ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey Spring Webinar
Remember all the doom and gloom predictions about how the cloud was going to put all the IT people out of work? Boy did it! The carnage brought on by cloud services has taken names like Dell and HP to all time lows, and has sparked rumors and reality of privatization. Yet, every partner I talk to is posting their best year ever, and is more excited about their opportunities going forward, even with the lackluster economy.
Success is not by accident. In our fast paced industry, success is a factor of the right tools, the right timing and the right partnerships – please read this newsletter, study it and call us. We want to help. The days of “selling” and thick gear margins are largely gone – clients are smarter, better informed, and more selective, but like all of us they are also busier and they want someone to handle the explosion of vendors they rely on for the modern workplace. Yes the technology is easier to consume but there is more of it and more ways to profit from managing it so the client doesn’t have to.
With that in mind, I would like to invite you to our Roadmap webinar next week. In this webinar we will discuss everything that we are working on and the things we see happening over the next 12-16 months.
Thursday, March 7th 2-3 PM EST
As with all our webinars this one will be recorded and available for download in the Webinar section of our web site.
Growth Continues
As some of you may remember, our hardware upgrade cycle began around Thanksgiving last year, and is scheduled to be complete in March. During that time, we have completely eliminated RAID from our Exchange environments, improved backup and redundancy worldwide, and bulked up our ExchangeDefender infrastructure for the growth we anticipate this year.
It has not been all good news (we had a Dell RAID failure in the middle of a migration affecting nearly 400 mailboxes), and our antispam detection efficiency slipped slightly due to the overtime put in on network management and growth. The good news though has been better than I ever expected. We now feature data center redundancy in all geographies we provide Exchange in, all of our Exchange 2010 systems feature 3-way redundancy through local copies/DAG, we provide clustered failover infrastructure with a lagged copy of all databases, as well we also provide a copy of those databases in a different data center. Our compliance products and LocalCloud have grown exponentially in 2012 allowing us to invest even more in gear and reduce your storage pricing. The scale and reliability that we are now able to offer is frankly unparalleled in the industry.
I know that maintenance, migrations, updates and upgrades are not fun nor easy to explain that it can take longer than a month to complete – those are the challenges of complexity and the massive scale that we work on. However, that scale is precisely why our platform is so reliable and why so many of you can leverage it to win competitively in the marketplace and not worry about servers, RAID controllers, patches and backups.
Specifically, our ExchangeDefender inbound nodes have 60% more capacity today than they did at Thanksgiving. Europe and Australia Exchange clusters now have data center redundancy. Louie, our Exchange cluster, is now on the same spec as our Rockerduck cluster – both with 3 layers of protection, both with data center redundancy. It’s not cheap but it’s cheaper than downtime and losing business – something I hope you remind your clients of when they get price sensitive about the solutions you provide.
New Stuff
Shockey Monkey is getting an upgrade next week, this update includes the new business management section, upgraded support area with private boards, new calendar / scheduling / dispatch center and an upgraded UI that is a few times faster than it was in the past. We are thrilled about this product and hope you consider joining over 100 partners that are currently selling Shockey Monkey to their small businesses clients.
Looks Cloudy, a site we sponsor and contribute to, is accepting nominations for the Channel Choice Awards in an attempt to recognize people that have helped advance our SMB tech industry. If you have a colleague, boss, partner that you would like to nominate please take a moment to get them the recognition they deserve.
We have a brand new billing system. This addition to Shockey Monkey has allowed us to automate the whole ordering, billing and collections system and consolidate entire months worth of billing updates and adjustments into a half day review process.
Finally, the most important development at ExchangeDefender that I need to let you know about: We hear you when it comes to training. Next month we will announce a new training program offered exclusively by us, over the web, live. The cost of travel, hotels, conference fees and most importantly – time away from the office – is leaving many of you and your staff away from the information that you need to succeed. I don’t mean training in a sense of a half-wailed sales presentation with minor educational content but a full schedule that you or your employees can sit down and benefit from immediately. Tune in to the webinar next week to learn more about this, we are very excited to be able to help you grow beyond our services.
Promotions
Feeling Lucky???? We are currently running a St. Patrick’s Day promotion!! For the entire month of March we will be offering Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this great promotion. The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period. The promotional period for this offering will be March 1st – March 31st. So don’t hesitate! Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email stephanie@ownwebnow.com to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Events
In the month of March we will be attending 3 events! Join us in our hometown of Orlando, FL for the XChange Solution Providers event! Then we will be headed up to Chicago, IL for the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting. Then we will be headed to Tampa, FL for the ASCII Success Summit! Stop by, visit us, and say hello, we will be giving away lots of prizes and promotions! We hope to see you on the road!