Own Web Now in 2009
Dear Clients, Partners and Friends,
I wanted to offer you a sincere statement about the state of Own Web Now Corp at this time.
First, the great news: We have posted yet another record quarter with record high revenues, profits and user counts. We are the largest we have ever been, and all products are currently at all time highs. We are on track to release half a dozen new products in 2009, and the feedback over the past few months has been overwhelmingly positive as we’ve introduced massive improvements to financial reporting, service management and support.
The good news is that, despite (or rather, in spite of) the poor economy, we are poised for record growth in 2009. We have worked very hard to introduce the kinds of products that users simply cannot live without and we will introduce new, more affordable solutions in 2009.
All the good news aside, things are far from perfect at Own Web Now. If there is one area we have struggled in over the years, it’s been consistency. This unfortunate problem comes as a result of rapid growth and, at times, overworked staff, poor management and issues with process control. Computers are easier to manage than people, and in an environment where people, objectives, metrics and software change rapidly, the problems become very apparent. We have worked very hard to address this issue, develop additional processes and assure that the improvements we have made over the past few months are sustained and not empty gestures soon to be forgotten.
Over the next few months I will be introducing you to the ITIL methodology we have implemented at Own Web Now. I will also be going in depth about our process, our reporting, our controls and our inputs.
For starters, our documentation efforts are now managed by the very same people that provide support online, in person and over the phone. As you may imagine, we answer certain questions repeatedly. Staff is now allocated time to pick repetitive questions, provide them directly to me and vote on the most complete and comprehensive answer. I believe this will create a reliable training platform and more connected community around our services.
Our communication platform for the most part has consisted of this blog. We have extended this in 2008 with the Network Operations site and in 2009 we have added Twitter as well as regular newsletter mailings. Encompassing it all is a new OWN podcast bringing you not just the news from us, but our industry as a whole. People discover, consume and respond to information in different ways. There is no unified way to alert everyone, so we are responding to the mediums that our clients and partners follow. Podcasts are not for everyone but an equal number of people absolutely despises whitepapers and network maintenance alerts. As a last resort, for the ultra-busy, your PAM is always there to answer any questions you may have. If you want to follow our every move, that’s possible too. For everyone in the middle we have a number of solutions as well. It’s a mix, much like our partner and client base.
The past few months have been all about documenting and improving the company as a whole. As you know from working with us, we’ve done this in the past with our infrastructure. We have worked very hard to get to this point, and we’ve had to let some bad habits die and some grow up, both as a technology and as a company.
I appreciate your continued business. I hope you see these improvements as positive. We not only believe in the future of our business model, but that the numbers are showing that it is the hottest thing available right now. As you trust us with your and your clients’ network operations, I want to assure you that we are committed to remaining the leader in this space and helping you grow through these hard times.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
SPAM Show #3
We proudly present SPAM Show #3. This all star mega mix super chat is about one thing: Awareness.
Understand that things change, understand where you are, understand what worked, understand why things worked or why things failed and understand where we are all moving. We discuss the MSP Mentors Top 100 ranking publication, Microsoft starting to open stores, Apple’s competitive challenge, Master MSP roles and the other exciting developers in our space.
This is by far the biggest one we’ve had so far: Mark Crall, Stuart Selbst, Dave Sobel and Karl Palachuk all join Vlad Mazek for an hour of analysis of top MSP and SMB trends of the week.
Tune in. You can stream the show by clicking the play button on the right.
P.S. The beta invitation mentioned at the beginning of the show will be published later this week.
Customer Support Notice: Phone Availability
We will be conducting a phone system upgrade tonight at 10 PM EST – 2 AM EST. During this time frame we will not be available for contact over the phone and all urgent requests should be handled through the support portal at http://www.ownwebnow.com as usual.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and hope that you will find the new features coming with the new system worth the wait.
OWN SPAM Show #2
I hope you are having a wonderful and relaxing Sunday afternoon. It’s my great pleasure to bring you OWN’s SPAM Show #2 with a special guest Tim Barrett. Tim is a prolific blogger and joins Mark, Stuart and me to discuss the changes coming with Windows 7. The conversation gets away from licensing and features that are still in development and onto the quagmire of supporting multiple production operating systems from Microsoft in a managed services industry. We talk about the opportunities and challenges this presents for us, our partners and vendors.
We also spice it up a little with the discussion about network policies and how an Indian contractor nearly destroyed Fannie Mae’s server infrastructure after being terminated for general incompetence. It doesn’t get more entertaining than that.
Click here to download it today or listen to it from our web site.
About SPAM Show
SPAM Show is OWN’s attempt to reach out to partners in order to inform, entertain and communicate the news in our business. More personally, it is a way for me to reconnect and chat with my peers so I can step on top of my game – and I’m glad to share. Show is free and open to anyone in our partner base, if you have something that’s on your mind and would like to discuss it please let me know.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Centralized Service Control Panels
Many of you have been looking forward to this day, and I am glad to announce the launch of OWN Service Manager dashboard for centralized management of all our services:
You can access this service in our Support Portal right now by clicking on Service Manager tab at the top. If you don’t see this tab, you are not a Client Admin (someone on your staff can give you access)
The entire system is centralized and linked in our process: billing, invoicing, support, documentation, fulfillment and projects are all tied to this service panel. This means that we can integrate all of these services with third party PSAs, offer our support direct to your clients under your own brand/label… I hope this gives you an idea what we are going to work on for the rest of 2009 🙂
ExchangeDefender Research Notice
For the past two weeks we have taken an unusual project: Find out why certain messages get deferred or delayed at random times to random recipients. While this task is something that we perform routinely through our support portal, my staff has taken a lot of abuse at the hands of something that is really not an ExchangeDefender issue or something we are capable of addressing.
Last week we have introduced a layer of monitoring service to ExchangeDefender that has been collecting data on failures our clients servers are experiencing. This data is being plotted for each IP address we hand off mail to. So far we have been able to identify users that have:
Inadequate Internet connections (bandwidth or reliability)
Inadequate Firewalls or routers (connections time out, get deferred or dropped randomly)
Configuration problems (lack of space, lack of resources)
We have made several adjustments to the way we deliver mail for the clients that have frequent or persistent delay problems. In each researched case we have been able to isolate the problem to the recipients servers or network not cooperating. We have attempted to replicate the scenario with servers / addresses that are not on the same ranges or networks to eliminate the possibility of network/routing causing a problem.
We are continuing our work on this because no user should be frustrated with the delays in their message delivery. If there is anything we can do to determine if these issues are persistent enough to recommend additional resources or spotlight problems that the admins or MSPs are not aware of, I’m glad to do so. It is in all our users best interest.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
P.S. There is only one legitimate reason for mail delays: Senders IP address is on a commercial RBL like SpamCop or SpamHaus. These messages are delayed intentionally and whitelisting does not affect the performance, they will get delayed. This behavior has been in place for a long time with ExchangeDefender and is not set to change: Senders on SpamCop and SpamHaus have been confirmed as spammers by independent parties and have not done anything to delist themselves. We can only assume that these resources are not managed and we just cannot trust mail from these hosts, even if you chose to trust the senders from those domains.
Take a listen: SPAM Show #1
Welcome to 2009! We’re half-way through the first month of the year, and things are going great. Thank you for a fantastic 2008, for your feedback, for your development support and, most of all, for your money. Own Web Now is a great company because its partners and clients invest in us by helping us deliver the exact software and services that are expected. I will not lie… 2008 was tough. We straightened out billing. We globalized half a dozen services. We added staff across the board and positioned the company to be by your side for years.
Now it’s payback time. My biggest regret in 2008 was that I did not spend enough time talking to you- my fellow partners and clients.
Today we are changing all that with the launch of Own Web Now’s SPAM Show. This podcast is meant to do two things:
1) Bring you up to speed with developments at Own Web Now
2) Provide you with the expert opinion on today’s top tech trends
Whether you own your own technology business or are responsible for a network of 64,000 users, time is scarce. Staying on top of all the technology developments and getting various opinions and experiences is a very difficult and time consuming task. Thankfully, I work with many intelligent people at Own Web Now and have a lot of friends in the IT field that talk to a lot of techies, and we will do our best to present a concise review of what you should be thinking about. (This used to be the most popular and most demanded quality of the SBS Show – people love to learn but they also like to be entertained and to save time.)
So to find out what is on my mind and what my friends are working on… just tune in and listen. The first show is online already:
Featuring Mark Crall from Tech Care Team and Stuart Selbst from SecureMyCompany, Inc. They discuss trends in cloud services, Kaseya, Google Reseller program and more.
Mark and Stuart are my go-to folks in the community and true leaders in our market. To find out more about them you can follow their blogs: Mark Crall’s blog. Stuart Selbst’s blog.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Announcing ExchangeDefender Client Software Suite
ExchangeDefender, now in the 4th release of the product, is proud to add Client Software Suite to the portfolio of security and business continuity products covered under a single fee. Consisting of ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 agent and ExchangeDefender Desktop agent, the suite is uniquely positioned to help users interact with ExchangeDefender without having to leave their day-to-day computing experience inside Outlook 2007 or Windows Desktop.
Click here to download ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Agent
Click here to download ExchangeDefender Windows Desktop
Click here to see the features overview
While the features of the two products overlap somewhat, each is designed for a specific audience. Outlook 2007 agent is primarily designed to let users interact with ExchangeDefender on demand, report SPAM that slips through and casually customize the service to their needs. Desktop agent is designed for the diehard email addict that needs hourly updates on the amount of SPAM, quick access to LiveArchive.
We will continue to develop both going forward and have plans to introduce web filtering, virus protection and web file sharing during 2009. We see attack vectors changing and becoming more social to compromise the security of more savvy technology users. With that threat, the software protecting our users must evolve as well.
As always we welcome feedback and suggestions on how to improve the software and make your clients and users more efficient and productive with our services. Please use the Development tab in our support portal to communicate directly with the development team.
Oh, did we mention that all this is FREE? Go ahead and download it now!
New ExchangeDefender Engine
Since December 15th we have been testing a new ExchangeDefender antispam engine that has gone into production last night, January 5th. The new engine improves SPAM filtering efficiency by nearly 800% and shows about 5% less false positives than the current engine.
This new system has been running in the background transparently simultaneously with our previous engine and did not impact operations. We have started to notice new trends in SPAM lately and have moved to improve filtering of the items that have not been accurately picked up by the network.
We want to thank you for submitting SPAM through our ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 agent as that has been critical in our ability to better protect you from junk. If you have not yet deployed the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 plugin, or the new ExchangeDefender Desktop please do so today. They are available for download on the homepage at www.exchangedefender.com
Enjoy your new, cleaner mailbox!
Welcome to 2009!
Dear Friends, Clients, Partners, Happy New Year!
Thank you for a fantastic 2008. Not only have we seen our service deployments and contracts grow at a tremendous rate but we have also undertaken a record expansion in our Global Network Services platform offering Exchange, SharePoint, Enteprise Offsite Backups, Virtual Hosting and more from the European Union (United Kingdom, Nethrelands, France and Germany), Canada as well as Australia. Our flagship product, ExchangeDefender, grew from a pure security service to one that also plays a key part in the business continuity and disaster recovery.
We look forward to an incredible 2009. With key hires and services delivery platform built for speed and value we believe that our solutions will be a great answer to what may be a tough economic cycle.
We will be introducing several new products in 2009.
We will also be making some interesting changes to the support of the existing offerings.
Happy New Year and best wishes for 2009!