By Alex Anderson, Contributing Writer, SMB Nation, with contribution from Heather Lawrentz, Writer, SMB Nation
Harry and I recently had the great opportunity to meet with Leonard Dimiceli, General Manager of Nuvotera (formerly SpamSoap). Leonard spoke with us about the rebranding, as well as his views on the evolution of the SMB IT Channel.
To begin, it’s important to note that the Nuvotera brand came about in November of 2013. The company had been evolving before this however, but, as Leonard explained to Harry and me, they didn’t want to put out the image that they only did spam monitoring. In fact, Nuvotera has a wide range of non-spam products as well, including archiving and encryption. The company name itself means the “Next Big Thing” or “Groundbreaking,” and Leonard’s team has been hard at work to live up to this moniker. Nuvotera is no longer an OEM, but rather a value-added SaaS distributor.
In this company evolution, the team had to make a change in what they offered. As such, the company became very selective in the products it had listed in its portfolio. “If we can’t monetize it with the parent company, then we don’t want to send it to the masses,” explained Leonard in our interview. In addition, Leonard said that his team is helping vendors who are primarily mid-market with mature products get in touch with the SMB Channel.
Harry then asked a great question: “Are you using platform technology, like Parallels, or did you build your own?” Leonard explained to us that they built their own platform, and that he’d actually quadrupled his in-house developer staff as a result.
Our conversation quickly moved on to the current SMB IT Channel environment, particularly where the challenges lie. According to Leonard, the main challenge facing SMB IT Pros is relevancy. Cloud technologies in particular are causing a lot of disruption in the Channel, and when paired with the big vendor hedge, as well as intelligent buyers, the environment is becoming less kind to the SMB IT Pro. Leonard suggests that any SMB IT Pro learn how to save their accounts and how to continue to serve their accounts, or move into a specialized vertical, such as healthcare. How, you may ask?
Leonard predicted that IT Pros who haven’t added some kind of Cloud services within the next 18-36 months, they may find it very hard to stay in business. Even telecoms are starting to offer cloud services, such as BDR and hosted workplace. In essence, there are three choices for the SMB IT Pro: Evolve, Merge or Sell.
When it comes down to the type of cloud services offered, Leonard did bring up a common concern, which is the Office 365 prevalence. In fact, Leonard said that Microsoft Office 365 was being driven into mass-adoption, but that his company, Nuvotera, has an alternative product to keep customer control in the IT Pro’s hands.
