SMB Nation Blog

Sales training is one of the most important investments most companies make, because it allows them to close the gap between current performance and potential performance. Nevertheless, around 80 percent of respondents to a recent study by the Rain Group Center rated their own training as being between average and poor.

Here, we take a look at some of the best sales training practices the most successful managers follow.

Use of Simulation or Role-Playing

Many organizations still utilize classroom-based, instructor-led training, which can be incredibly effective. However, it is important to balance it with practical learning as well.

Without applying learned information quickly, most expenditure on corporate training is wasted, because unfortunately people forget new information extremely quickly. Precisely how much knowledge is lost - and how quickly - is difficult to say, as studies vary significantly, but most agree that the majority of information is lost within a week.

"Role-playing [also] provides a safe environment to encounter [new] scenarios for the first time, which builds confidence in team members that can help them in their day-to-day roles," explains John Buelow, executive vice president of the Shapiro Negotiations Institute.

Sales Coaching and Reinforcement

Successful sales training requires newly acquired sales skills to be reinforced regularly, or else staff revert to old habits, and coaching is one of the best solutions. For this reason, coaching is often one of the most important things for a sales manager to learn and is a key component of most sales management training programs.

Yet, many sales managers continue to neglect their coaching responsibilities. Indeed, the CSO Insights 2016 Sales Best Practices Study revealed that just 32 percent of sales managers are currently spending sufficient time on coaching. In companies performing to a world-class standard, however, this figure rises to 88 percent.

A structured coaching program will allow leaders to work closely with staff to highlight issues, set targets and ensure new skills are put into practice. Meanwhile, reinforcement literature should also be made available. According to Aberdeen Group, 20 percent more reps achieve quota when post-training reinforcement is implemented.

Technology and Mobile-Friendliness

Finally, the most successful managers know that technology can be utilized to significantly improve both the quality of training and its results. In truth, technology can be deployed in an almost limitless number of ways, ranging from the use of virtual instructors in classroom settings, to bite-size video content.

One growing technology trend in corporate training has been the gamification of the learning process and eLearning Industry report that gamification features, such as the ability to progress to different levels, choose a difficulty setting, etc. can lead to a nine percent increase in retention rates. Meanwhile, adult learners who participated in gamified e-learning experiences scored 14 percent higher in skills-based knowledge assessments.

Furthermore, technology can be used to make learning a mobile experience. By ensuring that learning materials are available to access and use on mobile devices, sales skills can be improved even while outside the workplace, learning can become part of staff members' daily routines, and information can be reinforced on the go.

Conclusion

When it comes to delivering high-quality sales training, or sales management training, it is not just the quality of the information that matters, but the quality of delivery and follow-up. In particular, it is important to give staff the opportunity to put new information into practice quickly, to reinforce and personalize learning through coaching, and to make use of technology to improve all aspects of your training program.

Author Bio:

Monika Götzmann is the EMEA Marketing Director of Miller Heiman Group, a global sales training and customer experience company. It specializes in providing exceptional sales coaching and helps organisations develop business strategies to achieve sales success. Monika enjoys sharing her insight and thoughts to provide better sales and service training.

By: Rebecca Shipley 

When launching your startup, it is likely that the thought of how to best get exposure and a loyal following. And even better if you can do so while also building up your brand identity and its ability to be recognized and remembered by consumers, right? With the right elements, your website can make this happen for your startup. Use your website as a powerful tool to develop your brand and its ability to connect with and engage consumers.

Domain name
Your domain name is a link to your website (both literally and figuratively) that people will interact with before even reaching the homepage of your site. Therefore, you must help set your site up for success by choosing and registering a domain name that ties in with your brand and promotes recognition and remembrance of it.

Make the domain name for your site something that is short and sweet, no longer than about four words. It should also be simple to spell out and to share, whether through word-of-mouth or digital mediums. Avoid using hyphens or numbers, as they tend to be accidentally put in the wrong place or left out entirely. These things will help your site’s domain name be remembered and shared, and as a result, promote brand recognition with more people, both on- and offline.

Your site’s domain name should also be brandable in the sense that it should itself be relevant to your brand. When a person sees it, they should know that it is connected to your brand if they are familiar with you. If a person has never before heard of your startup, once they visit your site they should see how its domain name ties in with the brand that is presented there.

Logo
Your brand’s logo will take up some valuable real estate on your website, placed prominently at the top of its homepage and various other internal pages. Ensure that it speaks to the message your brand wants to communicate and gives people the right idea of what your brand stands for and represents.

Both in design and in color scheme, your logo should not be too similar to that of your competitors. Avoid having it be overly fussy in a way that detracts from all your hard work on the rest of the site or that makes your brand look like it was indecisive on what it most wants to convey with its logo. The right logo makes a website and its design, as well as further promoting the site’s brand. The wrong logo can confuse consumers as to what your startup values and/or has to offer them.

Links to social media
Include links to each of your brand’s social media accounts on its website in a way and in a location that they are easily seen. Place them prominently on the site’s homepage or on a clearly identifiable tab. By directing traffic to your social media accounts through your website, you are allowing web users to see more of your brand’s content through its social media posts and your brand to build up the engagement of its social community online.

Content catered to your target market
Everything your brand does with its website needs to be done with its target market in mind. Give them content they find interesting and useful within your site. If you are not quite sure of who makes up your target market and what it is your target market wants to see from your brand, you will need to conduct market research in order to find out. This can be done either through primary research methods (like surveys and focus groups) or secondary research, in which your startup takes data already collected by an outside organization and uses it to form its own conclusions.

Know who you are using your site to market to, what it is they like and want to see, and craft your site around this knowledge. It is much easier to promote brand recognition with a specific segment of the market that you are working to get the attention of with your site than it is to attempt to do so by making general content that you hope pleases everyone.

Of course, your startup’s website needs to express what it is as a business and what it has to sell to the consumer. On top of that however, it needs to be a part of your startup’s online presence that serves as a strong representation of its brand and allows visitors to it to see that brand. Having your brand represented well on your site will allow people to recognize it, remember it, and be encouraged to follow along with all it is doing.

Buying managed security services is a growing trend with companies, as they seek to implement market-leading security solutions while dealing with a shortage of trained security personnel and a limited CAPEX budget. IDC predicts double-digit growth for this market and is expecting the MSSP market to hit $27 billion by 2020 (WW). While telcos and system integrators (SIs) play a large role in this space, trusted channel partners are finding customers seeking help with their security needs.

Providing managed services can be an attractive and highly profitable revenue stream for channel partners already providing configuration and setup services. Utilizing cloud-based capabilities and automated reporting, partners are able to deliver peace of mind to their customer base without significant effort or expense.

With our latest release, Fortinet’s FortiCloud now has the ability to manage the world’s most popular UTM from the cloud (Fortinet’s FortiGate UTM appliances were recently named a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the eighth consecutive time). Channel partners can access customers’ FortiGate Firewalls from any browser, from anywhere, and at any time, simplifying the effort to service customer networks. Automated reports remind the customer of the value of the service, showing what protection the partner has provided each month via Fortinet’s UTM, switches, and wireless access points.

Compared to other vendors with cloud-managed offerings, Fortinet provides best-in-class protection throughout the product range and multiple third-party certifications have validated that the protection provided by Fortinet consistently leads the market. Learn more about our FortiCloud solutions or become a partner today!

80 Percent of Web Professionals Report Client Growth of 25 Percent or More a Year, According to Study of United States, Germany, United Kingdom, India, Brazil and Mexico

Web Designers Leading Indicators of Small Business Growth: Retail, Travel, Health and Fitness Industries Growing Fastest Globally

Growth Creates Pain Points: Web Developers Report They Have to Play Too Many Roles and Struggle Managing New Clients

Constant Need for Learning/New Skills: Web Developers Report Strong Support for Certification Program to Create Standards

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., August 10, 2017 – A survey of web developers and designers – a leading indicator of small business growth - finds that the web professional industry continues to boom two decades after the emergence of the Internet. Rapid growth in clients is fueled by the retail and travel industries, according to a new global research study commissioned by GoDaddy.

The industry study, conducted in the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, India, Brazil and Mexico by the research firm Evans Data, found that web developers and designers – many of which are relative newcomers to the industry - at times struggle to keep up with demand for services from industries such as retail, travel, health and fitness.

Seventy-nine percent of web developers and designers reported client growth of 25 percent or more a year – with more than 1 in 3 saying growth was 50 percent or more. Nearly half reported they have been in business less than 5 years, but revenue was still high: a majority had revenue of $250,000 or more and 1 in 3 reported revenues of over $500,000.

“Two decades after general internet adoption, this research indicates that the ‘Golden Era’ of web development and design shows no sign of slowing down,” said Raghu Murthi, SVP of Hosting and Pro at GoDaddy. “But the research also provides lessons to new web professionals on the importance of continued learning and the need to manage growth and focus on looking where your next clients will come from.”

Regionally, the industries that were driving growth varied:

The primary drivers of business globally are:

• Selling new services to existing clients: 40%
• Providing support to existing clients: 31%
•  Finding new clients: 21%
• Reselling 3rd party products/services: 7%

The research also shows key differences between more mature markets, such as the United States, German and the United Kingdom, and other regions. For example, in more developed markets, developers and designers are more likely to work for a small firm and concentrate their work on fewer clients who provide larger retainers. That has enabled them to focus more time on securing new clients and growing their business.

As the industry continues to mature, the study finds a strong desire for continued learning and support for certification programs. Overall, 83 percent of developers and designers support a certification program that focuses on improving the skills and expertise of web professionals.

The research found that developers and designers grapple with how to keep up with technical and business skills to serve clients – but how they do that often differs based on where they are from. While online training courses are universally used, industry publications are much more popular in the United States (60 percent) than Mexico (32 percent) or Brazil (31 percent). Conferences and meetups are popular in India, but not as popular in Mexico, Germany, or the United Kingdom.

“Web pros are clearly looking for help in managing their client base, so they can maintain quality while expanding their business,” said Raghu Murthi, SVP of Hosting and Pro at GoDaddy. “That is why integrated services that help them manage multiple clients and sites from one place, are in such demand.”

Overall, the study provides insight into an industry that is integral to small business growth[DCR4] and the overall health of a digital economy. For example, two in five respondents said they now tailor web pages specifically for mobile devices, with the majority reporting they spend most of their time on mobile. It also shows key differences between how web professionals operate globally:

· Length of time in business varied among the regions, varying between more and less mature markets. The newest web professionals are in Mexico, India and Brazil.

Revenue per client can vary widely based on where the web professional works. In India, for example, only 1 in 3 clients provides revenue of at least $10,000, while in Mexico and the United States the majority of clients provide that amount.

The skills needed to be a successful web developer or designer varied by region, with technical and creative skills viewed as most important in India and Brazil.

Where web professional work can vary. Those in India, Germany and the United Kingdom are most apt to work in an outside office. While 72 percent of U.S. developers and designers report that they work out of their home (either in a home office, at a table, or on a couch). That is also reflected in how they view their work environments: over half of German, UK and Indian web professionals called it “conventional,” while the majority of U.S. workers said it was “loose.”

New tools such as video apps and services such as Slack are popular in the United States, with 56 percent reporting they primarily use them to stay in touch with clients. But email remains the primary source in other countries, with India and Mexico reporting only 1 in 3 use those new tools to communicate with clients.

The research project surveyed 1,500 web professionals in May 2017. The margin of error of the research is +/- 2.6 percent. A summary of the data is available upon request.

To learn more about GoDaddy Solutions for Web Professionals visit www.GoDaddy.com/pro.

Apr 13, 2017 / Alex Moura

Let’s shake ourselves out of our four-wheeled stupor, look at the vehicles and devices being developed, and reimagine how we’ll move around our cities, says TED technology curator Alex Moura.

Humanity has come a long way from traveling by horse, but when we consider the future of transportation in cities, too many of us are still stuck in the 18th century. We still envision our streets full of four-wheel chariots (minus the horses), and our future as relying on cars or car-like vehicles, because that’s all we know. Why this myopia? For most automakers and transportation companies, adhering to the status quo is more profitable than experimenting; their business models, even for forward thinkers like Tesla, depend on their keeping drivers tethered with maintenance and service. And builders and urban planners have learned to limit their thinking because existing regulations and clunky political processes have made it nearly impossible to innovate without years of negotiations. As a result, we’re laying the foundations for a transportation future that carries forward the problems of the past.

But there can be another way forward, a new vision of transportation that upsets the four-wheel chariot model. And signs of it are already rolling across the landscape. By looking at some of the most advanced vehicles and devices out there — not just concept cars and prototypes but vehicles that are already in use or being road-tested in the real world — we can start to see a more interesting, less car-based future. Based on this new crop of transportation-related devices, I’m making the following four predictions:

Courtesy of i-Road.

1. Cars will become much, much smaller.

While SUV and truck sales have been on the rise worldwide, that trend has been boosted by low gasoline prices, which can’t last given the finite supplies of fossil fuels. As we move forward, personal urban transportation will be dominated by individual vehicles. In 2015, Toyota launched a trial run of its three-wheeled i-Road electric vehicles — which resemble an enclosed motorcycle and fit only a driver and perhaps a small passenger — through a network of sharing stations in Tokyo. (We road-tested them at TED, too.) The project is now expanding throughout Japan, a nation with more electric car-charging stations than gas stations. In a bid to become the first country to embrace smart transportation systems, government officials have gone as far as trying to create international car-charging standards.

Read More

America's foremost personal finance guru weighs in on small-business budgeting.

by Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki

I hate networking.” We hear this all the time from executives, other professionals, and MBA students. They tell us that networking makes them feel uncomfortable and phony—even dirty. Although some people have a natural passion for it—namely, the extroverts who love and thrive on social interaction—many understandably see it as brown-nosing, exploitative, and inauthentic.

But in today’s world, networking is a necessity. A mountain of research shows that professional networks lead to more job and business opportunities, broader and deeper knowledge, improved capacity to innovate, faster advancement, and greater status and authority. Building and nurturing professional relationships also improves the quality of work and increases job satisfaction.

When we studied 165 lawyers at a large North American law firm, for example, we found that their success depended on their ability to network effectively both internally (to get themselves assigned to choice clients) and externally (to bring business into the firm). Those who regarded these activities as distasteful and avoided them had fewer billable hours than their peers.

Fortunately, our research shows that an aversion to networking can be overcome. We’ve identified four strategies to help people change their mindset.

1. Focus on Learning
Most people have a dominant motivational focus—what psychologists refer to as either a “promotion” or a “prevention” mindset. Those in the former category think primarily about the growth, advancement, and accomplishments that networking can bring them, while those in the latter see it as something they are obligated to take part in for professional reasons.

In laboratory experiments we conducted in the United States and Italy with college students and working adults, and in an additional sample of 174 lawyers at the firm we studied, we documented the effects of both types of thinking. Promotion-focused people networked because they wanted to and approached the activity with excitement, curiosity, and an open mind about all the possibilities that might unfold. Prevention-focused people saw networking as a necessary evil and felt inauthentic while engaged in it, so they did it less often and, as a result, underperformed in aspects of their jobs.

Read More

By: Gloria Kopp

If you're often finding that projects are being delivered late, rushed to be completed or just not up to the standard you're expecting, you and your team could benefit greatly from the creation of a clear, organized workflow. Your workflow defines the patterns and processes by which you bring a project from conception to completion, and helps ensure that you don't experience these setbacks that exist when there's no organization behind the production process. Follow these steps to start putting together a workflow that is tailored to your team and the projects you're working on, and watch the levels of quality and speed in your work soar.

Ready to level up your working knowledge of business? Here’s what to read now — and next.

Business 101, with Nilofer Merchant

First, read these 2 foundational books…
1. The Change Masters
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Free Press, 1985

“A foundational book for your collection. When a colleague recently switched careers, I lent her this incredibly dog-eared book from college days. Rosabeth Moss Kanter helped coined the idea and term ’empowerment’ in the 1970s, a sure sign she was ahead of her time. Even though The Change Masters was published forty years ago, it’s relevant. Why? Because all progress is made by those that are change masters. Become one.”

2. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations
Clay Shirky
Penguin, 2008

“A few years back, I took out Clay Shirky’s book and found it filled with scribbles. While it’s almost passé now to talk of how Obama organized a large community to sweep into the presidency, Shirky’s book is textbook quality for what will happen next. It points to a new truth: Today, connected individuals can do what once only large organizations could. So look past the timeliness of his stories to see the timeless.”

Then, try these 4 to understand current needs…

1. Opposable Mind: Winning through Integrative Thinking
Roger Martin
Harvard Business Review, 2009

“I’m convinced that the way we create an abundant future of prosperity will require a global redesign of what is possible. And I think Roger Martin’s idea here could be key. When you hold two ideas as opposites, you’ll never find a way for both things to be true. But to go forward and reconcile some deep divides we have, we’re going to have to find new solutions to old problems through new thinking. Martin’s book is like yoga for the mind.”

2. Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
John Maeda
MIT Press, 2011

“The real question is: How will we reinvent the world around us? Well, fundamentally, it will involve having folks take the big step away from just being themselves (the thing we all know best) and join in doing something with others (the people we fear may let us down). John Maeda’s book captures a modern leader’s challenge to switch gears and become a social, collaborative leader.”

3. The Difference
Scott E. Page
Princeton University Press, 2010

“Complex systems turn out to be adaptive and resilient, and therefore thriving, systems. Sounds like something our world needs more of, right? See how a math theorist argues for including difference –- that is, cognitive difference — into our lives, our workplaces and ultimately what we create. The value of this difference is a proven truth, not a feel-good mantra, for how you shape both better ideas and new solutions. It’s going to be central to what happens next.”

Read More

Expanded Security Service Offering to include DNS Protection and Integrated Console Allows NinjaRMM Clients to Reduce Complexity of Cybersecurity Management While Growing their Revenue Stream

About the Partnership:

• NinjaRMM has been partnering with Webroot since May 2016.
• NinjaRMM’s addition of Webroot’s SecureAnywhere® DNS Protection to its portfolio will provide customers protection against malicious websites with minimal complexity for the service provider and the end consumer. The product is controlled via the Webroot Global Site Manager used by the endpoint solution, offering a single console to set company-wide browsing controls and internet-use tracking.
• In addition to SecureAnywhere DNS Protection, NinjaRMM offers its customers Webroot’s SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection, providing MSPs the ability to offer multiple layers of protection and increase revenue.
• The integration of Webroot’s industry-leading solutions into Ninja’s RMM platform provides one location for management and reporting, saving time and reducing the overall cost of administration.
  

Ninja is now HIPPA Compliant – Ninja’s focus on Healthcare will give the ability for agency’s to be sure of compliance standards from its platform.

Release 2.14 – Just completed

Third-Party Patching (beta): Fully managed patching of 100+ applications. Includes common office applications like Adobe products, browsers, Java, and more. For more information on how to access the beta, please refer to the Ninja Support Community.

Splashtop for Windows and Mac: Remote access your Win/Mac devices through a single-pane integration with NinjaRMM. Easily deploy Splashtop to your desired organizations.

NEW Mac Scripting: New out-of-box scripts for Macs. You can now enable SSH, re-apply user permissions and more directly from NinjaRMM console.

• Enable/Disable Firewall
• Disable Firewall
• Reset printing
• Empty trash
• Flush DNS
• Kill core audio
• Auto updates off
• Purge disk cache
• Reapply user permissions
• Reset launcher service
• Repair disk permissions
• Repair SSH
• Repair TeamViewer
  • Reinitializes Teamviewer, kills the service and restarts it

Windows OS Keys Report: New reporting section for Windows OS keys to make software asset management easier.

Remote Command Line: Ability to run commands as currently logged-in user.For full release notes, please refer to our community page here.

By: Jayson Demers

VIP CONTRIBUTOR

MARCH 21, 2016

You’re excited to start a business. Maybe you have an idea, or you’re just fascinated with the idea of launching and growing your own enterprise. You’re willing to take some risks, like leaving your current job or going without personal revenue for a while. But there’s one logistical hurdle stopping you: You don’t have much money.

On the surface, this seems like a major problem, but a lack of personal capital shouldn’t stop you from pursuing your dreams. In fact, it’s entirely possible to start and grow a business with almost no personal financial investment whatsoever -- if you know what you’re doing.

Why a business needs money

First, let’s take a look at why a business needs money in the first place. There’s no uniform “startup” fee for building a business, so different businesses will have different needs. It’s important to first estimate how much you need before you start finding alternative methods to fund your company.

Consider the following uses:

• Licenses and permits. Depending on your region, you may need special paperwork and registry to operate.
• Supplies. Are you buying raw materials? Do you need computers and/or other devices?
• Equipment. Do you need specialized machinery or software?
• Office space. This is a huge expense, and you can't neglect things like Internet, utilities costs, janitorial services and whether to outsource back office tasks, like payroll and invoicing.
• Associations, subscriptions, memberships. What publications and affiliations will you subsribe to every month?
• Operating expenses. Dig into the nooks and crannies here, and don’t forget about marketing.
• Legal fees. Are you consulting a lawyer throughout your business-development process?
• Employees, freelancers and contractors. If you can’t do it alone, you’ll need people on your payroll.

With that said, you have two main paths of starting a business with less money: lowering your costs or increasing your available capital from outside sources. You have three options here:

Read More

Joe Sykora, Fortinet’s Vice President of Americas Channels and Enhanced Technologies, gives his perspective on how an integrated security architecture like Fortinet’s Security Fabric creates new opportunities for solution providers. Joe Sykora, Fortinet’s Vice President of Americas Channels and Enhanced Technologies, gives his perspective on how an integrated security architecture like Fortinet’s Security Fabric creates new opportunities for solution providers. 

Why is the idea of a security fabric so important to network security in this current environment?

Organizations can’t just keep adding new, siloed security solutions that don’t talk to other devices on their network, and that require separate management and collaboration tools. What organizations need today is a collaborative system of tools that work together to monitor their network, share information, and respond to threats no matter where they occur.

The Fortinet Security Fabric allows us to take all of our tools and integrate them into a single, interactive security framework. This collaborative ecosystem also includes third-party partners in cloud, software-defined networking, sandboxing, testing, security information and event management (SIEM), and Single Sign On technologies, as well as support for the services provided by our worldwide family of channel partners.

How does Fortinet’s Security Fabric benefit Fortinet’s global partner network of distributors and solution providers?

Because of its critical and complex nature, security continues to be one of the largest opportunities for the channel. Partners that can plan, design, deploy, and optimize an integrated security offering are finding a growing demand for their skills. 

By tying traditional security appliances and emerging technologies together into an integrated security fabric, partners can help their customers collect and respond to more actionable intelligence, synchronize threat responses, and centralize the creation, distribution, and orchestration of their security management and analysis. This broad visibility and open-standards approach provided by the Fortinet Security Fabric allows solution providers to implement more automation to focus on the alerts that really matter.

How is Fortinet’s Fabric Ready Partner program different from the alliance partner programs we see other vendors promoting?

Like many partner programs, Fortinet’s Fabric Ready Partner Program brings together best-in-class technology alliance partners. But unlike those other approaches, Fortinet’s approach actually allows our channel partners to deliver pre-integrated, end-to-end security offerings ready for deployment.

And for our channel partners, extending the functionality and intelligence of the Fortinet Security Fabric vision with an open and cooperative ecosystem of partner solutions means they can more easily:

• Deliver more effective, more responsive security solutions that leverage the collaborative power of the Fortinet Security Fabric
• Speed business outcomes with integrated ecosystem solutions that address customers’ needs.  Leverage Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready seal of approval to build trust with customers and instill confidence that the solutions work
• Deliver solutions with faster time-to-deployment to customers, with reduced technical support burden & costs due to pre-validation.
  

Download our eBook, How the Fortinet Security Fabric Addresses Today’s Top Security Concerns.

When it comes to starting a business, you might be a pro…

But, what about when it comes to working through all the legal issues you must consider as an entrepreneur when launching your start-up?

The world of business can get complicated quickly when you add in all the laws that apply – liability, finances, trademarks…

The list goes on. 

Most entrepreneurs get caught up in the midst of starting their business and quickly forget about the legal aspects that need to be considered.

To ensure that you avoid the negative repercussions of an avoidable mistake, there are a few common legal issues you should be aware of:

1. Non-disclosure agreements.

It seems like a given – don’t talk about anything that is considered “top secret.” But, it isn’t that obvious to everyone and to some, it just isn’t a priority or even a concern…

Particularly those outside of your business who might become involved with you in some way.

Anyone who interacts with your business – from the business side, not your clients – should sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to ensure they won’t run and share your ideas with the competition. 

2. Future of the business – the what if’s?

Life happens. Unfortunately, sometimes people leave this world too soon. If that is the case, what will happen to your business?

It is important to invest in a will kit to ensure the assets of your business are protected and have a designated owner should you become unavailable. 

Have your attorney send your will kit to the post office for easy pickup.

3. Vesting.

Finding the right co-founder for your business is quite the task…

Who do you trust? Who will make a good fit and lead your business in the right direction?

It is important that you have a similar work ethic and timelines for investment – you need to have chemistry. 

Instead of getting all your shares at once, once option to consider is vesting. Your equity can be vested over time so that if you don’t have the chemistry you thought you did, there is a fair solution. 

4. Intellectual property.

While your business is still small, it is hard to imagine that you could potentially face the issue of people infringing on your intellectual property assets (or vice versa)…

But, it can happen easier than you think.

It is worth the investment of both time and money to get your trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets legally registered. It will be a lifesaver if, or when, an issue arises. 

5. Trademarks.

You just thought choosing a business name was difficult…

But, did you consider that even as creative as you might have been, someone else might still have thought of it first? 

Invest in performing a killer search to ensure your business name is not already another company’s trademark.

6. Compliance.

There are corporate compliance laws in place that affect companies in various industries. The laws that apply specifically to your business will vary based on the type of business entity you are, the state you do business in, and several other determining factors.

Do some research, and consult the help of an attorney, to ensure you know what documents should be generated and maintained by your business to remain compliant. 

7. Business structure.

There are several different business structures…

Partnerships, S corporations, corporations, sole proprietorship and a limited liability company.

All business structures hold very different meanings and offer a variety of different benefits. You should consider if your business is going to remain privately funded, if you plan on taking on investors, and what type of growth you expect your company to have in the future. 

You’ve already put in all the leg work to get your business up and running, don’t let a simple – and costly – legal mistake cause you to lose it all.

We have all seen it happen to at least one good person…

Rather it is in politics or small business – someone makes a huge mistake and loses it all.

But, the ironic part about the entire situation is that the mistake was totally avoidable. And, as an outsider, you could totally see that.

However, the person making the detrimental mistake is an insider – they don’t see what you see, hints as to why they didn’t avoid the mistake in the first place.

So, as you look into beginning your entrepreneur journey for the first time, I am here to be the person that offers you the advice you need to avoid those big, obvious mistakes…

As an entrepreneur for the first-time, a few big mistakes you can make (and also avoid) include:

1.    Falling head-over-heels in love.

Mistake: Young, or just first time, entrepreneurs often fall into one trap – they get bit by the love bug of the business industry. Don’t fall completely in love with your business idea; you will lose focus. Falling in love with your business idea could blind you and keep you from seeing that it might not have any profit-generating avenues.

How to avoid it: Be subjective. Always keep a list of your pros and cons, to remind yourself that if or when the pros outweigh the cons, it is time to move on to a new idea.

2.    Lacking support.

Mistake: This can encompass lacking technical, emotional, and/or financial support – trust me, you will need it all. While you can’t always get everyone in your corner, there is always someone. Especially financially, you will need this support to even get started.

How to avoid it: Create your own support group. Only keep the people you trust in your close circle, but be sure to keep it free of all the “haters.” Discuss business with people who truly believe in you and foster those friendships.

3.    Working with friends.

Mistake: Friends are just that. Friends. Friends and business should always remain separate. When working with someone so close to you, a level of respect is often lacking in your relationship which could lead to issues and tension in the workplace.

How to avoid it: Scout out talented people at networking events. Ask other people in the industry for recommendations – maybe some of their former employees would be a good fit. Always look for neutral parties to add to the team.

4.    Attempting to capture everyone.

Mistake: There is a big sea of people out in the world, and capturing the attention and likings of them all is impossible. You will never make everyone happy and intrigue everyone enough to buy your product, so why waste your time trying?

How to avoid it: Designate a target audience, then, refine your message and target specific niches that relate to your target audience.

5.    Using personal credit cards for business expenses.

Mistake: Several experts in entrepreneurship say you should only risk what you can afford to lose. There is no guarantee your business idea will work, so don’t risk it all just hoping that it will. Putting business expenses on a personal credit card is a good sign you can’t afford whatever you’re doing – and now, you are paying interest on your debt to credit card manufacturers and companies.

How to avoid it: Start a savings account. Continue to build the balance up with the intentions of it being your business funds. Then, use those for business ventures. You already had it set aside for that purpose, so you aren’t risking tour livelihood.

6.    Failing to test the market.

Mistake: While your idea might sound pretty intriguing, it isn’t fail-proof. Just because you assume the market will eat it up, doesn’t mean that they will. Testing the market could also lead to valuable advice that could improve your product for better sales.

How to avoid it: Test your product and get feedback from the market rapidly – before starting your business. Pass the product out to friends, family and anyone else who is relative to your target audience.

7.    Being the single founder.

Mistake: You will have far more responsibilities and tasks than you realize. You will suddenly find yourself overloaded with tasks that you can’t possibly get done.

How to avoid it: Learn to delegate tasks. Have a co-founder, or two, that you can hand some of the responsibility.

John Maddison, Fortinet Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions

Fortinet’s UTM solutions have been positioned in the leader’s quadrant of Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management for the 8th time in a row.

Fortinet has maintained its position as the leader in this market by delivering the broadest, most powerful, and highly-automated UTM security solution available, designed to protect all points in the network – from the IoT to the cloud, physical and virtual networks, and wired and wireless environments with a wide range of powerful security and networking tools.

We believe your customers should never have to choose between performance and protection.  Which is why Fortinet’s UTM solution consistently provides the best price to performance ratio in the industry. Our UTM devices are built using our patented series of security processors, and by offloading CPU-intensive security inspection and decryption functions to specialized silicon, our latest SOC3 (System on a Chip) processor is able to provide the most cost-effective, high-performance solution on the market.

The Leading Solution for Small to Medium Businesses and Distributed Enterprises

The Fortinet UTM solution enables you to protect your customers across the entire threat spectrum with integrated high performance next generation firewalls, web and email filtering, data loss prevention, and more. And unlike others in this market, Fortinet’s UTM solutions also enable you to address networking needs with extensive routing, switching, access control, Wi-Fi, LAN, and WAN capabilities.

These capabilities are all administered through FortiManager’s unified, single-pane-of-glass management console. It automates the provisioning and management of devices, centralizes policy distribution and orchestration, and helps maintain regulatory compliance to reduce operational burdens, so you can operate efficiently while providing superior service to your customers.

Learn more about our SMB security solutions on www.fortinet.com. If you’re interested in going to market with the industry leader, become a partner today!

This week we focus a Veeam - a deidcated community sponsor who get's SMB Nation! Here are seven ways to leave your lover and come over to Veeam! 

01 - Availability vs. Legacy BackupVeeam

is a solution that was specifically designed for the modern, highly virtualized hybrid cloud world. It allows you to meet aggressive SLAs for IT service recovery that can be measured in seconds and minutes versus the hours and days often required by legacy technologies.According to the 2017 Veeam Availability Report, Veeam customers meet their recovery time and point objective (RTPO™) SLAs 90% of the time compared to only 69% with their previous legacy provider. Veeam was built to manage the amount of data found in the data center of today — not the ones of yesteryear.

02 - Innovation vs. Status

QuoVeeam is an innovation leader with a proven history of being first to deliver market-defining capabilities, support of the latest platforms and the most comprehensive and forward-looking cloud vision in the industry.Legacy solutions were designed to protect the workloads of decades ago but still lack some of the key capabilities that Veeam invented, such as Instant VM Recovery® without limitations, SureBackup® and SureReplica, Virtual Labs, 2-in-1: backup and replication™ and many others! 

03 - Growth vs. Uncertain Future

Veeam is one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies today. It is a privately held rocket ship on target to reach $1 billion in yearly sales by 2018 with freedom to innovate. Recognized by Gartner, IDC and Ovum as a top choice among data protection and Availability solutions, Veeam’s forward momentum is in stark contrast with the lagging innovation and in many cases, the declining market share of legacy backup providers. As these providers impose mass layoffs and struggle to stay relevant in the modern data center, one can only speculate what additional steps will have to be taken to right the ship. Veeam’s growth shows no signs of slowing down — adding more than 4,000 new customers every month and new powerful capabilities with every release.

04 - Simplicity vs. Complexity

Veeam’s straightforward approach to licensing combined with a near-effortless scalable architecture and deployment gets you up and running in minutes. With no agents to protect virtual workloads or applications, two out of three Veeam customers spend 35% less time managing their Availability infrastructure which frees them up for more productive tasks.Compared to legacy solutions that impose antiquated capacity licensing requirements, myriad agents and separately licensed products, the choice is clear.

05 - Powerful Capabilities vs. Lack of Important Features

With industry-leading features such as instant, agentless recovery for tier-1 Microsoft applications, built-in WAN acceleration, secure end-to-end encryption, an innovative Scale-out Backup Repository™, deep integration with leading primary and deduplication storage arrays and advanced replication capabilities that enable near-continuous data Availability, Veeam’s capabilities are unrivaled by legacy backup solutions.

06 - Reliability vs. Guess Work

“It just works” – that is the feedback from Veeam customers. Veeam customers report substantially less downtime and fewer backup and replication failures than with legacy backup solutions. In fact, it’s the #1 reason enterprises select Veeam! Patented automated backup and replica testing AND recovery verification for 100% of your workloads, combined with Veeam’s industry-leading customer support will help you sleep better at night.Legacy backup solutions, on the other hand, have no infrastructure monitoring and no automated backup testing and recovery verification — leaving you vulnerable to potential data corruption and restore failures.07 - Customer Satisfaction vs. FrustrationVeeam’s customers are overwhelmingly satisfied with our product features and functionality, ease of use, technical support and sales effectiveness. With a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 2x the industry average, 9 out of 10 Veeam customers WOULD recommend Veeam to their peers.Former legacy backup users tell us they switched to Veeam for the stable, hybrid cloud-focused, high performance that their previous solution couldn’t deliver.07+1 - One more reason to switch from Legacy BackupVeeam Agents for Windows and Linux built to protect your physical and public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.) workloads are FREE for 6 months and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is FREE for 12 Veeam Backup & Replication is one of those rare solutions that surprises you right out of the box. I’ve been in the industry for more than 15 years, and I haven’t seen a product that has surprised me as much as Veeam has.

By:  Lisa Shorr, Certified Image Consultant & Brand Building Specialist

You all know them, THAT employee in the office or colleague that just doesn’t get it.  That person who rolls their eyes or always responds to your questions in an exasperated, angry tone.  Are you picturing “that” co-worker in your mind?  I knew you were!  Every office has one or maybe two.  I call them the “Culture Crusher.”   

In the IT SMB world, the Culture Crusher is often ignored or tolerated because there is always a client or some other pressing emergency to deal with.  Taking the “I-will-deal-with-it-later” approach often leads to much greater issues.

I employed a Culture Crusher. Full disclosure, I’ve had a few of these challenging employees over the past 25 years.  As tech-savvy as this Engineer was, his people-skills, or lack-thereof, ultimately cost us a managed services client. We kept justifying his behavior because he had the tech skills our organization needed.  Had we known then, what we know now!

Our client called our office one day requesting a different Engineer because the one we assigned to their account, made them feel “stupid.”  Probing the upset client further revealed that this Engineer had a condescending tone. This tone carried over into our office and included eye-rolling, when a co-worker did not understand a tech issue.  Our Culture Crusher put a kink in my otherwise well-oiled chain.  He not only cost us a valuable client, we also lost productivity because his co-workers did not want to approach him when they had a tech issue, that only he could answer.  Are you the business owner nodding your head feeling sick to your stomach?  Or maybe the co-worker, who fell behind on completing a ticket and got into trouble because you did not want to approach your Culture Crusher, for fear of being berated?

Whether your office is a one-man band or 50 plus employees, behavioral awareness always makes the difference between building trust or burning a bridge.  A true leader is not necessarily the C-Level Executive, it is often someone who focuses on these skills:  

1. Friendly Phone Skills – How many client IT issues can your company resolve remotely?  Cloud solutions have changed the dynamic from needing to go onsite to needing to pick up the phone to work with your clients.  It is more important now to pay attention to your tone of voice, volume and how fast you talk.  Do you or a team member have an engaging tone, sound happy and confident and speak at a slow enough pace to enunciate each word?  A phone call is often the only experience a client has with your company.  How you handle the phones sets the tone for building a relationship. 
2. Choose Your Attitude – Don’t be the angry guy!  IT is a very emotional industry.  One-minute a client is singing our praises, the next they are screaming at us because “you (our IT provider) lost our files!”  Yes, we get blamed for all tech issues, even if they were out of our control!  This emotional rollercoaster takes a toll on our nerves.  An inspirational leader, takes this ride in stride and tries hard to consciously maintain a can-do, let’s deal with this attitude.  It’s easy to let this pressure seep under your skin and ooze out of you in the form of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  This hairy green monster, often hits a plateau in their career growth due to lack of maturity and a perceived inability to handle challenging problems. 
3. Notice YOUR Nonverbal Behavior – Did you know, “We listen with our Eyes?”  Before a person utters a first word, their on-looker has surmised their wealth, health, hobbies, and whether they are management material or not.  We make “value judgements” based on what we were taught during our childhood.  Those ideas of what you “should” wear and how you “should” act, shape the way we view the world today.  In other words, people’s perceptions create their reality.  Take ownership of your actions.  Appear groomed and professionally dressed.  Stand tall versus slouch. Smile and make eye-contact.  Send the message to your client, prospect, employee that you genuinely care about what they have to say. 
4. Adapt to Team Culture – Here is a secret:  A key component to a thriving, fast-growing business, is a cohesive team culture, an environment that fosters collaboration. Each team member appreciates the positive contributions of the extroverts and introverts alike. Listens to the hard-chargers and is thankful for the great peace-makers.  Makes a concerted effort to share corporate values and resolve issues based on the needs of the team and company versus having their own personal agenda.  There is no “I” in team!
   5.    No Geek Speak – Know your audience!  If you are speaking to a fellow techy, then go ahead and use technical jargon.  Talking to your client who doesn’t know the difference between a hard drive and a thumb drive, requires an entirely different approach.  An empathetic leader has the ability to describe a technical issue or resolution and be understood by all.  Your mission is to make others “feel” calm, comfortable and validated, not inadequate in any way.  
     
   

The next time you communicate with a client or co-worker, think, how do I want to be perceived by others?  Cultivator or Crusher, the choice is up to you.

To learn more about Perception and Image in the Workplace visit Lisa’s website:  http://www.shorrsuccess.com

About Lisa Shorr:
Lisa has spent over two decades in the sales and marketing arena. She is certified in Advanced Image Consulting from London Image Institute and owns two businesses, Shorr Success and Secure Future Tech Solutions. She has delivered Professional Development and Corporate Branding workshops and seminars across New England. She has styled many professional women and men on photoshoots, T.V. shows and in the privacy of their own closets! Her articles on style, career development and IT, have been published in notable magazines and newspapers including PC World, Providence Business News, GoLocalProv, Rhode Island Small Business Journal, So Rhode Island Magazine and Trade Secrets Magazine. Lisa is Vice President of Marketing and Communications for the Association of Image Consultants, NY-Tristate Chapter.

GoDaddy Offers Customers World-Class Malware Removal and Website Protection

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., June 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - GoDaddy Inc. (NYSE: GDDY), the world’s largest technology provider dedicated to shifting the global economy toward life-fulfilling independent ventures, today launched GoDaddy Website Security, a cutting-edge website protection service to keep customers’ sites clean and free of malware. Website Security is powered by Sucuri, recently acquired by GoDaddy to further strengthen its security offerings, and provides world-class malware protection. It pairs powerful, comprehensive protection with ease of use.

The level of automation used by hackers in their exploits continues to grow. Networks of infected computers and devices pose a significant challenge to small businesses, with more than four percent of all internet traffic now being described as malicious. Security products need be equally automated and responsive to the changing environment.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘why would a hacker target me? I’m just a small business,’” said Kevin Doerr, Senior Vice President of Security Products at GoDaddy. “But hackers aren’t what you see in the movies – they now build sophisticated tools that hunt for known vulnerabilities on any website. Instead of breaking into one car, this is like a group of robots checking a parking lot of cars for unlocked doors. Websites owned by small businesses are far from impervious to this, although they may not have the preventative resources available to larger companies. We believe enterprise-grade security should be available to everyone, and that’s what we’re bringing to our customers with GoDaddy Website Security.”

Website Security offers continuous monitoring and daily malware scanning to detect any known security holes or issues on a website. If a website is infected by malware, GoDaddy’s Website Security guarantees fast response time, malware removal, and blacklist removal. Website Security premium plans add a second layer of protection, including a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that blocks malicious traffic before it gets to the website.

Key features and benefits include:

• Guaranteed malware removal and hack repair: All Website Security products are backed by an army of talented security analysts who will not stop until the sites are 100 percent clean.
• Expedited service for emergency cleanup: Website Security Express provides superfast malware removal service by security experts who will respond and fix the problems within 30 minutes of receiving a cleanup request.
• Continuous security monitoring: Offers proactive protection with daily scans and immediate alerts in case anything unusual is detected – unlimited malware cleanups are also included at no extra charge.
• Google blacklist monitoring and removal: Website Security monitors a number of blacklists such as Google, Norton, and McAfee to ensure your company’s reputation is protected. If a site is blacklisted, our security analysts will perform a complete malware and blacklist removal.
•  Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection: Blocks malware from penetrating websites, and prevents malware reinfection after an attack so your site remains secure and safe.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) accelerator: Global business sites can benefit from CDN to boost site speed and performance to ensure that pages load quickly, no matter where in the world customers are located.
•  Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Mitigation: Attacks such as an HTTPS Flood Attack and DNS Amplification DoS Attack can bring down a website by overwhelming it with a flood of automated traffic. Our advanced security monitoring and Web Application Firewall (WAF) prevents these types of attacks before they occur.
  
  GoDaddy’s Website Security products are available starting at $6.99 per month.
  
  For more information, visit https://www.godaddy.com/web-security/website-security
  
  Connect with GoDaddy on Facebook , Twitter & LinkedIn
  
  About GoDaddy
  GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward life-fulfilling independent ventures. With more than 14 million customers worldwide and more than 63 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business. To learn more about the company, visit www.GoDaddy.com.

Startups usually run on a shoestring, which means that they have limited marketing budgets. In order to reach their target audience and boost their business, startup owners have to be very creative and use every possible digital marketing strategy they have at their disposal. There are lots of cost-effective tactics that can be used, but having a well-defined strategy is essential for their implementation and success. If you do everything properly, you can expect a 50% increase in conversion rates.

Instant Messaging
Apps such as Viber, WhatsApp, Snapchat, or Tango are dominating the world of digital marketing. No wonder this is so when they offer easy audience segmentation as well as personalized communication. Messages that companies send their customers via instant messengers have very high open rates. As messages are precisely targeted and sent directly to customers, their reach is significantly higher than that of social media channels. Due to the fact that instant messages, even though they’re commercial, add a human touch to faceless and generic advertising communication, people open them within a few minutes, and their impact is instantaneous.

Outreach
There’s no better way to promote your business than to partner with an influencer from your industry. First of all, select someone who shares the same values and who doesn’t have a huge following. These, so-called micro-influencers with 10,000-100,000 followers, are more accessible to startups and SMBs, and they’re not too expensive. Besides that, although their following is smaller, it’s very loyal which means that your products and services will be presented to a relevant, target audience interested in what you have to offer. Another factor is even more important than the number of followers, and it’s their engagement. Always go for an influencer, or a Facebook group with responsive followers who like, share and comment a lot.

Mobile optimization
Google has reported that 9 out of 10 people leave a mobile website if they can’t find what they’re looking for right away. At the same time, a statistic has shown that 22.3% of all retail e-commerce dollars in the U.S. were spent through mobile devices. Obviously, if you want to grow your business, you need to optimize your website for mobile. If you take into consideration that more searches take place on mobile than on computers, it’s clear that you’re wasting a great opportunity to improve brand visibility if your site isn’t mobile friendly.

Video
Modern consumers are annoyed and fed up with traditional, intrusive ads and pop-ups. They want something to engage, educate, and entertain them. Valuable, relevant content can do wonders for your brand building efforts and awareness, which is why you need to come up with a stellar content strategy. Video has to be its essential part, as surveys say that people spend 1/3 of all their online activity watching videos. Live streaming adds a sense of urgency and interactivity to your video efforts and helps you connect with your customers on a more personal and direct level. However, in order to benefit from videos, they need to be well-produced and of high quality.

Social media
Social media platforms can amplify your brand message and help you expand your reach. Spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter can help you crowdfund your startup, grow your customer base, or generate traffic. It’s true that certain social media websites try to capitalize on paid ads, but their price is still moderate, which makes them affordable even for businesses with small budgets. Social proof, one of the most effective marketing tools, can be successfully generated and shared via social media, thus adding credibility to your business. Apart from improving brand visibility, social media channels can help you obtain valuable information about your customers and improve both your products and customer service.

Big data
Big data has the power to transform digital marketing by providing marketers with the necessary information, crucial for understanding and improving the results of their campaigns. Predictive analytics is highly useful for predicting customer behavior, customer profiling, reducing churn, and lead generation. All this can turn a modest startup into a highly successful venture. Many SMB owners fail to take advantage of big data because they believe that it’s too expensive, but as a matter of fact, there are more affordable options in which you can invest. Implementing this technology can be a real game changer for your business.

Digital marketing offers any startup a great chance to stand out and be noticed among the tons of its competitors’ commercial messages.

Nate Vickery is a business consultant and an online author mainly focused on latest trends in marketing and growth hacking. He is also the editor at Bizzmarkblog.com.

New solution brings the high quality and reliability of expensive MPLS networks to low-cost broadband with baked in enterprise security

Wilmington, DE– June 20th, 2017 – My Digital Shield (MDS), a leading provider of Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS) for small businesses, announced today the release of OmniWAN, a SD-WAN solution tailored to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). A combination of Elastic UTM and SD-WAN, OmniWAN brings important quality metrics to existing internet connections, turning cable, DSL and more into enterprise-quality MPLS, without the costly price. Having offered OmniShield, an ElasticUTM platform tailored to provide Fortune 500-grade managed security services to SMBs, MDS sought out to create a high-performing, secure UTM coupled with high-performing internet connectivity at a small business price.

OmniWAN optimizes the internet connection or bonds multiple internet connections, sets several parameters and adds dynamic guardrails in order to keep all traffic flowing optimally. OmniWAN also adds other technology to ensure all applications are treated and optimized according to how they should be treated across the network. All applications, including voice, video streaming, music, webcasts, video conference and file transfers, are sensitive to different network parameters such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss, fragmentation, etc. OmniWAN ensures each application receives the optimal treatment for its sensitivity requirements.

"SD-WAN and ElasticUTM are extremely powerful independently, but when properly used together, the enhancements are exponential," said Andrew Bagrin, founder and CEO of MyDigitalShield. "We didn't want to become another SD-WAN provider; our goal was to enhance OmniShield while building a combined solution for the SMB market. As a result, we are able to bring the high quality and reliability of expensive networks at lower costs, but with baked in high-end security."

Tested by MDS channel partners for months, OmniWAN and OmniShield have shown great success.

"OmniShield has always been an amazing concept for security and one which has proven to be extremely effective for our clients; however, I was a bit skeptical about OmniWAN,” said Kenneth Holley, founder and CEO of Information Systems Integration, a premier MDS channel partner. “After experiencing it first hand, thoroughly testing in our lab and several other locations, I am amazed at how the combined solution works so well. The improvements to the networks are incredible.  Absolutely everything works better, is faster and more secure. The OmniWAN and OmniShield combination is exactly what we - and our clients - needed."

For more information about MDS’ OmniWAN, visit http://www.mydigitalshield.com/omniwan/.

About My Digital Shield
My Digital Shield (MDS) is a leading provider of ElasticUTM and SD-WAN fused as a platform that provides enterprise-quality connectivity and security technology to small businesses and branch offices. Based on industry-leading unified threat management (UTM) technology, MDS’ customizable cloud-based security solution offers continual protection against cyber threats and intrusion at an affordable price. With no bandwidth pollution, the ElasticUTM delivery model ensures that the latest virus definitions and threat updates are in use for continual threat prevention. Founded in 2013, MDS serves thousands of managed service providers (MSPs) and small businesses in various industries, including retail, restaurants, hospitality, and professional services. For more information, visit www.mydigitalshield.com or follow on Twitter @MyDigitalShield.

Recently many MSPs and partners attended a lecture on “How to Throw an Election” discussing bots with the notorious Tcat. The well-attended event was to further our technology conversations beyond the LAN and even MSP land. The context was actually SECURITY and that is always a crowd pleaser. Funny thing is, an election bot rehash article emerged here just as I was writing the blog. If anything, this report from the NY Daily News is interesting.

But the real reason we’re here is to talk business bots. A tip of the hat to Sage (the accounting software firm) for hosting a one-day bot “BOTlanta” workshop in Atlanta as part of the Sage Summit 2017 conference (in part this made me think about the above Tcat lecture). “At BOTlanta, Sage’s chief of AI and bots, Kriti Sharma, will outline the importance of establishing a bot code of ethics and provide an interactive step-by-step guide on how to create a bot of your own.” This free day-long workshop was open to the Atlanta community. Bravo!

The Bot Chick: Kriti Sharma

At the Sage Summit keynote, Sharma introduced PEGG, a voice chat bot that resides on the Amazon Echo device. Beyond cool, you can use the most natural interface of all (voice) to manage the Sage One cloud-based accounting system. For example, you can as management reporting questions such as “How much does Microsoft owe me?” You can watch the keynote speech here as I shot a point of view (POV) vid (see below).

Now the good stuff. I had 1:1 interview with Sharma (“the bot chick”) after her bot presentation. First Sharma clarified that Pegg was launched as a chat bot for Facebook messenger and Skype. You could essentially type commands. At Sage Summit 2017, the voice portion of the Pegg chat bot was introduced. Point well taken.

“We use analytics to help design and improve Pegg. It’s the only way.” Shared Sharma. “Over 20,000 people are using Pegg and we can discover new features that people want. Our development time using a chat bot is much faster than traditional application development.” She emphasized voice integration as a way to get more tasks done and “open up the industry to a new wave of users who don’t have accounting expertise.”
Interestingly, Pegg is best thought of as having strengths in management reporting and revenue side transactions such as issuing an invoice. “You can’t trigger a payment from Pegg as we haven’t built a global payment solution yet.” Sharma added. “So security isn’t that different from a keyboard or mobile interface. We don’t want to give an account balance without some type of voice signature.”

Finally, I asked her if the industry is “early” with artificial intelligence with the likes of IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa and now Pegg. “Yes and no. The way I see it is that Watson and Alexa are very general. Pegg is solving a use case defined for a particular industry. And I want to speak of ethics. Bots should not pretend to be humans.” Sharma concluded. With that, refer back to paragraph one concerning Twitter bots and elections.

At the recently completed Sage Summit in Atlanta, I enjoyed a 1:1 meeting with George Foreman, boxing legend, following his keynote address to several thousand attendees. My question was simple – it was about advice for my 18 year old son who is an Eagle Scout and will start at CalPoly this fall studying information systems.
“It is important that you must start - you can't dream without making a first step to start. Then in life you will always have to start over. If you do it once, you can certainly do it again.” Foreman offered as advice that applies to anyone of any age.

Specific to a young person, Foreman opined “The most important thing is to get a job. Doesn't matter how many hours it is. Learn and then learn something you love. Even volunteer. Even clean the bathroom. At work, everyone will stop by to tell you something.” Foreman shared. “If you can just get into the door, you can learn what you really want to do. Don't wait to be successful. You got to start the ground work and you have to start from the bottom.” I’d offer that is sage advice from Foreman at the Sage Summit!

Keynote context
Foreman dazed and amazed the Sage Summit audience for a few rounds, literally. Today Foreman works with youth at the George Foreman Youth Center in Houston, Texas. “The youth energized me and really got me back into boxing the second time.” Foreman said. “I had run out of money and I was focused on getting kids off the street. I’m still doing the that."

Foreman told his story of not completing high school to learning boxing and become Olympic gold medalist within two years of starting boxing. He went on to be a twice world champion. That followed with success with selling 100+ million George Foreman Grills.
George Foreman

Bottom line. Foreman went from riches to rags to riches again. His success is well-earned.

by Oliver Schabenberger

To prepare for IoT, companies need to take advantage of big data and advanced analytics, and adapt their culture, so they are ready for the transformation.

In the early 1990s, the general public made its earliest forays into using the Internet. At the time, no one could have imagined where the technology would lead. Social media, e-commerce, mobile apps, cloud computing, software as a service -- the list is endless. Entire classes of applications -- even industries -- were not even a gleam in their creators' eyes. Today these internet-based technologies have transformed the way we live and work.

Fast-forward more than 25 years. We are at a similar stage in the latest iteration of the internet -- the Internet of Things (IoT). Pundits of all stripes predict that the IoT will change everything. Connected cars. Better patient monitoring devices. Industrial machines that track their own maintenance requirements. Intelligent street lights. Everything will be connected.

As with the original internet, we have no idea where the IoT will take us. And before we see the full impact of the predicted and unforeseen advances, we will need to remove significant technical obstacles, notably security and lack of standards.

Still, despite the roadblocks, companies that get ahead of the IoT curve will undoubtedly benefit from a lasting competitive advantage as they forge new markets. So what can your company do today to prepare for the future of IoT? The following are the top three best practices:

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By: Pedro Hernandez | May 18, 2017

A Power BI content pack allows Dynamics 365 customers to gain new insights into their business processes.

Microsoft wants to help demystify the business processes of its Dynamics 365 customers.

Power BI, Microsoft's cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and data visualization platform, is typically used to create interactive visualizations that unearth insights using a wide variety of business data. Now, joint Power BI and Dynamics 365 users have tool that can help them get a better grasp of what makes their businesses tick.

The software giant announced the release of a new Power BI Process Analyzer Content Pack for customers using Dynamics 365 (version 8.2 and up), a cloud-enabled business application platform that integrates Microsoft's customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software along with a bevy of intelligent applications. The pack is available in the AppSource marketplace from Microsoft.

The Power BI content pack, authored by Microsoft staffers Christian Abeln, a senior program manager, and Karl Maybach, a senior content developer at the software maker, links directly to the Dynamics 365 database and generates interactive charts and other visualizations that represent business process flows. According to the company, users can then track and explore several of their organizations' performance indicators.

A step-by-step guide on setting up the content pack and creating custom business process reports is available in this blog post.

Also this week, Microsoft released a preview of Power BI Report Server, which enables customers of the new Power BI Premium licensing option to store and manage reports on-premises. "With this first release, you connect directly to an Analysis Services data model, which in turn can connect to a variety of other data sources, including SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, and more," stated Riccardo Muti, a group program manager at Microsoft Power BI in a separate post. "We aim to extend direct connectivity to the other Power BI Desktop data sources, targeting later this year."

Power BI Report Server will be generally available alongside Power BI Premium later this quarter, added Muti.

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Published on May 18, 2017

Jill Rowley

I’ve seen this movie before, over in MarTech. I spent a decade at Eloqua building the marketing automation space from 2002-2012. Scott Brinker coined the term Chief Marketing Technologist in 2010 and has documented the “category” growth from ~ 150 applications to over 5,000 in 2017. Anything that could be automated was automated - at least at some companies - often without much thought as to the strategic plan underlying these sparkly new toys.

Now, the same thing is happening in SalesTech. Here’s one glimpse at this expanding universe from Nancy Nardin at Smart Selling Tools:

And here’s a more analytical look at the landscape, minus all the players:

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Alicia Sandino

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are getting on board with a virtual phone service. Its mobile-friendly capabilities and business-focused features are just a few of the alluring aspects of this business communication service. Not too long ago, if you were an entrepreneur you had to rely on your personal cell phone plan and phone number to stay in touch with prospects and clients, keeping you from establishing a professional image. As a result, you most likely had to shell out a pretty penny to get on a business phone service plan with major providers just to seem like a credible business.

Today, a virtual phone service can give you the professional image you need with some of the best VoIP features available. The best part? You can see significant savings if you’re switching from a major phone service provider.

Call Continuity

As a new business, you want to maintain a reputation of reliability. If you’re looking for maximum uptime, call continuity is your go-to feature. It’s easy to set up and keeps your calls coming in so your small business can reliably service customers.

Voicemail to Email

As a small business, you want to make sure you interact with every client that comes your way. Voicemail to email keeps your messages handy and ready to view from your email so you don’t miss out on new revenue opportunities; doesn’t that sound like something every business owner would want? Don’t let this seemingly simple feature fool you- there are several ways to make this feature really work for you.

Automated Attendant

Are you still thinking about hiring a receptionist for that professional feel? Look no further than an automated attendant. With this indispensable virtual phone service feature, you can professionally greet callers, direct them to the right person, and inform them of new products or upcoming promotions.

Customized Prompt Menus

Prompt menus work hand in hand with your auto attendant to give callers a chance to make their experience better. Customize your menu to your own services to help callers get the assistance they need.

Call Logging

Keep track of your calls and conversations for more accurate follow ups and add a personal touch to your interactions. Although this is a tool that call centers typically enjoy, call logging can give entrepreneurs and their teams the data they need to increase customer satisfaction and ultimately, customer retention.

Is a Virtual Phone System Right for Your Business?

A virtual phone system isn’t for everyone but if using your personal cell phone number to take care of business is getting in the way of establishing yourself as a professional and credible business person, then maybe it’s time to explore how a virtual phone system can help grow your business. FastPBX offers a Nomad Plan which includes the services mentioned above along with 24/7 U.S. based support and no contracts. Run your business on a mobile device without sacrificing quality or your budget!

LET'S MEET ONE ON ONE

Imagine the immense possibilities of working with a team that possesses these traits.

By Marcel Schwantes  Principal and founder, Leadership From the Core

CREDIT: Getty Images
 
In a recent report, top human resources officers from global companies were asked what they see as the 10 job skills required by the year 2020 for workers to thrive.

One of those critical skills for success that made the top 10 list? Wait for it ... emotional intelligence.

According to emotional intelligence (E.I.) experts, E.I. has become an important predictor of job success, surpassing technical ability. In 2011, a CareerBuilder survey of more than 2,600 U.S. hiring managers and human resources professionals revealed that 71 percent valued emotional intelligence in an employee over a high IQ.

What to Look for in People With High Emotional Intelligence
If you're looking to work in a high-performing tribe of people with E.I, or build your own E.I. superpower culture, you need to know some of the key behaviors that show up in its five tenets of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

1. Look for people who show up with their true selves.
Transparency is a hot commodity in the relationship economy. Sometimes the tendency is for employees and bosses to hide, withdraw, stonewall, or put on the mask of false charisma or dictatorship to avoid tough situations or conflict. And that mask hides who we truly are as we order people around or forcefully command attention. In teams that thrive, you'll find people showing up with raw authenticity. It's leading in conversations and interactions with your mind and your heart, during good times and bad. You show up with:

• Excellence
• Integrity
• Emotional honesty
• A great attitude
• An openness to feedback
• A self-awareness of not only your feelings, but of those of others in your sphere of influence

2. Look for resilient people who display flexibility.
Priorities shift in almost every company and every job. Surround yourself with people who are flexible during change and will jump on every opportunity to help during a transition. They have the flexibility to deal with uncertain and unpredictable situations--a hallmark of true E.I. You also want to be around people with resilient minds. They deal in the factual (what's really true) and the here and now, and leave the ghosts of their past in the past. The most resilient people recover from bad situations by saying no to anyone who interferes with their goals and schedules, and especially their values and beliefs. Resilient people don't allow themselves to feel guilty about things that have nothing to do with them. They know they are not responsible for the actions and drama of others, and they never beat themselves up for something someone else did.

3. Look for people who manage their emotions better than most.
This falls under self-management (or self-regulation) in emotional intelligence and is a personal competence found in most high-performing teams. The question behind self-management is simple but rare: Can I manage my emotions and behavior to a positive outcome? Internationally known psychologist and best-selling author Daniel Goleman says this about people with manage their emotions well:

Reasonable people--the ones who maintain control over their emotions--are the people who can sustain safe, fair environments. In these settings, drama is very low and productivity is very high. Top performers flock to these organizations and are not apt to leave them.

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Firm’s Mid-Market Discover Fund Wraps Up Active Week of Deal Making  

BOSTON, MA and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – June 14, 2017 – Thoma Bravo LLC, a leading private equity investment firm, today announced that it has acquired Continuum, a premier global IT management platform for Managed IT Service Providers (MSPs), from Summit Partners. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.  

Continuum, headquartered in Boston, is an international firm that provides MSPs with the platform, services and processes needed to simplify IT management and deliver high quality Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM), backup and disaster recovery and security offerings to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Its vertically integrated service delivery model combines a SaaS-based technology suite with a best-in-class Network Operations Center (NOC) and Help Desk, and allows MSPs to remotely administer, backup and secure their clients’ IT environments from a single screen and to scale quickly and cost-effectively. Continuum employs more than 1,400 professionals worldwide and monitors more than 1 million endpoints for its 5,800 partners, including MSPs servicing more than 60,000 SMB customers.

“Continuum sets the industry standard with its turn-key approach in the Remote Monitoring and Management market for MSPs,” said A.J. Rohde, a Partner at Thoma Bravo. “We know this market well, and have followed the company for a long time.  What Michael George and his team have delivered on in terms of an innovative product suite and full software and services model has been very impressive, and we can’t wait to work with them to accelerate the world-class offering they deliver to MSPs, both organically and through add-on acquisitions.”

“The company has a smart and proven business model which solves a well-understood skills gap in the MSP market,” added AJ Jangalapalli, a Vice President at Thoma Bravo.  “With its strong growth and high customer retention, Continuum is a great fit with the Thoma Bravo portfolio.”

“Thoma Bravo is the perfect financial and strategic partner for us at this important stage of our company’s growth,” said Michael George, CEO at Continuum. “This investment will enable us to continue to capitalize on our core value propositions and increase critical investments in product development as well as sales and marketing tools for our MSP partners to help accelerate their growth. We are incredibly grateful for the partnership and support we have received from Summit Partners, and are confident that Thoma Bravo’s operational expertise, knowledge of the space and strategic support will be invaluable to us as we focus ambitiously on our company’s future.”

The acquisition of Continuum was made through Thoma Bravo’s Discover Fund, which debuted in early 2016, and comes on the heels of its acquisition of Riskonnect, an integrated risk management provider, announced last week. The Discover Fund enables Thoma Bravo to expand its investment reach by focusing on growth-oriented technology companies in the lower middle market. Previous Discover Fund investments include Bomgar, a cybersecurity provider; Elemica, a supply chain operating network; Infogix, an analytics company; and T2 Systems, a parking management software firm.

Kirkland & Ellis is serving as counsel for Thoma Bravo. Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group provided the debt financing for this transaction. Lazard acted as financial advisor and Goodwin as legal counsel to Continuum.

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Jeff Shuey

Does the gig economy encourage the rise of the Uber Specialist?

Where Uber Specialist means a person with deep and specific skills.

    Note: This has NOTHING to do with the car service.

Effectively this is the market and model for independent consultants since the dawn of time. Where someone has a unique skill that people are willing to pay for.

Simple. That’s consulting 101.

What about generalists? We’ll come back to this.

The Gig Economy encourages and enables people from all walks of life to take their skills and put them on the open market.

For example, in business:

• If you want somebody to clean up your audio files you can find that online.
• If you want someone to help you proofread a technical document you can find them online too.
• If you want someone to help you with almost any task you can find that skill somewhere online and/or in your town.

Although the points above are specific tasks there are other skills that are more general generic in nature. There is nothing wrong with being a generalist in this sense. However, it is likely that generalists will be limited in what they can charge for their services.

Back to the question from the title of this post:

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By GlobeNewswire, June 05, 2017, 05:00:00 PM EDT

New partnership offers preloaded ClearOS on HPE ProLiant servers to make SMB IT simple, secure and affordable

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 05, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) today announced an exclusive partnership with ClearCenter, a leading open source platform provider, to offer ClearOS, a Linux-based operating system on HPE ProLiant servers. Tailored to fit the IT needs of small and medium businesses by consolidating server, gateway and networking functionality, HPE and ClearCenter deliver a powerful IT solution with a simple web-based user interface and a built-in application marketplace, making IT deployments for SMBs simple, secure and economical.

IT for SMBs is complex, with conflicting technology choices and trade-offs making it difficult for companies to identify the right solutions for their short- and long-term needs. HPE is joining forces with ClearCenter to help channel partners deliver cloudlike simplicity and on premise security in one affordable solution that will grow with the business.

In addition, HPE is announcing new servers for SMB customers, including the new ProLiant MicroServer, as part of its Gen 10 portfolio. Designed specifically for Small Office/Home Office (SOHO), the ProLiant MicroServer includes the new ProLiant ML30 and ProLiant DL20 servers refreshed with new Kaby Lake processors from Intel.

The ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 boasts several upgrades including:

AMD graphics embedded in the chip, enabling high-resolution applications like media streaming.
Dual DisplayPort connectors, equipping two monitors with 4K experience.
Optional GPU support on a PCIe slot, which allows users to connect a total of five monitors to the MicroServer or a five screen extended display.

"At HPE, we are committed to providing our SMB customers with simple, secure and cost effective solutions that are easy to deploy," said Peter Schrady, senior vice president and general manager, ProLiant Servers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "Through our exclusive partnership with ClearCenter to deliver ClearOS, we will enable customers to create a ready-to-use server at no additional cost with more than 100 applications to choose from so businesses can build the IT solution that is just right for them."

Small and medium businesses need easy-to-use solutions that are secure and affordable. HPE will be offering ClearOS pre-loaded on the new HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10, as well as ML110, ML30 and DL20. HPE ProLiant preloaded with ClearOS is ready to use out of the box, easy to customize and integrates into any IT environment.

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Last Look at Accelerate 2017!

I thought you might be interested in these two last looks at the recently completed Lenovo Accelerate 2017 conference in Orlando. I will repeat.

Long-term Roadmap: Analytics and IoT

My 1:1 with Lenovo NA President Emilio Ghilardi.

Different is Better

My 1:1 with  Sammy Kinlaw, NA Channel Chief

    Long-time SMB Nation readers will recall my mobile phone journey from Apple to BlackBerry to Windows Phone. Today I’m limping along with an aging Nokia 1020 that I originally purchased for its state of the art camera (40+ megapixels). That’s right– my need with my phone beyond basic communication was to have a kick ass camera. Fast forward the movie and I’m shopping for a new mobile phone.

I’ve made the decision to roll with an Android-based phone that doesn’t catch on fire. I need a superior camera, great sound and basic functionality and then some. I recently went on a first date with the Moto Z phone from Lenovo (Lenovo acquired the Motorola phone business October 2014).  

Features
The Moto Z is a capable Android-based phone on its very own. But it’s the Mods that add extreme value. My first need is a killer camera as I’m a blogger in the media. The camera Mod is based on Hasselblad True Zoom camera hardware and has the following features: 10x optical zoom, xenon flash, RAW format and easy sharing. My next need is sound. When I host a phone call on speaker, I need quality and volume (both missing on my Nokia 1020). The sound Mod (JBL SoundBoost) for the Moto Z uses JBL sound technology plus adds a ten hour battery boost. Imagine both a boom box and the world’s best speakerphone on a mobile phone! There is also an InstaShare projector Mod that blew my mind. You attach it and you can illuminate a 70-inch screen, even in a light room, to display a PowerPoint deck or watching streaming entertainment such as a football game.

Take a Look
At the Lenovo Accelerate 2017 conference in Orlando last month, I walked the trade show floor and got a look at the Moto Z and its mods. I shot a vid here of the experience and I highly recommend you look at it.  

Drawback
Right now the Moto Z is only available with Verizon. Small problem in that I use AT&T. I was educated that you can use an unlocked version of the Moto Z with AT&T. However I don’t like using unlocked phones because of support issues. (I had a family member use an unlocked BlackBerry Z90 that was programmed for Sprint that I “opened” using Unlock River. It allowed the BlackBerry Z90 to use an AT&T sim card but it downgraded the AT&T network coverage to 2G. A bit later, AT&T terminated its 2G network and rendered the unlocked BlackBerry Z90 useless. But I digress. I don’t like unlocked phones however Lenovo reports that the AT&T version of the Moto Z phone will be out mid-year 2017. At that time, I’ll seriously consider the Moto Z.

Next steps
Over the next several weeks, I’m gonna find a way to demo the Moto Z for two reasons. One is to provide an update to you, the SMB Nation reader. The second is to see if the Moto Z is indeed the phone for me when the AT&T compliant version releases later this year. Standby.

    This past week I received an announcement that Bainbridge Technology Solutions was closing its doors on Winslow Way (“Main Street”) on Bainbridge Island. It’s been a storefront institution for over a dozen years; a welcome man cave to pick up parts, order a new system and most importantly, receive expert repair services. It joins other recent closures such as an office supply store (“Paper Products) just down the street.

Bainbridge Technology Solutions was impacted by concurrent forces: retail disruption and pivot to cloud. Across Puget Sound, a short 35-min. ferry ride, is the home of Amazon.com who's disruption impacts physical presence retail everywhere. The pivot to cloud has reduced IT spends as we know it. In the words of Brandon Byron, owner of Bainbridge Technology Solutions, “We have sincerely enjoyed being part of the Bainbridge Island retail community. However, retail operations are no longer feasible in this evolving industry. So, we look forward to the next chapter that will allow us to continue to serve the community for many years to come.” Byron was also impacted by the very IT vendors he served. In this article, I outline how HP’s snub of small retailers in ink sales truly hurt firms like Bainbridge Technology Solutions.

[Photo credit to Charles and Dona Keating and Pattie O’Loughlin]

SMB Nation is a long-time customer and supporter of Bainbridge Technology Solutions. For a few years, we upheld it as a poster child for Small Business Saturday (in late November) that you can read about here (included popcorn and coffee for celebrants in 2015) and watch a video featuring Bainbridge Technology Solutions in 2011 here.

Moving forward, Byron shared that “Commercial clients will continue to be serviced as usual, residential clients will have the option to schedule on-site and remote service calls via our web site.”

The choice is yours on how to absorb this news. On the one hand, you can be angry and perhaps have grievances about losing something from the past. I’d offer, knowing Byron well, he’s focused on the future and, shed from the retail overhead, will figure it out. I’ve got his number on speed dial!

PS – big discounts on remaining inventory the next few days. Stop by and tell Byron that “Harry sent ya!”

Over the past few months, I’ve teased you with forthcoming changes in the world of Jamison West. He essentially divested

his MSP practice business interests, sold his Seattle home into a strong market and moved to Las Vegas with his family (pictured). It would be easy to assume it was the record setting monsoon season in Seattle that caused his move to fun and sun but it’s more than that.

So it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. What’s the story with Jamison? With life changes afoot, West is the new CEO for Teamatics. It’s kinda like Myers-Briggs meets Slack. To level set, Microsoft Teams is the competitor to the wildly popular Slack. It represents Microsoft’s latest endeavor into the malleable world of collaboration (following similar positioning with Yammer, SharePoint, Skype messaging and so on). Slack largely created the latest generation of collaboration with what started as a IM tool for gamer developers and was validated but serving as a rapid development environment for the reboot of the Healthcare.gov web site. I view Slack as an internal email replacement to keep my Inbox free. I’m using Microsoft Teams as well but it feels more like a document storage corpus to me (say SharePoint Jr.). Admittedly I’ve only been using Microsoft Teams for five months and it only recently was officially released so the Microsoft Teams journey continues.

West is leveraging Microsoft Teams as a “new platform for developing human capital and improving team performance.” His firm Teamatics strikes me as one part Myers-Briggs, one part peer group/living theology and one part technology. I’d first and foremost define this as a services business, not a product line. West’s calling is and has been for some time to help others ad this new venture allows for that.

Of the launch, West said, “In my 20-plus years of managing teams and leaders of teams I’ve struggled to find a simple, accurate way to ensure talents are aligned to objectives and that the team is aligned with each other and to the culture of my company. I am thrilled to be part of a new team that has done incredible work to solve that problem.”

I’ll continue to monitor this startup.

UPDATED: Let me know if you thing we should weave Jamison into the fabirc of our upcoming six-part MSP Tech Talk series? He is a frequent speaker in the SMB MSP channel partner community. Hmmm...

I recently had a surprisingly transparent conversation with Fred Voccola, the CEO of Kaseya. He has gained his sea legs just crossing his second work anniversary. The tone and tenor of the interview was three-fold: Hello World, No IT and Office 365.

Hello World
Voccola reached out to reinvigorate the Kaseya conversation in the SMB Nation community. To be blunt, Kaseya hasn’t been top of mind for some time at SMB Nation. It was always perceived as an expensive tool for the big guys. But Voccola had a different explanation. A couple of years ago, Kaseya was essentially acquired by a private equity group and had “lost its way” with the MSP community. Voccola promises it has returned with partner momentum. I’ll continue to monitor the situation.

No IT

I enjoyed a spirted conversation about the transformation MSPs are undergoing in a volatile business community. Loosely translated – everything is changing and very quickly. Voccola is committed to assisting MSPs with that transition to be, in my words, business advisors. I contributed to the conversation by highlighting how the IT spend is moving away from the server room (read CIO) and to other departments such as marketing (read analytics). It’s gonna be a rodeo ride and Kaseya wants to be right there with you, the SMB Nation MSP.

Office 365
I pressed hard on Kaseya’s commitment to Office 365. It acquired some dashboard technology but I had reason to believe it was put 365 Command on the shelf. Voccola insisted that recent actions such as moving internal operations to Las Vegas wasn’t a sign that the 365 Command team had been disbanded. Rather it continues to invest in this technology area.

BTW – the Kaseya Connect conference is May 9-11. I’ll miss it as I’m already committed to the Sage Summit in Atlanta. So many conferences, so little time!

UPDATED May 10, 2017 808AM Pacifc:

Hey Harry,

I am at Kaseya Connect and I read your piece on Fred Voccola. I know it was a short blurb, but one thing that underscores the “little guy” theme is that their PSA, called BMS is full featured and a lot less expensive than most other PSAs. It integrated, of course, with the Kaseya VSA, as well as Quotewerks, IT Glue and other vendors.

Yes, Kaseya had a bad two years (had to wait for their self-inflicted foot wound to heal up), but they are doing quite well and the ecosystem is back up and functioning due to a robust API in their products.

Randall C. Spangler, MCP, CSSA

Merit Solutions

One of the jewels at the recently completed Lenovo Summit (Orlando, April 2017), hardly hidden, was the Lenovo Tech Wheels truck. It represents the initial on-the-road outreach by Lenovo to tell it’s story to the people, one truck stop at a time.

Starting this Spring, Lenovo’s Tech Wheels truck will visit partner sites, stores and events in the Southeast US  region (Lenovo is based in North Carolina).

If this sounds like a redo from yester year, you are partially correct. SMB Nation readers will fondly recall the Microsoft Across America tour trucks and buses before the Great Recession. Here’s the good news. The Lenovo Tech Wheels tour is bringing that excitement back. Thank you.

The Tech Wheels truck that I toured (pictured) was a first class GEEK CAVE. Here is an example of how it works. The idea is that this vehicle will pull up to the office building where you have your MSP consulting and reseller practice. The trailer then spreads its wings to create a demonstration lab showing Lenovo wares. To me the secret sauce was the presentation, just like how an upscale restaurant presents gourmet food. It’s all in the presentation and Lenovo’s Tech Wheels scores high marks here.

So what’s it all mean? The Lenovo fiscal year just started April 1st. This is a pilot program with one truck running in the current fiscal year. If successful, I would offer you can anticipate seeing additional Lenovo Tech Wheels trucks in the next fiscal year. And once it hits critical mass, it’s essentially recreated the Microsoft Across America tour – updated by about ten years. Think of this as an “event in a truck” because the desired motion an MSP would take is that customers would be invited to walk through the Lenovo Tech Wheels truck and be dazed and amazed.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this initiative as I have a personal interest in its success.

Of course you want to find the best, most qualified freelancers to do the jobs you need done. No one sets out looking for the second or third best person to work for them. But remember that the hiring process is a two-way street – potential candidates also need to want to work for you.

Make it impossible for them to resist applying for and accepting your job offer, by putting together a winning job listing, paying attention to these techniques.

Make it easy for them to find your job offer
This sounds like a no-brainer. Of course, you wouldn't willingly make it more difficult to find your job posting, but you could be doing this without even realizing it. When you're putting a heading at the top of your job posting, you may be tempted to make it stand out from the rest. While it's great to set yourself apart from the crowd, steering yourself too far away could be making you less visible. Remember that candidates are going to search for certain keywords, so you've got to include those keywords within your title. You can include those keywords in a different and creative way, but in order for your posting to show up in a relevant search, those words have got to be there.

Let the candidates filter themselves
Chances are you're going to get a lot of applications, some much more qualified than others. You shouldn't be wasting your time reading through applications of candidates who are far too under-qualified to be considered. Instead, let them take themselves out of the running, by specifying in your job posting those qualities that are non-negotiable. If an applicant sees that they don't have the qualifications you'll be looking for, they're more likely to not bother applying. You'll end up with fewer applicants overall, but the crop you'll be choosing from will be more well filtered to start with.

See who's paying attention
You want to hire someone who pays attention to detail and listens to instructions. An easy way to see if a candidate has these qualities is to include a specific instruction within your job posting. Doing this helps you determine who has taken the time to actually read through the entire posting, and then has followed through and done what they've been instructed to do. The simplest way to do this is to ask candidates to put a specific word in the subject line of their application email. Without even opening and reading their message, you'll be able to see who reads through and follows instructions.

Don't skip the editing
No matter what your deadline for posting your job offer is, editing and proofreading cannot be overlooked. Putting out a mistake-laden job posting reflects poorly on a company, and shows a level of carelessness that may turn off potential candidates. Help get rid of errors in your writing with the help of these tools:

- Paper Rater
There's no need to download anything with this free online proofreading resource. And, with a paid membership, there are so many more features to make use of.

- Polish My Writing
Get instant feedback about the content of your job posting with this checker, that will point out mistakes you've made, as well as provide you with helpful suggestions for making your content better.

- Assignment help
When you have questions about the rules of writing and grammar, Australian Help is there to help you find the answer. Letting mistakes go unnoticed may turn away the best qualified candidates, who are unlikely to miss the mistakes in your content.

- Ginger
Download Ginger to any device, so you can write, edit and post your job offers, no matter where you are. Don't let errors make their way onto your job postings, simply because you're typing on the go.

- Paperfellows
It's always ideal to have a live person checking over your writing, since they can see things a computer just isn't able to. Errors in context that are easily missed by a computer won't get past a professional proofreader from Paperfellows.

- Hemingway App
Put your content through the Hemingway App to check for readability levels, grammatical errors and suggestions for improving the quality of the writing overall.

- Academized
Plagiarism checkers from Academized can help you avoid embarrassing and potentially reputation-killing mistakes.

- Easy Word Count
Some job postings are limited to a certain word count. If you're working within restricted counts, rely on this tool to help make the most out of each and every word you can use.

- Slick Write
It's fast, it's free, and it'll help turn your good writing into great writing. Slick Write breaks down your content into different categories and aggregate infromation, so you're able to see exactly what your job posting is composed of, including detailed word count breakdowns.

- Boomessays
Don't let the all-important job of proofreading your job posting be done by anyone less than an expert. Big assignments can match you up with a professional who's perfectly suited to get your job done flawlessly.

Don't leave anyone out
If someone applies to your posting, reply. A simple acknowledgement of their application can go a long way in keeping the doors open for future opportunities. You never know what may happen down the road. Another job opportunity may arise, or your chosen candidate may not work out as planned. Establishing a good rapport with all of your candidates means you can confidently contact them in the future if you need them, and expect a positive response.
Attract the best of the best, and hire the most qualified freelancer you can find, by putting together an irresistible job offer. Using these tips and techniques, you'll bring in a higher number of quality applicants to choose from.

"Gloria Kopp is an digital marketer and a business consultant from Manville city. She graduated from the University of Wyoming and started a career of a web content writer and an educator, now she works as a tutor at Write My Essay company. She is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Do my assignment, Huffington Post, and others."

Starting a business for the first time can be tricky, but it’s not impossible. Follow these sage advice tips to keep your head above water in the beginning stages.

By: Matt Knee Founder and President of MyNewCompany.com

Starting a new business for the very first time can be intimidating. As a first-time entrepreneur, your nerves may be wracked and you’re diving into a bit of the unknown. The good news is that overcoming some of the challenges that come along with first-time entrepreneurship can be extremely rewarding and satisfying. There is more advice for first-time entrepreneurs than there are hours in the day, so I’ve gathered some of the best I’ve heard over the years and distilled them down to the 8 best success tips for first-time entrepreneurs.

Drill down to the minimum viable product (MVP)
One of the biggest areas where first-time entrepreneurs fail is in failing to launch. They spend so much time perfecting an idea that it never actually gets off the ground or offered for sale. With an MVP, you identify the core problem people are trying to solve and build a problem around just that - no bells and whistles. If you can effectively solve the problem, you can launch and gather information and insights from customers as you go. From there, you can focus on iterating new versions of the MVP and adding on only what customers have expressed they need. It saves time, money and a lot of heartache.

2. Provide Top-Tier Customer Service
This one goes hand-in-hand with #1. An MVP should be tightly coupled with great customer service, which is where you’ll garner the most insights and provide a lot of value. You don’t need a perfect product, but you do need customer support staff available to make your customers feel valued and to address any issues that arise. People form relationships with people, not products. By making your brand shine with great people, you will have positive feelings attached to the product you sell. From there come positive reviews/testimonials and great referrals.

3. Find Great Employees
A company is only as good as the people that make it run. A bad hire can really throw a wrench in the works and make it more difficult for even the best employees to do their jobs. Do your due diligence in researching prospective hires and ensuring that they have the appropriate background and experience. Culture fit is also an important consideration. People who jive well together produce the best results because they’re happy at work. A negative employee can be like a cancer that eats away at the spirits of the rest of the team. If you make a bad hire, don’t be afraid to make tough decisions to make things right.

4. Don’t Skimp on Marketing
As a first-time entrepreneur, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of ensuring your product is perfect, that customers are happy and that business operations are running smoothly. All those are essential parts of running a successful business, but marketing is, too. You may have the best product the world has ever seen, but if the world never actually sees it, your business will fail. Whether you work with an agency or choose to do marketing in-house, it needs to exist to get your product in front of the right eyes at the right time and increase sales.

5. Keep Finances in Check
This is perhaps the #1 area where first-time entrepreneurs fail. Running a business requires money, and if you aren’t managing yours well, your business is at risk. You need to stay on top of your income and expenses to ensure that you’re not going to run out of cash. By keeping a close eye on the balance sheet, you can adjust spending as needed and keep overhead as low as possible. Being frugal isn’t a bad thing; unnecessary expenses should be avoided. Once you’ve established the business to a point where you see meaningful revenue, you can adjust spending accordingly. Until then, keep costs as low as possible and monitor what is happening with cash flow.

6. Be Open to Advice
Being a first-time entrepreneur is hard enough, but trying to do it solo can be disheartening. Whether you’re in business with a partner or going it alone, you don’t have to isolate. Talk to other entrepreneurs about your venture and be open to receiving advice. Take what you like and leave the rest behind.

7. Get Enough Sleep
It may sounds trite but getting enough sleep is extremely important for first-time entrepreneurs. Studies show that poor sleep quality is connected to reduced grey matter volume in the brain’s frontal lobe - the area that helps control executive function and working memory. In laymen’s terms? Your work quality and ability to be mentally alert suffer when you aren’t well-rested. Get the right amount of shut-eye, even if it seems like there’s no time. The trade-off for working one extra hour vs. getting an extra hour of sleep may be greater than you think.

8. Know Your Competition
Another great pitfall for first-time entrepreneurs is being so self-focused that they forget to look at who their competitors are and what they’re doing. If you haven’t already (and hopefully you have), complete market research on competitive products to establish what sets you apart. When you start doing marketing, these are the bullet points on which you’ll want to focus. Set up Google Alerts to monitor what is happening in your industry and what moves competitors are making. Keep your customers close, and your competitors closer.

Following the tips above can provide some peace-of-mind and help you elevate your new business to the next level. Before you know it, you’ll be a seasoned entrepreneur, sharing your own sage advice with people new to the game.

Matt Knee is Founder and President of MyNewCompany.com. MyNewCompany.com, started in 2001, makes starting and running a business simple, fast, and inexpensive for entrepreneurs and their advisors. They offer complete incorporation and LLC formation packages. To date, they have started over 50,000 companies in all 50 states.

mall business owners have a lot of responsibility. Between daily operations and managing employees, it’s hard to imagine having time to worry about your network connect. But with so many cloud-based applications currently helping small businesses run, the health of their network remains one of the most important aspects of day-to-day functionality.

Keeping ahead of major problems can keep a business from losing out on revenue and taking a hit to their reputation. But, understandably, most small businesses don’t have an IT department on hand. The fate of the network rests on the shoulders of the less technologically savvy, and sometimes, gets forgotten about until it's too late and there is already a problem.

Want to avoid issues with your network? We spoke to some IT managers to come up with five important steps you can take to protecting and troubleshooting your network.

Invest in a Network Monitoring Solution

If there’s one huge step you can take to track what’s happening on your network, this is it. Researching and investing in a monitoring solution that fits your needs will set you up for success. When you’re considering your options, you want to make sure you choose a program that provides ease of use, has the ability to grow as your company does, and a team that provides exceptional customer service. Having a team behind the program that’s willing to offer training and insight when needed is an added bonus. Don’t invest in the first program you stumble across. Ask around, do your research, and trust your gut instinct.

Develop an Escalation Plan

With a monitoring solution in place and an at-a-glance network map, you can move onto the next step in network health—the escalation plan. At this point, you need to take stock of who is going to step in when there’s a problem and start building a team of reliable employees. If you don’t have an IT team, this is incredibly important. You need to ensure you have employees at every location capable of troubleshooting or contacting the right people to start solving an issue at the first hint of a problem. You should have someone monitoring the network on a daily basis, but outside of that, know who else needs to be looped in if anything goes wrong.

Assign roles and make sure those roles are clear to everyone involved. Each person should know what they’re responsible for, who to contact in the event of an outage and how to escalate their problem. Developing contact lists that include emails and phone numbers, keeping employees informed of internet policies, and constantly adjusting your plan for company changes, are all part of keeping an escalation plan updated.

This plan is the most important aspect of a healthy network. Having a team that knows the warning signs of a problem and how to respond quickly, will ensure your company doesn’t lose any important information or businesses as a result of a network outage.

Keeping your data secure

Security is one of the major factors in network health. Businesses never get a warning before a data breach, but they can take the appropriate steps to ensure they’re keeping their information safe. Some of these steps are incredibly simple, including setting up a company firewall and setting priorities about what employees can access when they’re using your network. If you’ve assigned company mobile phones, it’s important to keep track of the applications that are being downloaded and blocking apps that come from unknown developers.

Limiting remote access for employees is another must. Working from home on their private network should be safe, but public Wi-Fi can expose your data to a host of hackers and other security issues. Don’t’ forget about updating your software. It may seem like such a small task, easy to overlook, but it’s incredibly important. Many software updates come with upgraded security features that coincide with any updates your computer or mobile phone has recently implemented. Not updating software could potentially expose your information to hackers.

Understand your Network Infrastructure

One of the key attributes of a good monitoring program is a network map. If you’re a small business with one location, this isn’t a huge driver. But if you’re a multi-location business, you need to monitor your network across all locations and understand the infrastructure you have in place. Having a network map, whether it’s designed for your monitoring program or a way of tracking your locations that you’ve developed on your own, should allow you ease of access to viewing and troubleshooting problems at any location at the click of a button. Knowing where your physical equipment is, and how your network is connected from one location to the next, can save time and energy when a problem arises.

Monitor your bandwidth and network daily

Just like consistently updating apps and changing passwords, someone on your team should be taking a look at what is happening on your network daily. This can be as simple as logging into your monitoring solution and seeing what’s happening with latency, bandwidth, and CPU. A great monitoring solution will even allow customers to set alerts, so if your bandwidth is suddenly soaring, it will send an email out to let you know.

For more in-depth networks, it also helps to set priorities for where your bandwidth can be used and for what applications. This will make you aware when one office is streaming YouTube videos or uploading and downloading major files consistently. Knowing what is happening at each one of your locations will help you define how to allocate your network and keep it from being stretched too thin.

A businesses number one priority is generating revenue. These days, we can’t do that without an internet connection. If a network goes down, it not only prevents us from providing our customers with what they need, but it impedes productivity internally. These tips can help any business, large or small, stay on top of their network and continue to keep it healthy.

Today’s global economy and advanced technologies allow us to include remote employees into our teams. With the use of various collaboration tools, cloud sharing apps, and video conferences, managers can effectively set goals, assign tasks, and get the desired results in real time. Since the high number of competitive firms in technological and economic centers have drastically increased their employee turnover, many big and small businesses have decided to use the affordable, educated, and loyal labor from the developing countries.

Remote management still comes with a wide variety of challenges. It is much harder to motivate your employees when you do not see them in-person on a daily basis. Furthermore, all paperwork and communication need to be done in the digital form. Before creating an effective remote management strategy, a company should set a special budget for buying and maintaining the appropriate software and hardware solutions. In this guide, we have explained remote team management by describing every step of this process.

Hiring
Choosing the members of remote teams is a little bit different from the regular hiring process. The candidate’s location is never an issue, but they still need to satisfy certain criteria apart from the adequate expertise and work experience. All team members need to speak the same language because running a team in different languages and using online translation tools would be too difficult. They also need to have appropriate hardware.

The hiring process for international businesses usually starts with posting a job ad on an international job search platform or with contacting an HR agency. Managers often outsource some minor and repetitive tasks to freelancers, through various freelance marketplace platforms. Freelancers who prove their skills and show outstanding results have a chance to be admitted into the team. The companies that run remote teams have a much bigger talent pool at their disposal. That is why they should try to speed up and automate their hiring process. They can do it by using chatbots or by utilizing a big data software.

Collaboration
Establishing a real-time collaboration is the biggest challenge remote teams need to overcome. It can also be solved by introducing some of the available advanced technological solutions. There are many useful apps that managers can choose from for this purpose. Some of them even use advanced collaboration and scheduling systems like Kanban, invented for managing the Toyota supply chain.

Most collaboration apps offer a simple interface which allows users to schedule tasks to each other, chat, and exchange files. Today, many companies use team collaboration apps such as Wrike. My team started using this app two years ago and although it offers a solid set of features, we have decided to replace it. We have found a good Wrike alternative that offers advanced features like invoicing, budgeting, client permissions, self-hosting, and the all in one feature package. Thanks to this small change, our productivity skyrocketed.

Real-time Collaboration
The collaboration in remote teams needs to be done in real time. Since team members often work from different time zones, they need to make themselves readily available at critical times of the day. They can do this by installing the collaborative app on their smartphones and regularly checking push notifications. Although good collaborative apps can replace a whole list of business software, remote teams can also use emails, social networks, remote access software, cloud storage apps, the MS Office suite, and many other business apps.

Meetings
Meetings are of critical importance for remote team management. Companies would need thousands of dollars to bring all the team members from different parts of the world to their headquarters. Still, efficient project management requires regular team meetings. Most successful teams meet at least twice a week. They assign tasks for the upcoming week on Mondays, while they review the team’s work results on Fridays.

Managers can organize team meetings with the use of a meeting software and online video conferencing. Each team member should have a webcam, a microphone, and a special app installed on their desktop or smartphone. Many companies purchase special software for video conferencing. Entrepreneurs who want to save money can also use the group chat feature offered on various messenger apps.

Team Building
Companies usually neglect this very important side of teamwork. Team building is even more important for managing remote teams because their members cannot meet in real life, talk or settle their differences. Companies should arrange team gatherings at least once a year. For some team members, these gatherings would be much more fun because they will need to travel to a part of the world they would never visit prior to the meeting.

Unfortunately, organizing regular team building events for remote teams can be very expensive, even for the biggest corporate entities. That is why companies need to motivate their employees to communicate on social networks, exchange ideas, post interesting videos, motivational songs, and memes on the team’s news feed. This way, managers will be able to lift up the team’s spirit and improve the employees’ morale.

Unite Around a Common Goal
Uniting all team members around a common goal is the most important task for every remote team manager. Unlike regular teams, remote teams need to seize every opportunity for in-person bonding. This often results in long lasting friendships and creates a unique sense of camaraderie that can only be seen in these types of business environments.

Highly efficient and productive teams have become more important than ever before at pushing best-in-class products and services to the market ahead of competitors. A range of tech tools have emerged to serve high-performance teams that help them get ahead of the game to achieve this goal. Below are five examples of tech products designed to boost team productivity.

Communication and Chat Apps
Instant communication is essential in highly productive teams, especially for those working remotely. Email used to be considered a quick and efficient communication tool, but has fallen behind new tools such as Slack, which allows teams to communicate and share files in real time. The ability to share resources, in real time, provides advantages.  Even to teams sitting in the same room – due to the ability to instantly share and collaborate.

Teleconferencing Products

Allowing people to meet face to face, when working in remote locations, can make meetings more productive than using text communication. CIO cites the ability to promote collaboration, in this way, as a top tip for increasing team efficiency. Products such as Skype can bring numerous people together.  Not only to speak face to face but to share work and resources, in real time via a single application.

Version Control for Creative Teams
For software developers and other asset creators, version control products, such as GitHub and Bitbucket, allow teams to work on the same files at the same time without overwriting each other’s work. This greatly simplifies the headaches that digital content-creation teams faced in the past, by allowing everyone to have their hands in the same work at once.

Cloud-Based Document Management
Cloud-based document services, such as Google Docs, allow people to view and edit the same documents at the same time. When combined with real-time communication tools, collaborating on a single document with other team members becomes effortless, and eliminates the need to share and compile multiple versions of a single document. The Huffington Post cites an example of a team member who must unexpectedly work from home to showcase the power of using document management services that can be accessed from anywhere.

Project Management Tools
Project management tools, such as Pivotal Tracker, can help teams to stay on track with real-time goal tracking and time management. The tools mentioned in the sections above help teams to work more efficiently, but teams still need something to help everyone to stay on track and on time with personal and shared deliverables. Forbes notes that this type of product, also, helps people to understand when the work of others that they rely on is complete and ready for them to move forward with their tasks.
Using technology efficiently is critical to thriving in a team environment, and the products noted above can put your team on the path to success by eliminating roadblocks to efficient team workflows. Above all, it is important to keep abreast of new and developing technologies to ensure that your team stays one step ahead of your competitors.

Last quarter I reported from the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership (PWL) Conference 2017 in Las Vegas. Now I want to check-in again on IBM’s efforts to transform and improve its channel partner program.

In the Box

Think of a box having four-sides. That is how IBM essentially communicated the PartnerWorld paradigm to its Business Partners at PWL. I’ll tackle each side here but Figure #1 shows you where I’m headed.

Figure #1: IBM Box

Global Markets. Don’t forget that in many ways (IMHO), IBM is stronger globally than domestically in the US. It’s a trusted brand when I’ve travelled to LATAM, EMEA and APAC. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. IBM’s claiming to continue to strengthen its globalization approach with dedicated segment leadership, stakeholder collaboration, strong business unit alignment and optimized buyer group focus. For what it is worth, a significant portion of the attendees at PWL were from overseas. Another factoid was IBM’s admission and assertion that it has a 1% market share with plenty of room to grow. I’d concur.

One Channel. Represents IBM’s primary route to market in commercial. The channel vision conversation with especially strong with the seismic shifts occurring in buyer behavior driven by cloud, digital, data and cognitive. The client journeys dictate seamless engagement across digital, direct and business partners. My point is this. Granted IBM tends to work more with larger partners (and ISVs like Bluebee, a genome startup I spoke with) and doesn’t have as meaningful connection with SMB partners and MSPs (more on this in a moment), the facts surround the customer behavior trends are the same!

In the context of channel, a shout out to IBM for the introduction of new competencies in cloud, Watson and security.

Marketing. I found this area to be very interesting and will spend a few extra minutes on this topic. IBM’s marketing strategy is very simple and reflected in Figure #2 below. Marketing is focused on three industries (Manufacturing, Retail, Banking), three professions (CIO/IT, CISO, Marketing) and four IT Products/Services (Analytics, Cloud, Systems and Security). If you get anything out of this blog, let it be this. Approximately 80% of the client base is seed accounts. Translation is that this is the green field for SMB MSPs who want to attach to IBM’s motion. You read it here first.

Figure #2: Worth a few hundred words, this one-pager succinctly summarizes the IBM PartnerWorld marketing strategy.

In the context of marketing, this is where I want to highlight two things. The first was my conversation with IBM Cloud CMO Quincy Allen (Figure #3). Basically, we landed on the conclusion that marketing is analytics. And who better to lead that charge than IBM with its huge head start with Watson.

Figure #3: Facetime with IBM Cloud CMO Quincy Allen discussing marketing analytics and how to get business value.

Digital Sales/Business Group. The basic story here is marketing workflow. The concept is a content-based strategy of digital hubs that allow the partner to market from top of funnel to mid-funnel and finally conversion. It has to do with relevant content showing up in search such as “AI for marketing” leading to a related article to engage the customer and convert to a trial version of the offering. To be honest, I’d be surprised if IBM didn’t offer this stuff to its partners.

A shout out to the Cognitive Sales Advisor. It’s a Watson-based tool to unify partner support.
The Magician

Jamie Mendez, Director at PartnerWorld, is the magician behind the scenes. And I got to meet her! She keyed in on PartnerWorld (which is the partner program, website and engagement model including events) with a “adding value” mantra. “Few partners only do one thing when you look at our partner program model.” Mendez said. “We want partners to build something, sell something and deploy something.” For that reason, I noticed the PWL conference had a lot more developers that you would see at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (now called “Inspire”).

I chatted about her breadth partner play because my perception has been that IBM doesn’t have an SMB play. They do it in a difference form. First IBM defines an “enterprise” as 50-employees or higher. Second – it partners with distributors for its breadth play including Ingram, TechData, Avnet and Arrow.
Final Thoughts

Gotta hand it to IBM for hanging in there long-term. Year-after-year I attend the PWL conference and they are investing in the partner channel. I think IBM is finally on to something with its focus on Watson and IoT. And it was the first time I had heard of PartnerWorld trying to engage audiences at scale.

During the last seven years, developers have designed state-of-the-art apps that can create a custom interface for each client, connect to many types of products, generate real-time statistics, examine factors that may affect health, sense a user's movements and automate day-to-day tasks. Moreover, the popularity of applications has been tremendously augmented by wearable devices, such as Google Glass, watches that can connect to Wi-Fi and fitness trackers.

3. Linking Apps to Other Products

According to one analysis, more than 122 million users have downloaded applications that can control various compatible products, and by January 2020, customers will be able to digitally connect apps to more than 26 billion items worldwide. Currently, users may link the software programs to remote cameras, automobiles, computers, certain electrical outlets, equipment that is related to various sports, unmanned aerial vehicles and some LEDs. Additionally, numerous apps can be connected to medical devices, which may monitor a person's heart rate, examine a diabetic patient's blood sugar and send notifications to physicians.

2. Software Programs That Can Evaluate Workouts and Routes That Many Runners Prefer

In 2014, several businesses released cutting-edge apps that determine the distance of each run, examine the number of steps that a person takes, analyze a workout intensity, predict the effects of inclined paths, provide audible feedback and locate nearby trails. The programs can also provide long-term plans for athletes and evaluate the risk of certain injuries.

Some apps offer analytics that are related to cycling, yoga and training sessions that feature weights. Once the applications log each workout information, users may rapidly send the detailed reports to friends, request tips and save maps that show previous routes, and the apps could automatically add information to a dashboard that allows customers to compare similar workouts.

1. The Advantages of Application Performance Management

While providing real-time statistics, some application performance management toolspplication performance management tools will indicate the number of people who utilize an app during specific time periods, the daily revenue that advertisements produce and the percentage of customers who use particular tools. The programs will examine bugs that decrease the speed of the app's processes, actions that could cause the software to freeze and the quantity of data that the application receives. The software can also analyze the performance of servers that are linked to related websites.

Certain programs allow developers to sort data and lists of processes that an app completed. Furthermore, some tools may provide interactive charts that indicate the historical prevalence of specific events and compare metrics that are related to multiple apps, and some applications will predict the activities of users, revenue that each app might generate and the number of customers who will likely use certain features every day.

Show us your newsletter that you send to customers! Here is the official story:

Harry here. I need your help.

I'm researching how MSPs, consultants, IT Pros and good old fashioned 'puter guys communicate with customers (small business owners).

There are a couple reasons for my research. Too often we spend far too much time researching recurring revenue and how to get you to sell more stuff for vendors. I am on a mission to see if we can strengthen the organic relationship between a service provider (MSP, etc) and the SMB customer.

My ask is this.

Please both SEND me and SUBSCRIBE me to the customer facing newsletter you send to your customers. Kindly use the following email address as I anticipate the response to be a large sample size: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

I'll publish the results of my research and analysis. One offshoot I'd like to discover is, based on how you communicate with your real world end-user customers, can we craft a better level of community engagement for Small Business Saturday in late November 2017?

Thank you for helping me. Your participation makes us a better community - even 18-years later since our humble start in the early days of Small Business Server (SBS) in the late 1990s!

Enjoy the ride....harrybbb
Harry Brelsford
206-201-2944 (yep - that's my real phone number!)

UPDATED: I've receive a number of great responses, samples and sign-ups since I announced this matter last Friday, March 17, 2017 (THANK YOU). I'm amazed at the innovation by wiser MSP minds out there. For example - one franchise organization provides newsletters for its franchise holders. Another MSP only sends print newsletters. So far this has been really interesting research.

Editors Note - this is a excellent partner/customer event in the Seattle area in a month. Please support the community (and yes- you can bring your toughest questions about Azure in small business, etc.)

Your Business, Cloud Ready in 100 Days
A one day immersive experience designed to help you build not just the knowledge but a roadmap to becoming a cloud ready business. Cloud readiness means that you and your business have the ability to:

• Generate new customers and recurring revenue
• Quickly identify areas for Cloud investments
• Strategically invest time and resources to build a Cloud Practice

We are providing a proven model that will deliver results for you in terms of growth and help your customers transform their businesses.
This trusted methodology has been adopted by the Microsoft Partner Community and endorsed by leading Tech Companies, along with the Economic Development Commission of King County and Seattle and City of Bellevue. This summit is focused on supporting Independent Software Vendor, Resellers, Managed Services Provider, Cloud Startups and System Integrator to build and grow their cloud practices. Join us to learn how to become cloud competent partners with leading Cloud Technologies companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and others.

We have invited cloud experts who not only understand the cloud but have built their businesses on it. They will share knowledge, expertise and open the door for partnerships accelerate your cloud business.

Space is limited to 100 participants and will fill up fast.
Register - http://bit.ly/2mOEQ99

Use Discount Code: SMBCLOUD to get 10% discount during the registration process.

PSA collaboration focuses on self-healing tickets, efficient billing and easy deployment

Toronto (PRWEB) March 07, 2017

Storage Guardian announced today that its data storage and recovery solutions can now be accessed directly from ConnectWise Manage professional services automation (PSA) software. The new integration automatically resolves outdated open-file alert tickets, simplifies the deployment of Storage Guardian services, and increases the efficiency and accuracy of billing.

“The goal of our latest integration was to give managed service providers (MSPs) the ability to easily manage, monitor and protect their customers’ critical data directly from ConnectWise Manage,” said Omry Farajun, President, Storage Guardian. “Backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is a critical part of ensuring business continuity. Our new integration provides MSPs with the ability to provide this service to their customers in a straightforward, uncomplicated way.”

One unique feature of the Storage Guardian offering is the self-healing ticket. Farajun said most BDR software solutions, including Storage Guardian’s, automatically create an alert ticket for any file that happens to be open when a backup takes place. The self-healing ticket process in the new integration goes one step further and automatically resolves that alert ticket when the previously opened file is found closed during a subsequent backup.

“The number one request we hear from MSPs was to find a way to drastically reduce the number of non-necessary alert tickets in their systems,” he said. “We listened closely and found a way to meet this need with our new self-healing ticket functionality. Open file alerts that do not require a technician’s attention are automatically resolved and closed, eliminating unnecessary tickets that clog an MSP’s help desk and divert attention away from more critical issues.”

Additional benefits that are part of the new ConnectWise Manage integration include:

    Easy deployment and management: Storage Guardian software can be deployed by MSPs onto their customers’ networks directly from ConnectWise Manage. The one-time install process requires no hardware, and the single-pane approach allows MSPs to easily select the company designated for the install and gives users direct access to a wealth of additional capabilities, including a new set of reports that are available in a clean, easy-to-understand dashboard look.
    Billing enhancements: An electronic interchange of data eliminates the need for manual entry of billing information, saving time and increasing accuracy. The new integration also includes flat-rate pricing based on total capacity rather than on agents.

Gavin Gamber, Vice President of Channel Sales & Alliances for ConnectWise, said Storage Guardian integrations are a welcome addition to the ConnectWise Invent partnership program. “Integrated, third-party solutions, such as those from Storage Guardian, add functionality and efficiencies to our suite of business management solutions. The work that Storage Guardian has done first with ConnectWise Automate, formerly LabTech, and now with ConnectWise Manage is vital to our partners’ success,” he said.

To learn more about Storage Guardian’s flexible data protection service and how an MSP can market and resell data protection services to its customers, visit the Storage Guardian website and register for a free trial.

About Storage Guardian

For more than a decade, Storage Guardian has been giving small- and medium-sized businesses and their customers the ability to quickly recover from any data loss disaster. Our robust set of enterprise-grade offerings include a secure cloud destination for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS); affordable, feature-rich, automated backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions; and robust analytics to help calculate recovery time. Storage Guardian solutions protect your business data in the cloud, on-premises, or via a hybrid configuration, and always comply with the highest regulatory requirements, including Sarbanes-Oxley and FIPS 140-2. Safeguard data – no matter where it resides – before a natural disaster, hardware failure or malicious software attack stops your business in its tracks. For more information, visit the Storage Guardian website.

February 23, 2017 Posted by US SMB Team

When you hear the word “entrepreneur,” what image springs to mind? Mark Zuckerberg in his hoodie? The young Steve Jobs in his parents’ garage? The familiar faces of entrepreneurship are those of brilliant young men who are tech-savvy newsmakers.

In reality, however, today’s entrepreneurs are a much more diverse group, including those who traditionally might have been considered “ready for retirement.” Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964, are redefining the marketplace as they rely on decades of experience, talent and passion to launch and grow businesses.

What’s behind the boom in Boomer entrepreneurs? Consider that some of them may:

Finally be giving life to long-held dreams by turning in corporate badges to hang out their own shingles.

Be energized by working and staying active. Many Boomers say they simply are not ready to put an end to their work lives.

Need or want work/life balance that the corporate world doesn’t offer. Caring for a loved one, or simply volunteering or enjoying leisure time, can become possible for people who lead their own businesses.

Need to replace or supplement income. Corporate downsizing closed some doors for older workers. Plus, many pensions and retirement accounts took a beating in recent years.

Long Live the Boomer Economy

The growing percentage of Americans working past age 65, the rise in life expectancy and the fact that about 18 percent of workers older than 65 are self-employed suggest that Boomers’ impact on the economy will be felt for years to come.

During the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation‘s sixth annual State of Entrepreneurship Address at the National Press Club, Kauffman Foundation CEO Wendy Guillies outlined the economic impact of both Millennials and Boomers. Citing research from a Kauffman report, “The Future of Entrepreneurship: Millennials and Boomers Chart the Course for 2020,” Guillies stated that the United States doesn’t just need economic growth. It needs economic renewal, renewed mobility and a renewed notion of shared prosperity and sense of possibility. One of the best and most effective ways to achieve those goals is entrepreneurship — the creation and growth of new companies.

And there are encouraging signs. According to the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity, “Startup activity rose in 2015, reversing a five-year downward trend in the United States, giving rise to hope for a revival of entrepreneurship.”

Notably, the percentage of firms created by Americans ages 55 to 64 grew more than any other age demographic, up 11 percent to 25.8 percent in 2014 versus 14.8 percent in 1996 .

Why Boomer Entrepreneurs Succeed

Many Boomers are finding entrepreneurial success. At least in part, that’s because they:

Read More

I started on the 3CX telephone system journey with my customer hat on. I believed I could do it all. So, I jumped right in without, you guessed it, reading the manual (RTM).

I quickly discovered that this was my first telephony rodeo in a while and I needed help after I tripped up on a security 3CXcertificate implementation. Help isn’t bad. It doesn’t mean the 3CX is overcomplicated. Just the opposite as I discovered 3CX is very powerful and I needed the help of a certified 3CX partner.

I reached out to my favorite telecom expert, Allen Miller, a well-known 3CX consultant based in Cincinnati, OH (Allen Miller Computer Consulting; www.MillerManor.net). Full disclosure: Allen and I worked together nearly a decade ago on a now discontinued Microsoft small business phone system. I credit Allen with introducing me to the world of VoIP. Needless to say, I trust him when it comes to everything telephony.

Over the course of a few working sessions, Allen and I configured 3CX for a test network at my company, SMB Nation. In the first session, we completed the server-side installation starting with the security certificate matter through the naming conventions and administrator authentication. We did this on a small Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop unit. And therein was one of the first magical 3CX experiences. This big-league phone system can run on tiny computers. Literally. Loosely translated, I’m saying the 3CX, which can scale well through mid-sized companies, has low overhead and hardware requirements. I was officially impressed!

Also, undertaken in the first session was configuring the external firewall. We configured the SMTP email connection to the email server capabilities as well.

At the end of the first session, I realized I “didn’t know what I didn’t know” about the 3CX system and its robust strengths are indeed its asset. I could see where I was of wise mind to secure the services of a subject matter expert (SME) like Allen. I recommend this as your very first step in working with 3CX!

In the second session with Allen, we set up the client side with desk phones. I offered to re-flash a few old Cisco phones from yesteryear for this stage. Allen overruled me. He was very strict in his beliefs to not only use approved phones on the 3CX support phones list but to use a specific few brands he had successfully worked with.

Allen shared that “Some suggestions – I am partial to Yealink phones. The one I use is the T48G which has a lot of soft buttons that you can use for speed dials which I like. I think you have a T46G which is nice with fewer buttons. They also announced a new line in the last couple weeks called T4S series. I believe these have blue tooth and Wi-Fi if those matter to you.” Yealink it was and a shout out of appreciation to 888VOIP.com (888VOIP also hosts 3CX Training events which are very useful for partners to get help toward their 3CX Certifications. Visit http://www.888voip.com/events/ for providing our test bed. This intercompany cooperation from all aforementioned parties is a credit to 3CX for having built a reputation where stakeholder and suppliers work together and want to cooperate. I’ve worked with other vendors where such a community didn’t exist.

By the end of the second session, we had successfully configured the desktop phones including assigning extensions, basic call rules, identities, etc. At this point, we had the server-side and the client side ready to go.
In the next and final session, we secured dial tone. Allen had arranged for carrier services to make the phone real and ready to roam in the wild using a SIP Trunk Allen provided from vendor/partner Vitelity.com. Again, deferring to my consultant, he quickly configured the proverbial last mile to give me dial tone. I then ran both traditional and secret tests. First, I called myself from my mobile phone to confirm the 3CX system was operational. Then I answered a Craigslist ad for boating merchandise where I normally wouldn’t want someone to know my real phone number. I asked them to call the phone number I had been assigned and the phone rang as expected without problem or concern. The call fidelity over my broadband connection was excellent.

Mission accomplished. A bona fide 3CX system was up and running real time and big time. I’ve had the test bed up for over a month. No drama. And, again, I want to reiterate, hire a 3CX partner as your first step. Don’t be like Harry as that was my second step. LOL.

Customer Evidence
Not content to simply share my own experience, I wanted to seek out 3CX customer evidence to balance my opinions. I didn’t have to look far. Since the first of the year, I’ve been working with a well-respected Seattle-area vendor in the technology ecosystem. It’s stock in trade is a number of global call centers. You know it takes telephony seriously. It depends on 3CX which is a testament right there. In this scenario, I’ve been using 3CX via the native softphone application. This is the basic CSG Services configuration for 3CX: softphones, not desk phones, for each of its 100+ employees in its call centers. While not my preference (I still prefer a desk phone), I grew increasingly fond of 3CX once I hooked up my Sennheiser professional headset, freeing me from a four foot USB headset cable and allowing to walkabout and pace on calls within Bluetooth range.

My experience on the 3CX customer side is this. It’s battle tested in the technology call centers. It has passed the test. By the way, it’s running 3CX on an Azure instance (that’s a whole future blog).

Goodness of Fit in an O365 World

Finally, I thought about how 3CX, a real phone system, fits into the Office 365 community. To me the answer is very simple. Microsoft is not a telecom at its core but a software company. I think you must strongly consider 3CX as your telephony solution when you are running Office 365. ‘Nough said.

Next Steps
Click HERE to learn more about 3CX.

In this era of click bait headlines, this one is true both geographically and business-wise. Long time SMB Nation member Jamison West is undergoing a life reset. He has recently completed the transition from his MSP practice (which was acquired by Aldridge just over a year ago that I wrote about HERE.)

West and family looked in the mirror and decided time in the sun would be the right next move. As I write this, Jamison is moving to Summerlin, NV from drippy Seattle so that they can be near his wife’s extended family and the children can settle into new schools. Jamison has new professional plans in the works that we’ll report on in coming weeks. All good.

Now the good stuff
Steve Banks’ venerable Puget Sound Small Business Server (PSSBS) group that still meets on every third Thursday night hosted a going away party for West. In a wide ranging free flowing community conversation, West shared his view of the world with reality-based real facts. He should know. He’s been there and done that over 20+ years as an MSP in Seattle.

Future Speak
West made forward looking statements along the lines of “If I was starting out today…” that focused on the three things you can do in 2017 as an MSP. It dovetailed into our “start over” editorial theme we’ve been preaching from the pulpit to the pews for a few years. West specifically shared these three pillars to focus on.

1. Year of the Cloud Directory Services. With Active Directory (AD) dying (if not dead), the opportunity is to master single sign on and encryption. This was presented in the context of Azure, which is another editorial “beat” at SMB Nation this year.
2. Voice – Skype for Business. West presented and defended his thesis that this is the year of Skype. I confronted West on these assertions as I’ve had mixed Skype experiences over the years and continue my long journey towards acceptance. But West laid out some compelling customer evidence from the real world to support his beliefs.
3. Dynamics 365. This conversation was one for “get ahead of the curve” as Microsoft is consolidating its CRM, ERP and accounting portfolio to be an online service that will be a game changer, even in SMB. The audience had a range of opinions on the future of Great Plains Dynamics perhaps being slated for an end-of-life motion in favor of NAV. In a future blog, I’ll show how innovative ISVs such as Versium are creating predictive analytics snap-ins for Dynamics 365 but that is for another day.

MSP M&A

West shared his wisdom on both organic and strategic growth – he’s done both. His M&A journey, both the good and the bad, was shared openly in the spirit of transparency. Takeaways? Focus on understanding the Guaranteed and Not Guaranteed elements of a merger and acquisition scenario.

My Advice?

Consider reaching out to Jamison West via LinkedIn here and arrange for him as a speaker at your next event. It’s a wise investment to tap into Jamison’s wisdom.

Wow – I’m continually impressed every time I attend the robust annual IBM PartnerWorld conference as I recently did at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. In a series of articles, I’ll share those experiences with you over the next few weeks with my analyst hat firmly affixed. The purpose of this blog is to paint the overall picture.

I’d offer the PartnerWorld Leadership Conference had around 3,000 participants, many of whom were worldwide attendees where IBM is a strong brand. The theme, “Next is Now,” wasfitting as few companies have pivoted as hard and as fast as IBM over the past decade-plus. This time the emphasis was on Watson, it’s well-renowned and respected analytical engine that is a category leader. Past conferences have focused on IoT and other topics that took a back seat this round.

Coverage areas that stood out for me were:

Female CEO – Ginni Rometty. Always a pleasure to hear and I continue to applaud her accomplishments. I’m from progressive Seattle and props to IBM for having a top ranking female CEO turning the ship.

Marketing 2.0. Who better to embrace marketing analytics than IBM Cloud’s CMO Quincy Allen. In a future post, you’ll enjoy my free ranging conversation with him about Marketing 2.0 as I like to call it.

Customer evidence. I spoke with Hans Cobben, CEO of Bluebee. This is a practical example of applying flexible consumption in a cloud computing scenario with analytics in the genomics area. A must read in a future installment.

PartnerWorld – Jamie Mendez. She directs the IBM partner world and in my interview with her, she offers insights into pathways for IBM partners to have a deeper sense of engagement and greater profitability.

Commercial partners. I explore the four in the box partner engagement model from IBM. Plus insights into new certifications.

Blue Jeans. Finally, the new blue at IBM is tech execs in blue jeans. Love it.

Standby for more. And give IBM another look starting with Watson. Trust me.

I recently surveyed our community and discovered something amazing! Over 40 percent of the IT community we speak with has either a relationship or interest in creating an opportunity with local/county/regional governments. Our large response rate to the survey made this statistically valid (read “not fake news”) and we were pleasantly surprised. Which brings us to the point of this blog. Pursuing more government accounts means more money for MSPs, partners, resellers and consultants. It’s good Azure-based recurring revenue work.

One of the biggest challenges in working with government in the past was the sales cycle. For those

of us who recognize selling into enterprise is a long journey, I can assure you the government sales cycle traditionally has a similar if not greater duration! In the past getting a foot in the door of a governmental entity could easily take a year or more with a combination of budget cycles, fiscal year start dates, political dimensions and more conspiring to lengthen your business development efforts.

Fast Track
There is a new way for MSPs et al to rapidly get a foot in the door. One of my community members, a successful ISV, recently reached out for advice on how he could rapidly ramp and scale his patented government security solutions. I’m happy to help and the good news is that you can too. In general a simple short consulting effort can lead to an “Affordable, Saleable Azure delivered and supported” 50% margin reoccurring Trust as a Service (TaaS) sale.

Here is how it works. Esignit is already in market with a portfolio of government security solutions. This is not a startup with closure risk (and embarrassment to you, the MSP et al). Ranging from the City of San Francisco to several counties in Washington State, Esignit bring the cred factor: referenceable clients.

More specific to you (the MSP et al), you will use the Esignit tools as a foot-in-the-door “door opener” to penetrate the Government veil and secure great recurring predictable new business. And if you already serve governments, this is merely a chance to expand your scope, scale and reach.
What’s the secret sauce? For many of the Esignit solution, there is no cost to the governmental entity. This results in a rapid sales cycle and high conversion rate by legally bypassing procurement procedures.

Learn more
As an MSP et al, I’d encourage you to click HERE and fill out the form to learn more. In future blogs, I’ll explore each product including the patented 256-bit encryption algorithm that is the foundation for the product portfolios success.

Thu, Mar 9, 2017 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM PST

Ransomware has become the scourge of every business. It hits suddenly and unexpected, and the business is crippled for many hours, if not days. When it hits during business hours, in today's use of computers, the paper trial has become minimal.

So once the computers are running properly again, how does the business data created before the ransomware attack get re-entered if not backed up? If there is no paper trial, how is that business data re-created? Just before the shutdown get re-keyed? If there is no paper trial, how is that business activity re-created?

Ongoing Backups of business activity, as data is created or changed, is the BEST way to protect.

If you are, or considering to be a Connectwise Automate or Manage user, there is now available a Backup Data Recovery solution that can lower the impact of recovery of a ransomware business crippling event. Join Us to find out what is unique from Connectwise and Storage Guardian.

Mark Coppock
Digital TrendsFebruary 21, 2017

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, which is when the company issues its security and bug fix updates for Windows machines, has historically been the second Tuesday of the month. That’s slowly changing with Windows 10, but for now, Patch Tuesday remains pretty entrenched.

That’s why Microsoft’s decision to skip February 2017’s Patch Tuesday and delay its updates for an entire month was particularly striking. It’s definitely an unusual occurrence, but it now appears that the company isn’t completely withholding all Windows updates, as Betanews reports.

Starting Tuesday, Microsoft is going to release some security updates aimed at patching some issues with Adobe Flash Player. The information comes from an email that the company sent to its largest enterprise customers, which read:

“Microsoft is planning to release security updates for Adobe Flash Player. These updates will be offered to the following operating systems: Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows RT 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016. No other security updates are scheduled for release until the next scheduled monthly update release on March 14, 2017.”

Read More

I started on the 3CX telephone system journey with my customer hat on. I believed I could do it all. So, I jumped right in without, you guessed it, reading the manual (RTM). I quickly discovered that this was my first telephony rodeo in a while and I needed help after I tripped up on a security certificate implementation. Help isn’t bad. It doesn’t mean the 3CX is overcomplicated. Just the opposite as I discovered 3CX is very powerful and I needed the help of a certified 3CX partner.

I reached out to my favorite telecom expert, Allen Miller, a well-known 3CX consultant based in Cincinnati, OH (Allen Miller Computer Consulting; www.MillerManor.net). Full disclosure: Allen and I worked together nearly a decade ago on a now discontinued Microsoft small business phone system. I credit Allen with introducing me to the world of VoIP. Needless to say, I trust him when it comes to everything telephony.

Over the course of a few working sessions, Allen and I configured 3CX for a test network at my company, SMB Nation. In the first session, we completed the server-side installation starting with the security certificate matter through the naming conventions and administrator authentication. We did this on a small Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop unit. And therein was one of the first magical 3CX experiences. This big-league phone system can run on tiny computers. Literally. Loosely translated, I’m saying the 3CX, which can scale well through mid-sized companies, has low overhead and hardware requirements. I was officially impressed!

Also, undertaken in the first session was configuring the external firewall. We configured the SMTP email connection to the email server capabilities as well.

At the end of the first session, I realized I “didn’t know what I didn’t know” about the 3CX system and its robust strengths are indeed its asset. I could see where I was of wise mind to secure the services of a subject matter expert (SME) like Allen. I recommend this as your very first step in working with 3CX!

In the second session with Allen, we set up the client side with desk phones. I offered to re-flash a few old Cisco phones from yesteryear for this stage. Allen overruled me. He was very strict in his beliefs to not only use approved phones on the 3CX support phones list but to use a specific few brands he had successfully worked with.

Allen shared that “Some suggestions – I am partial to Yealink phones.  The one I use is the T48G which has a lot of soft buttons that you can use for speed dials which I like.  I think you have a T46G which is nice with fewer buttons.  They also announced a new line in the last couple weeks called T4S series.  I believe these have blue tooth and Wi-Fi if those matter to you.” Yealink it was and a shout out of appreciation to 888VOIP.com (888VOIP also hosts 3CX Training events which are very useful for partners to get help toward their 3CX Certifications. Visit http://www.888voip.com/events/) for providing our test bed. This intercompany cooperation from all aforementioned parties is a credit to 3CX for having built a reputation where stakeholder and suppliers work together and want to cooperate. I’ve worked with other vendors where such a community didn’t exist.

By the end of the second session, we had successfully configured the desktop phones including assigning extensions, basic call rules, identities, etc. At this point, we had the server-side and the client side ready to go.

In the next and final session, we secured dial tone. Allen had arranged for carrier services to make the phone real and ready to roam in the wild using a SIP Trunk Allen provided from vendor/partner Vitelity.com. Again, deferring to my consultant, he quickly configured the proverbial last mile to give me dial tone. I then ran both traditional and secret tests. First, I called myself from my mobile phone to confirm the 3CX system was operational. Then I answered a Craigslist ad for boating merchandise where I normally wouldn’t want someone to know my real phone number. I asked them to call the phone number I had been assigned and the phone rang as expected without problem or concern. The call fidelity over my broadband connection was excellent.

Mission accomplished. A bona fide 3CX system was up and running real time and big time. I’ve had the test bed up for over a month. No drama. And, again, I want to reiterate, hire a 3CX partner as your first step. Don’t be like Harry as that was my second step. LOL.

Customer Evidence
Not content to simply share my own experience, I wanted to seek out 3CX customer evidence to balance my opinions. I didn’t have to look far. Since the first of the year, I’ve been working with CSG Services, a well-respected Seattle-area vendor in the technology ecosystem. CSG Services provides services to Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, CenturyLink and other clients. It’s stock in trade is a number of global call centers. You know it takes telephony seriously. It depends on 3CX which is a testament right there. In this scenario, I’ve been using 3CX via the native softphone application. This is the basic CSG Services configuration for 3CX: softphones, not desk phones, for each of its 100+ employees in its call centers. While not my preference (I still prefer a desk phone), I grew increasingly fond of 3CX once I hooked up my Sennheiser professional headset, freeing me from a four foot USB headset cable and allowing to walkabout and pace on calls within Bluetooth range.

My experience on the 3CX customer side is this. It’s battle tested in the CSG Services call centers. It has passed the test. By the way, it’s running 3CX on an Azure instance (that’s a whole future blog).

Goodness of Fit in an O365 World
Finally, I thought about how 3CX, a real phone system, fits into the Office 365 community. To me the answer is very simple. Microsoft is not a telecom at its core but a software company. I think you must strongly consider 3CX as your telephony solution when you are running Office 365. ‘Nough said.

Next Steps
Click HERE to learn more about 3CX.

Starting March 15, cloud solution provider SherWeb will be holding a series of exclusive online workshops with industry experts from the Microsoft Partner Network and CompTIA. These state-of-the-art sessions are free and designed to give MSPs all the tools they need to be successful reselling cloud services. You’ll also receive a certificate for taking part in these workshops.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

    Reduce risk when transitioning your business to the cloud
    Build winning packaged cloud service offers
    Adjust to the cloud customer’s new buying behavior
    Close deals quickly and cost-effectively

Places are filling up fast!

A quick look at the agenda:

March 15, 1 p.m.         

Session 1: Sales – The Cloud Financial Impact (Where the Money Really Is), by Dana Willmer, Principal at CloudSpeed

March 21, 1 p.m.         

Session 2: Sales – The Criticality of Packaged Offers, by Dana Willmer, Principal at CloudSpeed

March 23, 1 p.m.         

Session 3: Marketing is the New Sales – Building Your Marketing Muscle, by Sharka Chobot, Chief Transformation Officer at Neural Impact

March 28, 1 p.m.         

Session 4: Accelerating the Cloud Buying Process – Adjusting to Buyer 2.0, by Mark Stuyt, Chief Engagement Officer at Neural Impact

March 30, 1 p.m.         

Session 5: Trends in Managed Services, by Ian Khan, Technology Futurist
   

Mike Kappel,  Contributor

You would save money if you’re using Microsoft technology. If you want to supply terabytes of space, but you only want to pay for what you use (in a vm), then you are more likely to save money. If you only want a vm, then you'd save money and all this money could be saved if you buy Azure

Azure is 4-12% cheaper than AWS, and it also offers some extra properties which makes it better than AWS. It works just fine without learning from cryptic documentation and also by the way, the cli works perfectly, all the time, without any cryptic failures. Azure made earthshaking advancements over these past years. It now offers a whole new set of capabilities and features far more superior than its competitors. The following are some important aspects for why Azure is better than AWS.

PaaS Capabilities:

Both Azure and AWS are similar in offering PaaS capabilities for virtual networking, storage, and machines. However, Azure gives stronger and faster PaaS capabilities which nowadays is more important part of Cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure PaaS provides application developers with the environment, tools, thus giving them building blocks which they need to build and establish new cloud services quickly. It also provides essential ‘dev ops’ connections which are important for managing, monitoring, and continuously fine tuning those apps. With Azure PaaS, much of the infrastructure management is taken care of behind the scenes by Microsoft. Thus, you have 100% focus on innovation if you develop Azure PasS solutions.

Integrated Environment:

Azure now brings to the array an integrated environment for testing, developing, and deploying Cloud apps. The client has the choice of frameworks, and open development languages promotes the flexibility for Azure migration, whereas AWS is widely perceived as being complicated.

Security Offerings:

The new design of Azure is based on Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) which is an industry’s major assurance process. It contains security at its base and private data and all the services stays protected and protected while they are on Azure Cloud.

The first cloud vendor was Microsoft which was approved by the European Union’s data protection authorities and the Working party of Article 29. They also were the first to willingly accept the new international standard for Cloud privacy, ISO 27018. And so, Microsoft is considered the best in terms of safety for all operations and data on the Azure Cloud.

Developer Tools:

Azure and AWS have slightly different approach, when it comes to developer tools. Only based on the processes and tools that is used by Amazon's own internal engineering teams, the AWS suite of Developer Tools mainly focuses on supporting DevOps. The tools include CodeCommit, which is used to stores code in private Git repositories; CodeDeploy, which automates code deployments; and CodePipeline for a Continuous Delivery. In addition to this, AWS also offers a (CLI) Command Line Interface for controlling AWS services and writing automation scripts. Amazon also offers one non-DevOps tool – IDC, there are currently 13 billion connected "things," a number that will likely skyrocket to 30 billion by 2020, generating $1.7 trillion in revenue.

Azure now has an IoT Suite that provides solutions for democratic scenarios like predictive maintenance and remote monitoring. It also offers core for push notifications, monitoring IoT deployments, streaming analytics, and machine learning capabilities that combine with its cloud-based IoT services

The 'Enterprise Agreement' Advantage:

If an organization uses Microsoft software, then it surely has an ‘Enterprise Agreement’ with Microsoft. It is titled to receive discounts on the Microsoft software being used as Microsoft normally squeeze these agreements to lower the pricing of Azure. Thus, with the enterprise agreement, enterprises can typically obtain significant incentives for using Azure.

Choosing the right Cloud vendor is very essential and important decision for enterprises. Azure offers hybrid solution, PaaS, and many other beneficial features, which are very important for any Cloud strategy today. Numerous enterprises have observed steady business growth by moving to Azure. As a result Azure happens to be a better choice compared to AWS.

Here are two extremely cheap (read: free) ways to test ideas.

NATASHA CHE
CONTRIBUTOR
Founder of Soundwise. Host of Founders Nextdoor podcast.

FEBRUARY 21, 2017

Last night in the shower, you had an ingenious idea for a new business.

You rushed to the desk to write it down, with water still dripping down your back. Your [insert the brilliant thing] is going to change the universe! It’s time to call up investors, assemble a team and . . . stop! Stop right there!

Before plunging into execution, you should confirm you’re solving a problem and/or meeting a need that people want to pay for. (Unless you’re Beyoncé. Then you can make money selling the air you breathe.)

Idea validation should be done on both macro and micro levels. And if you do it right, you won’t need to spend your PayPal balance on any of that. Here are some extremely cheap (read: free) ways that I and other entrepreneurs I know have used to test ideas.

The macro test
Before testing the specifics of your new venture, validate the big picture first. How large is the market? Who are your potential competitors? Are you differentiated enough? Google will answer all of those questions for you.

Start by searching the keywords related to your idea in both Google search and Google Trends. For example, when I had the idea for starting Soundwise, a mobile platform for audio courses, I researched around keywords such as podcast, audiobook and e-learning. Need more keyword ideas? Sign up for Google AdWords and use the Keyword Planner tool for inspiration.

You should also Google “XYZ industry report” or “XYZ market analysis” to get stats and data about your market. Pay attention to the related search terms Google shows you at the bottom of your search result page. For more updated information, filter the search to only include results from the past year.

Think of at least one company that offers a similar product to yours. Do research on that company and on its competitors. How do you know who its competitors are? Just Google “product X versus.” The competitors’ names will pop up, as there are legions of articles written online comparing every minute detail of every product: Pepsi vs. Coke, Target vs. Amazon, chihuahua vs. chow chow . . . . How do people find time to write those? I don’t know. Ask Google.

What you want to find at this stage is not necessarily a large market size, which often comes with the side effect of competitors galore. Ideally, what you want is to be able to say yes to all of the following:

Is there an upward trend in search volume and industry growth related to your idea?

Can you find existing players in your market that are already doing well to demonstrate there’s indeed market demand?

Are there meaningful differences between what’s in the market and what you’re thinking of offering? (We don’t know that for sure yet. “Seem to be” is good enough for now).

Read More 

About one third of the people in the world are entrepreneurs today. And about half of them are not successful in this fast growing economy. One of the biggest reasons of this failure is because they are handling there business without any mentor or a helper. What do they think of themselves? Superman-The man of steel?
Nowadays, entrepreneurs are focusing more on increasing their business revenue. They want to do all the tasks alone, and don’t have the time to do it. Then the downfall begins. The only person that can leverage your working hours and help upfront your business is the virtual assistant. There is no harm in hiring a competent virtual assistant, seriously. They become a part of your business and can remove that entrepreneurial stress from you-somehow.
Now, most of the entrepreneurs are oblivious of what and how they can outsource. They didn’t know what could a VA do for them or what tasks should we give to them.
Here are 7 main tasks you can give a Virtual assistant to increase or improve your business.

EMAIL MANGEMENT OF FILTERING:
Checking emails again and again in your inbox while doing a hard tasks will probably be a waste your time. A virtual assistant will manage your inbox and respond to most of emails on your behalf. Managing emails is easy but you should provide your account, password and some guidance to reduce the risk of getting an error.

DATA PRESENTATIONS:
Doing the research and collecting the data is a hard process. But turning that data into presentation or excel can be a time waster for entrepreneurs. Hiring a virtual assistant having an expertise in Microsoft programs can give you great benefit of saving time you would be wasting on smashing your head to make a word document or presentation.

BOOKKEEPING:
To hire a Virtual assistant to manage all the bookkeeping like making invoices, recording payments and extra bills is probably the hardest task to give. Because in this, you have given personal information of accounts and password to him or her. But if find a trustworthy virtual assistant, then thank God for this because that assistant will shave your working hours and that billing-paying stress too.

ONLINE RESEARCH:
If you are having a content writing job, you would know how hectic is it to gather all the information by doing research. So why not hire an assistant to find that relevant information. All you need to give is clear and sound instructions and a topic. So, easy, right?

Former Amazon executive John Rossman shares his checklist for developing an internet of things strategy for your organization.

By Thor Olavsrud  | Follow
Senior Writer, CIO | FEB 20, 2017 6:53 AM PT

Credit:Thinkstock

The internet of things (IoT) may present the biggest opportunity to enterprises since the dawn of the internet age, and perhaps it will be bigger. Research firm Gartner predicts there will be nearly 20 billion devices on the IoT by 2020, and IoT product and service suppliers will generate $300 billion+ in revenue.

Successfully leveraging that opportunity — bringing together sensors, connectivity, cloud storage, processing, analytics and machine learning to transform business models and processes — requires a plan.

"In the course of my career, I've estimated and planned hundreds of projects," John Rossman, who spent four years launching and then running Amazon's Marketplace business (which represents more than 50 percent of all Amazon units sold today), writes in his new book, The Amazon Way on IoT: 10 Principles for Every Leader from the World's Leading Internet of Things Strategies. "I've learned that, even before you start seeking answers, it's imperative to understand the questions. Guiding a team to a successful outcome on a complex project requires understanding of the steps and deliverables, necessary resources, and roles and every inherent risk and dependency."

Before you start the hardware and software design, and before you figure out how to engage developers, he says, you need to start with a better set of questions.

Rossman says there are three key phases to building a successful IoT strategy. While he presents the steps sequentially, he notes that many steps are actually taken concurrently in practice and can be approached in many different ways.

Part 1. Develop and articulate your strategy

First and foremost, Rossman says, you must narrow and prioritize your options. IoT presents a broad swathe of opportunities. Success depends upon understanding your market, evaluating the opportunities with deliberation and attacking in the right place.

Read More

Will the Starship bot be the future of takeout?
By Cici Zhang January 27, 2017

Starship Technologies, co-founded by Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis of Skype fame, raised $17.2 million in January to build a fleet of six-wheeled delivery robots. More feasible for large-scale rollouts than drones, these delivery bots are scheduled to have their American debut in Washington, D.C. and Redwood City, California in early February.
On test day, the Starship company will have an employee walking behind the bot—which is basically a secured container box rolling along at 4 mph—to deal with unexpected incidents and too-curious pedestrians, according to CNN Money. For the lucky crowds who are going to live-tweet this scene, the spectacle may bear resemblance to a parent following their toddler as it learns how to walk, the parent ready to save the little tyke from tripping and crying.

Read More

Data theft is no more targeted at only large companies. To be fair, large companies can spend on building firewalls and pay for top notch enterprise security. Small businesses are being targeted and why not?!

Attackers want easy targets, but you are also not going to let your hard work slide into the wrong hands. You do not want third party information stolen, or the record of clients compromised. Whether you are an individual entrepreneur or a small business owner, the last achilleas heel you want attributed to your operations, is your inability to keep data safe and secured. You do not also want to lose your hard-earned client data because windows will not start or because your hard disk crashed. Here are 5 ways to effectively combat data theft and data loss;

1. Acquire a MiFi or a Personal Hotspot
   The ability to work on the go is a model which increases productivity. Sometimes the idea is not to move away from the office to work at the coffee shop, but it does happen, that you will receive a call requiring you to remotely solve a technical issue on your online shop to enable waiting customers make purchases. A situation like that can make you hurriedly connect to the open Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, forgetting that you are exposing your entire company to attackers. If you can acquire a MiFi, great, but if you are on a tight budget, speak to your network provider about the option to expand your data package to include a Personal Hotspot. This is a feature available in both Android and iOS. That way you can securely connect to your own network and not risk connecting to a public network which might just be betting on the wrong horse.
2. Learn to Create Impregnable Passwords and Data Backups
   The password needed to log into your laptop should be close to impregnable at least. Always include CAPS, NUMBERS, lowercases and Symbols. Be shrewd about it, and do not concentrate all the characters in your password at one side of your keyboard. There is also the possibility of your laptop getting stolen. Make use of the free cloud space Google Drive and OneDrive offers. Budget for more if you must, because a hard drive can crash unexpectedly. Make local backups as well and change your HDD to SSD if you can afford it.
3. Storage and Backups are not Enough
   So, you have been prudent by backing up your data online and locally on an external hard disk. That is not enough. Ransomware lurks all over the internet. Other malwares that can compromise data are multiplying. You need a strong anti-virus software which comes with a firewall that will manage your network connections and keep your computer safe when you connect to the internet or plug in a USB drive that is not yours. You also have to regularly keep an eye on the software which is responsible for syncing your files with your cloud storage to make sure backups are up to date.
4. Collaborated Efforts can go Wrong
   Mistakes do happen, but some people are just careless and negligent by nature. These days collaborating on a project in shared files and folders are great, but there is always the danger of one colleague wrongfully deleting some files or exposing his/her computer to a data theft. You need to have your own local backup for whatever file your team is working on. Do not assume everyone will be careful, because all your efforts can go down the drain because of some elementary mistake by a colleague. Always assume the worse and look out for yourself and the team.
5. Use Secured Links and Send Password Protected Documents
   Your business exists for your customers and you need them to achieve short and long term goals. As a small business, you cannot have your reputation ruined for mistakenly sending the right file to the wrong client. If that ever happens, only a password can save you, because you know only the right client has the password to access that file. Enterprise level security grants secured file sharing platforms and systems, and that makes working remotely safer. Small businesses cannot always afford such a service. Beware of sending sensitive links, and make sure there is some level of security created for clients to access their private data.

Microsoft researchers Shital Shah, Ashish Kapoor and Debadeepta Dey are leading development of the Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform. Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.

Posted February 15, 2017 By Allison Linn

When most people with normal vision walk down the street, they can easily differentiate the things they must avoid – like trees, curbs and glass doors — from the things they don’t, such as shadows, reflections and clouds.

Chances are, most people also can anticipate what obstacles they should expect to encounter next — knowing, for example, that at a street corner they should watch out for cars and prepare to step down off the curb.

The ability to differentiate and anticipate comes easily to humans but it’s still very difficult for artificial intelligence-based systems. That’s one big reason why self-driving cars or autonomous delivery drones are still emerging technologies.

Microsoft researchers are aiming to change that. They are working on a new set of tools that other researchers and developers can use to train and test robots, drones and other gadgets for operating autonomously and safely in the real world. A beta version is available on GitHub via an open source license.

It’s all part of a research project the team dubs Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform. It includes software that allows researchers to quickly write code to control aerial robots and other gadgets and a highly realistic simulator to collect data for training an AI system and testing it in the virtual world before deploying it in the real world.

Ashish Kapoor, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the project, said they hope the tools will spawn major progress in creating artificial intelligence gadgets we can trust to drive our cars, deliver our packages and maybe even do our laundry.

“The aspirational goal is really to build systems that can operate in the real world,” he said.

That’s different from many other artificial intelligence research projects, which have focused on teaching AI systems to be successful in more artificial environments that have well-defined rules, such as playing board games.

Kapoor said this work aims to help researchers develop more practical tools that can safely augment what people are doing in their everyday lives.

“That’s the next leap in AI, really thinking about real-world systems,” Kapoor said.

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What differentiates a good sales person from a bad one is often the ability to ask good questions and really listen to the answers. In fact, almost 50% of your sales effort should be put in understanding the business needs of your potential clients. Once you understand the business reality as well as the processes, problems, challenges, and goals, the sales part is quite easy.

Microsoft Office 365 provides an all-in-one modern workforce designed to provide customers with a single solution for all their end-user cloud productivity and collaboration needs.

Your Office 365 sales team has to use a systematic approach to collect the right information from your clients. Building this approach relies on your ability to:

• Identify Office 365 selling scenarios
• Position the right product benefits to solve the client’s top pain points
• Address security and compliance concerns with Office 365
• Overcome the most frequent client objections with counter arguments

Our white paper lists top questions every sales person should be ready to answer about Office 365, plus different customer buying scenarios.  You’ll also find a list of the most common values that Office 365 offers an SMB and how these values are linked to 4 core business goals.

Christian de Looper / Digital Trends

Microsoft’s Hotmail email service became Outlook.com in 2012, and since then the company has reworked it into arguably one of the best email services on the market. As a part of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity platform, Outlook.com offers a full range of email, contact, calendar, and other capabilities to compete with services like Google’s Gmail.

Outlook.com has been going through a complete revision to its online experience, and Microsoft has been previewing a premium subscription that adds even more functionality. Now, Outlook.com Premium is officially available, although only to users in the United States, as Thurrott reports.

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Small and medium businesses are constantly faced with maximizing their marketing and advertising budget, which unfortunately, comes in dribs and drabs. They want to stay competitive, attain brand awareness, even brand loyalty … but the issue is always a budget which throws cold water on all those goals. The good news is, the 10 points below might just put you (yes you, the small business owner) on cloud nine; call it the “five-finger discount” to achieving marketing and promotional goals with little or no budget!

1.  Your first target market should be friends, family and acquaintances. Do not underrate the power they have to recommend your product or service to others in their circles. Also, market all the time. Utilize your time at the coffee shop by telling a stranger about your product. If you drive, take the bus or train sometimes and share the unique features of your product or service with strangers.
2. Learn to give recommendations and referrals. Believe that that favor will be returned. If your shop is on the same block with another small business, recommend their products or services. However, you should do this only after you have used their product or service yourself. You do not want to recommend a substandard service or product to dent your reputation. You can even heighten the idea by collaborating with other small businesses in your environment to promote each other’s products. You can agree to leave flyers or brochures at each other’s shop.  
3. Get an attractive logo and a catchy phrase. Make it available on your products, website, emails and anywhere possible. Be shrewd with branding; one that easily identifies your product or service. 
4. Attend public events and give a speech if the opportunity presents itself. You do not have to be an expert in giving public speeches to take this up. For instance, if you know someone in the community who passed on, pass through the memorial service and ask the family members to share some few words. Make yourself known through supporting people in the community. They will surely return the favor.
5. Create a blog for your business. Dedicate some few minutes weekly to write a post about the services you provide or the unique features of your product. Take advantage of developing trends when they relate to your products or services and write about it. Provide useful information on your blog and optimize words which will promote your goods or services.
6. Create a loyalty program which would not take so much away from your profit. You can give discount coupons or voucher codes which will make customers make a return.
7. Make follow ups and ask for feedbacks. Contact customers about their experience with your product or service to create or build a lasting relationship. Studies have shown a positive correlation between good customer services and recommendations.
8. Give free trials in new markets. Be confident to entice customers to try out your product or service. Do not forget that people are more likely to purchase a product or service they have tried.
9. Associate yourself with a group which is involved in community service or charity events. Organize blood donation events, get involved in volunteering activities and create relationships.
10. Finally, tap into the power of social media. Do not underrate the power of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and any other social media platform out there. Do not be shy to ask for retweets. Grow your followers, generate interesting content on pages and beware of plagiarism. Try to be creative and make sure you have your products or services at the back of your mind at all times.

If these strategies will cost you anything at all, that will be time, but believe in the short, medium and long term returns they promise. If you have to take a free course online to learn a new skill to enable you implement any of these, try coursera.org and edx.org. The primary theme which seems to run through all these strategies is to engage people and create relationships. The money helps, but even those with the money to advertise are also engaging people. Above all, make your product or service kick-ass!

Ryan Matthew

Running a small business poses many different obstacles that you must overcome. It is important for small businesses to address these issues before they become major hurdles to the progression of your company. Some of the biggest mistakes small businesses can make are in regards to technology. By either failing to stay with the times or improperly applying new technology, a business can be set back far behind the competition. However, there are consultants that can help you avoid these common tech mistakes that most small businesses make

.Failing to Stay Up to Date on Hardware

When you are upgrading your technology, it can be easy to purchase new software updates instead of staying up to date on the latest hardware. Staying up-to-date on the latest hardware technology will help your business stay ahead of the curve and up to the task of any technological issues that may face your organization. Even though software companies are spending millions of dollars to advertise their newest releases, invest your money where it counts and keep your hardware up-to-date.

Not Having the Right Digital Security

When your small business doesn't have enough digital security, your risk factor goes up greatly. There are hackers that are ruthless when it comes to destroying websites and stealing valuable information. There are consultants who can help your small business fortify itself against these potential attacks. Not having the right digital security can be a tech mistake that can end up being very costly in the long run.

Failing to Utilize Social Media

When you are trying to reach a new audience online, social media is key. There are millions of potential clients and customers who are constantly checking their social media. It is important to take advantage of the great traffic on these social media networks in order to get the word out about your small business. Social media can be a great way to get people on board with your vision. Building a loyal customer base is easier than ever before with the rise of this new technology.

Failing To Back up Your Data

Companies today are very reliant on their records and data which are almost completely stored electronically. This is very true if you are a media company that may have to access old files in the future. Make sure that you are always making physical hard-drive or cloud-based backups of your files. This will help give you the peace of mind that even if your main hard drives crash, you will still have backups of all the files you may need. There are now backup programs that will automatically backup your files on a regular basis.

Not Being Mobile Friendly

More often than not, your customers are going to see your website for the first time on their mobile device. It is important that your site has great mobile capabilities. This will allow you to be able to make a great first impression with your mobile  friendly website. This will help your small business grow more than you ever imagined.

The secret to your success? Cold calls.

Alex Berman
Entrepreneur Network Contributor

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Alex Berman explains how useful cold calling is and an exact strategy you can use to do it well.

Berman and his team have found great success in cold calling. In fact, they've landed six meetings with six Fortune 500 companies just through cold calling.

To start, pick a Fortune 500 company that you want to cold call. Look at your past case studies to see who might be best suited for what you have to offer. Next, find the marketing director of that company -- this is simple and can be done through LinkedIn.

Research the company and come up with some innovative ideas. Most public companies publish goal sheets online. For example, if you search "Coca-Cola goals 2017," you'll see the company's blog posts and goals and can use this to help come up with ideas.

Now it's time to cold call! You probably won't get an answer the first few times, but keep trying. It takes an average of five times calling at different times during the day to get through, says Berman.

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by Judith Lindenberger

How do you write an employee handbook for your small business? What do you need to put in it? Whether you're writing your first employee manual or you're updating one you've had for a while, this article explains the topics you should cover.

Employee handbooks should be designed to do more than just communicate information and answer routine questions; your handbook should help you achieve your organizational goals and objectives. Thus, while a list of rules of conduct and a summary of benefits are important information, you should evaluate your handbook on its ability to help your organization meet its objectives.

One purpose of your employee handbook is to help you attract and retain employees. Your employee handbook should help your employees answer — hopefully in the affirmative — two important questions: “Why should I work here?” and “Why should I continue working here?” If your employees are not receiving a positive message about your organization, your handbook is not doing its job.

Your handbook should also help convey useful information about hours of work, paydays, leaves of absence, and benefits. More importantly, your handbook should help create an atmosphere of trust and respect and give your employees a sense of belonging.

At the same time, your employee handbook must help you comply with your legal obligations and ethical requirements. It must also help you protect management’s right to make changes and adapt the organization’s policies and programs as needed.

Since your organization and its employees are affected by all of your written and unwritten policies and procedures, you should ensure that your employee handbook incorporates as many of your organization’s written and unwritten policies and procedures as practical. You must further ensure that your handbook communicates top management’s commitment to your policies. As a result, your handbook will promote consistency and assist you in preventing claims of disparate treatment.

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There are two known options to dealing with malware and viruses; to clean or wipe and restore. It must be acknowledged that the main difference between the two has to do with convenience. Many argue that wipe and restore is the most effective way of dealing with viruses and malware, but to clean is equally effective and comes with certain advantages. For Small and Medium-Size Businesses (SMB) or Managed Service Providers (MSP) who are into the business of troubleshooting computers for a fee, it is very important to weigh the convenience each of the two methods bring to you and your clients.

There are some factors to consider when deciding on which method to use; time, cost, loss of irrecoverable data, etc, while ensuring that the primary objective of cleaning the computer or device of all malware and/or viruses is kept intact. Make sure that the client is satisfied with your work; you do not delete important files and folders that a malware has hijacked. You also want to ensure that there is a significant improvement in the performance of the computer; applications open faster, there are no popups or unauthorized applications running in the background and consuming vital memory space.

From the perspective of most clients, “wipe and restore” is how a lazy MSP gets the job done. The “I could have done that myself” feedback should not be unexpected. Wipe and restore, even when requested by a client, backed by a signed agreement, should be used when absolutely nothing can be done to recover files and applications. Truth be told, the client could have called his or her nephew in high school, or even the neighbor’s kid to do “wipe and restore” instead of hiring your services. It is clearly a bad idea to wipe; recovery files don’t receive updates, drivers which have been installed to work with peripherals will have to be reinstalled … too many inconveniences if we are to be fair.

• 
  To thoroughly clean is to first disconnect the computer from the internet and boot into safe-mood. This is a preventive measure to ensure that the malware does not spread or steal and transfer personal data via the internet.
• Run a Disk Cleanup to clear all temporary files. Aside creating useful space for the client, this will also get rid of some malware and improve the performance of the computer.
• Install a good malware software and run an on-demand scan to clean the computer. If client already had one installed, it obviously must be uninstalled since it failed to prevent the malware from spreading.
• The next step is to reconnect to the internet and have Malwarebytes installed. After installation and checking for updates, disconnect the internet again and run the program. If you do not want to risk an infection, download it on a clean computer and use a USB drive to install on the infected one. This will remove all threats not detected by the earlier scan. It is not recommended as a first option because some malwares are designed to prevent its installation even in safe mode.

There are some damages you would not be able to repair or restore, but the client will be far more satisfied to have almost everything running normal than to start Windows from scratch.

Getting technical support has been listed as one of the top 5 challenges small businesses face when they move to the cloud. Although Microsoft offers some assistance to Office 365 end users, the service does not fit this type of companies’ needs. Moreover, costs for a guaranteed, top-level support are high and only a few small businesses want to go that route.

CSP Direct and Indirect partners are not just reselling licenses; they have to offer a full customer experience that includes technical support. Guaranteeing the same level of support as Microsoft or better requires partners to know about:

• How to set up a first-class technical support service
• How to choose the right pricing model for your support services
• Hiring and training employees
• Managing customer satisfaction

As a VAR, MSP or SI, offering support service is a unique opportunity to improve customer loyalty, free referrals, plus cross-sell and upsell options. Being your customers’ first point of contact for either sales or support matters will keep you aware of your customer needs. As a result, you’ll be able to help them better adopt Office 365 services and come up with complementary solutions.

Malwarebytes acquires Italian cybersecurity firm to enhance threat detection, removal and remediation across the entire enterprise.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 7, 2017 – Malwarebytes™, the leading advanced malware prevention and remediation solution, today announced the acquisition of Saferbytes, a security start-up with a proven track record of building advanced technologies with anti-malware, anti-exploit, anti-rootkit, cloud AV, and sandbox capabilities. This acquisition will greatly enhance Malwarebytes’ enterprise remediation offering and threat feeds, in addition to further advancing the company’s market approach and global strategy. 

One of Malwarebytes’ core competencies is the removal of advanced threats from infected endpoints. With the Saferbytes acquisition, Malwarebytes plans to leverage the company’s popularapplication, as well as its sandbox expertise, to enhance existing solutions with new IOC and threat feeds and equip businesses with superior threat intelligence. The acquisition also serves as a continuation of Malwarebytes’ global expansion strategy and market focus on the enterprise.

“We are committed to keeping customers safe from the most dangerous cyber threats through continued advancement of our technologies,” said Marcin Kleczynski, Malwarebytes CEO. “Adding Saferbytes to the Malwarebytes team is a crucial step in enhancing our incident response offering and expanding our global footprint as a company. We have been incredibly impressed with what they have built and look forward to working together to keep businesses safe from cyber threats.”

“The entire Saferbytes team and I are truly excited to be joining forces with the exceptional and highly talented people at Malwarebytes to build advanced threat detection technologies,” said Marco Giuliani, Saferbytes CEO. “I have always envied the team at Malwarebytes for building innovative technologies and developing one of the most popular anti-malware solutions on the market. Since meeting the Malwarebytes executive team for the first time, it was clear to me that we shared the same vision for building technologies to enable our customers to have the best protection available.”

About Saferbytes Deepviz
Saferbytes’ Deepviz is a cloud based, self-learning threat intelligence platform powered by Deepviz Malware Analysis Engine. With Deepviz, users can start from an IP, domain, string, filename, e-mail or anything else they have to quickly rebuild the whole history of a targeted attack and identify malicious domains, similar malware and C&C infrastructure.
Deepviz easily integrates into the existing security workflow. Deepviz for Splunk allows users to enrich Splunk data by adding threat intelligence details to IP addresses, domains and hashes. Analysts can spot suspicious connections, find out what malware is connecting to them and identify malware on the network. The intel gathered by Deepviz will greatly enhance the

Malwarebytes portfolio and holds significant potential for enhancing existing Malwarebytes enterprise solutions.

Saferbytes is based in Perugia, Italy and was founded in July 2012 by Marco Giuliani. The company consists of an innovative team committed to protecting Internet users from all current and future cyber threats. For the near term, Deepviz will retain its current name, supplemented by Malwarebytes branding. Malwarebytes is committed to maintaining the mission of the Deepviz product and its features. Malwarebytes believes this will aid growing awareness for the Malwarebytes brand in areas of rapid growth within Europe, Asia and further countries outside of the United States. Malwarebytes will also integrate many of the proprietary techniques and detections into their flagship products.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About Malwarebytes
Malwarebytes is the next-gen cybersecurity company that millions worldwide trust. Malwarebytes proactively protects people and businesses against dangerous threats such as malware, ransomware, and exploits that escape detection by traditional antivirus solutions. The company’s flagship product combines advanced heuristic threat detection with signature-less technologies to detect and stop a cyberattack before damage occurs. More than 10,000 businesses worldwide use, trust, and recommend Malwarebytes. Founded in 2008, the company is headquartered in California, with offices in Europe and Asia, and a global team of threat researchers and security experts. For more information, please visit us at http://www.malwarebytes.com/.

Malwarebytes founder and CEO Marcin Kleczynski started the company to create the best disinfection and protection solutions to combat the world’s most harmful Internet threats. Marcin was recently named “CEO of the Year” in the Global Excellence awards and has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Enterprise Technology list and the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 award, adding those to an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

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Your company's goals will only be effective if you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve--and how.

By Peter Vanden Bos

A smart CEO understands the inherent value of goal setting in steering a growing business in the right direction. Unfortunately, figuring out exactly what the right direction is—and the road map to get there—isn't as much of a no-brainer.

More than 80 percent of the 300 small business owners surveyed in the recent 4th Annual Staples National Small Business Survey said that they don't keep track of their business goals, and 77 percent have yet to achieve their vision for their company.

Though the statistics are grim, they should make sense: establishing business goals involves a fair amount of introspection into what makes your business tick, and what you want its future to be. Devoting the proper amount of time to do that can be difficult in a struggling economy, but your goals will be more achievable and effective if you do.

"You have to know what you're going for, and do it with your eyes wide open," says Francisco Dao, founder and president of The Killer Pitch, a firm based in Tarzana, California, that helps companies and entrepreneurs refine their message, and former business coach and columnist for Inc. "Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what it's going to take to achieve your goals."

Here's Inc.'s road map to setting (and achieving) business goals.

Setting Business Goals: Determine Your Long-Term Aims

Start by distinguishing your long-term goals from your short-term ones. Your long-term goals should have a timeline of about three to five years, says Maria Marshall, an associate professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has conducted research on small and family-owned businesses.

They should articulate your company's mission statement, reflecting the reason your company was founded. "When you think about why the company is there in the first place, goals take on a whole different meaning," says Bill Baren, a business coach and founder and president of Bill Baren Coaching, based in San Francisco. "There's more energy behind them. They don't feel forced."

Marshall says that these types of visionary goals usually fall within four general areas: service, social, profit, or growth:

• Service - Goals related to improving customer service satisfaction or customer retention.
• Social - Goals that focus on giving back to the community, through philanthropy or volunteer organizations, for example
• Profit - Goals set to increase profits by a certain percentage
• Growth - Goals related to the expansion of the company, through new employees, for instance.

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Ransom + ware = Ransomware (for newbies to the term) is a malicious software which hijacks your computer until a ransom has been paid. A ransomware attack typically denies access to one’s own computer. The mild ones will target useful files and certain applications. Most ransomware attacks are known to demand ransom in the form of cash, but Microsoft reports that there are known cases where attackers request victims to complete surveys to regain access … bizarre, but nothing will be more irksome than doing everything a cybercriminal requested and still not gaining access to your computer; a phenomenon which should not be unexpected.

This malicious software, commonly used by cyberattackers, has gained momentum over the past year. As elaborated earlier, they are traditionally built to hold operating systems, files and applications hostage, but the cyberspace watchdogs are reporting on their threatening evolution; they are now designed to (in addition to blocking access to one’s computer) steal personal and financial data from victims. Studies on cybersecurity suggest that cybercriminals building ransomware are adding more atrocious features to it. Malwarebytes State of Malware Report 2017 also reveals the possibility of ransomware making modifications to a computer’s Master Boot Record (the part of a computer’s system which manages booting into the operating system).

As cybercriminals are enhancing their malwares, security agencies are also working their fingers to the bone. Europol (European Police Agency), Intel and Kaspersky have already teamed-up to crack down on ransomware. They unveiled an online platform, called No More Ransom, to create awareness and help victims to regain access to their computers, programs and files without paying any ransom. Last year, the master decryption key of TeslaCrypt (a notorious ransomware) was released, rendering it completely useless. But the fact remains that as at November 2016, ransomware accounted for two thirds of all malicious attacks and that can only get worse, looking at how the malware has advanced from 2014 to 2016 (a Kaspersky report showed that ransomware attacks increased from 131,111 to 718,536 within that period). Lucky, referred to as the successor to TeslaCrypt, is continually evolving and menacing.

The United States suffered the most ransomware attacks in 2016 worldwide. To stay protected, back up files and apps regularly, if possible in the cloud as well and update software regularly. It must be acknowledged that very little attention is being paid to antivirus software; a good one represents the first prevention barrier to cyberattacks.

The Windows Azure public cloud platform is one of the three pillars of Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision that will transform the traditional datacenter environment, help businesses unlock insights in data stored anywhere, enable the development of a wide range of modern business applications, and empower IT to support users who work anywhere on any device while being able to manage these devices in a secure and consistent way. The other two pillars of the Cloud OS are, of course, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2, and Microsoft Press will soon be releasing.

General Availability (GA) of these latest versions of Windows Server and System Center is currently scheduled for October 18, 2013. In sync with these two releases, the Windows Azure platform has also been enhanced in recent months with preview releases of new services like Windows Azure BizTalk Services, Windows Azure Traffic Manager, and Windows Azure HDInsight. And in the same timeframe, services that were previously in preview like Windows Azure Web Sites and Windows Azure Mobile Services have now reached the GA milestone.

At the core of the Windows Azure platform is its ability to execute applications running in the cloud. Windows Azure currently provides four different models for doing this: Web Sites, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, and Mobile Services. Together these four approaches comprise the compute services portion of the Windows Azure platform, and they can either be used separately or combined together to build more complex solutions that can meet specific business needs.

Windows Azure Web Sites is a scalable, secure, and flexible platform you can use for building web applications that run your business, extend the reach of your brand, and draw in new customers. It has an easy-to-use self-service portal with a gallery of the world’s most popular web solutions including .DotNetNuke, CakePHP, DasBlog, WordPress, and many others. Or you can simply create a new website from scratch and then install a tool like WebMatrix—a free, lightweight web development tool that supports the latest web technologies such as ASP.NET, PHP, HTML5, CSS3, and Node. You can use WebMatrix to create websites and publish applications for Windows Azure. And if you use Microsoft Visual Studio as a development environment, you can download and install a Windows Azure SDK so you can build applications that can take advantage of the scalable cloud computing resources offered by Windows Azure.
When you create a new website you can also have the option to create a database for storing the data for your web application. You can choose to create either a SQL database or a MySQL database for your website. You can also choose to publish your website from source control. This sets up continuous deployment from source control providers like Team Foundation Service, CodePlex, GitHub, or Bitbucket.

The running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform,Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Compute service can run many different kinds of applications.

A primary goal of this platform, however, is to support applications that have a very large number of simultaneous users. (In fact, Microsoft has said that it will build its own SaaS applications on Windows Azure, which sets the bar high.) Reaching this goal by scaling up—running on bigger and bigger machines—isn’t possible. Instead, Windows Azure is designed to support applications that scale out, running multiple copies of the same code across many commodity servers. To allow this, a Windows Azure application can have multiple instances, each executing in its own virtual machine (VM). These VMs run 64-bit Windows Server 2008, and they’re provided by a hypervisor (based on Hyper-V) that’s been modified for use in Microsoft’s cloud. To run an application, a developer accesses the Windows Azure portal through their Web browser, signing in with a Windows Live ID. They then choose
whether to create a hosting account for running applications, a storage account for storing data, or both.

Once the developer has a hosting account, they can upload the application, specifying how many instances the application needs. Windows Azure then creates the necessary VMs and runs the application. It’s important to note that a developer can’t supply their own VM image for Windows Azure to run. Instead, the platform itself provides and maintains its own copy of Windows. Developers focus solely on creating applications that run on Windows Azure.
A developer can use only Web role instances, only Worker role instances, or a combination of the two to create a Windows Azure application. If the application’s load increases, they can use the Windows Azure portal to request more Web role instances, more Worker role instances, or more of both for his application. If the load decreases, he can reduce the number of running instances. To shut down the application completely, the developer can shut down all of the application’s Web role and Worker role instances.

The VMs that run both Web role and Worker role instances also run a Windows Azure agent, as shows. This agent exposes a relatively simple API that lets an instance interact with the Windows Azure fabric. For example, an instance can use the agent to write to a Windows Azure-maintained log, send alerts to its owner via the Windows Azure fabric, and do a few more things.

To create Windows Azure applications, a developer uses the same languages and tools as for any Windows application. They might write a Web role using ASP.NET and Visual Basic, for example, or with WCF and C#. Similarly, they might create a Worker role in one of these .NET languages or directly in C++without the .NET Framework. And while Windows Azure provides add-ins for Visual Studio, using this development environment isn’t required.

by Jillian Stampher on January 26, 2017 at 8:41 am

(jmiks/iStock.com via Pew Research Center)

Even after being hacked, most Americans fail to properly protect their personal information online, finds a Pew Research Center study published Thursday.

Pew surveyed more than 1,000 American adults last year to determine their perception of cyber security and what measures they take to keep their online information safe. According to the study, most are failing to use best cyber security practices in their personal lives.

(Pew Research Center Graph)

Though 64 percent of the people surveyed had been victim to a cyber attack, just 12 percent have ever used software to manage their passwords. Most (84 percent) still rely on memorizing passwords or writing them down as the main way of keeping their information safe. Pew also found that 41 percent of people have shared their password to at least one online account with another person.

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According to recent evaluation by Department of labor, the average tenure of a U.S. employee is less than two years – a short 18 months!  There are numerous reasons why individuals change jobs. Nowadays, it is rare for someone to get a job and stay with it for the rest of their life. There are many other open doors and our lives are filled with flexibility and diversity. However, there are many people who leave their jobs to seek an ideal environment — and it isn’t just about the money or the location.

But as for the business holder, losing a great employee is a terrible thing. Finding, onboarding, and training a replacement costs both time and money. Not to mention you don’t know how a new employee will work out. There's the hardship on the rest of your staff until the position can be filled.

So, why did you lose your great employees?

Here are the five top reasons that makes an employee to quit.

Overwork
Nothing blazes great employees out quite like overworking them. Employesr, and clients expect more work out of these that work hard, which makes them feel as if they are being punished for good performance.
If you want to increase the work of your talented employees, you should increase their status as well. Promotions, title-changes, and raises are all acceptable ways to increase workload.

No career progression
Humans can no longer just do the same thing for the rest of their lives. They want to learn more and progress in their careers. Staff expect to be educated and trained so they can build their experience and skill. If a job provides no opportunity for career progression, chances are workers will leave and seek an ideal environment with better opportunities elsewhere.

Undervalued.
People want to be recognized and applauded for a job well done. Recognizing employees, in business, is not simply a nice thing to do but it is an effective way to show your appreciation for their successes and efforts while also strengthening those behaviors and actions that make a difference in your organization.  Lack of appreciation drives people to leave and find another job.

Excessive hierarchy
Every workplace needs an initiative structure, but an inflexible organization makes your employees unhappy. If your best performers know they're expected to deliver without contributing their ideas, don’t feel empowered to help make decisions, are always deferring to others on the premise of their title rather than their expertise, they don't have much to be glad about.
Most of the people who leave their job do so because of the boss, not the organization or work. Ask yourself what you may be doing to keep your best employees.  

Lack of recognition
Even the most selfless people want to be rewarded and appreciated for a work done well. It is the nature of human beings. When you don’t reward or appreciate your good  employees, you're not only failing to motivate them but also missing out on the most effective way to reinforce great performance. Even if you don't have the budget for bonuses or raises, you can provide them recognition by a money-free way-- although, a word of appreciation is free. If people are not noticed, they won’t care.

Hire and Promote the Wrong People
Hard working and good employees want to work with smart professionals. When managers don’t hire good people, it’s a annoying thing for those stuck working alongside them. And if you promote the wrong people, the condition becomes much worse. When you strive to give your best effort only to get a promotion or just an appreciation that’s given to someone who glad-handed their way to the top, it’s a big offense. It makes the good people leave you.

Richard Branson’s story is the one that’s been told several times. It’s a tale worth fawning over; a rags-to-riches tale that gives many hope as they try and develop their own flagship brand.

The biggest reason for Richard Branson’s success is because of customer service. B2C companies, like Virgin America and Virgin Records are the most famous companies of all. Branson has said, “Simplicity and good customer service will win every time’.

1. Leave it if you don't enjoy it.

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears (and caffeine) makes a business successful. Branson said in a press interview, " When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn't set out to build a business empire ... For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that's going to make a real difference to other people's lives."

2. Build a great team around you.

If you want to be successful, never forget to build a great team around you and reward them for their hard work. Understand what incentivizes and motivates your teammates. This is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur must have.

3. Take pride in your work

I enjoyed this year’s Virgin Stars Awards, where we celebrated some of those people who have gone the extra mile for us around the Virgin world. Many different companies, nationalities and personalities were there under one roof and it was very interesting to see what qualities they all have in common. The most important trait they all had was pride in their work and in the company they represent. You should always focus on helping your staff and take pride in them. In return they will shine through in how they treat your customers.

4. Take Risks
“The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all!” This is one of Sir Richard Branson’s favorite sayings. What I loved about him, was his ability to take risks to save the business he believed in.

He did whatever it took to save the company, and even mortgaged his own house. Virgin Records was sold to get the financing needed to keep the airline business alive. It was a hard decision for him but a right one (I guess). If I had to point out one thing that he does not lack, it’s guts.

Now I am not telling you to put your life at risk, but you should take risks and chances in what you believe. You are the one to determine what your business means to you and what it can become.
Just hold a vision and assess whether the risk is worth the return and if there is a chance that it might be... Go for it!

5. Think Simple
Your enemy is complexity. Only a fool will make things complicated. But It is hard to make something simple.I know it’s hard not to overdo things, when you’re still starting out. It is just because you want to make everything right, and you always tend to do things in a more complex way. The best way to solve business problems is to think simple (sometimes).

If you overthink and make things complicated you’ll only put pressure and tire yourself. When you face a challenge, calm down and analyze the situation thoroughly and then decide if it is a source of worry or not.

Think objectively and always have a game plan!

Defining Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a cloud service launched in October 2008. In direct competition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure comes out a more progressive and diverse cloud computing platform. Deploying different tools and frameworks, Azure provides cloud service to global clients. It focuses in three areas of cloud computing, remote monitoring, asset management and predictive maintenance.

Remote Monitoring through Azure
Millions of devices collaborate with millions of systems at one time through Microsoft Azure. This exceptional collaboration describes the resourceful Azure remote monitoring system, where every program is synchronized in a distinctive way. The system regularly checks status of devices and monitoring happens every single minute. A backend Analytics team of Microsoft is always there to support fast data exchange between devices and the Cloud. The idea of how Enterprise resources should be well-connected is actualized in Azure remote monitoring system.

Asset Management & Predictive Maintenance through Azure
Azure works on enhanced security protocols. By using unique identities and credentials, devices are brought to full protection in Azure Cloud messaging system. Confidentiality is maximized in such highly-vigilant communication system.

Microsoft Azure details the process of digital asset management.  It automates media management workflows, optimizing time taken in organizing or sharing corporate media files. Azure provides self-service portals for exchange or transfer of media files. It gives direct access of assets through Microsoft Word or Powerpoint extension. Azure aligns with other external Hypermedia such as Application Program Interface (API) to manage assets’ records in a more user-friendly way. It gives strong backup and recovery during Big-Data storage.

Azure Machine Learning is an artificially intelligent logical workspace to predict flaws of a Cloud system. Using work histograms such workspace predicts remaining life of a device, equipment, machine or anything huge such as an overall system itself. Predictability is inevitable with Microsoft Azure workspace, allowing strategists to bring more improved and productive solutions for business.

Plus the four steps to make your habit work for you.

Lewis Schiff
Contributor
Author, Executive Director The Business Owners Council, co-founder of BEN Global Mentorship

September 28, 2016

It was during a team-building exercise many years ago that I first discovered a talent I had no idea I possessed. The exercise itself was pretty run-of-the-mill -- name one special skill or talent for each person in the room. I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear anything life-changing, but I was taken aback when multiple people told me that I was very good at asking questions.

It was not really something that I had ever considered to be a personal talent. It was, and is, just something that has always come naturally to me -- something that I’ve never really had to think about. And that’s the thing. Your true talent isn’t something that you need to focus on to do it well, and it isn’t something that you will consider remarkable.

Rather, it is something that you should work on honing once you discover it, and it is definitely something that should be incorporated into your career. I’ve spent years working on turning my knack for asking good questions into a career and have helped thousands of other people do the same with their own talents.

Asking good questions and translating the answers to help other people access great insights has become what I call my “language” -- the way that I communicate with the world. One key thing that I’ve found really successful entrepreneurs have in common is that they’ve built their businesses around their own languages. They’ve identified their own innate special talents and have worked to build careers based on their ability to do what they do best. No wonder they wound up so successful!

Once you identify your own talent, you’ll know your own language, and you’ll be one step closer to building a successful career. This is such a basic, foundational insight that I call it “The First Habit.”

Why do I refer to this as a habit instead of an insight? Because knowing your talent isn’t enough. Making your talent work for you is an ongoing process, requiring you to develop it, hone it and build it into a viable career. The obvious applications for your talent probably won’t jump out at you immediately, but don’t get discouraged. It may take a few nights -- or weeks -- of brainstorming to come up with a viable business idea that really takes advantage of your skill.

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In part one of this series, located HERE, we discovered what AWS offers. In this second installment, we discuss the advantages of suing AWS. Let’s get started.

Advantages of using AWS:

AWS carries all the advantages that a conventional cloud-hosting platform provides, along with some unique aspects that make it an indispensable and unmatched tool for startups and SMBs. To paint you a realistic picture, in a survey carried out by Pacific Crest, 50% of the 300 SMBs reported AWS as their choice of cloud service. And this is not surprising considering the so many advantages AWS offers:

1.    Growth:

AWS is designed keeping the growth of businesses in mind. All the services offered by Amazon are completely scalable. You can start from choosing the cheapest available pricing for your needs. Once you grow, AWS takes care of the demand surges. The pay-per-use model ensures that there is a linear relationship between your business profits and cloud-hosting expenditure.  

2.    Performance

With AWS, you use an infrastructure which is hosted on world-class data centers and servers. When you first setup your cloud infrastructure, AWS allows you to choose a location to set-up your virtual IT infrastructure. This location may either be closest to where the majority of your users are or where your developers and administrators are based. This allows you to optimize your services for either your user base or for your developers in the development phase.

3.    Security & Compliance

AWS offers extra layers of security to address the misuse of resources, which is highly likely using a resource as AWS, where you can set up and erase production servers with just a mouse-click. There are obviously, many recommended practices such as not to create a super-user with unlimited access and allocating users to groups with varying levels of permissions. Additionally, AWS offers MFA (Multi-factor authentication) both in hardware form, wherein it comes as a key fob manufactured by a third-party, Gemalto and in virtual form, through MFA apps by Google and Amazon on all the mobile platforms.

4.    Integration:

With AWS, it is super easy to integrate your app or web development program. AWS offers enhanced compatibility with your applications by supporting numerous languages in it’s SDK program such as iOS, Java, Android, .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc.

5.    Learning Curve:

While a certain degree of IT background sure helps to accelerate the development process, the learning curve is a lot smoother, shorter and user-friendly. You can develop and deploy applications in a matter of days that would take you months to develop conventionally. For small businesses, which prefer the DIY method or do not have the resource to employ the services of a developer, this is a deal-breaker. Moreover, AWS boasts of a large global community where members help each other and even share pre-designed instances.

6.    Cost

Lastly, the most important feature of AWS is the low cost of the services. It is a pure pay-per-use model and you are not bounded by any contract or long-term commitment while deploying a service.

Moreover, to offer a more transparent system, AWS provides a monthly calculator, where you can calculate the costs of the deployments you use by adjusting the network usage and storage levels used. Based on this estimate, you can decide whether or not to deploy a service. The ‘Spot instances’ allow you to deploy services at a highly discounted rate if you are fairly certain of your usage levels. These and the many additional cost-reduction features make it a perfect tool for SMBs.

AWS is one of those cloud-computing solutions available to small businesses which allow you to grow while not compromising on the features. It is not surprising that AWS is the favorite of the majority of the small and medium-sized businesses and even used by popular companies such as Netflix and Spotify. If you are still relying on in-house IT infrastructures, make sure that you check out AWS and boost your results.

By Nate Teplow, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Continuum

Business challenges are inevitable, but figuring out how to effectively identify and overcome these obstacles means the difference between scaling profitably and stagnating.

If I were to ask you to name your biggest pain point, you'd probably say “cash flow,” or “lack of time,” or “not enough bandwidth,” but dig deeper. Is the primary issue that you can't simultaneously generate new business while supporting your existing client base? Does your clunky technology stack eat up valuable staff time and talent? Perhaps you have a talent problem and struggle to hire or retain qualified personnel.

There's no shortage of challenges, but to adequately address each you have to tackle the root cause. To help you paint a clearer picture, we’ve outlined 14 common problems that MSPs face daily. Read on to see if any sound familiar and check out a new tool we created to help you overcome each.

1. Too Many Tickets

As an MSP, you’re in the business of managing tickets. But ticket overload can be a huge drain on productivity and profitability. Finding ways to reduce ticket volume will help your team stay more productive, spend more time with your clients and focus on driving revenue for your business. Make sure the solutions and processes that you’ve implemented are helping to reduce ticket volume, not adding to it.

2. Building in RMM Alerting Conditions

RMM solutions are ideal because they allow you to monitor just about anything when it comes to your client machines. But typically you need to tell the solution what to look for before you start generating meaningful data. This can lead to dozens, if not hundreds, of hours that your team needs to spend setting up and configuring your solution.

3. Maintaining Your RMM Solution

The work is not done after setting up your RMM solution, however. You constantly need to update your alerts and configurations to make sure you’re monitoring the right thresholds and events, which can dramatically impact your business’ profitability. Using solutions that require minimal maintenance and updating will reduce your total cost of ownership and add money to your bottom line.

4. Catching Issues Proactively

Once you know what to look for, RMM solutions deliver. The problem is that you usually have to experience an issue first-hand before you know how to configure your alerting conditions. This can lead to reactive service, rather than proactive service, and oftentimes strains your client relationships.

5. Profitable 24x7 Monitoring

Your clients expect you to monitor their systems 24x7, but this can be very hard to do profitably. Staffing technicians around the clock can be an enormous cost, but not having people available to fix issues at any hour will reduce your ability to provide proactive services. This leaves a very small window for you to operate proactively and profitably.

6. Finding New Skillsets

If you want to compete for new projects and new clients, you need to have the right team and expertise in place to support them. But we all know how difficult it is to find technical talent. Make sure you have access to resources with different areas of expertise so that you have the opportunity to compete for new projects and new clients.

7. Technician Churn

If you’re like most MSPs, at some point you’ve probably lost a technician, scrambled to find a replacement and struggled to provide quality service. When faced with technician churn, the time spent searching for a replacement takes away from time you could be spending on client-facing activities. Again, having access to technical resources will reduce your risk of lost profits if a technician does leave.

8. Too Many False Positive Alerts

While RMM solutions are great at notifying you of issues, they can also be great at notifying you of non-issues! RMM solutions typically generate lots of false positives, which means your team has to investigate more issues before determining there isn’t a problem. Reducing false positives will make sure your team is only notified when action needs to be taken, which can dramatically reduce time to resolution and increase the amount of tickets your team is able to manage.

9. Lead Generation

Buying lists and relying on referrals – two common indicators that an MSP is having a hard time generating their own leads. It’s hard to run a business and service your clients, and even harder to find time for marketing as well. Take control of your growth, and make sure your partners provide knowledge, support and materials that help you market and sell your services.

10. Ticket Categorization

Not all tickets are created equal. Some issues need to be resolved immediately, while others require certain expertise or can wait until the weekend. Effectively categorizing and routing your tickets will help your team operate more efficiently and fix issues faster.

11. Level 1 and 2 Client Support

Supporting your clients is part of the MSP job description. But basic support tasks, like password resets or connecting to printers, can be incredibly disruptive to your team’s productivity. Offloading Level 1 and 2 support can free up your team to work on more complex, revenue-driving projects and reduce technician fatigue.

12. Patch Testing and Management

Clients have visibility into patch management, so it’s especially important that you adhere to best practices and monitor what gets deployed. The problem is that it can be incredibly time-intensive to thoroughly test patches to ensure minimal impact on your clients.

13. Maintaining Margins

Managed services can be a volatile business. One minute everything is under control, the next you have four clients calling you at the same time because their systems are down. This makes it incredibly difficult to maintain consistent margins and profitability. Outsourcing some of this support enables you to fix more of your service costs and stabilize your margins. \

14. Calculating Total Cost of Ownership

The cost of your solution(s) is a lot more than the invoice you receive from your vendors. In a services business, you need to understand all of the factors that contribute to the cost of ownership, in particular, the amount of time your team spends using and managing the solution. Make sure you’re looking beyond the sticker price to calculate your service costs.

So Now What…

With the New Year, review your business and identify inefficiencies that you can improve going forward. If any of these common challenges sound familiar, you should take a look at your solution(s), your processes and your strategies to make sure you are maximizing business efficiency and profitability.

Is it time for a change? Our new tool lets you select your worst pain points and tells you what to look for in an RMM solution. Check out the RMM Wish List Generator here!

Nate Teplow is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Continuum, currently managing the company's RMM marketing initiatives. Nate's experience spans inbound marketing, content strategy, marketing communications and B2B lead generation. A proud Miami Hurricane alumni, Nate enjoys staying active, traveling to new places and performing A/B tests.

Janakiram MSV, Contributor

At CES 2017, Microsoft announced that it is building a platform to enable automobile manufacturers to deliver connected car experiences to customers. Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform is a set of services that is integrated with Azure, Cortana, Office 365, Power BI, and Skype.

In the last couple of years, Microsoft has doubled down its investment in machine learning (ML) and analytics. The company is embedding ML in almost all its products. Powered by Azure, these new set of services such as Azure ML, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Cortana Intelligence Suite takes advantage of the abundant compute and storage resources exposed by the underlying infrastructure. Microsoft is also expanding its portfolio to enterprise IoT that delivers predictive maintenance, remote monitoring, and asset tracking solutions. Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform is yet another abstraction built on top of a variety of existing cloud and ML technologies.

Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform is not a finished product that automobile companies can buy. It is a framework that brings multiple technologies together to deliver the latest in consumer experiences. Car manufacturers can integrate In-car infotainment systems with Cortana for immersive conversational user experience. They will be able to take advantage of Bing for search, location-based services, and hyper-local integration. Office 365 and Skype would deliver presence information, calendaring, and conferencing capabilities. The combination of Cortana Intelligence Suite and Power BI become the brain of the connected car that capture, analyze, present, and predict various metrics related to the automobile. The heavy lifting involved in storing and processing the data will be handled by Azure Compute and Storage services.

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Azure is Microsoft’s own offering of the integrated cloud services with a wide range of features that can empower you to build enterprise-class apps and platforms. As with any cloud-hosting service provider, Azure provides you the flexibility and agility to handle your fluctuating business demands, while the pay-per model ensures that you only pay for the resources you consume.

Before we dive deeper into the built-in solutions and managed services that Azure provides, let’s take a look at what makes Azure different from other cloud computing solutions, or on-site IT implementations for that matter.

Why use Azure?

1. Ease of Usage:

Just like AWS, Azure boasts of multiple tools and pre-built templates or instances that you can use to build your web, mobile or Internet of Things app very fastly and efficiently. With Azure, build your product and launch it to your customers in a matter of days for what could take months by conventional means.

2. Integration:

Azure allows ease of integration not only with your existing apps and platforms but also with your existing on-site IT infrastructures.
Almost all the popular OS, programming languages, platforms, frameworks, databases, and tools are compatible with Azure. So you can either build your app with PHP, Javascript, .NET or build back-ends for your mobile apps across various operating systems.
Also, through hybrid database and storage solutions, Azure can easily integrate with your existing data centers to give you the best of both onsite and cloud computing implementations.

3. Scalable:

As with most of the cloud hosting solutions, Azure hosting solutions scale as your business demands grow. You are never committed to a resource and Azure’s ‘pay-as-you-go’ service ensures that you only pay for what you use.
Besides, Azure boasts of Microsoft-managed datacenters across 32 regions in the world, which is currently more than AWS and Google Cloud combined.

4. Security:

Many SMB executives are still doubtful when it comes to security in the cloud. Microsoft Azure is one of pioneers in cloud security and protection. Azure was the first major cloud hosting providers to embrace the new international cloud privacy standard, ISO 27018 and adhere to the EU privacy laws. Additionally, Azure has launched ‘Azure Government’ especially in the US to adhere to the compliance requirements of US public agencies.

Some Azure solutions ideal for SMBs

While the above advantages are offered by pretty much any cloud provider, including the big players in the industry, it's actually Microsoft’s brand name along with the ready-to-use solutions offered by Azure which make it a great tool for small startups and businesses. For each of these solutions, Microsoft provides you the complete technical documentation and access to partner resources to help you get started easily. Azure has a vast list of such solutions; let’s take a look at some of which are particularly suitable for SMBs.

1. E-commerce:

Azure provides a flexible and open e-commerce platform which allows you to sell products to your customers ‘intelligently’. Through the built-in tools, you can analyze factors such as site traffic, conversion optimization, abandonment zones and customer behavior & history to create personalized sales funnels and tailor-made offers and recommendations for customers. This results in a more personalized shopping experience and increases customer retention.

Azure also extends these functionalities to your supply chain and customer service sectors. You can build self-help portals for suppliers to streamline your supply chain, improve inventory management and reduce support costs. Besides, the scalable solutions by Azure assure you of a continuous uptime even at times of peak demand, so that you can devote your time and resources to business-critical functions rather than IT infrastructure.

Azure has many related products and services to aid your e-commerce venture and also offers pre-built e-commerce frameworks in the marketplace to help you get started.

2. Digital Marketing:

Azure offers in-built tools to handle the Digital Marketing functions of your business that acts on real-time data and analytics. The platform makes use of customer data, feedback, history and behavior along with intelligent predictive analytics to devise and understand different customer profiles. It then builds personalized marketing campaigns for these profiles and analyzes and optimizes these campaigns in real-time based on user behavior and responsiveness.

3. Business Intelligence:

Azure offers a wide range of predictive analytics services such as Machine Learning and Cortana Analytics, which helps your business to make better-informed and smarter data-driven solutions in real-time. Azure allows you to use the numerous ‘Power BI solution templates’ to create a feature-rich BI platform that will provide you with intelligent insights. These platforms also allow you to make use of data to create fully interactive and visual apps for your users.

4. Apps:

Azure has many functionalities when it comes to user applications.

Azure makes use of predictive analytics and machine learning to help scale your SaaS apps as your business grows, helping you to scale your business model efficiently. Further, you can rest assured that your customers’ data is always protected as Azure allows you to isolate data in separate databases. Azure also allows you to use ‘Power BI Embedded’ to deploy sophisticated features as Image Recognition in your apps and deliver rich and interactive visualizations to users.

The ‘Dev-Test’ solution by Azure provides you cross-platform functionality to test and build your applications. Deploy and use virtual machines on a pay-per-use basis to expedite your development and launch new features and updates in a matter of days.

Azure’s MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service) allows you to develop mobile apps for your business across all the operating systems by compiling in a single language. MBaaS allows you to find and fix bugs easily and distribute beta versions of your apps to a development community to collect real-time data and improve your app.

5. Backup & Recovery , DR:

Azure offers the ‘Backup as a Service’ and Restore Solutions that enable you to run your business even when your onsite IT implementations are damaged. Reduce the expense on storage devices and tapes as your business grows and leverage Azure’s pay-per-use cloud storage model to make a backup of all your business instances.

Azure’s DRaaS provides you with business continuity during natural or artificial catastrophes. Eliminate the cost of secondary datacenters and losses due to downtime by making use of Azure’s data recovery solutions which assure you low RPOs and RTOs for every business-critical instance at affordable rates.

Cloud solutions such as Azure open up a world of possibilities for your business where you can scale your business model without any initial heavy expenditure. Azure is made to handle any type of business load: from a small dev-test project to a global product launch. More than 66% of the Fortune 500 companies use Azure. If you are still relying on onsite IT infrastructure, it’s time you give cloud solutions as the Azure a shot. It’s free to get started!

Steve Weisman, Special for USA TODAY

I first warned you about the dangers of ransomware in early 2015,   and its increased use was one of my cybersecurity predictions for 2016.

Unfortunately, that prediction has come true, and my motto of, “Things aren’t as bad as you think — they are far worse,” has proven accurate. In fact, the FBI has recently warned that ransomware attacks against hospitals, schools, government agencies, police departments, businesses and individuals are dramatically increasing.

Ransomware is a type of malware that once installed on your computer locks and encrypts files.   The cybercriminals who send it to you then threaten to destroy your files unless you pay a ransom, generally in untraceable bitcoins.

Phishing or its more sophisticated version, "spear phishing," is often used to spread the malware. Emails lure the victim to click on a link, which downloads the ransomware.  Spear phishing targets specific victims by personalizing an email to make it appear especially legitimate.

Cybercriminals can do this by gathering information from various sources including social media accounts.  By putting too much personal information on social media, we often become our own worst enemy.

Ransomware is also spread through malvertising, which is apparently legitimate advertising, and on bona fide websites. But click on it, and you've downloaded the malware.

Yet another way cybercriminals strike is by infecting legitimate websites such that merely going to the site without clicking on anything is sufficient to infect your computer.  A newer version of ransomware called CryptXXX is being spread in this manner and was used to infect the website of American toy maker Maisto.  Fortunately, there is a free decryption tool for this particular type of ransomware, available from Kasperksy Lab.

Often the websites are infected through attacking vulnerabilities that exist in plug-ins such as Adobe Flash.  As long ago as 2010, Steve Jobs complained about this vulnerability.  Despite security patch after security patch, new problems kept coming up with this software.  It would appear that just as companies retire certain programs when it is just too difficult to continue to patch them (as with Windows XP), this may well be the time for Adobe to retire Flash. And if the company doesn’t do this, you should consider retiring it yourself and replacing it with another plug-in that performs the same function.

One of cybercrooks' newer methods is deploying ransomware against smartphones. While this tactic is less common, it is only a matter of time before the myriad of devices that make up the Internet of Things could be subject to such attacks.  Just imagine the dangers of Internet-connected medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps being compromised.

Rarely is paying the ransom a good option, although in a controversial statement at a Cyber Security summit in 2015, FBI Assistant Special Agent Joseph Bonavolonta indicated that sometimes the FBI advises victims to pay up.  The FBI, as would be expected, has since backed off of this statement.

New versions of ransomware are constantly being developed by cybercriminals who often — rather than merely using the malware themselves — will sell it on a part of the Internet referred to as the Dark Web, where less technically sophisticated criminals buy and sell malware as well as stolen information, such as credit card numbers.

Cybersecurity predictions for 2016

Some cybercriminals are even taking advantage of the general awareness of ransomware to trick their victims into downloading malware that merely locks their screen while a pop-up message appears telling the victim that they have become a victim of ransomware and that they must pay a ransom or their data will be destroyed although the data has not been locked or encrypted.  Merely restarting the computer can often get rid of the pop-up and end the screen lock of these wanna-be ransomware criminals.

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There is much to talk about when it comes to Internet of Things (IoT) in the Food industry. There are several emerging Food Startups that have adapted IoF and have integrated it into their business processes. The trend of Internet of Food (IoF) is enormous, as business are experiencing major difference after adapting these technologies.   Let’s look at two startups who are embracing IoT and bringing them into the food industry.

BovControl
BovControl is a Brazilian group which that keeps all information regarding Cattle farming on it’s data collection and analysis tool hosted on the cloud. This tool allows Farmers and Shepherds to track the Cattle and keep updated record of stock and trading. Using multiple digital tools such as charts and inventory graphs, BovControl controls effective exchange of information with farmers. After this first successful adaptation of IoT, BovControl is about to launch a second Cloud Offering which will provide information to Food providers. This is how BovControl applies Internet of Food (IoF) technology in it’s emerging business model.

Consumer Physics
When it comes to scanning, or analyzing content of food, Consumer Physics has kick started the market. With a mission to empower people to have a better understanding of our physical world, Consumer Physics has developed and produced a scanner that helps users identify the composition of food, medication, and plants.
Scan meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables for macro nutrient values (calories, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins), produce quality, ripeness, and spoilage analysis. Not only does this scanner work for food, but it is designed for you to create your own DIY material sensing applets to identify different materials of your choice. The possibilities are endless.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), having been around for a decade, is the market leader by miles in the cloud-based computing industry, providing the foundation and framework to power application developments, storage and data processing. However, growth figures, as reported by Synergy Research Group for 2016 (53%), puts them behind Microsoft’s Azure (100%) and Google’s Cloud Platform (162%); even for a business with 45% market share (more than twice the size of the next three competitors combined), those growth figures will make them shake like a leaf.

Market share figures may suggest absolute dominance in the short term, but AWS is aware of the growth waves of the other competitors; a clear indication that the market will most likely look enormously diverse in the long run, probably even before their second decade. The power of Google is also intimidating even from a distance; Android developers are increasingly finding Google’s Cloud Platform preferable. Also, both Google and Microsoft are heavily resourcing their research and development departments and the fruits have been a rhythmic launch of new products. AWS though, seems to want to focus on a new target market; Enterprise customers.

Enterprise customers was widely referred to as wealth beneath the soil. These are large organizations using systems such as SQL Server, MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle … and are either slow or reluctant to migrate onto any cloud platform. Amazon is trying to make migration from any of these systems seamless with their AWS Database Migration Service. The aim is to be the market leader for enterprise customer; to sweep every organization that falls under this category as Google and Microsoft focus on startups and individual developers. However, Microsoft is also tapping into its long-standing relationships with some of these organizations to have them migrate onto Azure. Google though, was a major winner last year when Apple signed up for their Cloud Service for some of its iCloud services. Clearly, Microsoft and Google will also focus on this market sooner than later, but AWS would have lead the market by the nose.

Another area AWS seems to want to revamp is security. TechCrunch reported earlier this year that AWS has acquired a cyber security firm called harvest.ai; a startup which is known for using artificial intelligence to assess and analyze the behavior of users around a company’s IP to automatically nullify any attacks. This will eliminate the need for third party security for some AWS subscribers. This will also enhance the work of Amazon Inspector; a security service that enables users to analyze the behavior of applications used in AWS to unearth potential security threats.

Some may find AWS decision to focus on a new market a major risk; others may find making startups an opportunity cost costly, but that is business. Enterprises are continually looking for new ways to get work done faster, smarter and cheaper. Startups are most likely going to deal with Google anyway. AWS has been shrewd to say the least, and they will continue to rule the roost this year.

As seasoned IT professionals running a small-sized business, you probably must be aware of the advantages cloud-based platforms bring over in-house deployment of hardware.

Most of the small business and startups lack the budget and workforce to purchase, install, handle and maintain on-site data centers and servers. Cloud Computing has long been known as the solution for such businesses, where rather than deploying in-house IT hardware, the business model is deployed on the infrastructures hosted by a third-party. Most of these providers use a pay-per-use model and the initial investment is almost negligible.

Cost aside, cloud-based solutions offer flexibility and scalability. If you are using an in-house IT infrastructure, scaling up your business systems demands heavy investment in hardware, often at the cost of downtime for your business. With cloud hosting platforms, the peak demands are automatically met through the pay-per-use model without any additional hardware costs.

There are numerous cloud-hosting providers in the market currently. Unarguably, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the most popular one, especially when it comes to catering to small businesses.

What does AWS offer?
AWS includes numerous cloud-based computing, storage, database, networking, administration, security, mobile services and enterprise-based applications. When you open the main console of AWS, you will see more than 30 tools available in each section such as EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) in Cloud Computing, S3 (Simple Storage Service) in Storage and Content Delivery, RDS (Relationship Database Service) in Database and many more.

Here are some noteworthy features of AWS:

1.  Prebuilt AMIs (Amazon Machine Images):

It is extremely simple and easy to build your product with the wide variety of prebuilt Amazon Machine Images. Additionally, there is a marketplace where there are user-built Machine Images (MI) and a vibrant community that creates and shares such MIs. With AWS, you can build a product and reach your customer within a matter of hours.

2.  Understand your usage of IT applications and save more:

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring tool within AWS to monitor your use of IT applications. This tool provides you multiple insights and metrics that will aid you in choosing the correct price model for the service you want to deploy- be it Amazon EC2 or the S3 .

3. Automated infrastructure:

AWS offers auto-scaling through services such as Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, which automatically scales up your service capacity when the traffic spikes and downgrades it when demand is low and helps you decrease costs while ensuring 100% uptime for your business.

4. Cost management:

AWS offers a very transparent billing model with many instances where you can cut down your expenditure. The Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances can cut down your hourly costs by 50% if you invest in a reserved capacity upfront. AWS also offers Spot instances, where you bid your own price based on a fixed usage of resources and this can significantly reduce your costs. The ‘Cost-aware architecture’ allows you to monitor and tweak your architecture to control the usage to adjust to your business’ growth over time.

5. AWS Activate:

AWS Activate is a global program developed by AWS and directed at SMBs to help them develop their products easily and provides them the same computing power and technology used by global corporations. With AWS, you can get started for free to try out the many services within AWS and see if it is fit for your business and budget.

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