SMB Nation Blog

In a virtual world of online business websites and social media marketing, the question for any corporate blog beginner is how to draw people to their website and keep them interested.

The answer is, on one level, fairly simple, and yet there is an underlying complexity to it. You need quality content that is relevant and written in an engaging style that will continue to attract interest right now and into the future too.

While content may be king, each type of content does not rule equally. There are some well tested content styles that have proven to be effective and could work well for you. Here are 10!:

We received news that Results Software and Constant Contact, have partnered to give away a free 12-month basic subscription of Constant Contact to SMB Nation Members for today only! This giveaway is to celebrate Results Software’s CRM integration with the email marketing company.

This subscription is worth $180.00, and is available to any SMB Nation Community Member who does not already have a Constant Contact subscription!

Just sign-up for the offer here. Interested parties must sign up before CoB (Close of Business) today, May 28, to receive the free year’s subscription!

Please see more detailed information about the offer at the bottom of the sign-up page.

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

I’m a high tech marketing guy, and make a living generating leads, awareness and interest for IT products and services.

So, more than most, I know how hard it is for most IT Service companies to land new clients. That’s why it’s so important to make the most of the clients you have.

Noted IT services guru Erick Simpson has teamed up with RapidFire Tools to show IT service pros how to make more money with their existing clients. They’re offering up a free training video plus valuable documents that you can also download for free by clicking here.

Your weekly roundup of IT news for the channel

Vigilance Networks launches new global partner program

Security Intelligence vendor Vigilance Networks announced a new global partner program, although the Denver, CO-based company provided very few details about exactly what support would be available to the channel. The Vigilance Network Security Intelligence Platform helps users secure their networks while supporting IP applications and mobile end points. Formerly known as Vibesec, Vigilance said the new channel program will enable security, solution and service providers to offer its Security Intelligence Platform as a service to address critical operations, security, fraud and compliance issues. Early partners include: ASLO Information Technologies, Weidenhammer, VOIPHEAD, and Cirosec.

Avnet unveils new Government Solutions Division

Avnet Technology Solutions has established a new division that will focus on driving U.S. government sales for its channel partners, including ISVs, VARs and integrators. Avnet Government Solutions will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on the U.S. public sector. “The U.S. government is the world’s largest and most lucrative IT market, and the federal, state, local and education sectors are expected to spend more than $148 billion in IT-related purchases in 2014,” said the new division’s GM Ray Ramey in a prepared statement. “We created Avnet Government Solutions to provide our partners with a single source for all of the resources they need to succeed in pursuing government IT business."

Extreme Networks announces new IdentiFi wireless LAN

Extreme Networks announced a new outdoor access point that will allow users to take their work outside the office and anywhere in the campus environment and extend connectivity for wearable IP devices. According to the company, the new IdentiFi WLAN access point will deliver reliable and easy to use Wi-Fi for high-traffic areas. Extreme Networks' wireless solutions are designed for a number of environments, from stadiums to college campuses and more. The latest offering – the 3865 802.11ac WLAN outdoor access point – extends IdentiFi’s capabilities and scale beyond traditional workplace Wi-Fi by offering complete parity for software capabilities and functions found with the indoor solution. IdentiFi offers three times over-the-air performance compared to 802.11n. It also offers increased throughput with air-to-wire transition, supporting 75,000 packets per second for both indoor and outdoor APs. Finally, the new solution features zero-touch AP initialization, allowing new applications and services to be delivered with a single click.

Microsoft announces plans to make Azure available to partners and resellers

Starting August 1^st, Microsoft partners will be able to resell Azure cloud services through it’s open licensing program. The move is aimed at keeping SMBs from switching to Amazon Web Services and Google. Under existing arrangements, Microsoft customers have to buy Azure services directly from Microsoft or get them as part of an Enterprise Agreement. After August 1, Microsoft's partner community will be able to buy Azure services from distributors and resell them to customers. According to a blog post by Josh Waldo, Microsoft’s senior director of cloud partner strategy, Microsoft partners will be able to take advantage of the "flexible monetary payments" available through Open Licensing to "grow margins and deepen customer relationships." To resell Azure services, partners will buy tokens from distributors and apply the credit to their customers' Azure portal in $100 increments.

Lenovo posts strong earnings

Chinese PC-maker Lenovo reported a 25 percent revenue increase, thanks to strong PC and smartphone sales for its fiscal Q4. Net profit hit $158 million, up from $127 million in the same period last year. The channel-centric company, which derives more than 85 percent of its US sales from integrators, VARs and MSPs, has managed to increase PC shipments by 11 percent despite the overall market contracting by as much as two percent according to Gartner Group. Increased smartphone sales are attributed to strength in the Chinese market. Lenovo recently announced plans to acquire IBM's x86 server business and Google’s Motorola division. According to a Bloomberg analysis, once the IBM and Google deals are complete, the company will have revenues of $50 billion, up from $15 billion five years ago. Current year-to-year revenues were reported at $38.7 billion.

It’s springtime, and we are refreshing our White Paper Library with two additions from Symantec! One lucky person to download either one of these white papers will be selected to win a FREE Miracast device on June 23! You can download these two white papers easily from the two links below:

"Security and the Cloud"

In This White Paper:

Why are security and the Cloud a perfectly matched pair for your business? Independently, they have lots of benefits. Security protects your key devices, like PCs, and laptops, from cyber-thieves’ malware, viruses and other nasty threats that can compromise, or even destroy, your business’ critical information.

Cloud technology, on the other hand, might seem complicated but it’s really a simple way to use sophisticated software, like security technology, without the day-to-day hassles of software updates, hardware maintenance, and other expensive and time-consuming tasks.

But both are better together—especially for small and medium businesses who want to protect their key information, but don’t have a full-time IT shop to support the infrastructure.

ProBoards, an Orange County, CA-based Internet forums hosting company, recently announced the addition of Forums.net. This new platform has been specifically designed for SMB needs, and is powered by the company’s ProBoards Version 5 software. I was able to have a chat with ProBoards President and CEO, Patrick Clinger, yesterday, and he gave me the rundown on the new platform, as well as some insightful observations on why SMBs should use forums in everyday business.

Purchasing new machines can be a considerable expense for most small businesses. As the workplace continues to change and evolve due to social and mobile, savvy entrepreneurs understand the need to invest in devices that are best suited to the needs of everyone on staff. If you’re ready to take your company’s productivity to the next level, Intel has created a quick infographic with divergent arrows to help locate what device is best for you and your small business team.

Join SMB author and coach Karl Palachuk for the second of two companion webinars on project management. In this webinar, Karl shows how to use the project scope to manage client expectations, employee labor, and the project itself. Project management in the small business space should be simpler than most of us make it. Karl takes us step by step through the management and execution of a successful project. This includes an outline of using your PSA ticketing system to properly manage a project.

Here are the details:

Earlier this week, D&H Distributing announced that is has signed an agreement with San Diego, CA-based RoBo 3D, an upcoming 3D printer manufacturer. This agreement gives D&H exclusive rights to distribute RoBo 3D’s “Fused Deposition Modeling” 3D printers to its SMB and education reseller bases.

Earlier today, Symantec announced the release of its Norton Small Business, a cybersecurity solution built specifically for SMBs. I was able to speak with the company’s Senior Director Marketing, North America Consumer and Small Business Marketing, Anne O’Neill, who took me through the solution’s key features, as well as its roots.

To begin, Anne let me know that Symantec developed the Norton Small Business solution with the help of its user community. The three major wishes for SMBs were simplicity, flexibility and BYOD support. Anne also told me that Symantec recently did a survey on the current state of SMB security. The result was that SMBs, as you all well know, are time-starved and are very value-conscious.

If you are like most MSPs, more new business comes through referrals than any other single source of leads. You’re also not alone if you think going to a networking event is on par with a trip to the dentist. With a few simple strategies, you can make your trips to the meetings less stressful…and maybe even something you come to enjoy.

1. Set your long term goals

Just like every business process, you should decide how networking fits into the overall growth of the company. In general, the goal of networking is to build referral business. But, consider different approaches you can take to expanding your referral network, including:

• Expand your connections within the local business community,
• Connect with complementary partners for reciprocal referrals and shared opportunities,
• Build your reputation as an expert in a specific industry.

Of course you can take more than one approach, but it’s better to get deeply involved in one organization than to spread yourself across too many. Shaking hands and trading cards is not enough to build enough trust for someone to be comfortable referring business your way.

Your weekly roundup of IT news for the channel

Dimension Data buys Teliris

Dimension Data has acquired another company – the second in the last three weeks – in its ongoing bid to double its current annual sales of $6 billion over the next four years. New York-based Teliris was one of the first companies to offer cloud-based managed telepresence videoconferencing services. The acquisition is the second in the past 20 days for the South Africa-based $6 billion solution provider. On April 23^rd, Dimension Data significantly expanded its US presence by picking up Nexus (valued at $471 million). Like the Teliris deal, financial details were not disclosed. According to Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data's IT as a Service business unit, the Teliris deal will allow Dimension Data to "accelerate the development of a true videoconferencing as a service offering to the market." The statement went on to say that Teliris will continue to operate under the Teliris brand for now, offering the services it does today and supporting "its current managed services clients using its own proprietary technologies and cloud platform."

Symantec’s Q4 performance reflects positive moves

Troubled internet security and data management vendor Symantec has taken a series of positive steps over the past few months, including a revamped channel program, new products and improved internal sales processes – steps that are reflected in its fourth quarter earnings performance. While revenue is down by 7 percent, profits are up with net income reportedly $217 million generating 32 cents per share. The Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor has been in an ongoing transition as it fights to stay relevant in the market. That transition was undermined in March when CEO Steve Bennet was suddenly relieved of his duties. The search for a permanent replacement – the company’s third new chief executive in four years – is ongoing. In the meantime, interim CEO Michael Brown says he expects to see modest revenue growth return later in fiscal 2015.

HP reorganises U.S. sales and channel operations

In a move aimed at streamlining its sales and channel activities, Hewlett-Packard has reorganised its U.S. sales operations. As of May 1^st, HP is focused on three separate geographic zones instead of just one, with a separate team addressing the Fed. Prior to the re-org, HP’s Enterprise Group was running several different sales models for its x86 and Mission Critical servers. The storage, networking and services teams also operated independently and had their own strategies. Going forward, executive teams are streamlined with each territory headed by a single VP to who all support staff, including the regional channel director, reports.

Tech Data Partner conference: Expanded VMware cloud BDR offerings, new Cisco training announced

Tech Data Corporation took the opportunity of its TechSelect Partner Conference in Orlando to announce an expanded relationship with VMware Inc., through which the IT distributor will offer vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery. The new disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering is aimed at midsized businesses and is built on VMware’s hybrid IaaS platform -- vCloud Hybrid Service. DRaaS, which is available from Tech Data’s Solutions Store, makes it possible for IT solutions providers to deliver disaster recovery and protection coverage to any end user applications running in a vSphere virtual environment.

Tech Data also announced new educational programs for Cisco partners. Dubbed Core and BOOST, the new programs deliver a range of training from entry level programs to personalized post-specialization offerings in the form of 30-minute webinars. Each Core (basic level) webinar addresses a specific topic that supports one of meta-topics: Cisco 101, Partnering with Cisco, CCW Platform, Programs and Promotions, and Cisco Services. The BOOST program is more advanced, having been designed to support Cisco partners with guidance on Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Services, and require more advanced Cisco qualifications. Qualified solution providers can access a variety of support offerings including: consultation services, case studies, business transformation workshops, industry experts, personalized sales enablement trainings, demand-generation tools, and mobility applications.

Continuum released book on “everything managed services”

The content marketing team at Continuum has been busy. The Boston-based RMM vendor just released an e-book that purports to be the “definitive guide to managed IT services.” The book covers the history and evolution of the MSP and looks at various tools and service delivery models designed to help MSPs better serve clients. Readers also get some insights into costs and third-party vendor evaluation criteria. In amongst all the self-serving marketing messaging – like why you should have an integrated RMM and NOC offering, something that very few vendors offer – and the irrelevant history lesson, readers who have yet to make the move from break/fix to recurring revenues might find some morsels of real value. In particular if you’re an MSP with a really, really good sales team, you may find value using the book as a leave behind with your prospects. Though if you can get someone to read a book, you probably already have the account. 

Thanks to the spread of IT into our homes, offices and pockets, we're all fluent in what was once considered "geek” speak - hard drive, RAM, WiFi, backups and bytes are now everyday words.

But what is Internet Presence Management (IPM)?

Well simply put, IPM sums up everything your SMB is doing online. If your IT firm has a website, then it has an internet presence - even if it is just a single page site with a number and a list of services.

But Internet Presence goes far beyond websites. It's about how you're being found by people   looking for products and services using Google or one of the other search engines. It takes in social media like Facebook and Twitter, where people give reviews, likes and links.

PowerSourceOnline.com, the online marketplace for sourcing and selling new, used or refurbished IT & Telecom parts & equipment.

Benefit from PowerSource Online's professional community.

You will very rarely find small business employees and owners just standing behind a counter or sitting at a desk. In today’s business environment, employees are constantly on the move, connecting with customers and bringing in business no matter where they are. The ability to work from anywhere has opened doors and allowed access into communities and worlds that customers might otherwise overlook. The Small Business Administration (SBA) found that 96 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States. It is up to small business owners everywhere to capitalize on this global consumer, but how?

Dell recently announced the Version 6.0 of its Dell KACE K100 Endpoint Systems Management Appliance. I was able to speak with David Kloba, general manager, Endpoint Systems Management, Dell Software, last week about their changes, designed to help SMBs manage the upcoming trend of IoT (Internet of Things), as well as what drove them to make the enhancements.

One of the key messages Lenovo has been emphasizing Accelerate 2014 – the company’s annual partner forum which kicked off Monday in Orlando – is about device proliferation. The tremendous variety of devices available infuses the market with confusion, making it difficult for VARs to figure out exactly which computer, tablet, server, etc., to sell in any given situation.

Naturally, the company unveiled two new additions to its device line-up.

While the two concepts may seem contradictory, the new products are intended to be a case of subtraction by addition. The new devices are expected to help solve the device confusion problem by providing equipment that will solve specific issues for end users.

For example, the new ThinkPad 10 tablet sidesteps the long-standing challenges of BYOD by providing business users with a business-oriented tablet computer. Rather than trying to manage a fleet of consumer devices in the workplace, controlling what software and apps are being deployed by staff and ensuring sensitive company data is secure, companies can now deploy a tablet designed from the ground up for the business user.

We’ve always been known for our business devices, says David Rabin, Executive Director Marketing, Lenovo Americas Group. “Over time we’ve realized that one size doesn’t necessarily fit all and we’ve made a range of specialized devices, the (new) tablet being one of them.”

The new 10-inch ThinkPad 10 tablet, which will start at $599, runs Windows 8.1 with 64-bit support on configurations with up to 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB hard drive. Accessories include a digitizer pen, a stand, compact Bluetooth keyboard and a USB3.0 docking station which allow users the flexibility of four different modes of use – tablet, stand, laptop and desktop. It also uses Gorilla glass, reducing the fragility that characterises most tablet products.

The key advantages really seem to be aimed at IT managers though. The new device offers VPN access control, application deployment management and the ability to prevent users from installing prohibited apps. Basically, the goal seems to be to pre-manage the entire Mobile Device Management issue. In addition, Lenovo Services offers a suite of support packages, including sealed battery warranties, accidental damage protection and laser etching and tagging.

“Customers want a versatile device that adapts to their way of life and offers uncompromised productivity whether in the office or on the move,” said Luis Hernandez, vice president and general manager, ThinkPad, Lenovo in a statement. “Our new ThinkPad 10 tablet marries business optimized features with a unique multimode design to offer an exceptional computing experience that allows users to work, play and create in virtually any environment. ThinkPad 10 is engineered for quality you can touch and measure and is designed to adapt to be what you need, when you need it.”

The second new product is the ThinkStation P300 – an entry-level workstation that offers MSPs, VARs and end users enhanced configurability. To start with Lenovo did away with the bulky handle that was a sore point with previous Lenovo chassis designs. There is also a flex module which supports a combination of an ultra-slim optical drive, 29-in-1 media card reader, IEEE 1394 Firewire, and eSATA, essentially allowing a higher level of customization during deployment. The P300 runs on the Intel Xeon E3-1200v3 product family or the 4th Generation Intel Core processor and ECC memory support.

“Professional workstation users run very advanced, specialized applications. The ThinkStation P300 features the processing power, graphics capabilities and ISV certifications, needed to run these applications smoothly,” said Victor Rios, vice president and general manager, Workstation, Lenovo in a statement. “But the ThinkStation P300 also gives these users a new level of customization. The new FLEX module … offers customers truly unique configurations that match their specific project needs and goals.”

David Rabin knows that making things easier for the channel is critical and expects these new products to do just that. “About 85% of our business in this region flows through the partner community, so if we don’t make them successful we won’t be successful,” he said.

Our friends at Channelpro-SMB have an excellent gallery of images of the ThinkPad 10 tablet here.

Today, the Outlook Foundation announced that it is expanding its support for veterans by supplying them with a device so they can seek employment and/or education. Recent studies show that, although dropping, the unemployment rate for returning military personnel is still 7.9%, higher than that of the national rate. This organization, which presented at the 2013 SMB Nation Fall Conference in Las Vegas, is a nonprofit outreach program that assists veterans and children in need.

If you attended our first webinar on the Next SBS, we have great news! Part II will be live this Thursday, May 15 from 9-10 am PDT!

Here are the details:

Registration Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/871136088

Presented by: Harry Brelsford, Founder and Chairman, SMB Nation, Nick East, CEO, Zynstra and Rhett Ryder, VP Business Development, Zynstra

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

Last month I wrote about the huge opportunity that exists for EVERY IT service provider and MSP in the medical and healthcare market.

In that article I explained that recent changes in the federal law called HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), dramatically broadened the definition of what kinds of organizations are required to have formal IT security risk assessments performed annually.

And, if you’re reading this article before 2 PM EST on Thursday May 22, then I strongly recommend that you click here to register for a special SMB Nation webinar, sponsored by RapidFire Tools, Inc. that will open your eyes to this opportunity and give you the secret sauce to make it work for you.

We all know that the work you, our SMB IT Pros, do deserves more than one week of recognition. But we are glad to see a Small Business Week, and we are excited to cover this year’s news! We have stories from Tradeshift and Microsoft, as well as insightful graphics from PayChex and special sessions from PayPal.

Today, D&H Distributing announced that it saw double-digit growth in SMB solution sales during the first quarter of 2014. The company, which just ended its Fiscal Year for 2014 on April 30, is excited about this growth, as well as plans for the future.

In the last article, we talked about Facebook Graph Search - one of the major changes to the popular social networking site since it was launched in 2004. This feature makes Facebook more interactive and personalized. It also offers accurate and almost predictive search results. Basically, it is designed to improve searching on the site. Users simply have to input what they want to search for, and Facebook can figure it out and provide results. If you would like to find out more about this feature, read the first part of this write-up .

We have learned from the last article that Graph Search could vastly increase new traffic to Facebook Pages and eventually new prospects. Thus, it is high time to be prepared as you could witness improvement in your online presence and reap the rewards. This article focuses on how you can optimize your Facebook account and Page to best benefit from Graph Search.

Good morning, SMB Nation Community. We have good news from our partners at the West Sound Technology Association that they will be holding a special “Night at the Living Computer Museum” event on May 15 from 5:30-7:30 pm. This museum, located in Seattle, Washington, is entirely devoted to preserving computing technologies from the past. This allows the SMB community, as well as the general public, to view the technological leaps and bounds that brought us to the present stage of technology.

I periodically want to brief you on developments concerning the million mile Modern Partner Tour, a series of executive workshops that we are conducting globally for Intel, Microsoft and Actiontec. We’re just over halfway done for the current quarter and we’ve honed our message to truly daze and amaze the top 15 reseller partners who are invited to this exclusive event. It’s morphed into an Executive MBA gathering, versus the stand-and-deliver “death by PowerPoint” lecture we’re all too familiar with. And it’s been an honor and a privilege to be along for the journey. To be honest, I have learned more than I’ve delivered – just part of the ongoing US foreign trade deficit that’s burdened my motherland for more than a generation.

Here is my latest report:

With Microsoft ending support for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 being phased out in July 2015, many small businesses (especially those running SBS 2003) are exploring their options for the easiest and most affordable transition to new server and workstation operating systems.

For IT providers, this offers an opportunity to not only update client operating systems, but also to start a conversation about virtualization. Migrating legacy systems from physical machines into a virtual environment offers numerous benefits:

Your weekly round-up of channel and IT news you don’t want to miss.

StorageCraft offers free BDR to storm victims

Now that Tornado season is upon us, StorageCraft Technology Corp. is offering its StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition for free to businesses and non-profit organizations in the affected areas of the Southern and Midwestern United States. These areas include parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee. “The StorageCraft team’s hopes and prayers are with the people affected by this week’s deadly storms," said Curt James, marketing and business development VP of the Draper, Utah-based company in a statement. ShadowProtect IT Edition gives users three days to backup and recover any number of laptops, desktops even if it wasn’t previously installed on the devices.

Perficient purchases Trifecta Technologies’ IBM business for $13.7 million

Perficient is continuing its strategy of picking up assets, expertise and market capacity through acquisition. This week the St. Louis-based solution provider bought Trifecta Technologies’ IBM Smarter Commerce division for $13.7 million. The move follows the purchases in February and April of ForwardThink ($46 million) and BioPharm Systems ($17.6 million) respectively. The roots of the growth-through-acquisition strategy were planted firmly last year with multiple deals for IBM and Salesforce.com businesses, including CoreMatrix in October, and Clear Task and TriTek Solutions in May. According to Perficient executives, the Trifecta business was attractive for a number of reasons, but especially for technology that provides users with a preconfigured store-front with back-end operations on IBM Commerce Suite. In addition to the technology Perficient – which was already IBM’s top U.S. partner in the midsize partner category – also picks up more than 40 employees and significant enterprise class clients. The company plans to take some time to integrate the latest three acquisitions, but expects to make at least one more purchase in the third or fourth quarter as it nears hitting its stated $500 million revenue target by the end of the year.

Michael Dell reveals massive channel business growth [with Ingram Micro] to kick off 2014

Speaking to the inaugural Ingram Micro One event this week, Michael Dell told the audience – made up primarily of channel partners – that Dell’s channel business [with Ingram Micro] grew 95 percent in the 1^st quarter of 2014. Moreover, the company experienced its best growth in five years during the quarter. Dell's Partner Direct program currently has 146,000 partners and accounts for about 30 percent of the company’s total business. “Our channel program has evolved in a tremendous way. The momentum and growth is unparalleled,” he said, adding that he believes its possible for Dell to pull in as much as 75% of its overalll revenues from the channel. “There's tons of upside.” According the Dell, current channel success is built on the foundation provided by the channel programs of the companies it has acquired in recent years, including SonicWall and Quest Software.

Amazon introduces AWS certification

Amazon Web Services has introduced a professional level certification program for its partners. The new certification builds on the AWS Global Certification Program, which was launched last year and allowed technicians, administrators and developers to qualify and validate their skills and abilities to plan, deploy and manage solutions and systems on the AWS public cloud. "The new AWS Certified Solutions Architect -- Professional Level exam validates advanced technical skills and experience and represents the next level of proficiency along the AWS Certified Solutions Architect path, with a focus on the design and development of distributed systems," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, wrote in a blog. According to Barr, candidates for the new certification must already hold the Associate Level certification, and should have several years of experience designing and deploying architectures on AWS. AWS has published an Exam Guide to help applicants prepare for the new test.

SAP creates new channel organization, elevates channel focus

SAP has been undergoing major changes over the past little while, continuing this week with the departures of two senior executives and the creation of a new channel organization that is expected to carry more revenue weight for the company. Early in the week news that Vishal Sikka, the head of SAP's development operations, was leaving the company for personal reasons. A few days later it was revealed that Shawn Price, president of SAP's global cloud operations, also was stepping down. The week has closed with the announcement that the company is creating a new Global Partner Operations organization under Rodolpho Cardenuto who will report directly to CEO Bill McDermott. The GPO will take over responsibility for SAP's existing channels endeavours as well as managing the SAP Business One application set for small businesses, the OEM business, and the vendor’s other strategic partnerships. "The formation of our new Global Partner Operations organization is key to driving scale and adoption of the SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA," McDermott said in a statement. "Rodolpho will engage with a vibrant and open ecosystem of more than 11,500 companies worldwide to unlock the potential of every customer to become a best-run business. Rodolpho's appointment shows that our bedrock commitment to the spirit of partnership with the SAP ecosystem has never been stronger."

Yesterday, Kaseya announced that is has enhanced its Partner Program with new tools, new tiers and more resources. This program, which was rolled out to 150 pilot partners, has already seen great success in the SMB community.

I was able to speak with Kaseya’s Roger Hodskins, vice president of global channels and alliances earlier this week, and he let me know about some of the highlights of the enhanced program. Roger Hodskins joined the Kaseya team in January 2014, and he had been instrumental in the evolution of the company’s partner program. He explained that the company recently combined its Authorized Seller and Certification programs into one, to better give SMBs the support they need in the changing IT environment.

Features of the Kaseya Partner Program include:

Small businesses have to be more agile than ever, often working outside any sort of traditional office and meeting with clients, vendors, and others over the course of a single day. So, are you working like it’s still five years ago?

In years past, before tablets and other mobile devices became mainstream, taking the time to set up a laptop in order to play a non-interactive presentation wouldn’t be considered outside the ordinary. But today, customers of all kinds expect a seamless, polished way of viewing presentations and other business materials.

Yesterday, Microsoft released news that, overall, the increased awareness in security has caused the cost of business to increase for cybercriminals. In fact, the company reported that the number of severe vulnerabilities exploited in Microsoft products decreased by 70% between 2010 and 2013. This news came from the company’s Security Intelligence Report, volume 16.

Despite this, there were still attacks made via “deceptive tactics.” This deceptive tactic behavior actually saw a major increase as well in the latter half of 2013. There was also a trio of threats that worked in tandem, which caused problems for both enterprises and end users:

Earlier today, Zendesk released the results of its Q1 2014 Zendesk Benchmark report, which measures the customer service ratings of over 16,000 organizations from 125 countries. Zendesk reported that customer satisfaction ratings rose one point in Q1 2014 to 81% overall. Zendesk representatives said that, in order to be listed on the Benchmark report, a country has to have over 10,000 responses per quarter.

As such, the company announced that it added Mexico and the Philippines to the Benchmark. In fact, Mexico (6) and the Philippines (16) came in with 88% satisfaction and 78% satisfaction respectively. New Zealand retained its number one spot for the second year in a row with a 92% customer satisfaction rate, followed by Canada (90%) and Norway (90%).

Based on survey recommendations in the marketplace and feedback from thousands of NovaStor Reseller partners, the May 2014 release of NovaBACKUP 16 includes a more robust All-in-One Physical and Virtual backup solution. The new NovaBACKUP Business Essentials product is poised to disrupt the market, offering features usually found in far more expensive solutions.

We recently received news that Microsoft is sponsoring the Seattle Chamber Business Tradeshow, taking place May 15 from 3-7 pm at the CentryLink Field and Events Center. As part of their sponsorship, they are offering free passes to SMBs in our community.

The event is expected to draw 1500 attendees and will include dedicated networking time, as well as a presentation from Marketing Guru Whitney Keyes and a variety of attendee prizes available.

By Brian Ferguson

One of the biggest challenges Value Added Resellers (VARs) face is differentiating themselves from competing VARs that sell similar products. It’s fairly common within a city, or other geographically defined territory, to find several technology providers that offer similar, if not the exact same products and services within a few miles of each other. As a VAR, how can you separate your company from the pack? How can you become the provider of choice in your space? One way to do this is to focus on vertical markets.

Calyptix Security today released a white paper designed to help MSPs accelerate profits. In particular, the white paper outlines three ways that MSPs can better manage their profit lines.

To start, the White Paper, titled: “Profit Rockets: 3 Fast Ways to Accelerate Profit with Better Network Security,” suggests that MSPs get a device that is easy to use. Going deeper into this tip is for MSPs to make sure they are selecting a device/service that is automated, can provide good reports, have good troubleshooting tools and can be managed remotely.

While the title of this article may sound redundant, “isn’t being proactive the whole point of BDR?” being sensitive to your approach to marketing BDR services is important. People don’t want to think about disasters – until they happen. By taking a proactive approach to your BDR marketing, you can position yourself as a champion of business.

Business preparedness

The summer months heighten awareness of natural disasters – from fires to hurricanes – for a large part of the country’s population. That awareness provides a good opportunity to educate your clients and prospects about how they can be proactive to protect their businesses. It’s very important that all of your messaging be focused on the business value of preparation. There is a risk of being perceived as a profiteer instead of an advocate if your message is not genuine.

Resist the urge to use scare tactics to sell BDR. The message of business continuity allows you to take a positive approach to the subject. Help your customers imagine the value of keeping the business moving forward in the face of emergency. 

Registration Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/702257688

Thursday, 8, 2014 10:00-11:00 AM PDT

Presented by: Ken Shaw, Jr., Founder and CEO, Infrascale and Harry Brelsford, Chairman and Founder, SMB Nation, Inc.

Spend 45 minutes with Ken Shaw Jr., Founder and CEO of Infrascale. Ken will cover the company and will detail our award-winning suite of cloud-based data protection tools designed specifically for MSPs and resellers.

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to generate honest-to-goodness qualified leads – that is, having an opportunity to pitch your services to organizations actually ready and able to do business with you.

Most service providers and MSPs I know find marketing and sales to be the hardest part about running their businesses. In fact, most have resigned themselves to relying almost exclusively on word-of-mouth referrals for new clients.

Hot on the heels of revamping its membership access model a few weeks ago, ICT industry association CompTIA has expanded its lobbying and advocacy capabilities with the acquisition of TechAmerica. The new organization will operate under the CompTIA brand, however the lobbying arm will retain the TechAmerica name, at least for the foreseeable future. 

Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO, CompTIA, said the merger is a complimentary one for both organizations, which have very little overlap between them, and creates an organization that will represent the entire ICT industry – from the SMBs that are CompTIA’s traditional strength to the public sector and large private organizations where Tech America has strength.

Shawn Osborne, president and CEO of TechAmerica, echoed the sentiment in a letter posted on his organization’s website this morning. “This is not the merging of two identical organizations. TechAmerica and CompTIA have complementary interests and goals within the ICT industry. Whereas TechAmerica has been a leading voice of large businesses and the tech public sector, CompTIA has built a strong reputation for workforce training and certification, business education and best practices, and advocacy for small and medium technology companies in the IT sector. Joining forces consolidates disparate segments of the ICT sector under one roof to enhance voice, reach and influence. A single, unified organization for commercial and public sector interests allows us to advance business interests and opportunities as a whole.”

“Over the last couple of years our board has been looking for ways to grow the value of CompTIA,” said Thibodeaux. Part of that was revamping the access model which has opened up access to CompTIA’s insight and research for the entire industry through a free membership. CompTIA has also broadened its educational offerings.

“Another part was broadening our reach,” he said, adding they the board knew CompTIA could be doing more for a broader audience and was actively looking for ways to accomplish that without compromising the services delivered to existing members.

The big win for CompTIA really comes with the deepening of is advocacy capabilities. Of the 24 former TechAmerica staffers coming over to CompTIA 14 are lobbyists, quadrupling CompTIA’s existing strength and extending its reach on the state and international levels and especially in Federal procurement.

“It’s about relevancy, it’s about influence,” said Thibodeaux. “And by doing that, hopefully it’s about making the other things we are doing even more powerful.”

CompTIA unveils CertMaster

Speaking of CompTIA’s role in education, the company also unveiled CertMaster a new online learning solution designed to help students and professionals learn and retain technical information more effectively, better preparing them for IT certification exams and, eventually, helping them deliver higher quality services to customers. CompTIA CertMaster uses the latest research in brain science, neurobiology, cognitive psychology and game studies, combining key principles from each field to help users learn necessary information quickly and retain it long-term.

By Raymond Vrabel, Director, Technical Account Management, Continuum

Part three 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 bring out the best in your employee talent. In this month’s blog, I’ll be more specific as to how to encourage your employees (and yourself) to maintain a work/life balance that is realistic and healthy.

Many of today’s MSPs are one-person shops that perform several duties throughout the day; there never seem to be enough hours, and multi-tasking is an understatement. However, whether we are talking about work/life balance for you, the business owner or your employees, it has to start at the top. As the business owner, you set the tone for the rest of the organizational culture. Here are a few tips for you and your employees to begin maintaining a healthy work/life balance.

Our weekly round-up of the IT news you don’t want to miss.

Datto integrates with Servoyant RMM, LabTech integration coming

Datto announced that its image-based backup and disaster recovery technology now integrates with Servoyant’s RMM solution. New features available through Servoyant include new reporting capabilities such as Datto-specific reports and aggregate status of all devices and backup processes. This broadens the penetration Datto has with RMM solutions beyond existing connections to Kaseya and AVG Managed Workplace and more are planned, with LabTech currently in the works.

Xerox integrates Managed Print Services with LabTech

Xerox is continuing to upgrade its managed print services partner program for MSPs. After enhancing its partner program in March that added new opportunities to generate recurring revenue and strengthen customer relationships, the company has now embarked on a path to integrate with IT management tools. First up: The document management giant has unveiled a new cloud-based plug-in that integrates its printer discovery and monitoring capabilities with LabTech Software’s RMM platform. Through the integration, MSPs will be able to use Xerox PrintAssist Services from the LabTech Control Center which will also report on printer activity and error alerts. The company says that more RMM integrations are coming, but did not disclose which vendors it is working with or when the connectors will be available.

Equinix launches cloud exchange, delivering private network speeds to public cloud services

Equinix, a builder of data centers and dynamic Internet exchanges, launched the Equinix Cloud Exchange – a new offering the company claims is a breakthrough in enabling enterprise hybrid cloud solutions. According to the company, the new exchange advances the process of managing connections to multiple clouds, enabling user to go from one-to-one to one-to-many, and many-to-many connections. Most importantly, it will allow enterprise customers to realize the scalability of the public cloud without compromising the speed, security and accessibility delivered by their private virtual networks. The claimed breakthrough is build on a pair of new elements: new hardware that interacts with software-defined networking vendors and offers adequate port-density and the next generation of its business intelligence software. Currently, the new exchange works with Microsoft Azure and AWS. Other cloud services will be added in the future.

Red Hat buys Inktank for $175M to extend open source storage footprint

Red Hat announced plans to expand its footprint as a provider of open source storage with the acquisition of Los Angeles, Calif-based Inktank for $175 million. Inktank is the developer of the Ceph open-source storage technology that delivers object, block and file storage in a single file system for unified storage. This is the second storage acquisition for Red Hat, which is making a play to be the top provider of open source storage, and follows the 2011 purchase of Gluster, and its GlusterFS scale-out NAS file system. The company announced that it sees opportunities for both Ceph and Gluster and will maintain both storage solutions in the market.

IDC: Tablet shipments stall

Research from global research firm IDC reports that tablet and 2-in-1 device shipments have stalled and that sales are cooling off with large screen phones encroaching on the market. According to IDC Apple continues to lead the market (as it has since 2010) with 32.5 percent share, followed by Samsung, with 22.3 percent, Asus at five percent and Lenovo at 4.1 percent. Amazon rounds things out with 1.9 percent of the sales. Android is the leading operating system, with almost two-thirds of the market. IDC reported total unit shipments of 50.4 million in Q1 2014, up just 3.9 percent from the same period in 2013.

HP, Foxconn partner seize server opportunity with Internet giants

Hewlett-Packard and long-time contract manufacturing partner Foxconn Technology Group unveiled a joint venture they hope will deliver a major breakthrough in server price-performance for Internet giants like Facebook and Amazon. According to HP, the strategic commercial agreement is aimed at disrupting traditional hyperscale server design with a new line of cloud-optimized servers which "specifically target service providers." Hyperscale servers are low-cost x86-based servers that that power many of the world's largest Internet companies, a market that IDC predicts will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15 percent to 20 percent through to 2018. Rivals who will feel the pinch of the new server economics this deal is expected to produce include Dell, IBM and Lenovo, which is expected to finalize its $2.3 billion acquisition of IBM's x86 server business this summer.

According to research completed last summer by Wakefield Research and Citrix as little as 16 percent of your SMB customers might actually understand what the cloud is. Twenty-eight percent of survey respondents said that it was weather-related (literally a cloud in the sky) while another 17 percent...well, the less said about their responses the better. Suffice it to say they were wrong.

The numbers are probably better now, almost a year later but the cloud has gotten more complex too. The big public cloud providers – which are gearing their services to large enterprises which have proportionally large IT staffs – have stuffed their offerings with hundreds of solutions and it’s your job as their IT guru to help them navigate that morass.

That’s why Continuum launched the Continuum Cloud Console – C3 for short – this week. C3 is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) management platform that helps MSPs unlock the value of the public cloud for SMBs by streamlining the congested world of the public cloud.

“We’ve simplified the complexity of the choices out there,” said Dee Zepf, Continuum’s Vice President of Product Management and Technical Services at Continuum. Essentially, C3 preselects the solutions that are going to make the most difference for SMBs and excises the rest, decluttering the process for MSPs.

C3 – which provides cloud service management through the same pane of glass used by the company’s existing RMM solution, thus putting everything on one screen for techs – is initially limited to Amazon Web Services (AWS), but Zepf says that she expects to roll out enhancements every quarter going forward, including Google, Azure and other large public cloud offerings.

Tim Lasonde, president of Boston-based NSK Inc., which is focused on providing IT services to SMBs, says the conversation about the public cloud comes up with customers all the time, especially when a client is due for a technology refresh.

As a member of Continuum’s Partner Advisory Council, one of the partners who beta tested the C3 offering and an existing Amazon Web Services partner, Lasonde has some keen insights on the value of a service like C3.

“Working with Amazon can be a bit of a daunting process. They are big player and have a lot of offerings. It’s such a disruptive technology. There are a lot of different ways to implement it,” he says. “I think one of the reasons C3 is a good product is because it helps smaller MSPs that don’t really have the time to invest in figuring out all the options.”

Lasonde adds that considering the rapidity with which customers are moving towards buying services through the cloud, getting up to speed on these services is critical for MSPs in the evolving IT landscape. The very public price war driving costs down across the board is certainly a factor driving interest.

On the one hand, this is helping us get new clients over and above existing customers, he says, but MSPs really do need to look at this for their customers because if they don’t then someone else will or the customers will do it for themselves.

Right now anyone can go online and order Office 365, but someone still needs to manage that and controlling how the SMB is exposed to the value these services deliver allows the MSP make sure it’s own value proposition is included in the message.

“Sure customers can go online and purchase O365 and stuff like that,” says Lasonde. “But when it comes to managing it, like migrations, that requires some skill and some training. There are a lot of pain points. It’s not the kind of thing that the average SMB wants to do. That’s where we can add a lot of value.”

Steven Ostrowski

Managed services providers (MSPs) must routinely and regularly examine their customer contracts and pricing strategies if they intend to maximize profitability. That message was delivered Wednesday by several industry experts during a meeting of the CompTIA Managed Services Community. The session was part of the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting taking place this month in San Diego.

Earlier today, Unitrends announced Release 7.4, which includes improvements in replication and archiving speeds, as well as the addition of improved disaster recovery setup. Chief among the updates is Unitrends Bridge, a system that allows users to move physical Windows machines to virtual versions with one click.

“Unitrends Release 7.4 moves us even farther beyond the point-product orientation of most of our competitors, strengthening our ability to help customers simply, quickly and reliably recover their diverse IT infrastructures anywhere, anytime,” said Joe Balazs, vice president of engineering for Recovery Series, UEB, and Unitrends Cloud. “We are delivering innovative conversion and recovery technologies such as Unitrends Bridge, Unified Bare Metal™ Recovery and instant recovery for physical, virtual and cloud-configured environments—plus optimizing all of that with incomparable disaster recovery testing, orchestration and governance.”

Additional features include:

Microsoft this week released the findings of a survey of worldwide financial institutions and how they use technology, particularly security technology, in their organizations. This week’s results are slated to be part of a four-section blog series from the technology giant, which will later include results from government, healthcare and retail sectors. Data for this survey was collected from over 12,000 respondents, all of whom used Microsoft’s Cloud Security Readiness Tool (CSRT) between November 2012 and February 2014. Let’s take a look at a few of the key findings of this report.

Continuum recently announced that it will be the exclusive sponsor for all of HTG Peer Groups’ monthly online meetings for 2014. This is a great expansion in the current partnership between the two organizations. Continuum has been a long-time partner and sponsor of HTG’s quarterly Centralized Meetings.

By Rene Reinsberg, General Manager/Vice President of Product, GoDaddy

I am in Boston on a business trip and as I am walking down the street between meetings, my smartphone suddenly vibrates with a notification:

“Rene, it’s been 4 weeks since your last haircut. You have 1.5h until your next meeting. 5-star rated Judy’s Hair is nearby and is available right now. Say “book appointment” and get a $10 discount.”

Of course I go ahead. The above scenario from the not-too-far-away future is just one of the many examples and use cases that will impact how the world’s small businesses, in particular brick-and-mortar businesses like Judy’s Hair, will attract and retain customers. It’s a radical change from how customers used to connect with businesses; it is the Discovery Marketing revolution.

What has changed? I would have traditionally noticed looking in the mirror in the morning that my hair is getting too long and hence concluded that I need a haircut soon (‘intent to purchase’).

Assuming that I was happy with my usual hair salon and they had availability, the ‘discovery’ and ‘selection’ steps would have been limited. However, I may have heard or read about a better place (‘discovery’) or in a scenario where I was not satisfied with my usual choice or where there was no availability, I would actively engage in ‘discovery’, leveraging a variety of signals (local search, social, ads, coupons) that eventually lead to a decision (‘selection’) and booking of an appointment (‘purchase’), likely via phone.

Illustration 1 below shows how the typical customer journey is changing.

Illustration 1: Typical Customer Journey – Traditional vs. Discovery Marketing

A New Category

The ways consumers find information about businesses and connect with them is changing. It has always been clear that ‘discoverability is key – both offline and online’, particular for brick-and-mortar businesses like Judy’s Hair. Forrester was among the first to use the termDiscovery Marketing to acknowledge how consumers’ behavior has been changing with respect to discovering businesses online:

“Where natural search results once were the primary way users discovered content or websites, now non-search engine media such as mobile apps, social networking sites, and consumer review hubs are veritable contenders in consumers’ paths to discovery. […] To ensure that SMBs are “findable” across all different types of media, we believe that we must shift the scope of our work (on behalf of the SMB) from just buying paid search ads and conducting SEO projects to enabling brand discovery — a practice we’ve dubbed “discovery marketing”

Having been helping local businesses get found with Locu, and now GoDaddy, I couldn’t agree more. I want to take this a step further and extend the framework by calling out five principles that my colleagues and I see at the heart of Discovery Marketing: mobile, multi-channel, actionable, controllable and measurable. GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving gave a sneak preview of this framework during his keynote at the recent BIA/Kelsey conference in San Francisco.

While I have no doubt that we will see a lot of great innovation around new self-serve marketing products in the industry, these five principles should provide a long-term framework for any business running marketing campaigns and any vendor building discovery marketing products by taking into consideration a mix of consumer behaviors as well as the business’ standpoint.

Mobile

94 percent of smartphone owners look for local information on their phone, according to a study by Televox. Due to the rise of smartphones and smart devices – think Google Glass, navigation system in cars, smart watches - the time between intent and purchase is being compressed; often intent is sparked and satisfied in close-to real-time. Another recent study reveals that when consumers use mobile search to help make a decision they are 57% more likely to visit a local store and 39% more likely to call a business.

Mobile goes hand-in-hand with local. Geo-targeting, i.e. the ability to advertise to consumers based on their location, as well the real-time consumption aspect allow for easier customization and optimization of marketing campaigns.

The rise in mobile devices – think of the number of local businesses who now use internet-connected tablets as point-of-sale - is also helping bring business data online, enabling the above scenario where appointment availability is accessible in real-time to consumers.

Multi-Channel

According to a recent report by Black Box Media, 92% of consumers use online directories to research businesses in their local areas. The average searcher uses 2.5 different types of sources when looking for local business information. For local business owners, getting found on search engines, directories and social sites, like Facebook, has become de facto mandatory. Given the numerous platforms and channels, aggregation is important to streamline efforts and help SMBs save time.

Actionable

In the above example of the haircut, I was able to book the appointment right after finding out about the business. When consumers search for local information online, 70 percent end up connecting with the business. The increasing availability of (internet-) connected devices in small businesses, fueled by rapid growth of tablet-based Point-of-Sale and loyalty systems, is making it increasingly possible to connect consumers and businesses, beyond the phone call.

Controllable

Describing a scene from the movie Minority Report, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving highlighted the importance of the user being in control and surfacing content based on a set of events and criteria, such as time of day, calendar entries, and location. “The way we actually intelligently filter [content] and allow the user to be in control is going to be a necessity for [Discovery Marketing] to take off”, said Irving during his keynote speech at the recent BIA/Kelsey conference in San Francisco.

Measurable

Coming from a world of $10,000 newspaper ads with limited ability to track performance, small businesses want simple metrics to track campaign success; there is a trend of replacing brand dollars with metric-based spending.  A significant portion of local businesses interviewed by Street Fight as part of their Local Merchant Report 2013, said that ‘direct ROI is the No. 1 most important factor in deciding to run a local marketing campaign’[8] .  Simply put, Judy’s Hair should have an easy way to see how well marketing campaigns work, e.g. how much it costs to acquire me as a customer or what an incremental $500 per month mean in terms of new customers.

Conclusion

We are at the beginning of an exciting, new chapter in the history of marketing. During the last decade, companies like HubSpot reinvented marketing for larger SMBs, coining the term ‘Inbound Marketing’. The next decade is about enabling smaller SMBs, the hair salon at the corner and the car repair shop down the street. In a recent survey, 76% of SMBs said ‘attracting new customers’ is the #1 topic that keeps them ‘up at night’. We believe Discovery Marketing products will help SMBs grow their businesses without losing sleep

Earlier today, VMware and Forrester released the results of a late 2013 survey about the virtualization habits of SMBs. In particular, this survey was run between November and December 2013, and includes responses from 389 SMB IT Professionals from the US, UK, France and Germany.

One of the foremost findings of this survey was that 71% of respondents said they expected their virtual environment to grow within the coming year, but only 34% of those SMBs will be able to hire the additional staff to manage the growth in infrastructure. In addition, the survey showed that 53% of applications are virtualized in the SMB sector, but that only 45% are “very satisfied” with the ROI of Virtualization.

While content marketing has gone mainstream in the past couple of years, MSPs and other technology providers understood the importance of educating prospects long ago. Explaining the value of new technology and what it can do for a business has always been the foundation of marketing for MSPs.

Dimension Data dramatically expands U.S. Presence with Nexus acquisition

The biggest news of the week was far and away the next (and possibly final) phase in Dimension Data’s growth-through-acquisition strategy. The global ICT solution provider announced the acquisition of Valencia, Calif.-based Nexus. Along with an additional 40 percent of the US market, and near 50 percent jump in US revenues, Dimension picked up 19 Nexus offices throughout the West, Southwest and Southeast regions, where Dimension is looking to grow. Valued at $471 million, Nexus offers clear synergies for Dimension. Both companies are prominent Cisco partners. In fact Nexus, which has nearly doubled its sales since 2011, was named the 2014 Cisco Global Americas Partner of the Year, 2014 Cisco Nationals Services Partner of the Year and 2014 US Cisco Capital Partner of the Year.Just a few months ago, Dimension Data expanded its European footprint with the purchase of NextiraOne. Company executives say they expect most of their projected growth (the company wants to double revenue globally and triple US revenue) to now come organically, with some small acquisitions still possible. The terms of the Nexus deal were not disclosed.

Birch Communications announces plans to buy Cbeyond, prompts investigations

National MSP Cbeyond will be acquired by telecom services provider Birch Communications in a deal worth $323 million, but the announcement was met by raised eyebrows and has prompted numerous investigations by law firms concerned that the deal was undervalued and that alternatives may not have been fully considered. Combined, the two companies, which are both based in Atlanta, GA, would form a national organization focused on communications, cloud and managed services with annual sales of about $700 million. If the current deal goes through Cbeyond shareholders will receive between $9.97 and $10.00 per share. News of the acquisition prompted Cbeyond shared to jump 38 percent to $9.83, up from closing price of $7.08 on the previous trading day.

New Microsoft CEO puts his spin of company in first earnings call

In Satya Nadella’s first earnings call since taking over the hotseat as CEO of Microsoft, the company announced earnings that beat Wall Street's profit expectations for Fiscal Q3. Nadella then shared details of how he is going to steer the ship going forward. For the quarter ended March 31, the company reported a profit of $5.66 billion on revenue of $20.40 billion. That’s 68 cents per share, which was up from Wall Street analyst expectations of 63 cents per share on revenue of $20.49 billion. Microsoft's Commercial division saw revenue rise 7 percent year on year, while Devices & Consumer division revenue jumped 12 percent. Microsoft's Commercial Licensing business increased sales by 10 percent during the quarter, generating around half of the company’s overall revenue. Office 365 sales were up, driving adoption of the Azure cloud offering. Even the Windows Surface tablet is showing signs of market growth, posting $500 million during the quarter, up 50 percent year on year though still well down from the $893 million it made over the holiday season. Nadella claimed Microsoft will continually evaluate its plans for becoming a "mobile-first, cloud-first" company and suggested that the software giant would not hesitate to jettison products and services that underperform or which don't fit the mobility and cloud-based vision.

TigerDirect joins Huawei channel program

TigerDirect, one of the largest online resellers of IT equipment to business and end-user customers, is continuing to expand its B2B offerings with the addition of Huawei's server, storage and networking products. Miami-based TigerDirect has been aggressively pursuing the B2B market for almost two years and has been fielding requests for Huawei products, so the move was a natural one, said the company. For Huawei, the new partnership accelerates its recently announced US-based SMB drive, adding 500 more salespeople in a market the company has identified as a specific target.

Earlier this week, CompTIA announced a new initiative to encourage women to pursue careers in the IT Industry. The program, called Dream IT, is a speaker outreach program through which women and men currently employed in IT fields will visit schools to share their experiences and inspire young women to get degrees in technology.

Nancy Hammervik, Senior Vice President, Industry Relations, CompTIA, said this about the new program in a press release this week: “Our goal is to create a grassroots movement and reach 10,000 women and girls with information about the opportunities, rewards and value of IT professions.”

David Gerhart, an IT Consultant with over twenty-five years of experience, recently contacted us with information on an interesting article he posted to his blog.

In this article, titled “Social Media — New Economy Opportunity,” he draws parallels between the first twenty years of internet occupations, and the recent boom in roles designed for social media experts

Writes Gerhart:

Attend.com recently released a free app for event coordinators to manage attendee check-in and seating. This app is currently available on iOS devices, with Android availability to come later in 2014.

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to generate honest-to-goodness qualified leads – that is, having an opportunity to pitch your services to organizations actually ready and able to do business with you.

Most service providers and MSPs I know find marketing and sales to be the hardest part about running their businesses. In fact, most have resigned themselves to relying almost exclusively on word-of-mouth referrals for new clients.

If you’re in that boat, then you certainly can’t afford to squander those precious few opportunities. You need to “bat 1000” when it comes to closing those leads and turning them into clients.

There’s some great free information available for you in an information-packed 16-minute webinar presented by noted IT Sales Guru, Gil Cargill.

D&H Distributing recently announced that it has signed an agreement with Google to offer the company’s Chrome Management Console to D&H SMB business and K-12 education resellers. In fact, D&H is currently one of the only companies with permission to sell this particular solution in the Channel. D&H resellers may either offer this solution as a total package, or as a “management-as-a-service” offering.

RapidFire Tools, Inc. recently released the Network Detective HIPAA Compliance module, a comprehensive compliance tool designed to help MSPs navigate the often-choppy waters of HIPAA. Mike Mittel, President of RapidFire Tools, took some time to speak with me today about the new module, as well as the current HIPAA environment in the IT field.

It was recently announced that Matt Makowicz will be joining SMB Nation’s Harrybbb at Karl Palachuk’s third annual SMB Online Conference. This event, taking place June 24-26 allows attendees to listen live and/or gain access to recorded sessions for later review.

Matt, who was a speaker on last year’s IT Business Reboot 2013, will bringing 20 years of sales and marketing experience, 17 of which have been in the IT field, to this year’s event. As of this writing, his session will cover the best M&A practices for Small IT, for which he will be utilizing his extensive knowledge in the areas of IT company evaluation and mergers/acquisitions to present.

Earlier today, Manta and Dell released the results of a March 2014 survey titled “Money v. Happiness” that showed some surprising trends about how SMB owners think and what they find important. To be exact, this report is a collection of 3025 Manta SMBs from between March 24 and March 27. The most intriguing finding was that 37% of those polled said that their motivation for being successful is the sense of personal achievement, while 28% said that they were driven to be financially stable.

As many of you know, today marks the 44^th year of Earth Day. This day of action, which began in the US in 1970, featured peaceful demonstrations for environmental change. Originally observed on university campuses and in communities across the US, Earth Day went global in 1990, and is currently observed in 192 countries.

Social networking sites have become a significant marketing platform, especially for all small businesses. For many businesses, these platforms are the easiest and most inexpensive way to reach out to customers. You cannot even imagine a marketing program that does not include social networking platforms like Facebook. Who would not make use of a top social site that has over a billion users? In fact, a Facebook Page is already a must-have for pretty much every business. The best thing about using it is that Facebook's developers continue to think of ways to improve features and service, benefitting all of its users.

One of the key components to Facebook is the all-important Graph Search, first introduced almost a year ago. Graph Search was a significant change to the social networking site, yet many businesses are still unaware as to how it works and how it can benefit their business.

Happy Easter everybody! Here is your long weekend edition carrying the news you don’t want to miss from the past week.

SAP reports positive performance in Q1 with cloud, HANA leading the way

The first quarter was a decent one for SAP, a fact that the company is crediting to positive performances from its cloud, its HANA in-memory computing platform offerings and to its channel. Now with more than 900 VAR and OEM partners and more that 1200 ISVs, SAP is continuing to push its cloud and HANA offerings through the channel. For the quarter ending on March 31, SAP reported revenue of $5.12 billion, up three percent from the same period in 2013. After-tax profit was $740 million, also up three percent from last year. Software revenue declined five percent to $863.3 million, but software and software-related service revenue climbed five percent to $4.23 billion. The real win came in cloud subscriptions and support revenue, which grew 38 percent in the quarter pushing the company’s annual run rate for cloud revenue to near $1.5 billion. SAP is now boasting approximately 36 million users.

Riverbed rebrands its Granite, eyes greater converged infrastructure play

Converged infrastructure vendor Riverbed Technology has announced plans for an updated and rebranded version of its Granite platform that will have more play in branch offices and distributed enterprises. The company is calling the new offering SteelFusion 3.0 – a solution that combines branch servers, storage, networking, WAN optimization and virtualization infrastructure, making it possible to host and manage branch office information in a centralized data center without compromising the locally hosted feel for end users. SteelFusion is an evolution of Granite, and thus built around a central appliance in the data center and an edge appliance in the branch or remote office. The data stored in the central data center is transmitted to the branch via the central appliance which feeds data to the edge device with high enough performance that users won't realize they are actually working with data located off site. According to the company the new SteelFusion brand will reposition the product as a full, converged infrastructure stack, rather than a platform primarily identified with storage, like Granite.

IBM emphasises channel partners in SoftLayer cloud play

IBM is turning to channel partners to help it step up its SoftLayer cloud services business and offset the significant setbacks the company has been experiencing on the hardware side. Big Blue is making a major cloud services push, including an updated channel program for SoftLayer that will boost reseller margins, make more channel co-marketing money available, and expand in-person partner training. At the heart of the new SoftLayer partner program are bigger partner discounts on recurring SoftLayer business. IBM is promising five to 20 percent increases on discounts for deals worth between $15,000 and $100,000 in recurring revenue. SoftLayer's existing referral program – which pays 10 percent the first year, 8 percent in year two, and 6 percent thereafter – will continue without change. According to the company, IBM would ultimately like to see the number of channel-led accounts increase from 40 percent to 50 percent by the end of the year.

Trend Micro simplifies product choices for SMBs

Aware of the complexity of its growing product portfolio, Trend Micro wants to make it easier for partners to make sure they are selling the right solutions to the right customers – i.e.: not selling stuff to people who won’t use it and who will thus wind up dissatisfied with their ROI. According to the company, providing the right mix of products is critical in markets with restricted IT budgets and thus it has unveiled a new strategy that will simplify packaging, especially between SMB and enterprise markets. The new product packaging gives customers the ability to mix on-premise and cloud versions of the security solution, thus supporting hybrid deployment strategies --- something the company has seen increasing. Endpoint protection functionality can be purchased separately or bundled with mail, web, and collaboration server and gateway security.

Other changes from Trend Micro include:

• A new promotion called Switch To Trend which is aimed at displacing Symantec, McAfee, Sophos and Kaspersky Lab with license portability.
• Application Control, a new whitelisting option which enables IT teams to set policies on types of software applications, like restricting the installation and use of P2P file-sharing apps.
• It also boosted its hosted email security suite to support both inbound and outbound protection for Microsoft Office 365.

Google fires next salvo in cloud services price war with Amazon, Microsoft

Search engine giant Google announced lower than expected first quarter financial results, but that didn’t deter the company from announcing plans to increase its investment in cloud computing infrastructure to continue to drive down costs for enterprise customers. The company, which is the midst of a price war with rivals Amazon and Microsoft, said it would pass savings from lower digital storage costs directly to customers in order to attract more users to its infrastructure as a service offerings. Google reported net income was up three percent in Q1, hitting $3.65 billion and a 19 percent increase in sales to $15.4 billion. Google’s biggest capital expense is increasing data center capacity as the company ensures it is capable of handling the anticipated demand for cloud services.

VMware expands its public cloud with BDR-as-a-Service

VMware finally launched the cloud-based disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering it hs been talking about. This marks the second product offering to go live on Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor’s public cloud in a matter of weeks. The new service, which starts at $835/month for one TB of storage and 20 GB of RAM, backs up virtual machines running in VMware private clouds to the vCloud Hybrid Service public cloud at intervals ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours. The company is highlighting the ease of deployment and management, and the lower cost of entry the service – which VMware is targeting at midsize companies – offers. Channel partners can generate additional revenues from the new service by advising customers on which apps should be protected by the service or by running the service on behalf of those customers.

IRS misses Windows XP Deadline, buys extended support from Microsoft

It appears that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service didn’t get the memo about Microsoft’s end of support for Windows XP in time to migrate and has now signed a deal with the software giant for the provision of custom support and security patches for the obsolete operating system. According to a report in the Washington Post, the IRS says it has migrated 52,000 of its 110,000 XP PCs to Windows 7 so far and expects to complete the transition by the end of the year. In total the migration will cost the agency $30 million. Moreover, the agency insists that the situation will have no impact on the processing of individual tax returns. The cost of the special deal with Microsoft was not disclosed, although the IRS claims it is lower that $500,000. This isn’t the only special support deal Microsoft has with its large government clients. The U.S. Department Of Defense is also still in the process if migrating its XP fleet and negotiated extended support while the British and Dutch governments are paying millions for extended support.

We received news from the Idaho Technology Council that Idaho’s Governor, C.L. “Butch” Otter, this week signed a piece of legislation, HB 598, that will better define how Software-as-a-Service fits within the state’s tax law, and will support growth of SaaS, as well as other budding technologies in Idaho. HB 598 passed the Idaho Senate by a 33-0 majority and the Idaho House of Representatives by 58-12. This week’s legislation is the answer to a series of challenges raised by an Idaho Tax Commission bill in 2013.

I was contacted by Harrybbb on Tuesday evening with the news that Cavu Networks, a long-time SMB Nation Community member (and neighbor!) posted two very nice “thank you” comments on its Facebook page. John Benjamin, Managing Director and CTO, Cavu Networks, graciously took some time out of his busy day to discuss just how far a simple “Thank you” can go.

To begin, I asked John if he felt that “thank yous” and positive comments were becoming rarer in today’s environment. He replied that he and his team actually see positive comments increasing. He attributes this to existing comments driving new customers, who then send in “thank yous” and other positive comments of their own.

Earlier this week, D&H Distributing announced that it has sold over 39 million Green products since its launch of the “Go Green” campaign in 2010. Company representatives said that although this program was originally meant to foster awareness in the IT Community, and to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, it has taken on a mind of its own.

The D&H “Go Green” Program features a special “green” product filter for resellers to use in their searches, as well as a dedicated “Think Green” link on the reseller site menu, which features special offers and facts about D&H’s current green efforts.

Earlier this month, Boston, MA-based Managed Services company, Continuum, launched a new podcast series called “MSP Radio.” Podcasts will be broadcast weekly, and community members are encouraged to subscribe for instant streaming to their iTunes lineup.

The first session, titled “The Future of Managed IT Services,” presented by the company’s VP Sales, Mark Connolly and VP Channel Sales, Mark Zahar, aired on April 10, and was a 35 minute cast focusing on industry expectations for 2014 and beyond. You can listen to a recording of this cast on the blog here. Listeners of MSP Radio are encouraged to ask live questions by using Continuum’s twitter handle: @FollowContinuum and the tag #MSPRadio.

Everyone of a certain age reading this blog remembers the famous dialogue between Benjamin (Dustin Hofffman) and Mr. McGuire in the 1967 hit movie “The Graduate.” It goes like this:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Now in 2014, substitute the word “Robotics” for “Plastics” and you’ve got the right context to proceed.

Harry has been named as one of the nine consulting IT and business experts for Karl Palachuk’s well-respected annual online conference. This year’s theme, as you can view above, is “Systematic Success,” and conference sessions will focus on the best procedures and processes SMBs need to thrive in a changing environment. This online conference, now in its third year, will take place June 24-26, 2014.

We recently received news that the Microsoft SMB Advantage Program, designed to offer SMB partners subsidies for selling qualifying Microsoft services, will come to an end on Saturday, May 31. In particular, SMB partners can offer Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Office 365, CRM Online and SQL Server Premium.

The SMB Advantage Program is a three-step process:

Today, Intronis, Inc. announced that it has launched the Spring Release ‘14 for its data protection platform. Notable updates include support for new platforms, such as VMware vSphere 5.5 and Exchange 2013, Hyper-V backup capabilities and physical imaging support.

“The Spring ’14 Release is a transformative announcement for Intronis and positions our partners to deliver higher-value services and enterprise-grade support,” says Chuck DeLouis, Intronis vice president of product management. “It’s extremely rewarding to see the enthusiasm our partners have for Intronis’ new Spring Release ’14 and the solutions coming shortly on our strategic roadmap.”

Stoneware, Inc., an Indiana-based Lenovo company, recently announced that it will be releasing a SaaS version of its webNetwork solution. In addition, the company stated that it has two new add-ons for webNetwork, designed for online security and ease of browsing.

The SaaS version of webNetwork will be hosted in secure data centers. Features of this upcoming release include enhanced support for HTML5, Chromebook, Android tablet and Mac technologies, webPass Single-sign-on, access to public cloud and network storage via webStorage and the ability to deliver published Windows/virtual apps to a variety of devices.

As many of you remember, we covered the Heartbleed Bug news break last week. This latest security flaw has grabbed the attention of IT Professionals and SMB end users alike due to its attack on the OpenSSL standard, and the fact that it took so long to uncover. We have recently received two responses from our community with tips for ensuring safety in the wake of this bug.

To start, long-time SMB Nation Community member, Carl Mazzanti, CEO, eMazzanti Technologies, sent over an e-mail with information on how they are keeping their eCare customers safe:

You’d have to be living in a cave somewhere to have missed the fact that Microsoft ended all service and support for Windows XP last week. The amount of hype surrounding the move has been staggering. So much attention in the channel has been focused on the XP story that you could be forgiven if you had missed the fact that XP wasn’t alone in being banished to the scrapheap of software obsolescence.

Microsoft Office 2003, long a stalwart of office applications, has likewise and simultaneously been cut off and Microsoft is making a strong push to migrate users to Office 365.

“The term ‘paradigm shift’ is badly overused,” admits Geoff Anderson (pictured), but he insists it really applies in this case. As Group Product Manager for Office 365 for SMBs, Anderson is front and center in the drive to make Office 365 as successful with SMBs as Office 2003 was.

Since 1984, more than a million businesses have chosen Retrospect to provide a complete and versatile Backup & Recovery, Data Archiving, and Duplication solution.

With 25 years experience working directly with SMB customers, Retrospect continues to hand-craft a complete 3-in-1 data protection solution for Windows, Mac, and Linux designed specifically to meet the needs of small and medium businesses.

We asked a few what they thought of it.

Today, AT&T announced that it has invested approximately $120 million in upgrades to both its wireless and wired networks in South Dakota between 2010 and 2013. This resulted in a variety of enhancements (see below) as well as the addition of two new LTE markets in Brookings and Watertown.

“AT&T is making robust investments locally to make sure that residents can take full advantage of the latest services and tools, and that businesses have the speed they need to compete and grow,” said Cheryl Riley, director of external affairs, AT&T South Dakota, in a press release today.

This morning, GFI MAX announced that it will be hosting its fourth annual customer event series, MAX 2014 in September of this year. To date, tour stops include Australia, England, Germany and the US.

“Every organization has the potential to improve the way it does business and by bringing our customers together each year, we provide the opportunity not only to learn about the future of the MAX platform and industry best practices, but also to network with and learn from each other, gaining practical and actionable real-world advice on how to deliver outstanding service to their clients and accelerate the growth of their business. In addition, our team has an unparalleled opportunity to hear directly from our customers on their evolving needs, providing insight that helps us to direct further development of our product offerings and to address developing opportunities and needs in the industry,” said Dr. Alistair Forbes, general manager of the GFI MAX business unit.

Social media has changed the way companies market their brands and manage their reputation so much so that it's now common to see social media sites being the main platform for sales and marketing programs. With Facebook and Twitter entering the limelight and gaining millions of users worldwide, the world is quickly becoming smaller and the communities based on sharing have been able to rapidly advance brand exposure for businesses of all sizes.

While businesses now enjoy an accessible, flexible and not to mention more exciting medium of customer interaction, social media can harm businesses if mishandled. The Internet is rife with tales of poorly managed, ineffective social media campaigns that led to businesses harming their brand or even turning customers away.

Ingram Micro reinforces cloud offensive

Ingram Micro had numerous developments for channel partners during its Ingram Micro Cloud Summit 2014, held in Hollywood, Fla. The IT distributor announced cloud partnerships with IBM and Parallels and introduced a series of new hosted services and tools aimed at simplifying deployment, management and billing for cloud services as more business migrates to the cloud. The relationship with Parallels is based on an equity investment made by Ingram (Cisco also made an investment in Parallels last year) and will see Ingram Micro adopt and deploy Parallels Automation as the core service delivery platform for its new globalCloud Marketplace. Through the alliance with IBM, Ingram Micro will make IBM and its SoftLayer Infrastructure services available to partners, along with data center colocation services from 365 Main, Office 365 migration tools from SkyKick, Charter’s telecommunication services and SurePayroll’s online payroll tools. The trio of new services added to the company’s portfolio are Ingram Micro Hosted Exchange, Ingram Micro Virtual Private Server and Ingram Micro Web Hosting.

Tech Data bulks up TDCloud with Cisco-powered Peak 10 Hybrid Cloud, Services

Tech Data announced a partnership with Tampa, Fla.-based Peak 10 to offer its partners a Cisco-powered hybrid cloud solution. Peak 10 uses Cisco to deliver a hybrid cloud environment which is then supported with managed services. Peak 10’s entire range of solutions is now available through the Clearwater, Fla.-based distributor, including public and private cloud options with BDR, security, performance and governance. Partners can access the Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution through Tech Data's TDCloud business unit in the division's Solution Store.

Tech Data partners with Good Technology

Tech Data also announced an exclusive partnership with Good Technology to distribute its mobile security solutions. Prior to this deal, one of the first announced since Tech Data launched the Tech Data Mobile Solutions division in February, Good Technology’s primary route to market in North America was a small direct sales operation and a handful of channel resellers. Going forward, Tech Data and its larger channel partner network will provide the company's only US sales channel, with all existing resellers moving into the Tech Data network.

Gartner: Windows XP migration mitigates falling PC shipments

According to global IT analysis firm Gartner, Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP boosted PC shipments in Q1 2014. Research firms have been predicting a significant slide in PC shipments and worldwide PC shipments did decline in Q1, but the 1.7 percent market contraction was much less significant than expected thanks to the rush to upgrade systems driven by the XP migration story. The US market actually experienced modest growth for the quarter, rising 2.1 percent to 14.1 million units. Hewlett-Packard was top dog in the US market, shipping 3.6 million devices, up 1.8 percent over last year. Dell is coming on strong posting a 13.3 percent increase over last year with sales of 3.4 million units while Apple was in the number three slot, with sales dropping 3.8 percent to 1.5 million units. Lenovo, the biggest winner with a 16.8 percent growth rate and sales of 1.5 million units, and Toshiba rounded out the top five. Globally, Lenovo was top, followed by HP, Dell, Acer and Asus.

VMware makes a play for Citrix's XenApp market

VMware announced it is bundling application virtualization technology with its virtual desktop software for the first time in a play to boost its end-user computing business and compete with chief rival Citrix. Horizon 6 is scheduled for general availability in Q2 and uses Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services technology to deliver hosted apps and session-based desktops to any type of device. The product will include VMware's own desktop virtualization and management software but by adding RDS, VMware provides an attractive option for customers that prefer to take a one vendor approach to buying technology for running virtual desktops and apps – which is a key value proposition of Citrix XenApp.

MobileIron files for $100 million IPO

MobileIron finally did what many channel insiders had been expecting and filed the necessary paperwork with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission for an IPO it hopes will raise $100 million. The enterprise mobility management vendor named Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.; and Barclays Capital Inc. as the offering’s book-runners. MobleIron is one of the few independent EMM vendors remaining, along with including Good Technology and SOTI Inc. This money will undoubtedly go a long way toward helping the company compete with competitors who have been acquired recently, including acquired AirWatch (acquired by VMware) and Fiberlink Communications (acquired by and IBM). In its S-1 filing, MobileIron said its total revenue grew from $13.9 million in 2011 to $40.9 million in 2012 and $105.6 million in 2013 however, it posted net losses of $25.7 million, $46.5 million and $32.5 million in 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively. Subscriptions accounting for about 14 percent or revenue while perpetual licenses made up a further 66 percent.

M&A in the channel: Venture Technologies and Information Systems Consulting announce merger

Making an aggressive play for critical mass and scalability, Venture Technologies, a VAR based in Jackson, Miss., and Denver’s Information Systems Consulting have announced plans to merge. The combined IT, network infrastructure and cloud solution provider business will have four data centers and combined revenue of $150 million. The transaction is expected to close next month. The consolidation of operations will be a longer term process, with the entire organization ultimately running under the Venture Technologies brand.

Early this week, Parallels announced that it has expanded its current strategic alliance with Ingram Micro, Inc. With this expansion, Ingram Micro will adopt Parallels Automation as the core service delivery platform for its new Cloud Marketplace.

By Brian Ferguson

The increasing use of cloud-based phone systems, along with the general trend toward Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), has sparked a debate within the communications industry as to the preferred deployment method for business phone systems: Cloud or on-premises.   It’s understood that each has its benefits and challenges. The industry as seemingly arrived at a consensus as to which key factors play into the decision for the best solution:

Guest post by Laplink Software

April 8^th marked the end of support for Windows XP bringing an end to hot-fixes, security updates, and technical support for Windows XP users.

The reality of the end of Windows XP support was difficult for many to swallow. Windows XP already had an infection rate six times higher than Windows 8 before the April 8 deadline. Now, with known vulnerabilities leaving XP consumers and businesses exposed to hackers, viruses, and other malware, this number is likely to be much higher.

Recent statistics show that 20-25% of users are still using Windows XP despite these security risks. However, we at Laplink don’t believe this will be the case for very much longer. As shown in the graph below, migrations with PCmover jumped by a drastic 300% as April 8^th drew nearer.

So why are people finally deciding to make the move? One reason that we already touched on is security. As updates come out for Windows 7 and 8, analysts predict that hackers will investigate XP for these same vulnerabilities. If they are shared, the hacker now has an open doorway into unprotected Windows XP machines.

Yesterday, San Diego, CA-based SaaSMAX reported increasing membership growth and partner momentum in 2014. In particular, the organization has added a number of diverse SaaS vendors, including ClubLemeno, Speek, TripScanner, and VeliQ.

For those of you not familiar with SaaSMAX, this organization was started in 2011 and is designed to be a matchmaking site for SaaS Vendors, Resellers and Buyers.

Hey you! Stop It!

Like many well-seasoned travelers reading this blog, I am a happy road warrior just trying to make a buck along the way. Part of my professional behavior is to utilize the in-flight WiFi connection services when I travel. I value my time, and get some of my best work accomplished on long flights. No questions asked. Until now.

Motorola today named Rick Osterloh as its new President and COO. Osterloh has been with Motorola for the past seven years, since it acquired Good, and he has been a product management leader for the past two years.

We recently received a high-priority message from Jessica DeVita, the Uber Geek Girl, regarding the recent breach of HTTPS security. The so-called “Heartbleed bug” attacks the OpenSSL technology, taking users’ personal login information for many sites.

In fact, Tumblr yesterday issued this statement about the breach: “We have no evidence of any breach and, like most networks, our team took immediate action to fix the issue. But this still means that the little lock icon (HTTPS) we all trusted to keep our passwords, personal emails, and credit cards safe, was actually making all that private information accessible to anyone who knew about the exploit.”

This past week, I re-routed the last leg of my first round of travels on the WW Modern Partner Tour through New York. I had a day in the city that included meetings and a long Friday afternoon lunch. But as the day ended, I needed to get the airport. How was I going to efficiently get from Point A (mid-town Manhattan) to Point B (Newark Airport) in traffic without lugging the luggage around? And save a lot of money at the same time.

Fortunately I caught up with long-time colleague Grace Schroder for lunch. As the CEO of Idea2, Schroder prides herself on being in front of the technology power curve. A successful entrepreneur, you can always count on her to share what’s hot and what’s not. So as we bid our goodbyes, Schroeder suggested I try the Uber car services for my ride to the EWR airport. I was game! My experience follows below.

This morning, Dell Software announced the release of AppAssure 5.4. I was able to speak with Michael Grant, director of product marketing, data protection, and Jason Raymond, director of product management, data protection, Dell Software, yesterday, both of whom took me into the latest version updates for this solution.

To start, I spoke with Michael Grant, who explained that he joined Dell in the mid-90s. Michael said that, like many of you, he is seeing a major industry shift in both the amount and importance of data. Today’s organizations, particularly in the SMB segment, are bound to be on 24/7 and they need to provide immediate services to customers. “This shift has really exacerbated the SMB problem,” said Michael Grant, in an interview yesterday.

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

You’re going to hear me talk a lot about this topic over the next couple of months because it is BIG, BIG, BIG.

If you don’t have any clients in the healthcare vertical – or don’t have any clients who, themselves, work with healthcare organizations – you can go back to sleep.

I’m talking about 700,000 hospitals, Emergency Medical Clinics, Dental Offices, Nursing Homes, Psychiatric Care Facilities, Diagnostic Labs, Corrections Facilities and Pharmaceutical Companies. These are the so-called “Covered Entities” that must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

I’m also talking about another 2+ million companies known in the law as “Business Associates” that are ALSO covered by HIPAA – that would be the lawyers, accountants, billing services and, yes, IT Service Providers!

Here’s a useful link that’s buried on the federal Health and Human Services web site that talks about this requirement, and also includes a sample contract that Business Associates (you) should have with Covered Entities. You might need a HIPAA expert or lawyer to interpret some of the provisions, but they’ll tell you that you need to do your own HIPAA Risk Analysis… and document it.

As more and more companies are realizing the value of Office 365 as a means to empower their employees to work from anywhere and on any device, they are looking to their IT providers to help them migrate their current on-premises Microsoft Office to the cloud.  Until now, enabling your team to migrate customers’ Office has required significant planning, project management and technical expertise - a significant barrier to taking advantage of this new revenue stream.

Now there is a solution from SkyKick – “Microsoft  2013 Partner of the Year”. SkyKick offers a new type of cloud migration application that significantly reduces the time and resources it takes to migrate to Office 365 by automating many aspects of the migration project.  And with the Turbo program from Microsoft and SkyKick, your first migration project is free.

We received an e-mail bright and early this morning from one of our contacts at D&H Distributing with a reminder that today is the end of life for Windows XP. Our contact included a neat countdown (from 5:45am PDT today) showing 15 hours left on the OS (see below).

With today’s milestone, we want to know: what are your plans for the future? Take a bit of time and tell us in the comments section, or on our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/smbnation.

It’s a “true that,” according to me, that most successful entrepreneurs have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). None other than USA Today recently had a fantastic spot on article about accommodating hyper-activity children in K-12 education with free radical active learning approaches. The thesis was that confining (“chaining”) ADHD students to a desk is counter-productive and fails to tap into the child’s potential. Where was this research when I was a kid?

So fast forward the movie and now you and I are professionals who march to a different drummer as entrepreneurs. I’d offer that giving us a desk job is a jail sentence and makes us under perform. But un-leash us with mobile devices and cloud services and we’re world beaters. Case in point is Exhibit A: myself. I have the high honor of traveling the world right now telling the Modern Tour story surrounding devices and services on behalf of Microsoft, Intel and ActionTec. Its 30+ countries in 90-days to inspire and motivate top performer to leverage migration opportunities into get modern wins.

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t learn something new from talking to IT pros.

While everyone is more-or-less in the same business – providing outsourced IT services to clients – it seems as if every MSP and IT service provider has a truly unique business. They’re delivering different types of services, packaged in unique ways to their own specific clientele, often influenced by geography and mix of industries served.

Earlier today, Zultys, a Silicon Valley, CA-based UC organization announced that its line of advanced IP phone systems has completed interoperability certification with BCN Telecom’s SIP Trunk Solution.

“Our MX product line has been SIP-capable at both the trunk and station side from its inception, as the company management has always believed in the ultimate adoption of this protocol within the business market place. Partnering with BCN Telecom enhances our ability to deliver the benefits of VoIP end to end.” said Steve Francis, chief sales and marketing officer at Zultys.

As the ticker clicks down to H-hour there is a ton of pressure to migrate away from XP. There is, of course, a lot to justify that. As of April 9^th, Microsoft will stop supporting XP. That means no new patches to discovered vulnerabilities, no support, no bug fixes, no nothing. If you’re on XP you’re on your own. Moreover, Microsoft may actually expose new vulnerabilities for XP users with the patches they provide for more recent operating systems.

But that’s not the whole story, especially for SMBs.

“It’s not going to turn into a pumpkin overnight,” says Khaled Farhang, Owner, eGuard Technology Services Inc., a Microsoft Certified partner, provides IT services provider to SMBs and non-profits in the Washington, DC area, downplaying the hype that has overtaken the industry. “There are plenty of companies out there that are protecting operating systems that are out of life.”

For example, despite “strongly recommending small businesses using XP upgrade to a more current operating system as soon as possible,” Symantec has pledged to continue supporting Windows XP systems “for the foreseeable future.”

“We adhere to the three layers of protection approach,” adds Farhang. “You want to have it on the firewall, on the PC side and on the server. Because we believe there is no way you can 100 percent protect yourself as long as you are connected to the Internet so the more layers you have the better offer you are.”

With the XP end of life one layer will fade away, he adds, but as long as you maintain the others you should be okay. “Now, if you are still on XP in two or three years then you may have a problem.”

Ray Vrabel, Director of Technical Account Management for Boston-based RMM provider Continuum, agrees. “For some of the smaller SMBs out there it’s not going to be a big problem. They bought a new PC (at a retailer like Best Buy) and it came with Windows 7 or 8 and they are already up to date.”

Continuum partners currently manage something in the order of half a million PCs ranging from SMBs upwards and there is a significant difference in the degree of urgency from one end of that spectrum to the other.

One of the challenges people in all walks of business are going to face is trying to upgrade the operating system on hardware that wasn’t designed for it, says Vrabel. “There are probably people out there who upgraded the operating system rather than buying new equipment. XP was a very light OS and (older machines may not have the performance specs to handle the heavier operating systems.)”

Adds Farhang, “One thing we do as a trusted advisor, we advise clients upgrade one-third of their computers each year. That’s a complete refresh every three years. Under that system almost everyone is migrated already. We protect every other layer. So we feel they should be okay, at least for the short term.”

No one is saying that existing XP users shouldn’t upgrade sooner or later, but there is no need to panic – especially for SMBs. Things are different for large enterprises that have to worry about migrating 5,000 machines, but for everyone else the world isn’t going to end on April 9^th.

You know it’d be fast and furious as we skidded into the April 8, 2014 end-of-support (EOS) deadline for Windows XP (and Office 2003). It’s been a long year preaching the XP migration opportunity to the partner crowd, and many have heard the good word. But many haven’t. Here’s the good news: the party continues.

Looking forward, I see most of the Windows XP migration work ahead, not behind us. It turns out the econometric model that rational small business owners would plan for the April 8^th EOS deadline was wrong. Both SMB owners and SMB IT Pros proved too busy to effectively meet the deadline, and the real work starts April 9^th moving forward. This revised forecast is based on our own research both inside and outside of Microsoft, plus extensive domestic and worldwide travel. I’ll go into the details of this in my keynote speech at the Channel Pro SMB Forum on April 9^th in Southern California.

Here at Pronto, we develop websites for small businesses who serve local markets. In the vast majority of these businesses we work with, the founder and owner are regarded as the “face” of the business, or the best representatives of it. With the number of websites we work on and clients we communicate with on a daily basis, we often wonder why some business portraits and CEO headshots are quite frankly poor in quality.

Displaying the portrait of the company head may be a bit old-fashioned, but it many cases, it could be highly advantageous. In most cases, a portrait of picture of the owner projects how professional and genuine a firm is, since it is very much willing to show who the main person is behind the business. In many small businesses the portrait of a business owner allows customers to put a face to a name of the person they want to deal with. If used on websites, the right photo can be significant in engaging a visitor who could be a prospective client.

Your weekly roundup of news for the IT channel.

N-able releases Help Desk Manager for MSPs and updates RMM platform

RMM vendor N-able rolled out N-Central 9.4, the latest version of its remote monitoring platform, and complimented it with a new Help Desk Manager. The Help Desk Manager features numerous functionalities, including email-to-ticket support, customer portals, automatic ticket assignment, time and material billing, an integrated knowledge base system, an integrated survey engine, drag-and-drop and drilldown dashboards. The Help Desk Manager can be deployed as a standalone solution for companies that don't use an RMM platform but want the capabilities offered by a ticketing solution, or it can be integrated with N-central. N-central 9.4 offers updates to usability and UI enhancements, OS X support, monitoring support, Patch Manager updates, new TeamViewer support and Automation Manager enhancements.

Researchers discover second NSA link to RSA Encryption Toolkit

The news continues to be bad for RSA. Researchers have uncovered a second link to between the company’s encryption toolkit and NSA spying activities, making it possible for the agency to spy on supposedly protected communications. News about the initial vulnerability was leaked by Edward Snowden, prompting a great deal of backlash in the IT community. With accusations that RSA knowingly deployed an encryption algorithm the NSA had compromised refusing to die despite strident denials from RSA, the latest revelation – this latest report will only further fuel the fire. According to a report in Reuters, a research team consisting of professors at Johns Hopkins, the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin discovered the "Extended Random" extension, a tool for secure websites that was helped the NSA crack the faulty encryption algorithm. You can read the group’s report detailing their findings.

Extreme Networks unveils new SDN, network management solutions

Extreme Networks is making it easier for partners to manage the technology it acquired in with the $180 million September purchase of Enterasys and its own through a single pane of glass with a new software-defined networking (SDN) architecture and management software. NetSight 6.0 is part of a broader SDN architecture rolled out this week, which uses a combination of hardware and software from both the Extreme and Enterasys portfolios – the latter of which was particularly well known for network management functionality. The next phase of the merger will involve integration of the two partner programs, which have a combined total of about 2,000 global channel partners.

Perficient acquires BioPharm Systems for $17.6 million

St. Louis-based Perficient is continuing to expand its vertical footprint through acquisition, this time opening up the life sciences and pharmaceutical technology consulting verticals with the purchase of San Mateo, Calif.-based BioPharm Systems for $17.6 million. In February the company bought into the financial tech consulting market when it paid $46 million for ForwardThink Group. BioPharm, which brings an additional 50 consulting, technology, sales and support professionals, will become the life sciences and pharmaceutical element of Peficient’s lucrative health care division which accounts for about 25 percent of Perficient’s annual revenue. The company’s next targeted growth areas: technology consulting firms focusing in energy, gas, utilities and retail.

Tech Data launches new portal to help manage recurring revenue opportunities for Cisco partners

Tech Data introduced the SMARTattach Opportunity Portal, a new online offering designed to help Tech Data’s authorized resellers get as much recurring revenue from their Cisco services contracts and revenue streams as possible. The Opportunity Portal is part of an larger strategy to emphasize Cisco services and to simplify processes through automation, says the Clearwater, Fla.-based distributor. Initially developed in 2009 to help solution providers add Cisco SMARTnet services to Cisco hardware purchases, SMARTattach now adds the Opportunity Portal to enhance operational management capabilities that have been less than stellar. Going forward, Tech Data resellers will be better able to track what equipment was sold in each account, what services were and were not sold with it and circle back to pitch those services, boosting their recurring services revenues in the process.

Samsung overhauls partner program

Samsung made the largest update to its partner program since the company founded a partner program in 2004, adding new incentives for top tier partners, a revamped partner website, and significant sales performance incentive increases. The new program, dubbed Samsung Team of Empowered Partners, will help the company stay relevant in a rapidly changing IT landscape and continue to compete with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo who have been pressuring Samsung into reduced prices (and margins for resellers). Designed to drive sales of its tablets, PCs, memory and other desktop desk top products, the new program is based on a four-tier global partner platform: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Entry Level. According to the company, the new Platinum tier will provide rebates, volume discounts, dedicated sales resources, demo equipment and marketing development funds. Gold partners also have access to a selection of rebates and to inside sales support. Silver partners can access inside sales and pre-sales support, and engineering product specialists. The new program will be phased in starting April 7.

Salesforce.com announces new vertical industry initiative

Salesforce.com announced a new industry-specific go-to-market strategy at its sales event in Boston with the goal of realizing its ambition to overtake SAP as the world’s third largest enterprise software vendor. Through the new initiative the company will tailor versions of its Salesforce1 CRM platform for specific vertical industries. These solutions will be distributed, at least in part, through increased engagement of the channel, including ISVs, systems integrators and others. Having posted upwards of 30 percent growth per year, President Keith Block told attendees, "We're growing faster than any other enterprise software company in the world." Adding the company forecasts sales of $5.25 billion for the current fiscal year. Salesforce will initially focus its attention on the financial services/insurance, health-care/life sciences, retail/consumer products, communications/media, public sector and automotive/manufacturing industries.

Earlier this week, Continuum announced that its Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Jeanne Hopkins (pictured), was named to the Sales Lead Management Association’s (SLMA) “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management” list. This announcement marks the third time since 2011 that Jeanne has been named to this list.

The “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management” list was selected from 41 nominees this year, all of whom were submitted by colleagues. A panel of three judges selected the 20 winners based on their contributions to sales lead management throughout their career history.

Earlier this week, Open-Xchange released its newest application, OX Spreadsheet, an open source, browser-based spreadsheet program which allows users to securely share and edit Microsoft Excel documents without loss of formatting.

Yesterday morning, Zenoss, Inc. announced that its Zenoss Cloud Service Assurance Solution, Version 4.2.4 has completed interoperability testing with Cisco’s Virtualized Multiservice Datacenter Virtual Service Architecture, Version 1.0. Zenoss representatives explained that this testing was completed via Cisco’s Developer Network.

CompTIA is changing the way it does things, opening up access to market intelligence and other benefits for all IT professionals to deliver value throughout the channel and increase membership.

Announced at the IT industry association’s annual member meetings this week in San Diego, the new go-to-market approach reorganizes CompTIA’s memberships, introducing a free “Registered Users” category and revamping and renaming the paid membership as “Premium Member” with some new perks.