business software by blending CRM with enterprise resource planning (ERP). Dynamics 365 is a direct competition to Salesforce and Oracle. There are a couple of features that are designed with sales and service personnel in mind.

Customer Insights: a stand-alone cloud service that has partnered with Facebook and Trip Advisor to bring data to end users. Companies can integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. The solution includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don’t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).

Aside from the expo hall, I spent a long day learning about the technical details of Windows Server 2016, Azure, Hyper-V and more. Microsoft has done an excellent job of providing speakers who are leaders or senior members of the product team and in several sessions they had a few others “on the bench”. These folks sat in the audience to ensure that questions were answered. In only one of the sessions did I hear, “I’ll need to get back to you.”

Ignite is packed full of information on a myriad of technology topics. There are so many sessions it is almost always difficult to choose which to attend. In this update I am going to touch on a few and look for more posts in the coming days and weeks.

Digital Transformation
This is the buzz here, it’s on the lips of most presenters I have seen. No one has provided a universal definition of it and as I talk to people it means different things to

Old school SMB Nation fans remember our love and affection for BACON! Who can forget our “Save Your Bacon” campaign back in the day promoting StorageCraft? (Remember the bacon bit muffins at SMB Nation Spring?) So

Everyone loves a success story. So hang on fast as Atera, a seasoned start-up, is making fast moves in the SMB channel. You’ll recall we extensively covered it’s “Hello 2016” launch at the start of the year. There is ample evidence suggesting nine out of ten start-ups fail (of course) but I’m more interested in learning what makes the ten percent successful like this Forbes article did. Needless to say I count Atera in this top ten percent. So what’s it’s secret to success

Since NetConnect splashed on the US MSP scene in 2Q, I’m monitoring the chatter and am finding that MSPs, while sincerely intrigued, still have more questions about this “Workspace as a Service” (WaaS) solution

With all due respect and honor, it’s time to remember September 11, 2001 which was 15-years ago today. Everyone has a memory and we welcome your stories on our Facebook page. 

Briefly, today is my birthday and it is the same day my father was born. In part, that’s why we shared the

Earlier this month, the Seattle Times ran a thoughtful article about a long journey for Microsoft contractors to unionize. The short story is these “perma-temps” where seeking benefits and stability afforded permanent Microsoft employees. Please

Many readers know that we’ve helped tell the attachedapps story at SMB Nation for the past 2+ years. It’s a start-up that has “layered” on top of Office 365 with a -baby CRM- solution similar to Business Contact Manager (BCM) in the early 2000s. This past week, BoomTime announced

Last week we enjoyed our largest audience of the year on the weekly webinar for good reason: it was the 3Q2016 MSP Report with industry updates and forward looking statements. I was joined by respected blogger and analyst Karl Palachuk as we talked about yesterday, today and tomorrow. Here are