SMB Nation Blog

It’s HERE! My BlackBerry Z10 arrived late last week, and I’m up for the 30-day challenge that awaits me.  Like a kid at Christmas, I couldn’t wait to open the box and assemble the mobile phone. It feels good to have that giddy feeling again! (View my video at right for more info!)

It is with great sadness to report that John Harris, vice president for Seattle-based Network Support for Small Business, has passed. John drove success in the Small Business Server community for over 13 years in this role, serving numerous Seattle-based businesses with his expertise. Many readers will recall John’s active community participation in the Puget Sound Small Business Server (PSSBS) user group. He was a young 66-years old, and just a few days shy of turning 67. 

Last year we declared “Geek Week” in Seattle to be the convergence of the long-time MVP Summit, our own conference and the MacTech Boot Camp that all occurred in a seven-day period. This year, the situation was slightly different with Microsoft Research’s TechFest and the MacTech Boot Camp II occurring last week in Seattle. I’ll report on both here.

This is a tale of a “forced” 24-hours offline that I recently enjoyed as part of the National Day of Unplugging, which occurred March 1-2, 2013. It was sponsored by a Jewish technology community called Reboot, which asked you to pledge to go off the grid from sunset Friday until sunset Saturday. Here is my story.

Over the past two days, the MacTech Boot Camp in Seattle has brought together a robust audience of Apple aficionados. So intrigued was I that I attended part of both days. The first day (Tuesday) focused on an Office for Mac accreditation. Yesterday was the full-on robust workshop featuring a variety of Macintosh-centric topics including mobility, storage and Office as seen here: http://www.mactech.com/bootcamp/sessions.

We have exclusively learned that within the next few hours, Microsoft intends to launch a site that is designed to attract professionals to become teachers. This information was revealed to SMB Nation today by internal Microsoft sources at a private summit, which Harrybbb is attending in the Executive Briefing Center at Microsoft Redmond.

Today is a new day. It’s the start of another month, March. With numerous global milestones kicking in, such as the markets hitting new highs, and the sequester here and now, I’m especially completive today. Maybe it’s the coffee (or lack of).

As you can see in the graphic, there is a time duration calculation. It reflects when I started SMB Nation, and now my company is 13 years, 4 months and one-day old! It’s a great time to ask the proverbial Pocket MBA strategic questions of:

A trending topic yesterday in the SMB ether was the update/release of the new Office 365. The abbreviated online launch party and initial message was covered by us (http://smbnation.com/content/news/entry/microsoft-releases-next-gen-version-of-office-365-for-biz) and nearly every major site covered off on this release (see my summary below), and click the image above for a quick intro video.

One thing clients like is managed expectations. In that category, I’d give the 2013 ASCII Success Summit a big thumbs up. You can count on a quality venue, great catering, approximately 100 engaged attendees, and a wide range of industry solution sponsors. You will also find the event is lacking the hyperbole or ethical conflicts plaguing other IT tours resembling aggressive time-share seminars. All in all, ASCII remains relevant and energetic “after all these years” with Jerry K at the day-to-day helm.

Right now in Las Vegas at the annual VMware partner conference, there are pockets of “SMBisms”. On the surface, VMware plays best in the enterprise (picture windowless datacenters). However, the white elephant in the lecture hall has been: What’s the role of virtualization in SMB? It’s a fair question. 

(Pictured at right): Chris Waldo, Director of Channel Promotions and Launches, VMware

A few weeks ago, I advised SMB partners to liquidate their stock equity portfolios as major indexes are approaching recent highs. I still stand by and defend this “buy low and sell high” strategy. It’s now time to buy again – but this time I’m talking real estate--and this is your Pocket MBA moment.

Verizon recently reached out to me and asked that I test its new Verizon 4G Jetpack device and share my findings with you. Little did they know that I’m especially well-equipped for this assignment for two reasons. First, I’ve used successive generations of Verizon WiFi and MiFi service, starting with the external PC Card proving a legacy laptop with on-the-fly WiFi capabilities outside the office. That was followed by an internal Verizon air card inside my old HP Mini netbook. Next up was my most recent experience using the Verizon 4G LTE external mobile hotspot for the past year.

I’ve just learned that over 1,500 Microsoft MVPs will be massing on the “Eastside” of Seattle in Bellevue and Redmond early next week for the annual MVP Summit. This private event, not open to the public, allows MVP technical award-winners to work with their product teams from February 18-21 in general and break-out sessions.

Despite the gonzo journalism antics of Hunter S. Thompson in the classic “Fear and Loathing,” I really did work last week at the Parallels Summit at Caesars Las Vegas! In fact, I found three worthy mentions I wanted to share with you.

At the Parallels Summit at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, CEO Birger Steen deftly borrowed an Obama-like phrase to excite and motivate more than 1,100 attendees about the SMB cloud. Aside from the standard product news and upgrades, Parallels displayed its solid community leadership by sharing its latest research findings. “Parallels SMB Cloud Insights research is core to our commitment to help service providers make both strategic and tactical decisions about the rapidly growing market for SMB cloud services,” said Steen. “We are pleased with the responses we are receiving from our service provider partners and will continue making a substantial investment in our expertise and knowledge initiatives.”

I’ve always felt that there is seasonality in the SMB channel. The “end-of-year” blues has been a common refrain amongst the media integration companies as SMB partners and sponsors are typically holiday budget lean because most of these unsophisticated entities operate on a simple calendar year. They are either out of do-re-me as year-end approaches and/or are marshaling up financial resources for the coming year. It’s something of a cash flow purgatory where more than one snappy salesman has questioned his or her intelligence quotient.

The New York Times (my fave) recently ran a fantastical article on small investor’s new faith in stock marketing investing. I quote an interesting passage: “In good times and bad, many individual investors tend to buy and sell at precisely the wrong moments. They dump stocks after the market falls and buy stocks after the market rises--the opposite of what investors aim to do.”

The facts are straight forward. Cisco has sold its consumer/SoHo/small business networking unit to Belkin. An investment to go downstream made a decade ago by Cisco has come to an end. Sadly – I’m honor-bound to report this news.

Privately-held Belkin will continue to sell and support the Linksys brand and perhaps discover the magic that didn’t happen for Cisco. Cisco is now free to focus on its enterprise niches where it makes its riches. I don’t do good-byes nearly as well as “Hellos” so I’ll share a few thoughts.

With the president’s inauguration coming up on January 21, 2013, to be followed shortly thereafter in February by the State of the Union address, I thought I’d tie-in a few SMB geek observations.

Over the holidays, I enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with the Infrascale team to discuss its FileLocker cloud service. This team has been a “true” member of the SMB community having grown up with the rest of us and earning a positive reputation. The company has its SOS Online Backup solution for SOHOs and FileLocker, the public and private cloud collaboration for small business and enterprise (which is the focus of this article).