Business Speak

As I sit here overlooking South Lake Union in Seattle – the neighborhood that Paul Allen restored and the home of Amazon HQ1, I wanted to reflect on what Paul Allen has meant to Seattle and myself. I’ve expressed my thoughts on today’s Northwest Digital News (NDN) where I’m a regular contributor for the Tech Tuesday segment. You can watch that

Bestselling Windows Secrets author Brian Livingston has more secrets to share - in the financial technology (FinTech) area. His new book, Muscular Portfolios, is here and advises you that, yes, computers are smarter than emotional humanoids.

Spiceworks, a large community of IT Pros, can be viewed from many directions. In addition to being a community, it behaves as a media integration company with vendor support and its also known for it’s solid research and reporting. I had my annual visit with Peter Tsai (@supertsai), senior technology analyst at Spiceworks where he released the 2019 State of Future Workplace Tech.

Where to begin? Let’s play the standard who, what, where, when, why and how.

Who – the audience for Smartsheet is primarily IT Pros who work for traditional businesses day-to-day. These attendees would use Smartsheet as part of a job role. Over 60% of the attendees are women (compare to many tech conferences where I believe 90% of the attendees are men).

What – the Smartsheet Engage conference is in it’s second year and doubled in size from 1,000 last year to over 2,000

We are all evolving as MSPs in the channel. Discover how an industry-leading, intuitive marketing solution for small to medium sized business (SMB) that has been offering primarily email marketing as SAAS since 1995 has been radically updated. It might be a great time to see how adding the solution as a VAR tool can help your clients and you grow.

Nowadays, the online market is oversaturated with various businesses. Since many people are online these days, businesses are also moving their operations to the digital world. Not only that, but the digital approach is much more convenient for both companies and consumers. However, new businesses that arrive on the market face certain difficulties and challenges.

The following insights, while intended for nearly any customer-facing business, are tweaked just a tad to have an information technology (IT) twist for those readers running an MSP practice. Here are some of the highlights you can expect from this short learning vid from Harry Brelsford.

Discover eight ways to use the right support tools to take control of your technology practice, your MSP entity, your IT shop. Hosted by long-time IT Pro Harry Brelsford, this educational presentation speaks to channel partners, MSPs and IT Pros seeking to run their own businesses better and thus provide a better customer experience.

The eight ways include:

Bona fide community members will easily recognize our expert legal speaker, Ben Yarbrough, practicing attorney and MSP security ISV. Not only is he back and he’s reloaded his legal talking points that pertain to owning and operating an MSP business practice. If you view running a business as a stool with a few legs (e.g. HR, Sales/Marketing), then you’ll appreciate the legal matters are “one of the legs.”

Live from SolarWinds EmpowerMSP 2018 in Scottsdale AZ, I want to share some left to right visibility from Day One of this annual confab.

National Happy IT Pro Day. SolarWinds MSP deftly created a business holiday that got legs – right out of the “unmarketing” philosophy. This trending event

When disaster strikes, you want to be ready for it.  The best way to do so is to minimize the chances you’ll be hit by a crisis in the first place. But what does that mean, exactly?

A disaster comes in many forms. Maybe a rogue employee decided it would be fun to bring your IT infrastructure crashing down around your ears. Maybe a faulty piece of equipment caused a catastrophic fire. Maybe mother nature just arbitrarily decided that it hates you.

After delivering a rousing keynote at the SolarWinds Empower conference (Scottsdale, AZ), I spent a few minutes with Robert Stephens – the founder of Geek Squad. His speech detailed his journey from bicycling computer repair guy to car-based Geek Squad to its corporate acquisition by Best Buy.

I was more interested in his final speech topic, the Internet of Things (IoT),