Geek Speak

Talk about a blast from the past and the good old Windows Small Business Server (SBS) days! Michael Jenkin, Managing Director at Business Technology Partners Pty Ltd in Adelaide, Australia and long-time community leader (MVP, GITCA), has transformed into a security expert and a social media whiz.

Sometimes you have to raise your head from the traditional SMB managed services provider world (trees) to see the forest. IBM has deftly asserted itself in the partner security realm with an at-market Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) program unlike I've seen from other major players.

I recently hooked up with serial entrepreneur Michael Fraser about his new platform play Refactr. He’s committed to brining devops to the SMB Nation community whereby you could offer Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions to your customers.

We’ve struck a nerve in the SMB Nation community with our “How To” series and we’re thankful for your overwhelming support! That said, we going to continue to stream out resources you can use to improve your lot in life as a managed services providers (MSP). And I got a secret – even experienced MSPs should revisit adding on this CompTIA certification.

Cloud computing has given small businesses access to IT capabilities that were once reserved for enterprise teams with seemingly-infinite resources.

And for a while, security was thought to be the main disadvantage of moving workloads to the cloud—

I was depressed on Sunday night after both my teams lost in the NFL football playoffs. I tucked in early but then a text alerted me to the pending lunar eclipse. So I rapidly rebooted my good self and grabbed my Moto Z2 Play mobile phone from Lenovo and the Hasselblad True Zoom mod.

Small business owners can agree—any kind of outage that disrupts operations and hurts revenue should be avoided at all costs.

We teamed with Kevin Hunter from Northwest Digital News (NDN) to cover the recent Interface Seattle technology event. This conference focuses on IT Pro and customers seeking solutions.

If it’s early January, it’s the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). And we’re reporting on top gizmos and gadgets that stand out amongst the 4,000 vendors and over 180,000 attendees.

Ryan Becker is in the busy season – the post-holiday geek gift deployment season. Lemme explain.

Becker, owner of Hi-Tek Computing in a Dallas, TX suburb, supported small and medium businesses (SMB) but equally exciting he support the home/residential market.

If you have participated in SMB Nation for any length of time, hopefully you’ll know that we ascribe to an abundance philosophy that is DNA-driven and impacts everything we do. It’s a big blue ocean and there is enough for everyone to harvest.

A long-time SMB Nation member Brian Keith from Bend Oregon updates the community on his current world from carrying the bag as an MSP to evolving to a consultant for Philips with a focus on health care technology. Throw in off color comments on how we me when I taught at Central Washington University and Brian was my student (shades of early Windows NT Advanced Server running on a 386 box).