SMB Nation Blog

By Casey Morgan, StorageCraft Technology Corporation

Is file-based backup enough for desktop units or should managed service providers be taking full, image-based backups of them? Proper desktop backups can be a value to them and a potential revenue source for you. I’ll share a story that looks at why your clients are best served by full, image-based backups, not simple file and folder backups.

My roommate mentioned a few months ago that the hard drive on her laptop was showing signs of impending failure. She had issues saving files, odd noises coming from inside, and so forth. I told her I had an extra copy of StorageCraft ShadowProtect and that she was welcome to use it to take a full backup of her system. “Nah, I’m ok, I’ve got my files backed up,” she said. I shrugged and said, “You know you’ll wish you had a full backup, right?” “I’m ok,” she said. I shook my head.

IBM recently introduced a new range of systems designed to handle extensive computational data more efficiently than comparable systems; IBM’s new systems handle computational data at almost 20 percent better price/performance than competitor's processor-based systems. .

New IBM technologies are integrating member technologies from the OpenPOWER Foundation , including NVIDIA’s GPU accelerator technology.

Passportal recently announced that it will be making strategic enhancements to both its product development and team. This organization, based in Alberta, is a provider of secure and audited password management, with an MSP partner base of over 500 worldwide.

What’s driving this expansion? Well, Passportal representatives said that there has been a growth in the trend of RMM companies who are acquiring password management companies. According to Passportal CEO, Colin Knox, this has “shone a much needed spotlight on the importance of password security, management and control.”

By Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management

At a recent client meeting we discussed the need to create a Board of Directors.   It is a difficult task to find the right individuals and more difficult for an entrepreneur to accept what a good board can provide. Another spin is creating a “Client Advisory Board”. This is easier to develop and can actually provide real value to your business as well as your sales process. Both topics are covered below. Let me know your thoughts? Experiences with these kinds of boards.

Our research shows that accountability -- or, more accurately, the lack of accountability -- is among the top challenges that partner-company executive’s face. We've also found that many partners are too close to their own organizations to have genuine insight into their own businesses, their marketplaces or their industries. Client Advisory Boards and Business Advisory Boards can help provide better visibility for both those blind spots.

Good morning, SMB Nation Community, and welcome to the autumn season in the northern hemisphere. I just wanted to pass along an interesting bit of news from RapidFire Tools! I was recently able to speak with Michael Mittel, President and CEO, who gave me the rundown on his company’s latest offering: Inspector.

Let’s start with a bit of product background. The RapidFire Tools Inspector Application was released mid-September 2014, and its subscription has been designed to support more sophisticated IT assessments, such as internal vulnerability scans and layer 2-3 discovery. Interestingly, Inspector is an Application-as-a-Service with Software-as-a-Service attached, and is available to MSPs via an annual subscription.

I asked Michael about that particular model, as well as more about the application features:

A key theme that kept coming up at the recent SMB Nation Fall Conference was “How do we make more money from Office 365?” A main value proposition of Office 365 is that it’s easy to deploy and maintain, meaning that partners who were dependent on revenue from server installation and maintenance are having to adapt their business model. Thus, the message that attachedapps delivered at the Conference was very timely and very well received since their apps are designed for partners to generate additional revenue while filling in a key functionality gap in Office 365.

Today, Voxox, a San Diego, CA-based unified communications company, announced that its Channel Partner Program has been recognized with three well-respected industry awards. To begin, the Voxox Partner Program was listed in the CRN 2014 Network Connectivity Services Partner Program Guide this past August, and will be featured in the CRN 2014 Cloud Computing Partner Program Guide, to be released later this month. Finally, the Voxox program placed as runner-up in the UC category of TMCnet’s Internet Telephony Channel Program Excellence Awards.

Rebit, Inc. today announced availability of Rebit Unlimited, a backup solution for home and SMB users that combines unlimited cloud service with Rebit’s comprehensive local backup.

“Rebit has built a reputation for delivering ridiculously simple, yet powerful backup solutions for home and small business users,” commented Paul Guerin, CEO, Rebit Inc. “Rebit Unlimited extends this commitment to our customers by combining all of the advanced functionality of Rebit6 with unlimited cloud storage at a great price! Rebit Unlimited is simply the most comprehensive, cost-effective, and simple-to-use backup solution available in the market today.”

By Raymond Vrabel, Director, Technical Account Management, Continuum Managed IT Services

Part 8 of a monthly blog series examining tips on how MSPs can work to break “bad” business habits that they might unknowingly fall into as a result of just wanting to get things done.

In the previous installment of “Breaking Bad,” I discussed how to combat business complacency by adding a few simple technologies to your services offering. This month I take a different approach, with a recap of Navigate by Continuum, our inaugural user conference held last month in Boston. With more than 450 attendees, Navigate featured three great days of our MSP partners meeting and greeting with vendors, Continuum staff, and their peers.

If you couldn’t make it to Boston for the event (or even if you did), here are my top five take-aways from Navigate 2014:

As part of Verizon’s commitment to the ConnectED initiative, Verizon has launched an expansion of its Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program that will implement schoolwide 1-to-1 mobile technology learning environments.

Nonprofit Digital Promise will provide 5,000 students at eight schools with personal tablets, donated by Verizon, that have 24/7 Internet access, enhancing the students’ studies in the classroom and at home.

Actiontec Electronics today announced ScreenBeam Mini2, its compact, sub-$40 HDMI adapter, is now available through Tiger Direct.

The adapter allows consumers to connect devices to HDMI ports on projectors and HDTVs. It’s compatible with WiDi-ready and Wi-Fi Certified Miracast devices.

Cloud-based IT management software provider Kaseya today announced availability of Release 8 of its product portfolio, which builds on Kaseya’s core IT, cloud and remote management solutions as well as its acquisition of Scorpion Software.

“We have been aggressively innovating and acquiring selectively to build the world’s leading IT management and security solution,” said Yogesh Gupta, president and CEO of Kaseya. “Organizations and MSPs today need to continually enhance their capabilities for security and compliance in order to meet increasing threats and regulatory requirements. Kaseya Release 8 further extends our commitment to address modern IT management challenges for our MSP and enterprise IT customers with a strong focus on security so customers can deliver higher quality and more secure IT services.” 

By Monica Caraway

Long-time community member and author Karl Palachuk is packing a big suitcase and getting ready to head to Australia and New Zealand in November. Palachuk will take his “SMB Roadshow” Down Under with stops in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland, NZ.

Karl will be accompanied by Jenifer Novak Landers, a life coach and business coach who also presented at Karl’s SMB Nation Preday seminar last week. That event was very well received and packed the room with eager attendees.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the next version of Windows, known as “10,” at an event in San Francisco. Optically, it appears to be a hybrid between a traditional Windows paradigm and the “eight era” emphasizing touch and mobility. I have reason to believe it’ll emerge as a best of breed and be the most significant release since Windows 95 in terms of favorability ratings. Why?

Click the image to watch my blog video!

Pent-up Demand. Microsoft will fulfill a market gap. The eight haters sat on the sidelines the last two years using Windows 7 or (gasp) Windows XP. This is their release. No longer can they complain that they can’t have a “real” Start button. It’s back.

Final XP EOS Push. Look for Dell and other OEMs to make one last push to eradicate the still sizeable base of Windows XP in the marketplace. Windows 10 will break Windows XP’s last stand.

Good day, SMB Nation Community! The team is coming off the heels of our 12^th annual SMB Nation Fall Conference, and we wanted to pass along an interesting bit of news we heard at this year’s event.

This morning, D&H Distributing announced that it will be offering the Intel Retail Client Manager software to its partners. As part of this new digital signage offering, the distribution company will also be hosting one of its well-respected Solutions Lab sessions on October 7 at 2pm Eastern.

“Digital signage has been a viable product application for some time. However, the market has been waiting on a practical and easy-to-use platform that empowers companies to manage these displays and turn them into truly persuasive business tools. RCM’s analytic component lets users customize content to engage specific viewers and generate sales, which is a breakthrough capability,” said Jeff Davis, senior vice president of sales for D&H Distributing.

Voxox today announced the promotion of Joann Farrar to the role of VP, agent channel, Joe Schiavone to the role of VP, dealer channel, and Tad Nikolich to the role of SVP business sales.

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is one of the most sweeping regulatory mandates in the history of IT. It applies to literally millions of businesses and healthcare organizations, and impacts every IT service company – including yours – either directly or indirectly.

That’s why you need to understand the real risks of ignoring HIPAA, and huge opportunities that exist when you make it a part of your offerings.

To help you understand the impact of the regulations, noted compliance expert and consultant Mike Semel has put together a nifty compendium of facts and figures he calls, “HIPAA by the numbers.” Here are a few of the more juicy ones to whet your appetite for more:

It was another jam packed week in IT land, what with Spiceworld (no not the girl power Brit poppers, but rather the SpiceWorks conference in Austin), Continuum’s Navigate show, and Ingram Micro ’s ONE event in Las Vegas, not to mention our own humble conference in Seattle.

Last week we started with iPhone 6 news and since that went so well we're going back to the well for some more. Apparently iPhone users have discovered a hole in Apple’s there’s-an-app-for-that universe. It seems there’s no app that lets your phone double as a stool. If you sit on it it will break! Shocker! The idea that a delicate piece of technology (would you sit on your flatscreen TV?) can’t support the weight of your average human is, naturally, beyond the pale for some people who have broken their expensive devices and whined about it online to all and sundry. So far Apple has reported only nine complaints, but dumb is contagious so no doubt there will be more. Naturally this turned into a Thing. (Even Consumer Reports got into the act, testing a bunch of phones in a bend test. No Apple didn't win the sit-on-it-Potsy sweepstakes.) Somehow this is Apple’s fault. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an Apple user. I don’t love iPhones, or iPods or iPads, or i-Whatevers. I prefer devices with a bit less pry-ware, but I digress. That all said, I kind of feel for the company on this one. Only an idiot sits on his or her phone. But then again, maybe the people who do this are trying to mindmeld with Siri and the back pocket is the closest they can get her to their brains.

Now this, on the other hand, is something you can lay at Apple’s feet.

Teachable moment: Apple botches iOS 8 update

Apple botched the iOS 8.0.1 update so badly that the maker of all things i* had to pull it from the app store just two hours after releasing it. Apple scrambled back to the drawing board following a deluge of user complaints about problems with cellular network connectivity and Touch ID on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and issued a fresh patch – 8.0.2 – the next day. That wasn’t fast enough for some and Apple shares took a hit, tumbling more than three percent to $98.47. Many IT solution providers have taken this as a teachable moment for their clients: Regardless of what IT product you are talking about, never be the first to download a new update. Wait at least a day or two to let the bugs – and there are almost always bugs – reveal themselves and be addressed by the vendor.

BlackBerry gets back to its enterprise-oriented roots with the new Passport

Still in the land of smartphones: Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry unveiled its new device. The BlackBerry Passport is a clear sign that the inventor of the smartphone is listening to all the people who have been telling it to stick with what it’s good at and re-engaging with the enterprise business market.

"As we set out to design BlackBerry Passport, we were guided by a simple yet challenging idea -- to set aside the limitations of traditional design and to instead simply build a device that fundamentally changes the way business professionals get work done on their smartphone," said BlackBerry CEO John Chen (see photo, inset) in a statement. "The BlackBerry Passport was created to drive productivity and to break through the sea of rectangular-screen, all-touch devices."

The Passport is no consumer device (To start with it won’t fit in your back pocket!), featuring a square-shaped 4.5 x 4.5 in. display that the vendor says was designed to support the specific needs of business users as opposed to the consumer the company had started trying to woo years ago, leading the organization to the brink of ruin. Also front a center: the traditional BB tactile keyboard has been given a makeover, making use of the larger form factor to provide bigger keys and the potential for an easier, more accurate typing experience for those of us with fat thumbs. The Passport will also come equipped with the next BlackBerry OS: BB10.3.

(Disclosure: I mentioned earlier that I’m not an Apple fan. In fairness, I thought I should let you know that I currently use a BB Z30. I don't love BB any more than Apple -- especially after making the mistake of buying a Playbook -- but I got a deal and it really does have less pry-ware.)

IDC predicts channel growth

According to new research from IDC the next year will be a good one for the channel, which will outgrow the overall server, storage and networking markets in some specific industry sectors. The report, penned by IDC Director of Infrastructure Channels Research Paul Edwards, claims the channel will gradually pick up more of the total IT spend until it owns 61.1 percent of the market by 2018. The North American channel should expect to see a 2.7 percent CAGR key sectors, such as servers, storage and networking, which beats the 2.3 percent CAGR for the overall market. This translates into a $38.1 billion share of the market in 2018, up from $33.5 billion in 2013. The channel is expected to pick up $17.3 billion in Networking sales by 2018, up from $14.4 billion in 2013. While analysts predictions should always be taken with a healthy dose of sodium chloride, these predictions bear up under one critical measure. As we’ve seen in the Week that Was over the past few months, OEMs like Dell, HP, Cisco and Xerox have been redoubling their channel engagement with new partner programs and strategies. Clearly they expect a lot more of their revenues to be flowing in indirectly and are investing in engagement with partners with specific, and valuable, customer knowledge.

Free Pass to the ChannelPro SMB Forum on November 5^th in Philadelphia! Limited time offer!

Time is running out to register for our Philadelphia event, and we urge you to reserve your spot ASAP. Our April and September events were maxed out. So, now is the time to get on the invite list!

Why you must attend the ChannelPro SMB Forum in Philadelphia November 5^th:

• Timely, informative sessions and workshops for Cloud, Managed Services, Sales and marketing and much more
• Unique, interactive format: no other channel event makes sure that you are part of the conversation
• Jam-packed one-day event to make the best use of your time
• Tons of hardware giveaways for attendees
• When you pre-register as a VIP, the event is FREE with all meals, materials and parking included

What are you waiting for? Click here to register and we'll follow up with you soon

More event info found here .

By Bob Nitrio, CEO, Ranvest Associates

In January of this year we completed an historic shift in Internet use. For the first time, Internet access via mobile devices exceeded that from desktop PCs. This trend toward mobile Internet consumption has huge implications for us and for our clients. Those businesses that are able to adapt to this change quickly will have a competitive advantage over those companies that lag behind. At the same time, they can remain in front of their clients and potential customers by being available to them on the devices they are using with greater frequency as their preferred tool for communication and work. Think of it as fishing where the fish are.

By Bob Nitrio – Ranvest Associates

I discovered Centurion Technologies and SmartShield when I had to replace two aging, malware-plagued computers at a senior living community clubhouse. Although I had an instant recovery product already, I wasn’t satisfied with it. This client was over two hours away and I needed something to make the new systems bulletproof.

My search for a replacement solution led to Centurion’s SmartShield. This program restores a system to a locked-down state every time you reboot. It also allows you to specify files and folders that stay outside of the golden image so that they always remain current, such as a PST file or a document folder. If you need to add a new program, you simply turn off SmartShield, install and update the program and then lock things down again.

Leading Small and Medium Business community creates Board of Advisors group offering designed to bring together like-minded business people with the common goal of leading successful IT practices.

Bainbridge Island, WA – September 26, 2014 – SMB Nation announced today that it has launched what is known as “Board of Advisors” program. As part of this initiative, the media integration company has established a new division to manage this program. The groups, which are designed to bring together like-minded MSPs and business people, with the common goal of leading successful IT business organizations, will be made up of solution provides, based on what solution providers want out of a group, and evolving with the groups respective  businesses grow and change.

Powered by IT and MSP consulting firm K2, SMB Nation Board of Advisor Groups will be led by Ken Thoreson and Keith Lubner. Both are well-known thought leaders in the SMB channel, are industry veterans, having spent several years directing Acumen  Management Group and Channel Consulting Group. Both are well-published authors in Redmond Channel Partner magazine, Channel Pro and other respected journals.

SMB Nation Board of Advisor Groups will be geared toward IT business professionals and MSPs who are looking to be part of an affinity group that will provide them with a holistic approach and outlook to furthering their respective business models. The Board of Advisor Groups are based with the idea in mind that they are willing to be open and honest, and share information about all aspects of their business.

“With Board of Advisor Groups we are working to accomplish three things, improve profitability, overall company growth, and improve the quality of life of owners and employees,” Thoreson said. “We are building the next generation of peer groups, which are not tied to antiquated management methods or driven by vendor agendas.”

According to Lubner, while SMB Nation Board of Advisor Groups will be available to anyone in the SMB industry who is looking to share best practices with other like-minded individuals in their circle, he did add that the ideal candidate is an individual whose company has revenues between $500,000 to $2 million per year, has invested in a PSA infrastructure, and has at least one layer of management within their business. “These are the types of “emerging partner” companies that usually thrive in a Board-  environment,” he said.

As a member of SMB Nation Board of Advisor Groups, IT professionals can expect to achieve the following:

• Learn from the mistakes and successes of other IT service providers.
• Set ambitious, achievable targets for your company.
• Learn effective management/leadership methodologies.
• Improve personal and professional life balance
• Discover new ideas that have already been successfully implemented by others.
• Improve the capacity of your sales, service and other managers.
• Stay on the cutting edge of the latest IT industry trends.
• Network with professionals in your industry.

Furthermore, to provide a true granular effect for each member, SMB Nation Board of Advisor Groups will be designated by three separate categories of like-minded individuals, as outlined below:
We are offering three distinct pathways:

*   Board of Advisors: Accelerate your Cloud and Mobility Practice

*   This is a 5 session, 4 month program

*   Board of Advisors:  Business Acceleration Program

*   This  Owners Board is a yearlong Program

*   Board of Advisors: Sales and Marketing Acceleration Program

*   This is a 10 Month program focused for sales and marketing teams

Contact SMB Nation for exact details of each Board, all programs will begin in 2014.

“This is not your grandfather’s Board of Advisors group,” said Harry Brelsford, CEO, SMB Nation. “What differentiates SMB Nation Board of Advisor  Groups from other groups like this in our industry is that we will be investing forward in focus areas such as Cloud, Office 365 so that it’s not overwhelming and cumbersome to you, the IT professional and MSP. We will focus on helping you to look at alternative ways to help you successfully run your business. And we’re open membership encourages participants from all walks of life and lifestyles.”

To learn more about SMB Nation Board of Advisors, and to have one of our representatives contact you with more information, go to www.SMBNation.com and select Contact Us.

About SMB Nation

SMB Nation is a community targeted at the small and medium business (SMB) channel partner/reseller/consulting/VAR community.  SMB Nation spreads the knowledge of SMB technology trends through its conferences, books, print magazine, online services, and worldwide seminars, workshops and accredited Pocket MBA certificate.  As an active participant in the technology community, SMB Nation has a long history of enthusiastic advocacy and evangelism. The SMB Nation tribe exceeds 40,000 followers worldwide. For more information, visit www.SMBNation.com, www.O365Nation.com and www.Telephonation.com. Follow us on Twitter @SMBNation, and join our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/SMBNation.

For more information, contact:
Harry Brelsford
Founder and Chairman
SMB Nation
206-201-2944
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

D&H Distributing announced it redesigned and improved www.dandh.com to improve customer experience.

Specific improvements include new drop down menus, customizable Watch Lists, discontinued item notifications, an enhanced notification center and the availability to browse product categories from any page through the navigation menu.

Everyone loves secrets. It somehow makes you feel you know something that others don’t know. LOL!

Long-time SMB Nation member Robert Nitrio shared a few Uber insights in preparation for the transportation needs of incoming attendees en route to Seattle for the 12^th annual SMB Nation Fall conference this weekend (Sept 26-28).

First – he surfaced the Uber option as one of the transportation alternatives to consider for the ride form the airport to the host hotel. He shared:

Spiceworks today debuted the Spiceworks App center and formalized its developer program.

The App Center will allow IT professionals to find, research and purchase free and for-fee apps and cloud services directly from Spiceworks. By formalizing its developer program, independent developers and technology brands including Microsoft, Lenovo and IBM will be able to offer free and paid applications to IT professionals within the network.

“Millions of IT professionals already rely on Spiceworks for the technical information, peer feedback and vendor connections they need to make an informed purchasing decision,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “The new App Center takes the Spiceworks experience one step further by streamlining how 6 million IT professionals research, buy and use IT apps and cloud services.”

New, free apps will be available later this year and paid application support will begin in Q1 2015.

Additional App Center information is available here, and more information about Spiceworks’ developer program can be found here.

SMB technology provider GoDaddy collaborated with Microsoft Corp. to create Get Online Today, an offering intended to help SMBs worldwide start, maintain and grow their online presence.

For $1/month for the first year, the Get Online Today offering includes: a custom domain name; subscription to GoDaddy’s Website Builder, including hosting for the business’ website; Microsoft Office 365 from GoDaddy; $50 credit for Bing Ads; and GoDaddy 24/7 phone support.

Continuum , the sole channel-exclusive provider of fully integrated managed solutions, launched private forum Collaborate to allow its 3,500 MSP partners to connect, share and learn.

Collaborate offers more support features than Continuum’s current partner support portal in an effort to educate partners and equip them with resources so they can compete effectively for business.

While your intentions are good to try to attend the in-person 12^th annual SMB Nation Fall conference, sometimes it’s not possible. But it’s now possible to attend online and listen to the Business (B) and Technical (T) speeches. Using Lync, we will broadcast three days of academic Office 365, Server 2003 EOS and many more lectures for just $99. For you, it’s the ability to participate from afar in the comfort of your office (or home) without time away and travel and accommodation expenses.

So what are the next steps?

• Discover what the conference can offer you at fall2014.smbnation.com.
• Note the times and dates. The conference is the weekend: Friday September 26 to Sunday September 28                                                                                                                          
• Register for the online event via this registration link: https://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1573788
• Order your pizza and make your popcorn for three-days of jam packed content!
• Hurry – online attendance is limited to 250 participants.

If you have any questions, call SMB Nation at 206-201-2943 and speak with Edna at extension 105.

Notice: In order to offer you this subsidized online attendee rate of $99, you agree to allow SMB Nation to share your contact details with the conference sponsors.

Registration Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/177730585

Thursday, September 25, 2014 10:00-11:00 AM PDT

Presented by: Harry Brelsford, Founder and Chairman, SMB Nation

It’s not about hitting home runs. It’s about consistently getting base hits and having a high batting average when it comes to MSP success. Discover how old school biz dev practices, such as lunch-and-learns really really work. And you can do it all for under $100 (catering included). Bottom line – if you are not selling into your customer community, you are leaving money on the table. This webinar, hosted by Harry Brelsford, digs deep into the vaunted Microsoft Community Connections program and walks you through the mechanics of easily acquiring new customers for a very low acquisition cost. This is a “must do.”

Turns out you still love Microsoft! Like a long-term marriage, there are ebbs and flows in the relationships. You’ve had your peaks and valleys in the Microsoft relationship, but at the end of the day, we’re family, and blood is thicker than water. Such are the findings in my well-received Microsoft Satisfaction survey for partners. I’ll share the results here.

It’s easy to think that the only IT news worth knowing to start the week starts with the new iPhone 6, continues with Microsoft layoffs (probably carefully timed to coincide with the iPhone news so it would get drowned out of the news cycle) and finishes with the new iPhone again. That would be a misperception though. Sure, what Apple CEO Tim Cook gushed about his “better in every way” and “best iPhone yet” device which sold more than 4 million pre-orders in the first 24 hrs of availability – making a moderate splash. But other things did happen this week in IT Land.

Microsoft to buy Minecraft maker for $2.5B

It wasn’t all dark news from Microsoft this week. The company made the widely rumored $2.5 billion deal to acquire Sweden’s Mojang, maker of the popular game Minecraft, official. Minecraft has about 100 million users worldwide and made about $100 million in profit last year, making the price tag a bit surprising. However, the growing popularity of the game may have posed a threat to Microsoft’s Xbox market leading some industry observers to think that the move was a defensive one. One must also consider the value of the connected community Minecraft has built. In and of themselves connected communities are inherently valuable. Amazon paid $970 million for Twitch and its million-odd users recently. The majority of Mojang’s 40 employees will join Microsoft Studios, which brought you Halo, Forza and Fable. However, the people that actually created Minecraft, Markus Persson, Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser, will be leaving to start new projects.

Home Depot lifts lid on investigation into massive breach

The fallout from the Home Depot data breach continued to rain down this week, with the home reno retailer issuing a statement detailing the attacks, the measures the company has taken to address the weakness and the cost of those measures. To start with, Home Depot failed to properly deploy data encryption capabilities, opening a window of attack that gave criminals access to as many as 56 million credit and debit cards between April and September 2014.

According to the statement, the investigation discovered a new malware, customized to avoid detection. “The malware had not been seen previously in other attacks, according to Home Depot’s security partners. To protect customer data until the malware was eliminated, any terminals identified with malware were taken out of service, and the company quickly put in place other security enhancements.”

The whole incident should serve as a massive lesson for retailers and IT services pros who support them. Expenses related to this breach will top $62 million, with about $27 million coming back from the company’s data breach insurance. The final tally has yet to be counted though, with additional expenses coming from paying banks and processors for credit card fraud and card replacement costs.

SAP acquires Concur for $8.3B

SAP announced plans to buy Seattle’s Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion. Concur makes a SaaS-based software package that manages corporate travel and entertainment expenses – including travel booking, corporate credit cards, reimbursements and audits – and runs TripIt, a popular mobile travel organizer. Details about the deal are sketchy as the deal hasn’t closed. The two companies are expecting regulatory approval by the end of the calendar year.

Cisco buys both Memoir Systems and Metacloud

In separate deals, networking giant Cisco announced plans to purchase Memoir Systems, a privately held semiconductor memory vendor, and Metacloud, which develops and sells OpenStack-based private clouds. Financial terms weren’t disclosed for either deal. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Memoir Systems sells embedded memory solutions that make vendors' ASICs faster and more programmable. According to Cisco the Memoir technology will accelerate the memory access of its ASICs and the speeds of its switches, routers and other networking equipment. The Metacloud acquisition is expected to drive Cisco’s Intercloud play. Metacloud, based in Pasadena, Calif., was founded in 2011 and claims to deliver a full public cloud experience – including all the self-service capabilities, OpenStack APIs and integrated developer tools – only with the security and control of a private environment. Cisco's Metacloud announcement plans comes only a few days after HP announced it will acquire Eucalyptus, which provides of open-source software for building private clouds.

The Cloud Security Alliance today released Cloud Usage: Risks and Opportunities. Survey results from IT and security professionals worldwide indicate they perceive their organization has significantly fewer apps running in the cloud than reported by vendors and researchers.

Dell has shown significant growth in software offerings and revenue through its PartnerDirect partner program. Channel partners and Dell Software have embraced the opportunity, securing partners associated rebates with the sale of Dell products and substantial deal registration and revenue growth—with deal registration up 61 percent and revenue growth up 15 percent year over year—for Dell.

Evolving from an hourly-fee based break/fix (B/F) service model to one that includes a managed services (MS) recurring-revenue model provides benefits to both IT Service Providers (ITSPs) and their clients.

Read the rest of this article at:

http://www.autotask.com/about-us/press-room/details/2014/09/02/autotask-introduces-new-smart-it-guide-5-steps-to-pricing-managed-services

snom technology AG  today introduced its new lineup of IP-based cordless DECT products, expected to improve coverage, reliability and features.

The snom M65 IP DECT phone and M700 multi-cell base station will be released in October, and the M5 DECT repeater will be released later this year.

“Our M65 DECT phone and M700 base station represents a new generation of feature-rich mobility for business users,” said Tom Ostrander, Director of North American Channel Sales. “These new products offer expanded range, and more features and flexibility for administrators to easily increase the number of users while maintaining performance.”

Microsoft pulled the trigger on another 2,100 employees today, executing the second wave of its record layoff plan that will eventually cut 18,000 positions – 14 percent of its global workforce. The first 13,000 cuts happened in July when the software giant first announced the plan.

Today’s cuts, 747 of which strike the Seattle area, are being made across all roles and teams as CEO Satya Nadella attempts to simplify engineering operations and management processes, as detailed in a July memoto staff. In the memo he said the goal was to have “fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making.”

Of the 18,000 total cuts 12,500 hit the recently acquired Nokia division – an acquisition driven by former CEO Steve Ballmer which Nadella is widely reputed to have opposed.

Also apparently affected by today’s moves is the company’s Mountain View, Calif.-based research facility, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. The lab, which opened in August 2001 employs more than 75 researchers focused on distributed computing, including Derek Murray who tweeted that the lab would close this Friday, Sept. 18.

With today’s cuts, Microsoft still has 2,900 positions to eliminate – most of which the company says will be resolved by the end of the calendar year. The layoffs are expected to be complete by the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year end in June.

DataMotion , an email encryption provider, and Envoy Data Corporation, an IT security solutions specialty distributor, agreed to a partnership that will strengthen Envoy Data’s product portfolio and help its North American resellers sell to a mid-sized enterprise market.

On the surface, this isn’t news. But dig a layer deeper and there is a story about “innovate or perish” here. On my recent trip to the D&H Distributing Canada show in Toronto, I drove by, made a U-turn and took the following photo. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words applies here. You are looking at a shuddered truck that niched on offering faxing and other services to long-haul truckers. I’d offer it’s a sort about technology relevancy.

Over the years, readers have followed the challenges and successes of my niece, Christa Brelsford. Today, I am happy that I can report success, and there is a lesson learned for all of us in the SMB IT Pro community experiencing “disruption” in our profession. Stick with me and think about this the next time you complain that “they took away Small Business Server.”

Pic 1. Christa Brelsford won gold at the IFSC Paraclimbing World Championship - Gijon (ESP) 2014 this past weekend.

Since its creation in 1997, PowerSource Online has helped thousands of computer parts and telecom equipment buyers to efficiently source used, refurbished and surplus IT and telecom systems, parts and equipment for their PCs and laptops, central office, VoIP and business telephony systems, storage components, point of sale systems, wireless networks and networking operations.

Hackers don’t care that you have a business to run. They’re just looking to exploit your site for their own gains. One day, you have a nice beautiful site. The next, it’s littered with links to shady pharmaceutical websites.

While you probably don’t need to be worrying about your site getting hacked every minute of everyday, it is a real and serious threat to your online presence. But, if you take the right steps, it’s something you’ll never have to worry about.

Have you made the transition to Office 365 (or planning to)? If so, you don’t want to miss out on the next BIG revenue opportunity. Check out attachedapps. They found a way for partners to generate even more revenue while adding additional value to your Office 365 customers. In fact, conservative estimates show a partner that sells one of their apps to just 2 customers monthly can earn an estimated $100K+ in referral fees and services add-ons in the first year alone!

What are attachedapps, you might ask? They are powerfully simple apps that solve the #1 pain of SMB customers who are using Office 365: retaining, managing and growing their customers. Here’s a quick rundown:

• attachedContacts: Converts leads to contacts. Integrates and syncs to and from Outlook, and allows up to 99 users to easily share contacts across the company and devices. All for free.

• attachedContacts+: Enables additional security and admin. Capabilities, and allows partners to function as their customers’ administrator for an unlimited number of users. $3/user/month

• attachedSales: Converts contacts to sales. Supports sales pipeline management, tracking and customizable reporting. $7/month

• attachedCustomers: Keeps customers happy and buying more. Enables tracking and follow-up capabilities to grow your customers. $7/month

attachedapps has a true “partner-first” strategy. Their unique partner program enables you to generate revenue through generous, perpetual referral fees, and by adding your own services on top of their apps. They also just announced a Preferred Partner Program for partners that sign up before November 31. Bonuses include:

•      Higher referral fees that double your referral fee percentage in year 2
•      Priority placement on their partner locator
•      Lifetime Partner Account Manager (PAM) support
•      Lifetime Partner Advisory Council membership
•      Co-marketing assistance

Become an attachedapps Preferred Partner today, and start generating even more revenue. Sign up at www.attachedapps.com/partners or call (425) 615-7008.

Oh yeah, be sure to stop by their booth at the SMB Nation Fall Conference and let them show you the next BIG thing for Office 365 partners!

DDoS and advanced threat protection solution provider Arbor Networks announced it received several commendations at the 2014 Golden Bridge Awards program, including Gold for Mobile Network Security, Gold for Network Security Innovation and Bronze for Security Service Innovation.

Global IT solutions distribution leader Avnet Technology Solutions, an operating group of Avnet, Inc., today announced its Avnet Services business unit is working with the Linux Foundation to offer popular Linux courses through Avnet Academy in both online and classroom settings worldwide.

It’s been a tremendously busy week in the IT world. We’re going to start with IT Slowdown Day. You may have noticed some of your connections taking longer to load on Wednesday. This was the result of a one-day protest by many popular websites, including Mozilla, Netflix, Vimeo and our friends at AVG, who displayed a number of symbolic “loading” graphics to show you what your Internet might look like if the big Cable companies win the right to extort companies by constricting bandwidth. The goal of the protest was to encourage you to contact lawmakers and tell them to support Net Neutrality before the FCC’s Sept. 15 deadline for public comments. This is an issue that should be near and dear to your hearts. After all, how many new clients are you – an IT expert – going to land if every prospect visiting your website has to wait while your site loads? Either you don’t know how to build a website or you aren’t big and successful enough to pay for decent bandwidth. Either way you are screwed. You can find out more at https://www.battleforthenet.com/.

Autotask finally adds RMM with CentraStage

Not too long ago speculation was rife about Autotask and RMM. Connectwise picked up Labtech, Kaseya got acquired and private equity bought into N-Able. As someone working at Level Platforms at the time I recall many conversations about the way the professional services automation market seemed to be following the same evolutionary path Enterprise Resource Planning systems did. Essentially we expected to be using Autotask business cards before too long. Then AVG acquired LPI and East Greenbush, NY-based Autotask was left without an RMM option. So what were they going to do? We continued to speculate, as did many others in the industry, but nothing happened. Nothing happened for so long that the conversation went from who-will-they to will-they to have-they-missed-the-boat?

This week they finally did, picking up UK-based cloud RMM player CentraStage – possibly kicked into motion by the company’s new paymasters, Vista Equity Partners (which bought Autotask in June). Autotask and CentraStage already have a relationship, with CentraStage being one of 20 RMM packages integrated into Autotask’s PSA platform, and so over the past couple of years an increasing degree of intimacy has developed. According to Autotask, those other integrations will not change in any way and MSPs who rely on them won’t suffer, but the CentraStage acquisition – which is expected to close within three week – will drive a much deeper integration and introduce increased management capabilities. For example, customers who work with both companies will be able to receive a single invoice and engage with a single support team. The exact nature of those technology integrations are still being worked out.

WAN-as-a-service startup, VeloCloud, launches first partner program

Los Altos, Calif.-based VeloCloud launched its first channel partner program. The startup recently raised $21 million in financing and is using some of that money to kick start is sales efforts – effort the company says will be entirely channel-based. Thus the new VeloCloud Partner Program is aimed at MSPs and IT solution providers who want to deliver cloud-based WANs to midsize and large enterprise customers. The VeloCloud technology is designed to extend the benefits of cloud and virtualization to the enterprise or branch office WAN. To start with, VeloCloud is recruiting partners with footprint in specific vertical markets, including retail, hospitality, engineering, and mining and gas. Like most partner programs, the VeloCloud iteration will be tiered (Platinum, Gold and Silver) with perks like MDF and discounts improving as partners move up the ranks based on their VeloCoud sales volumes.

Xerox gets friendly with the channel

Xerox wants to be more channel-friendly and in keeping with that the Norwalk, Conn.-based printer vendor rolled out a series of changes to its hardware, software and services lines that it hopes will help drive partner revenues. Traditionally, Xerox has earned a reputation for neglecting the channel in favor of its direct sales efforts – this despite the fact that the channel accounts for more than 50 percent of the company’s sales. According to John Corley, who took over as Xerox’s channel chief just a few days earlier, the company wants to see that number climb into the 65-70 percent range.

ConnectKey 1.5 --Xerox is adding four new printers to the ConnectKey platform. The new A4 devices are a direct response to demand from partners.

Personalized Application Builder – A new Authorized Developer Program will extend the company’s Personal Application Builder beyond ISVs to include channel partners. Going forward Xerox's 10,000-odd channel partners will be able to build custom applications for their customers and become certified to sell those applications to other partners.

Xerox PageConnect Services – Xerox PageConnect Services is expanding. Managed print services is definitely making a splash in the market and this program, which Xerox first announced in April as a MPS-oriented rebrand of its Basic Print Services, is designed to provide a way for channel partners to provide related Xerox offerings.

Xerox Small Office Savings Plan – This innovative new plan (Xerox claims it’s the first of its kind) channel partners can give SMB customers a free printer if they sign up for a plan that will deliver consumable supplies like toner and paper and services for a monthly fee ranging from $59 to $149.

Registration Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/784313752

Date: Thursday, September 18, 2014 10:00-11:00 AM PDT

Presented by: George Anderson, Webroot and Harry Brelsford, Founder and Chairman, SMB Nation

Customers are looking for ways to increase their IT prowess without increasing their IT spend. VARs that are holding on to the traditional hardware, break/fix model of business soon will find themselves left behind by customers who need 24/7 support from a reliable services provider.

In this webinar we'll discuss how you can evolve your business into a services-based model that can increase your customer base and your monthly revenue:

September is the Federal Emergency Management Association’s (FEMA) disaster preparedness month. This means a number of things for you and your family, but as you’re making your disaster plans for earthquakes, tornados, floods, and so forth, don’t forget about your business and any businesses you provide services to.

The first question to ask yourself is this: do you have a formal, written disaster plan? If not, it’s time to make one. The first things to consider are your employees.

Keeping a business running after a disaster is important, but it’s not as important as the wellbeing of the people around you. A good disaster preparedness plan will include more than just getting systems back online. It will also lay out expectations you have for employees or clients and expectations they have for you. If a disaster happens while you’re all at work (a very likely scenario) do employees know what to do if there’s an earthquake? What about a tornado? Do they know the procedure for what to do after any disaster?

The other side of this is what if a disaster happens while employees are not in the office? Will they know what to do the following day? It’s important to think about how you’ll communicate with your employees or clients following a disaster. Certain methods of communication may not work in large catastrophes, but it’s important to find something that does.

There are lots of methods to communicate after a disaster. In fact, you might be able to send emails and update social media pages, but if all systems are down, you might be out of luck. That is, unless you have equipment prepared well ahead of time. Think carefully about how to communicate if the Internet and cell services are down.

Once the human aspect has been sorted, you need to think about your backup and recovery plan. Your disaster plan will probably cover human elements like those we mentioned above, but a backup and disaster recovery plan for your equipment is much different. We won’t go into the minutiae of building a plan here because there are some very detailed guides available that can do the subject more justice.

Once you’ve established expectations for different scenarios above, make sure appropriate protocols are in your written, formalized plan. Now share the plan with employees so everybody knows what to do. Once that’s done, the final and most important part of your plan is testing it, which should be your primary goal for disaster preparedness month. If you can test your plan and everything goes well, you’ll know you’re ready.

Whether we’re talking about your business or a client’s, you’ll really want to schedule a day to test disaster recovery plans. This way you can verify that people know what to do, and that your equipment can be put back online without any time or money-consuming hiccups.

Disaster testing sounds boring, but if you’re like Google, it can be fun. Google has been known to have themes for their disaster recovery tests. They’ll attribute various disaster scenarios to fictional attacks by everything from zombies to aliens, just to make a dull subject a little more interesting. Disaster testing doesn’t have to be boring, but it does have to be done if you hope to be ready for whatever nature throws at you.

How are you preparing for disaster preparedness month?

etouches , a provider of cloud-based event management enterprise software, and Salesforce.com, the largest CRM provider, announced strengthened integration intended to provide a more responsive system and allow for sophisticated workflows

Bigger Brains recently announced that it has started a special Kickstarter campaign with three new “Brain Bites” videos aimed at helping MSPs and their clients increase productivity. Each video is 10 minutes long and the subjects released deal with Email Management, File Organization and Time Management.

As a special offer for MSPs who back the Bigger Brains campaign, the company is offering a special reward for those who donate either $120 or $160 that will allow the MSP to custom-brand the course for their clients.

The reason behind this campaign hits home for Bigger Brains President, Chip Reaves: “I was working with an attorney recently, helping them with an email issue. He had a terrible email setup – over 20,000 emails in his Outlook inbox and no subfolders.  He deleted spam, but otherwise everything he ever received was kept in his inbox, until the system inevitably overloaded and crashed every few years, at which point his former IT consultant would move a block of emails into an archive PST.”

Bigger Brains will be running this Kickstarter campaign until October 3^rd, 2014. Check out the campaign here.

Enterprise Mobility Management provider Airwatch by VMware today introduced AirWatch AppShield, which allows organizations to secure data, enforce compliance policies and control the development, deployment, and security of critical business applications.

Our very own Harrybbb will be on the road this week! Stop by and see him in Boston, MA, and at his Beerfest in Newton, Ma tonight, and at the D&H show in Toronto later this week.

 By Alex Anderson, Contributing Writer, SMB Nation, with contribution from Heather Lawrentz, Writer, SMB Nation

Harry and I recently had the great opportunity to meet with Leonard Dimiceli, General Manager of Nuvotera (formerly SpamSoap). Leonard spoke with us about the rebranding, as well as his views on the evolution of the SMB IT Channel.

To begin, it’s important to note that the Nuvotera brand came about in November of 2013. The company had been evolving before this however, but, as Leonard explained to Harry and me, they didn’t want to put out the image that they only did spam monitoring. In fact, Nuvotera has a wide range of non-spam products as well, including archiving and encryption. The company name itself means the “Next Big Thing” or “Groundbreaking,” and Leonard’s team has been hard at work to live up to this moniker. Nuvotera is no longer an OEM, but rather a value-added SaaS distributor.

Microsoft’s decree to end technical support for the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 solutions creates great potential for growth in Q3 and Q4 for distributors and VARs as many SMBs complete the transition before support for Server 2003 ends in July 2015.

Today marks the kickoff of Robin Robins’ first multi-city tour since 2009, with the first stop in Los Angeles, CA. Each tour stop will be two days long, and will be focused on proven marketing campaigns for MSPs and IT Pros to use in their business.

“Grow From the Right Intro,” a new study by the CMO Council and the Business Performance Innovation Network, found that today’s businesses highly value the importance of partnerships.

By Natalie Lehrer, Senior Contributor for CloudWedge

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular in recent years due to the flexibility and cost savings it provides organizations. Forrester research examined the ROI of building out a private datacenter and the research analysts concluded that the average cost across all organizations to build out a private datacenter was $59 million. Public cloud solutions can equate to efficiency and cost savings advantages over traditional means of housing, manipulating and backing up data. Cloud data centers are being built all over the world due to a rising demand in services.

Tableau Software, a business analytics company, announced the launch of its 7^th annual Tableau Conference, taking place this week in Seattle, WA. There are over 5500 customers and partners expected to attend, with a wide range of sessions available for attendees.

“This is the event of the year for our customers, partners and employees,” said Elissa Fink, Chief Marketing Officer at Tableau Software. “They come together and create an environment that is electric. This year’s event sold out six weeks early and will be our biggest one yet.”

These sessions include 270 breakout presentations, four major keynotes, including one from Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Wednesday, and 50 hands-on labs.

For more information about the Tableau Conference, please visit the site here.

 According to a recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services , it is business agility, not cost, that is driving cloud adoption.

Enterprises are recognizing that if you only focus on cost-savings, you are missing out on the bigger benefits of the cloud. The study notes that business agility was the leading driver for cloud adoption among all respondents, with 32% saying it was their primary reason for pursuing the cloud.

This is a great sign for the market. Enterprises are seeing cloud as a competitive advantage, rather than just a way to improve a balance sheet. By not leading with cost, enterprises are positioning themselves to be more productive, efficient, and competitive. When we talk about business agility in the context of cloud communications, it is really about the ability to change and grow, and improve or streamline communications, which feeds competitiveness. 

In the past, enterprises buying premise-based solutions needed to anticipate near term or future needs and be ready to lock themselves in for multiple years. With cloud communications, you can grow, shrink or change how your offices are structured without the fear of being strapped with the wrong equipment. 

Cloud communications services can scale to meet the needs of a growing business with the flexibility to cater to the communications needs of an increasingly mobile workforce. When adding offices or phasing them out, the enterprise has control and they are able to quickly adjust their communications requirements to meet the needs of their employees. The responsibility to ensure the scalability of the communications services is in the service provider’s hands, rather than the enterprise.

Upfront costs are minimal and it is an opex-driven model.  That gives the enterprise an efficient way to manage cashflow and positions them to invest in communications services based on real demand instead of anticipated requirements.

Since the servers and software are in the cloud, features and functions are more easily improved and enhanced over time. This future-proofs the enterprises communications services and prepares it to adjust and adapt to new technologies and user behaviors. It also helps lengthen the lifecycle of the premise-based telephone and video end-points since they look to cloud services for updates, as well as enhanced features. 

Enterprises that adopt cloud communications are preparing themselves to manage change in the future  and react quickly to new opportunities. They can be faster and more efficient than competitors and use the cloud business model to create new advantages in their operations.

 To Learn More About CoreDial's Private Labeled Cloud Software Platform, Please Go To www.coredial.com.

By Bob Vogel, B2Marketing

Hardly a month goes by without the leading news headlines covering a major IT security breach with national – and sometimes international – impact.

But for every big data breach you read about, there are thousands of instances of external and internal cyber-thieves gaining access to information that’s supposed to be private and protected.

In fact, according to a recent survey, in the past 18 months, 51 percent of companies said they had at least one security breach. And, in the same survey, 18% of companies said losses from data breaches were more than $500,000 and another 8% said they had losses of more than $1 million.

This presents a big opportunity, and a big risk, for any MSP or IT service provider. If the networks and computers you manage are breached, some of that liability could easily trickle down to you. On the other hand, with the right legal agreements and the right tools, you can protect your clients AND make more money doing it.

The fact-of-the-matter is that many security breaches are the result of too much focus on “the edge” where the networks are connected to the internet, and not enough attention is paid to what happens on the inside. If a “Trojan” attack makes it pass the firewall, then what? Or, if someone from the “inside” decides to go after private company data, what becomes vulnerable then?

A powerful new security assessment tool from RapidFire Tools could help. Called Network Detective Inspector, this innovative hardware/software solution is designed to quickly and easily uncover a wide array of INTERNAL network vulnerabilities.

If you’re an MSP or Service provider, simply attach the appliance to your client’s network, turn it on, head back to your office and let it do its thing. When the scan is complete, you’ll get an email notification. Next, jump into your Network Detective application, open the client site, pull in the scan and run your reports.

In addition to the comprehensive output showing security holes, warnings and informational items, you can also produce a super detailed Layer 2/3 diagram.

And if that’s not enough, you can beef up the assessment with the Network Detective Security Assessment module – with or without the Inspector.

Just run the non-invasive (nothing to install) scanning tool on the network and a random selection of PCs or Macs, and in about 30 minutes you’ll get:

•      Security Risk Report. This executive-level report includes a proprietary Security Risk Score along with summary charts, graphs and an explanation of the risks found in the security scans.
•       Security Policy Assessment Report. A detailed overview of the security policies which are in place on both a domain wide and local machine basis.
•       Shared Permission Report. Comprehensive lists of all network “shares” by computer, detailing which users and groups have access to which devices and files, and what level of access they have.
•       User Permissions Report. Organizes permissions by user, showing all shared computers and files to which they have access.
•       External Vulnerabilities Full Detail Report. A comprehensive output including security holes and warnings, informational items that can help make better network security decisions, plus a full NMap Scan which checks all 65,535 ports and reports which are open. This is an essential item for many standard security compliance reports.

Want to learn more? Visit the RapidFire Tools website.

Dell today debuted a variety of new commercial PC solutions, including: the Latitude 7000 Series 2-in-1 detachable laptop, the Latitude 3000 Series laptops, the Latitude 5000 Series Laptop, and the Latitude 14 Rugged laptop.

Last time, I asked the question: “is there a simple, friction-free button to push in Office 365 (say the Admin console), to move my data corpus from OneDrive to OneDrive for Business 2013?” The answer is no. I expected a GoDaddy-like push-button experience (where you configure the DNS automatically in Office 365 for your domains).

Instead, I started to investigate how to efficiently migrate 33GB from One Drive to OneDrive for Business 2013. The native interface for OneDrive for Business 2013 felt too much like the traditional SharePoint file upload dialog box (it is). The modern OneDrive for Business application in the Windows 8 merely offers navigation features. It’s not a utility tool. My source on the Office 365 team asked if I had installed the Office 365 Office 2013 Pro Plus bits. I replied yes. He then asked if I could see the OneDrive for Business 2013 desktop application in the Microsoft Office 2013 program group. I replied NO that I could only see the SkyDrive for Business application. Puzzled, he asked if I was truly using the Office 2013 Pro Plus SKU from Office 365 as it should have automatically updated. We confirmed I’m using the proper Office 2013 Pro Plus SKU and we were both puzzled why the automatic update had not occurred.

My Office 365 team source asked if I had an Office application open. Yes. Then go to File -> Account and look to the right under Product Information. There we discovered that the update had not been automatically applied, which would bring me the current OneDrive for Business 2013 desktop client and allow me to complete my OneDrive journey!

So I manually installed the Office updates, resulting in access to the OneDrive for Business 2013 client and the elimination of the SkyDrive for Business desktop client. And since that “manual” update (which is contrary to the Office 365 experience), Office 2013 Pro Plus now correctly automatically updates on my system. Whew!

The journey continues.

Basically the net result is that, using the OneDrive for Business 2013 desktop client, I was able to bulk copy the data from OneDrive to OneDrive for Business 2013 using the traditional “drag and drop” behavior. Comprende comrade?

As a bonus, the OneDrive for Business 2013 desktop application “insisted” on syncing my data store down to the a local “OneDrive for Business” folder of my Lenovo Helix laptop. I have the space and it’s both a form of redundancy and supports offline use like when I’m on a plane without WiFi (increasingly rare domestically, but common on long overseas flights).

PowerSourceOnline.com is the largest B2B computer, printer, networking and telecom exchange that connects buyers and sellers of IT parts. The online marketplace for buyers and sellers of telecom systems and parts, networking equipment, computers and laptops and other IT equipment is the largest online network for the secondary telecommunication and IT marketplace. Since its creation in 1997, PowerSource remains committed to providing quality sourcing and disposition solutions of hard-to-find, excess, discontinued, obsolete and end-of-life computer parts and systems. With a global member base of over 2000 members consisting of Dealers, Resellers, Brokers and Service Companies, locating computer parts, systems, telecommunication equipment, peripherals, printers and networking equipment has never been easier! In 2010, Telecom Finders joined the PowerSource Online website and community to add telecom parts and equipment to the already expansive IT and computer parts and equipment database.

PowerSource Online has helped thousands of computer parts and telecom equipment buyers to efficiently source used, refurbished and surplus IT and telecom systems, parts and equipment for their PCs and laptops, central office, VoIP and business telephony systems, storage components, point of sale systems, wireless networks and networking operations.

The heart of our service consists of a searchable parts and equipment database which instantly connects the buyer to over 3 million lines of inventory which is advertised from the most reputable suppliers in the IT and Telecom Secondary Market Industry. Power Source Online understands the importance of quality information, and requires that all its suppliers upload their most recent stock list at least once a week. Our Verified Suppliers upload more often and users can view images of the warehouses and information about the Supplier with confidence that the part is in stock.

PowerSource Online also offers a Broadcast Section where buyers can upload their requirements and sellers can advertise their excess and unwanted equipment.

Today is a very important day. It is the day our Office 365 Nation community, known as “O365 Nation” is launching, and will start a new conversation that we predict will continue for at least a decade. Welcome aboard and enjoy the ride.

Pictured: September 4, 2014: O365Nation founder Harry Brelsford with the Microsoft Office 365 Support Managers spinning up the O365nation.com site!

So why are we here? Simply stated, you asked for an independent Office 365 community. As you know, there are Microsoft-based communities that we participate in but, at the end of the day, those are managed and supported by Microsoft. Our founder, Harry Brelsford, served as an “outside” Microsoft insider during the server-era from the mid-1990s forward, and he’s back as an inside-the-beltway, but keep it real, analyst blogger at O365nation.com.

We are here to take the Office 365 journey with you as your “guide-by-the-side.” Count on us to earn your trust with our credible, authentic analysis to help you answer your Office 365 questions and solve your challenges. We will engage in both technical and business Office 365 conversations in a safe, respectful and nurturing environment.

We have already received significant coverage related to our community launch. Here are a few O365nation stories:

• Channel Pro
• Telecom Reseller News
• Microsoft Princess
• SmallBizThoughts (Karl Palachuk)

Who should participate as a fan of O365nation?

We cater to a wide and diverse audience that wants to be “in the know” right now about the Office 365 platform. This includes:

• IT Pros
• System Administrators
• Business Decision Makers
• Consultants
• Customers
• Resellers
• Partners
• MSPs
• And all the rest (VARs, VAPs, System Integrators, System Builders, Distys, Vendors, Sponsors, ISVs, OEMS)

What segments will we be covering?

We are not limited to any single channel or niche. Our Office 365 conversation will span the business community to cover matters relevant to:

• Enterprise
• Government
• Education
• Small and Medium Business (SMB)

What can you expect from O365nation as a community fan?

• Content
  • Synthesized news
  • Unique analysis from our bloggers
  • Breaking news
• Newsletter
• Educational Opportunities
  • Events
    • Be sure to attend the Office 365 Nation summit, September 26-28 at Microsoft Redmond with the O365nation team AND the Microsoft Office 365 product group!
    • Details at fall2014.smbnation.com
• Webinars
• Services
• Forums
• And much more! Tell us how we can help you be more successful with Office 365!

O365Nation Writers

You can look forward to great, high-quality content from the following writers on O365Nation.com:

• Jenn Reed, author of Office 365 for Dummies
• Melanie Gass, Microsoft Princess and Office 365 expert, and author of A Day In The Worklife of Microsoft Office 365
• Robert Crane, Office 365 MVP and author of:
  • Getting Started With SharePoint Online 2013 for Enterprises
  • Getting Started With Powershell for Office 365
  • Getting Started With SharePoint 2013
  • Getting Started With Skydrive Pro for Office 365
  • Getting Started With Lync Online 2013
  • Getting Started With SharePoint Online 2013 for Small Business
  • Three Simple SharePoint Scenarios
  • Sharepoint Client Side

• Alex Anderson, SMB Nation Editor

Support Shout Out!

It takes a village. We wouldn’t be here without the kind and generous support on Day One from:

1. AttachedApps (an application suite on top of Office 365)
2. Idea2
3. StorageCraft
4. Microsoft
5. Intel
6. D&H events
7. Channel Pro events
8. CompTIA events
9. SMB Nation Team (Jenny, Heather, Marianne, Edna, Brook and all the rest!)
10. And many other community members!

So that’s it! Bookmark us. Share us. Most importantly, sign-up for the Office 365nation community so we can stay in touch. As the country western song says “Strangers are just friends who haven’t met yet!” Be sure to visit us daily for Office 365 news, analysis and even secrets and gossip. Every journey beings with a first step: click over to www.o365nation.com.

Questions? E-mail our founder directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Registration Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/619730720

Thursday, September 4, 2014

10:00 - 11:00 am PDT 1:00 - 2:00 pm EDT

Learn how to generate incremental revenue while increasing the level of service to your customers with attachedapps.  attachedapps offers a powerful yet lightweight solution for SMB customers’ biggest pain point of effectively winning, delighting and growing their customer base.  A complete offering that no one else provides today, attachedapps are easy to install, “attach” to Office 365 and run on Azure.

In this webinar, we will cover:

Melanie Gass, aka the Microsoft Princess, recently had a broadcast of Office 365 basics, with our very own Harrybbb.

Also be sure to catch Harry and Melanie at the 12th Annual SMB Nation Fall Conference, September 26-28 in Redmond, WA!

http://fall2014.smbnation.com

Lenovo today announced an expanded portfolio of tablets and PCs to be released between September and November 2014. The first product to be released will be the Lenovo Tab S8 this month, followed by the Lenovo Y70 Touch in October and the Lenovo ERAZER X315 in November.

“Our latest consumer tablet and PCs give consumers even more choice so they can select the right device that fits best into their mobile lifestyle,” said Jeff Meredith, vice president, marketing, Mobile Business Group, Lenovo. “From the super mobile TAB S8 tablet to the Y70 and ERAZER X315 gaming PC, we’ve optimized each one to meet the diverse needs of customers.”

The Tab S8 tablet, with a competitive starting price of $199, is powered with an Intel processor and is slim and lightweight at 0.65 pounds and 0.31 inches thick. It runs Android 4.4 KitKat and includes 16 GB of storage.

The Y70 Touch includes NVIDIA GTX graphics, an Intel Core i7 processor, JBL-designed stereo speakers and subwoofer, and Dolby Advanced Audio. At 17 inches, its Lenovo’s largest touchscreen laptop, yet it’s lighter than others in its class at under 7.5 pounds.

The ERAZER X315 is an affordable, efficient and immersive gaming PC with AMD Radeon R9 series graphics, a quad-core processor and up to 2 TB of SSHD. It also features four USB 3.0 ports and 12 GB of memory.

A year ago last Fall, I predicted the end of the world was near. I was on a Windows XP migration mission to seek and destroy legacy XP assets. My pillar message was the security threat. My secondary messages focused on productivity, getting to modern, economic incentives and compliance matters. I used a few examples from the field. One of my “tales from the trenches” concerned Home Depot. As you might know by now, earlier this week, Home Depot reported a massive security breach exposing over 70 million customer payment cards to hackers. In the Kerbs report, please pay close attention to the Windows XP conversation.

 By Forrest Blair, CEO of AirDesk Solutions

1.Will data be converted?

Many cloud services require your existing data to be converted into their format. That is a one-way trip. Imagine not being comfortable with the service or choosing to move to another vendor. Vendors who can move the current data to the cloud intact and without conversion present less risk in many ways. Anytime data is touched or manipulated there is a chance of error or collision with naming conventions.

With only one month till the SMB Nation 2014 Fall Conference, the room block at the Marriott Residence Inn has been sold out.  Not to fear, however, as we got another room block at the Redmond Inn, just one mile away.

SMB Nation has worked closely with the Redmond Inn to offer you a conference rate of $119 per night USD during the SMB Nation 2014 Fall Conference. To secure your reservations please call 425.883.4900 or 1.800.634.8080 and let them know you are with SMB Nation. 

By Robert Crane, Director, CIAOPS

Social networking is changing the way that business works today. We all know that to get ahead it is a matter of 'who you know,' and building a network of contacts increases your chances of success exponentially. Look at some of the biggest businesses today, Facebook and Linkedin, whose sole product is social networking. This highlights how important social networking will be not only to businesses, but employees going forward. It was not until recently that smaller businesses had access to truly enterprise-grade social tools.

With the integration of Yammer into Office 365, many subscribers now have access to social tools that were once the domain of Fortune 500 companies. However, having the tools is not enough, they key is how does an organisation drive the adoption of these new social tools and integrate them into their business? How do they take existing business processes and communication methods and adapt them to the new world that social open up?

This requirement creates opportunity in the market for resellers with the skill and understand of social networking integration within business. To be successful, you need to move beyond the concept of 'Facebook for the Enterprise' and into areas that involve changing the culture of how things are done inside a business to match the way much of the world is now communicating. It is important not to limit the concept of enterprise social to within a business, great opportunities also lie with social integration between suppliers, business partners and customers outside the organisation.

It is true that you can't sell social unless you utilise it yourself and with Yammer, there shouldn't be any excuse to get started as free accounts are available. Using these accounts allows you to create your own network as well as join others such as those set up by Microsoft for partners. Thought leaders are already exploring how social tools can help their business, the question is what are you doing?

As time progresses, the integration of social and Yammer into Office 365 will become deeper. At the moment Yammer, to an extent, sits off on the side. However, previews show the deep integration of Yammer technology throughout aspects of Office 365. Upcoming products like Delve and Office Graph build on this social intelligence to help foster a truly social organisation where everyone in the business can be heard and has the opportunity to contribute.

Being social is critical for a business to attract and retain key staff in the future because their expectation is to work the way they interact with others outside the workplace. That is why it is so important to integrate social into business today. If the business already has Office 365 then chances are they already have the capability but all they need is someone to unlock that potential. This is the opportunity that presents itself to IT Professional and resellers today. Ask yourself, who else is helping customers with Yammer? If you don’t know anyone who is then that usually means an opportunity that is ripe for those willing to make the commitment and learn the product because customer are adopting Yammer fast. Best of all, there is no hardware to purchase, there is no software to install, and you can start learning how Yammer can help organisations today by starting yourself for free!

Colocation provider 365 Data Centers announced Utopia Systems Inc. selected 365’s Philadelphia data center to deliver hosted SaaS and managed service solutions.

Utopia, a provider of hosted Microsoft Office solutions for SMBs, offers hosted SaaS applications for firms in industries such as legal and medical records. 365 offers the scalability necessary for Utopia as it grows its business and works to meet increasing demand for cloud and virtual servers, as well as HIPPA and SSAE 16 compliance.

In my personal desire to “get modern” with myself and the company, I am happy to say that we’ve all made the move to touch, we’re all on Windows 8 and on Office 365. So far so good. I recently decided to “clean house” and make OneDrive my primary data repository. That way I can access my information anytime, anywhere. As I started to move my “Documents” on the C: drive to the OneDrive via File Explorer, I hit a snag. The consumer-side OneDrive offers 15GB free storage. My Documents’ data corpus exceeded 33GB. So the copy operating failed just before mid-point. Read below for my interim solution as part one of my journey. In part two, I’ll complete the transition to OneDrive for Business 2013.

The short answer is that I increased my OneDrive storage to 100GB for $1.99 a month by making a frictionless online purchase from Microsoft. The transition was akin to buying a service from Amazon, perhaps the gold standard for online purchases. The file copy from “Document” on my C: Drive restarted at its point of failure and completed a bit later. Full disclosure: I went for a late afternoon bike ride while the copy function completed. My local C: Drive is nearly empty after this data migration.

Pictured: Bike ride with my son during the One Drive data migration

By Jesse Hebisen, Centurion Technologies

We have all been there; no matter how many times we tell them - DO NOT CLICK the link in the email, they still do it. Now the client is upset and you have to spend time to clean the computer and get them up and running again. Even worse, in the course of fixing the problem, the client may lose valuable data or emails saved before the attack.

Office 365 migration and deployment creates a lot of revenue opportunities for partners yet still leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit in the form of additional products and services. attachedapps helps you grab some of that fruit by helping you solve your SMB customers’ #1 pain point: attracting, retaining and growing their customer base. attachedapps are powerfully simple apps that “attach” to Office 365 and run on Azure, address critical needs like contact management, sales tracking, and customer service support.

By Joanne Black, Founder, No More Cold Calling, LLC

Technology is fantastic, but it will never replace a great salesperson.

You are the ultimate sales technology! As a buyer, I don’t care how your technology works until I know what it can do for my business. The same is true for your prospects and clients.

Over the last 30 years, I’ve seen technologies come and go. Many of them have contributed to the effectiveness of salespeople, but none of them has managed to replace us. And I doubt this will ever change, because selling is (and has always been) a person-to-person business.

Hey folks, join us on September 9 from 6:30-7:30 pm in the Boston, MA area for a Beerfest, presented by D&H Distributing! This will be a great night of networking, food and fun!

We will be at the RiverBend Bar:
Marriott Hotel Newton
2345 Commonwealth Ave
Newton, Massachusetts 02466 USA

You’ve never had a better opportunity to grow your business!

Driving a new norm in IT, Zynstra Cloud Managed Server Appliances deliver the best in on-premise and the Cloud. Integrated, secure and “as a service”. Your customers’ decide what runs where, we take care of the rest.

Help your customers’ transition from Windows Server 2003 & SBS 2003 to Zynstra’s Cloud Managed Server Appliances and benefit from:

ü  Offer your customers the best of local and Cloud IT

ü  Integrate Office 365, Azure & SPLA solutions

ü  Highly sticky recurring revenue, no capital costs

ü  You control your customer pricing, billing & support

ü  Compelling margins & upsell opportunities

ü  Dramatically increased operational efficiency from deployment to support

Take your business to the next level with Hybrid IT.

 Watch our 90 second video to find out more:

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

Blake Schwank is no novice when it comes to managed IT services and providing HIPAA Consulting Services to his clients. He’s been the CEO of Colorado Computer Support (CCS) since 2001, and has built one of Colorado’s premier MSP operations.

But if you ask him, Blake will tell you that even though he thought his company and his team were “covering the bases” when it came to their routine HIPAA Risk Assessments, as soon as they started using Network Detective he realized how much more his company could do to protect his clients – as well as his own business.

“When we first purchased the Network Detective HIPAA Compliance module, I figured it would be a quicker and easier way for us to generate the mandatory reports our clients need in order to be in compliance with the sweeping HIPAA regulations,” Blake told me.

“Once we ran our first report, I realized the true value in using this tool was with the evidence it provided to the client. By the time we complete the interviews, they realize we know what we are doing. Once we turn that into a report that references the specific HIPAA requirements, it is no longer just my team trying to convince the client of the need for policies or hardware expenditures. We can point them to the exact rules”

Another significant value was the ability to do internal IT audits of his own team. “The fact of the matter is, nobody’s perfect,” said Blake. “After we collect all the data needed for the analysis, we run a set of draft reports to see if my team has missed a task or a system like Antivirus, or updates have failed. They are easy to identify because the issues that need to be addressed are printed in red. Those are issues we need to resolve internally for the client to ensure they are compliant.”

Blake said that the final reports are proof to the client – and also to any government auditor – that all the required HIPAA policies related to electronic patient information are in place, and are being enforced. And if there are remaining risk issues that are dependent on the client to address, Blake and his team can point that out as well.

“We don’t charge our clients for these reports,” said Blake. “Our business model is to provide our clients with comprehensive services, and our fees cover the services we deliver.”

Blake also pointed out that even though there’s plenty of HIPAA-related information that has to be manually collected to supplement the network data collected by the Network Detective tool, all that information can be entered into the tool in one place, and the real savings is in the generation of the reports.

“It would take us weeks to compile and organize all of the data we collect to generate the reports that come out of Network Detective in minutes,” he said. “And we can easily brand them as our own. We realized our ROI on this tool with the first HIPAA risk assessment we performed.”

Microsoft promises O365 Fast Track won’t eat your lunch

Microsoft kicked off the week with a promise that the new Fast Track O365 services, which will include free remote “onboarding” and support to some customers starting in early September, won’t cut into partner business. Microsoft also announced plans to provide free email migrations to Office 365 through a special "adoption offer" that starts Sept. 1 and will run until March 31^st.

Naturally, Microsoft Partners who make their living charging for those services have expressed concern over the fact that the channel leader is essentially eating their lunch. In response to the outcry, Microsoft says that it will only do email migration work that can be easily automated and done remotely. This includes processes like domain configuration, service provisioning and identity-related tasks. Perhaps we should be inferring that Microsoft channel partners have never heard of remote monitoring and management (RMM) solutions and don’t do anything remotely. In any case, Microsoft promises to advise customers who choose the free Fast Track services to work with a partner anyway, especially if they have complicated environments. The company also ensures partners that Sharepoint and Lync will be unaffected by the new fast Track services and so represent areas of opportunity for partners.

This was promptly followed by news that Huawei will no longer produce Windows Phone devices. Richard Yu, who runs Huawei's consumer business group, told The Wall Street Journal that Windows Phone Devices have been a money pit for Huawei. "We have tried using the Windows Phone OS, but it has been difficult to persuade consumers to buy a Windows phone," said Yu. "It wasn't profitable for us. We were losing money for two years on those phones. So for now we've decided to put any releases of new Windows phones on hold."

AVG releases new O365 service module

Speaking of remote monitoring and management, AVG Technologies has released a new service module for its Managed Workplace tool (formerly Level Platforms Managed Workplace) designed to streamline remote management functions for customers using O365. With the new offering MSPs no longer have to log into and out of different applications to view essential Office 365-related information. According to the company, the new module will enable MSPs to remotely deliver the five most popular management tasks: password resets; tracking mailbox usage; viewing mailbox quotas, policies and memberships; setting alerts for license expiration; and checking up-to-date information on subscriptions, usage and license status.

HP partners with Avaya to deliver UC-as-a-Service

Avaya and Hewlett-Packard have partnered up on a five year deal that will allow HP to include Avaya's hosted unified communications and contact center offerings in its HP Helion cloud services suite. Through the partnership more than half of Avaya’s Private Cloud Services group – including elements of its outsourced communications and managed services operations – will join HP's Enterprise Services division. According to Avaya, the partnership will provide the company with the strength and depth to meet sharply rising demand for its cloud-based UC and CC solutions. HP’s presence in 166 countries compared to Avaya’s in 55 is a significant part of the deal, as the deal opens up many new markets for the telecommunications vendor. Avaya and HP partners will be able to resell both UC and CC service offerings delivered as part of the HP Helion platform. HP Enterprise Services will pick up the service delivery for a large part of Avaya's Private Cloud Services unit.

Nutanix raises $140M in funding

San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix, which develops hyper-converged infrastructure technology, has closed a new round of funding worth $140 million it expects will lead to an IPO – possibly as soon as next year. While the company declined to identify the investors, a report in Reuters, cited an unnamed source that named them as Fidelity Investments and Wellington Management. Nutanix will use the funds to deepen its R&D and Sales teams so it can keep up in what is shaping up to be a highly competitive market. In the last few weeks alone SimpliVity, VMware, Maxta and Overland, who have all made major hyper-converged infrastructure-related announcements recently. According to the company, the new investment brings total funding to about $312 million and gives Nutanix an implied valuation of about $2 billion.

When Laurie Speaks took over Marketing and Communications for Retail Solutions Inc., (RSi) one of the first things she noticed when doing her budgeting was that the demand for travel from sales and marketing was significantly higher than she could support.

Mountain View, Calif.-based RSi tracks point of sale data in real time and provides actionable demand data and predictive analytics for the Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods industries and Speaks needed to find a way to deliver the value the organization would get from investing in all those trade shows and conferences focussed on IT for the retail sector without actually spending the money required to attend them all.

The solution she came up with was to use webinars to deliver the messaging and drive sales. The only problem was, as those of us in the IT industry know, webinars need to be done just right or they are a waste of time.

Webinars have become almost ubiquitous in the IT industry. They have become a primary method of disseminating information, training, lead generation and qualification. They are far from perfect though. Many are little more than static, overly lengthy and boring. How do you get people to sit still and pay attention while you pitch them for an hour? Moreover, how do you make your webinar one that people will want to attend instead of the other guy’s?

One company I used to work for ran two such webinars each week, and several more focussed on training. A significant part of the junior sales team’s job was simply to get people to show up. Characterised by unidirectional barrages of rapid fire value messages that would – hopefully – stick and resonate with the prospect, those webinars were in a constant state of revision as we worked to come up with new things that would get people to stay until the end. (“We’ll give you a free gift, but you’ll have to email us a code we’ll give you at the end to collect.”) A lot of follow up was required to make sure we got our message across and determine the quality of the lead before hopefully closing business.

Like I said, far from perfect. If Speaks was going to deliver the value demanded of her she needed to find a way to make her webinars do a lot more than simply give people data. They needed to collect data too. Fortunately for Speaks, webinars have become more sophisticated over the past few years. Current approaches include numerous approaches to maintain engagement and connect directly to third-party applications like Marketo that help capture and use lead qualification data.

“A lot of our focus is around demand generation and customer engagement,” says Tom Masotto, VP Product Marketing & Business Development for ON24. San Francisco-based ON24 develops and markets webcasting and virtual event and environmentsolutions.

“A lot of organizations are using webinars to identify new opportunities for the company. Typically they use it at the top of the funnel, doing the lead gen but we’ve seen a trend of late in the use of webinars throughout the process, right through to the closing processes.

ON24 captures about 30 different data points, says Masotto. Did someone register? Did they attend? How long were they on for? Did they attend a live presentation or a recorded one? Did they actively participate (respond to polls, ask questions, etc.)? All these elements and many more combine to give a much more reliable measure of attendee engagement than previous presentation models.

According to Speaks, RSi has seen measurable results from using the tool.

When comparing webinar reach in 2013 and 2014 we’ve “seen an uplift in both registration conversion rate and attendee conversion rate. Our current registration conversion rate averages 98.12% and our attendee conversion rate averages 53 percent.” Prior to adopting On24 and integrating it with Marketo those numbers were around 90% registration conversion and closer to 45% attendee conversion.

As noteworthy as those stats are, Speaks says she is most impressed with the engagement results – something that is critical to RSi. “We’ve done a number of different things with our webinars to keep them engaged; to keep them in the environment. We do polling, give points, award prizes. We have an average of keeping them in there for 54 minutes out of a 56-60 minute webinar. Usually people stay as long as the Q&A at least.

There has also been a significant increase in the number of questions being asked by attendees, suggesting more engagement and attention. “That information is a perfect lead-in for our Sales team and really gives them the additional insight on whether or not they have a qualified lead.”

IBM released “The Individual Enterprise — How Mobility Redefines Business,” a new report that provides guidance to businesses on unlocking enterprise mobility potential.

The report, developed by the IBM Institute for Business Value, highlights the importance of analytics-driven mobile strategies in redefining business and how work gets done.

The International Data Corporation Worldwide Enterprise Videoconferencing and Telepresence Equipment QView showed mixed results for Q2 2014. Though revenue in regions such as North America and Asia/Pacific increased quarter over quarter and decreased year over year, Latin America saw opposite results.

Overall videoconferencing equipment revenue increased 1.8 percent quarter over quarter in Q2 2014, it decreased -9 percent year over year.

LogMeIn, Inc. announced the availability of a new integration between LogMeIn and Autotask designed to help Managed Service Providers increase efficiency and reduce response time.

The remote management and automation features of LogMeIn Central combined with the workflow features of Autotask allow MSPs to create a workflow that eliminates the need to use multiple interfaces to handle ticketing.

"We believe that today's MSPs and IT service providers have a great opportunity to better service their clients, differentiate their services from the competition, and create new revenue streams by addressing the inherent realities of today's mobile, distributed workforce," said Ted Roller, vice president of channel development at LogMeIn. "By bringing together the best of Central and Autotask – tools trusted and relied upon by today's MSPs – we can help our channel partners continuously improve their ability to monitor systems, automate tasks and better manage devices, both inside and outside of office."

Other benefits of the integration include the ability to configure ticket parameters that map to Autotask and to diagnose and fix computers directly from Autotask. 

Folks – I’m always promoting portfolio diversification in the SMB IT Pro Community. My poster child of the month is Ken Edwards, longtime SBSer from Phoenix. With the sad demise of Small Business Server, wise SBSers like Ken are seeking to apply their small business acumen in fields far from technology. The case here is protective red BBQ gloves. I got my pair and started BBQing ASAP! Basically, I was able to manipulate my lamb on the foil on the grill without utensils. I give two unburned thumbs up on these oven mitts. You can help Ken, the community and yourself by purchasing a pair here and have them just in time for your Labor Day BBQ beast feast.

D&H Distributing recently announced the addition of four new services for its education resellers. As many of you have read, the well-respected disty has been fostering an in-depth education program for its resellers, as this particular vertical is rapidly-growing.

“We’re finding the opportunity is not just limited to large-tier resellers in expansive metro areas. There’s a significant market for SMB VARs to gain revenues through regional K-12 installations. As a distribution partner, we provide the guidance and resources that increase the reseller’s ability to capture the sale,” said Larry Staub, director of D&H’s education division.

Continuum recently announced that it has accelerated its partnership with MaaS360 by Fiberlink because of unprecedented growth in mobile device management.

“While the number of mobile devices per individual is rapidly growing and the need for MDM policies is becoming more and more obvious, a fraction of MSPs is still overlooking possibilities offered by including MDM in their day-to-day business,” said Francois Daumard, VP of Channels at Fiberlink. “But, there is a tremendous need and opportunity, and Continuum and Fiberlink make it very easy to get started. With no minimum devices required, Continuum’s MSPs can easily help their clients manage mobile devices alongside their desktops and servers, under the same single pane of glass, addressing HIPAA compliance, security and control over all devices – including mobile.”

We’re only a month away from our SMB Nation 2014 Fall Conference, and I am happy to say that I was able to catch a few moments with one of this year’s speakers. I met with Ben Gower, Managing Director, Perspicuity (pictured), and I asked him, among other things, what his organization does to succeed.

I’ll start with a little background on Perspicuity. This is a UK-based organization focused on Managed Service Consulting, particularly for Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365. I first met Ben at during the Modern Partner Tour, sponsored by Microsoft, Intel and Actiontec, at our Reading, UK tour stop. Read on for my interview:

Harry: So tell me, what was the bookmark for your entry into the computer sector?

Ben: “Haha! I actually come from a farming background in SE England. I started in technology with a major global outsourcing company, and I loved to talk with people, as well as listen, so I quickly moved up the ranks. Then, I went to Xerox in the late 90’s. I did a lot of work in outsourcing on Microsoft contracts.”

Harry: So why choose the Cloud?

Ben: “It’s clear and understandable, and that’s what we built Perspicuity on as well. You know, it makes sense to most IT Pros, and people in general really seem to get it.”

Harry: Great. Let me give you a bit of background about our current situation, and I’ll ask you a question. In the US, we have a very small SMB reseller community, most of whom are coming off the SBS era. This has actually caused an ideological rift between the on-prem SMBs and the Cloud SMBs. Has this been affecting you as well?

Ben: “Not as much. We are very much focused on doing our own thing. Though we were warned about the potential for this conflict, Perspicuity has been just staying focused. To that point, however, we are seeing three types of people: those who love the Cloud, those who are transitioning, but not leading, and those who are staying with their profitable businesses.

Harry: Now, you all have a very interesting business model. Can you tell us, what’s your “Secret Sauce”?

Ben: “Haha, sure. Our secret sauce is that we took time and completely reevaluated what modern Cloud customers want from services. The key change these days is that the IT Pro is moving from the Selling to the Advisory/Educational. So the biggest way to actually gain new revenue is to explain to existing and potential clients the experience they can get. In fact, most cloud customers nowadays are asking, ‘How do I get there?’ more than anything.

Sure, customers will still have concerns about security, but in my view, there are a lot of well-written resources online that you can refer any customers to. Once you’ve told them how to get to a great business tech experience, you work to get them there.

This brings me to another key point, which is that we evaluated the type of staff needed to give the customer that great experience. The truth is that you don’t need a super high level of experience to complete a cloud migration and provide a good experience. The high experience staff should be used for advising. Once the customer is migrated and on our system, we can reach out to them and talk to them about 10 other things we can do to help them. This is not only an interesting model for us, of course, but also for the end-user, who is looking for something new.”

Harry: Yeah, that's very interesting! So let me ask, what’s your employee turnover like, if you are using college upperclassmen, etc.?

Ben: “That’s a good question. In wave one of our program, we had about a 50% turnover after 3 years. Now, we have developed programs to help retain these individuals past the 2-3 year mark, and our turnover is lots lower.”

Harry: Do you provide any kind of Management Consulting?

Ben: “Absolutely. We have SharePoint Devs on staff who are constantly creating new apps for our clients. Also, it’s important to note that when I started out in this industry, we had no Marketing department, the company owners did sales, and everyone else was a techie. Now, I’d say that we are approaching a 50/50 split between Marketing and Technical staff. Our next steps are looking at reselling and customizing packaged products for our clients.

This actually brings me to an interesting point in the Channel today. Most Channel members see that the sole opportunity is Office 365, but it’s not. In fact, that particular portfolio is headed quickly towards maturity, but there are other huge opportunities. Lync Voice comes to mind, and it’s available today.”

Harry: So, how do you get new customers?

Ben: “We do a lot of Lunch and Learns, and Go to Markets with Zynstra and Microsoft. I will admit that, to date, our referral processes aren’t as sophisticated as we’d like them to be, but that’s a major goal for us.

For the SMB Nation Community, I’d suggest that one of the best ways to get new cloud/migration customers is to use their existing list. Just call them and offer new services to existing end users. Depending on the number of clients, this can be very lucrative.”

Harry: Great, and you’re absolutely right. I just have one more major question for you: What tools are you using?

Ben: “The two major solutions are SkyKick and Zynstra, no brainer.”

So there you have it. I want to take time to say a big thank you to Ben for having a great discussion with me! Beyond his work in the IT field, he is a committed husband and father, and he is learning how to kite surf in his spare time. You can listen to Ben Gower speak (and even chat with him) more at our upcoming SMB Nation Fall Conference, September 26-28 in Redmond WA! Registration and agenda information is available at: http://fall2014.smbnation.com.

Canadian telecommunications company TELUS partnered with Vox Mobile and AirWatch to create “MDM Made Easy,” a turn-key mobile device management solution.

MDM Made Easy is a cloud-hosted, quick-to-deploy, feature-rich solution that eliminates the need for on-premise hardware and simplifies the processes for enrolling, configuring, and updating devices with pre-configured user profiles.

"AirWatch, TELUS and Vox Mobile have come together to enable Canadian businesses to drive transformation across their organization through mobile," said John Marshall, senior vice president and general manager, AirWatch by VMware. "By leveraging AirWatch's best-in-class platform and TELUS' coast-to-coast network, TELUS MDM Made Easy helps businesses quickly deploy a leading solution that combines connectivity, security, service, simplicity and value."

TELUS business customers receive a complementary basic package for their TELUS devices, and can further customize MDM Made Easy with additional security features such as secure email, application scanning, file sharing, and web browsing.

Visual solution product provider ViewSonic Corp. joined up with NaviSite and NVIDIA to showcase its new VDI client at VMworld.

ViewSonic’s CDE-8451-TL, an 84-inch, 4k, touch screen display, works seamlessly with NaviSite’s cloud-hosted Desktop as a Service that includes NVIDIA GRID technology. NVIDIA GRID technology benefits users by giving them the ability to offload graphics processing from the CPU to the GPU in a virtualized environment.

IT management company ManageEngine today announced availability of VMware Horizon View monitoring in its application performance monitoring solution, Applications Manager.

VMware Horizon View Monitoring will enable enterprises to view and understand virtual desktop infrastructures running on Horizon View so they can deliver optimal performance to employees that use applications delivered via Horizon View.

Hey folks, I recently had the chance to interview En Pointe Technologies, a Los Angeles, CA-based IT Solutions Provider. I spoke with Tyler Coppock the company’s Director, Microsoft Cloud Solutions, and we had a great conversation about the trends they are seeing in the IT space.

According to En Pointe, Microsoft has been receiving quite a bit of heat for their issues with the Office 365 support, particularly as it relates to wait time. “Even when our support desk calls Microsoft, we’re on there an hour and a half, two hours wait time, consistently,” said Tyler in our interview. “So this is really a resource thing for Microsoft.”

McAfee today announced advancements to its Server Security Suites portfolio, including optimized performance and additional management efficiency to improve security in physical, virtualized, and cloud server environments.

Servers are often the target of threats and attacks due to the significant amounts of data stored, which makes securing them a top priority.

“Today’s flexible data centers require innovative solutions that shield physical, virtual and cloud environments from stealthy attacks,” said Candace Worley, senior vice president and general manager of endpoint security at McAfee, part of Intel Security. “Our Server Security Suites guard servers, the crown jewels of the data center, with comprehensive protection, simplified security management, improved scalability for large environments and connections into key technologies throughout the data center.”

McAfee’s new server security suites, McAfee Server Security Suite Essentials and McAfee Server Security Advanced, both include McAfee MOVE AV technology, complete blacklisting, and optimized virtualization support capabilities. McAfee Server Security Advanced includes whitelisting and additional, comprehensive server security protection.

Demos of these products will be available at Intel’s VMworld booth, #1721, until August 28.

Recently, Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella (pictured), defined the Office 365 opportunity as the new gold rush. It’s a heartfelt and accurate statement. Nearly every day Microsoft is reporting new sales records confirming Office 365’s momentum. Simply stated, this is the real deal and you need to hear that message right here, right now!

Photo credit: Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

So what are the first steps along the long-term Office 365 journey? Consider attending the first independent conference dedicated to Office 365 this fall at Microsoft Redmond. Dubbed “Office 365 Nation,” this is a three-day deep-dive summit into both the technical and business conversations surrounding Office 365. Powered by the well-respected SMB Nation community, this conference offers, in addition to peer interactions, the following 20 impactful content sessions:

By Raymond Vrabel, Director, Technical Account Management, Continuum Managed IT Services

Part 7 of a monthly blog series examining tips on how MSPs can work to break “bad” business habits that they might unknowingly fall into as a result of just wanting to get things done.

In the previous installment of “Breaking Bad,” I discussed how to make a solid plan for navigating the industry trade show landscape. In this month’s blog, I offer a few tips on how to avoid becoming complacent in your business, by adding a few simple technologies to your services offering—all at a relatively low cost.

Before focusing on the technology aspect, think about your customer base and how you want to approach your clients about trying something new. I’m not suggesting that you approach them immediately and offer the full managed services gamut. However, by adding just one of these technologies and then building upon it, you can get there one step at a time. In addition, you can effectively demonstrate to your clients that you are being proactive about your business model.

Consider these technologies for your portfolio:

1.) Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM): While you might currently be working as break/fix, managed services is still trending at an upward pace. In fact, recent studies are predicting a bumper year in 2014 for MSPs. According to MarketsandMarkets,the managed services market will grow by almost 80%, from $142.75 billion in 2013 to $256.05 billion in 2018. This demand is set to translate acrossevery industry vertical. However, even if you are apprehensive about offering a recurring business model, start slowly by first adding an RMM tool. Find one that provides the freedom to scale your business and allows you to invest as little or as much as you want.

Providing some type of remote support is key when a problem should occur; it’s even appropriate if you are running a break/fix model. This way, you can think about issues before they occur, all while keeping employee uptime to a maximum and avoiding downtime. Remember, each time you do something that’s proactive for your business (like adding RMM), you are moving one step closer to a managed services model, whether you intend to or not.

2.) Regular Updates and Patch Management: No solution provider wants, no matter what business model they are offering, a client whose patches are out of date and not secure – this could lead to potential disaster. For instance, think about what happened earlier this month with the Community Health System security breach; nearly 4.5 million patient data records were compromised. While this is a much larger scale than your SMB clients, even if just one of your clients experiences a data breach, it can lead to much larger problems. Most of these breaches and viruses, for example Cryptolocker, ultimately settle by way of weak or out-of-date patches. Patches can protect against these vulnerabilities in which hackers can easily gain access. By keeping track of your clients’ patches and offering updates, you save both yourself and your client time and stress that could lead to a possible data compromise.

3.) Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR): This is a technology that is truly a no-brainer. Even if you only budget for one additional technology, I recommend BDR. It offers low overhead to your client and is not costly for you. I have seen many solution providers who have shifted their business model to managed services simply because they wanted to add BDR. Managed services isn’t something you can actually “touch” and/or “feel,” so many times it can seem a bit more daunting when moving from break/fix--not to mention a harder value proposition sell to your client. But because BDR is an actual device and function that can be demonstrated, it is often the stepping stone that leads to a managed services model. This, coupled with its ROI and up-front cost-effective price point, can be the first move toward putting together an eventual managed services model. And you might even pick up some new clients along the way.

4.) File Sync and Share: In the last year, I have seen more gravitation toward this technology. File sync and share offers low overhead and cost and is another way to get your foot in the door to talk with new clients about this hot topic. File sync and share could also be a way to get your business ready to move to the cloud (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet). The reality is that everything is moving into a virtual world, and now with the cloud and other phenomenons such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and smartphones, users want to access their data anywhere, and at any time. With a reliable file sync and share platform, you can offer this (along with BDR) to ensure that your client’s data is safeguarded and accessible at all times.

Complacency can occur at any time within your business. Take time each month to step back and perform a quick re-evaluation. By adding just one of these technologies, you can gain a “double dip” for both yourself and your client—adding a new offering to benefit your clients and possibly obtain new ones. You can also move one step closer to offering a managed services model. It really is a lot easier than you might have thought!

Raymond Vrabel is Continuum's Director of Technical Account Management and participates in product and service growth initiatives. He manages Continuum's Technical Account Management team which supports over 3,400 partners worldwide. Vrabel has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, specializing in managed IT services, disaster recovery and cloud solutions. Follow him on Twitter: @rayvrabel.

StorageCraft Technology Corporation will be exhibiting at VMworld 2014, where it will preview for the first time its StorageCraft Plug-in for VMware.

StorageCraft will be located in booth no.2531 from Aug. 24-27.  VMworld attendees can pre-register for the StorageCraft demo here, with the first 100 attendees to see the demo receiving a free time-limited StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition subscription.

“Attendees will get a sneak peek at the next addition to the StorageCraft Recover-Ability™ Solution,” said Curt James, StorageCraft vice president of marketing and business development. “The StorageCraft Plug-in for VMware will solidify StorageCraft as one of the best disaster recovery solutions for physical and virtual environments.”

The StorageCraft Plug-in for VMware will allow users to monitor the status of VM backups and start, pause, and resume a backup job. More information is available here.

For many technology solution providers (TSPs), giving clients the best service offering possible is a key focus, and they have the best intentions for how to make that happen. They work hard, log long hours and yet they find themselves in a position to ask, “Where are the profits? What about customer loyalty? Why isn’t it happening?”

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Autotask adds sales tool

East Greenbush, N.Y.-based PSA vendor Autotask unveiled the new Autotask Opportunity Assessment/Sales Process tool – a new element aimed at helping channel partners increase their closure rates with better opportunity and sales process management. The new addition to the Autotask suite provides enhanced visibility into the sales pipeline, right from prospect identification through to deal completion. Additionally, the tool provides key analytics and intelligence. According to Jake Carroll, Autotask’s vice president of strategic account sales, the new solution will take a lot of the guesswork out of the sales process. Through process standardization, sales organizations will be able to gather and apply intelligence that will not only help provide more internal structure and identify opportunities, but also deliver better prospect qualification so sales staff can concentrate their attention and energy on the best prospects. The new tool will be included in the Autotask Ultimate Bundle or can be added on separately.

Bluebeam invests in Marketing support for Partners

Pasadena, Calif.-based Bluebeam Software has been investing in Marketing and Sales resources to help support channel partners pushing its document collaboration tools into highly technical verticals like manufacturing and oil and gas. Bluebeam’s Revu 12.5 competes against the likes of Adobe Acrobat and other PDF creation tools. The company has quadrupled its marketing staff from one to four people, adding much needed bandwidth that will make it possible to provide partners with vertically tailored pitches and promotional materials. The added strength is already making itself apparent on the industry conference circuit, where Bluebeam is now able to raise its profile. Bluebeam attended 60 events by the end of the first quarter, demonstrating its technology, answering questions and recruiting channel partners, equaling the entirety of its 2013 travel schedule. Currently Bluebeam takes in about 40 percent of its revenue through the channel, but says it would like to see that number closer to the 70 percent range.

IDC: SDN reaching market adoption threshold

According to new research from IT analysis firm IDC, software-defined networking (SDN) is rapidly approaching an inflection point where it will become mainstream technology. IDC forecasts released last week have the global SDN market – which combines physical network infrastructure, controller and network virtualization software, SDN network security services and SDN-related professional services – growing from $960 million in 2014 to more than $8 billion by 2018. That’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 89.4 percent! Moreover, while large cloud services providers have been the early adopters, IDC expects its SDN to see similar traction in the enterprise segment. And it’s news that will have the likes of Cisco and VMware salivating as they have already made significant investments in SDN – VMware with its NSX software overlay platform, and Cisco with the Application Centric Infrastructure.

VMware acquires CloudVolumes

Speaking of VMware, the Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization vendor acquired CloudVolumes, a startup that specializes in delivering virtual applications to desktops. According to a blog post by Kit Colbert, CTO of End-User Computing at VMware, app delivery is often "challenging and cumbersome." CloudVolumes has developed technology which addresses the numerous glitches that crop up by splitting a Windows instance into separate pieces to which apps can be installed with ease and speed. If is delivers as advertised, the CloudVolumes technology – which is applicable in both virtual and physical environments – will make it possible for technicians to add new or upgraded apps on the fly on running desktops obviating the need to schedule a service outage to perform system upgrades. VMware plans to integrate the new technology with its Horizon desktop virtualization platform. The financials of the deal were not but VMware said in a press release that the transaction will not be material to its financial performance. To date CloudVolumes, which was established in 2011, has raised $4.4 million through two funding rounds.

Email encryption provider DataMotion announced it has partnered with Rain Networks. The DataMotion-Rain Networks partnership will be centered on sales and integration of DataMotion’s encryption solutions for SMBs.

Rain Networks will sell and distribute DataMotion’s encryption offerings through its reseller channel, consisting of VARs, system builders, technology consultants and technical service providers.

“We’re on opposite sides of the country but have had a close relationship with Rain Networks for quite some time. By fortifying and combining efforts under this new partnership, DataMotion greatly increases its visibility in the small business market, making it easier and more cost-efficient for a business to buy and integrate our security solutions,” said Bob Bales, CEO of DataMotion.

PowerSourceOnline.com is the largest B2B computer, printer, networking and telecom exchange that connects buyers and sellers of IT parts. The online marketplace for buyers and sellers of telecom systems and parts, networking equipment, computers and laptops and other IT equipment is the largest online network for the secondary telecommunication and IT marketplace. Since its creation in 1997, PowerSource remains committed to providing quality sourcing and disposition solutions of hard-to-find, excess, discontinued, obsolete and end-of-life computer parts and systems. With a global member base of over 2000 members consisting of Dealers, Resellers, Brokers and Service Companies, locating computer parts, systems, telecommunication equipment, peripherals, printers and networking equipment has never been easier! In 2010, Telecom Finders joined the PowerSource Online website and community to add telecom parts and equipment to the already expansive IT and computer parts and equipment database.