SMB Nation Blog

Earlier this week, we broke the news that N-able announced its intent to be acquired by SolarWinds for $120 million in cool cash by the end of the month. The news item also noted that N-able’s CEO, Gavin Garbutt, will be retiring, and JP Jauvin, the company’s GM will take the reins once Garbutt hangs his hat for the last time at N-able’s Ottawa, Canada, headquarters.

SMB Nation is pleased to announce that we have released a few session recordings from our 7^th Annual Spring Conference and SMB 150 Awards Gala for public viewing!

Sessions include:

Microsoft today drew our attention to a blog post highlighting its US Partners of the Year, who will be recognized and awarded for their accomplishments in July at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. 

Date: Thursday, May 23, 2013

Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Presented by: Steven Snyder, Technical Marketing Manager, StorageCraft and Harry Brelsford, Founder and Chairman, SMB Nation, Inc.

Minimizing the impact of downtime for your clients’ businesses is critical. We all know disaster recovery preparations can appear to be costly and time consuming. With the StorageCraft® Recover-Ability™ Solution, you can easily put a flexible disaster recovery solution in place for your clients. And, most importantly, this solution gets your clients back up and running within minutes, not days. Plus, it places the recovery process directly under your control, so you don’t have to wait for vendor help when disaster strikes.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. We helped Cisco develop “Thunderbolt,” which later became the basis for the OnPlus product. OnPlus is/was (more on that in a moment) a remote network management tool to remotely monitor, manage and maintain small business networks. Think of it was an RMM with MMM!

BrightGauge Software said that it has released BrightGauge 3.0, the company’s latest update to its web-based business analytics and customer-reporting platform for MSPs. The new release provides enhanced customization of data metrics and more robust reporting features that now enable MSPs to measure and visualize their own business performance across their entire client base.

Dell said that it will now enable Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor choice for the OpenStack cloud platform. This development, which is the first instance of a technology vendor enabling Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor on OpenStack for private clouds, will give customers additional flexibility and choice to run OpenStack workloads within their existing Windows Server environments.

Late last month, I attended Lenovo’s Accelerate Partner Conference in Las Vegas, and I had the opportunity to chat with Ashley Rodrigue, Lenovo Ambassador, Lenovo Customer Care. Ashley spent time speaking with me regarding the company’s new ThinkPad Helix, which was launched at the event last month. So what were my first impressions of the product?: Lenovo knocks it out of the park with the ThinkPad Helix. It has everything you need to live in a digital world. The Helix is portable, flexible, user friendly and has a great batter life with Lenovo's attention to building a stable and robust product.

In response to the tornadoes earlier this week in Oklahoma and Texas, StorageCraft has pledged to provide relief by offering a free three-day version of its BDR software products, StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition. The company is providing a free download to businesses and non-profit organizations in the regions that were affected by the storms.

D&H Distributing has introduced its “Get Authorized” program for resellers, which is designed to reduce the time and labor of the vendor authorization process, of which resellers must go through to buy products that are subject to MAP (minimum advertised pricing), UPP (unilateral pricing policy) and similar authorization restrictions.

At this point, about 18 months later, you would have been living in a cave if you are involved in the SMB channel and had not heard that Zenith Infotech’s managed services business unit was spun off as a separate entity known as Continuum. Based in Boston, the company, in which VC firm Summit Partners has made a sizable investment, Continuum (formerly known as Zenith RMM), operates as a strong U.S.-based company that is continually focused on its MSPs and helping them to better their lives—both professionally and personally.

This morning, dinCloud announced that their cloud management platform, dinManage, is available to the company’s channel partners as a white label product. The addition of this white label option will allow partners to streamline the process for migrating their customers to the cloud by adding virtual servers or hosted virtual desktops.

The white labeled version of dinManage features the following:

We heard just now from our good PR friend Marie Rourke and Co. of WhiteFox Communications that SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software has agreed to acquire N-able for $120 million cash. The acquisition is a quick one in that is set to close by the end of this month.

Welcome to the real world. Sure, there are plenty of early BlackBerry 10 mobile device reviews being posted up. Fancy test labs are dissecting and reverse engineering the hottest mobile device on the market. However, at SMB Nation, we’re taking our testing the streets and have been giving the product a real world test.

Pictured: 14-year-old Harry Jr., with his BlackBerry Z10 device.

There are two things I look forward to each quarter. First: The quarterly earnings report for numerous companies on CNBC, the financial network. Second: The quarterly update from Cindy Bates. The first can disappoint; the latter never does.

(Pictured): Cindy Bates accepts her SMB 150 Award at this year's Awards Gala earlier this month at Microsoft's Redmond Campus.

The good news is that the annual BlackBerry conference, known as BlackBerry Live (formerly BlackBerry World) was held in Florida last week. The bad news is that because Florida is so pleasant, events held there always compete with the sun and beach. However, that didn’t stop our own Chris Bangs from attending as press and filing this report.

To this day, there is still an opportunity for a “void filler” to satisfy the demand for telecom in small business, created by the abrupt departure of Microsoft Response Point in 2009/2010, and the slow fade of the Cisco small business phone systems a la its refocus on the enterprise. The very first one in the world was awarded to Jamison West (pictured at right in white shirt), a Seattle-based MSP, as part of the SMB Nation Spring Conference prize drawings.

Here we go again! As I do each week, I am really enjoying bringing our readers a quick round-up of the blog coverage I didn’t manage to get to during the week prior. It has been a bit of taking a breather here for us, since we wrapped up our Spring Conference and SMB 150 Awards Gala just over a week ago. But the quiet before the storm hasn’t lasted for long…before you know it, we will be gearing up for our annual fall event to be held Oct. 10-12 in Las Vegas at the Rio!

Please take some time to peruse a few snippets of information that we didn’t get a chance to bring you last week….let us also know if there was something we might have missed, which is not mentioned in this entry…because as you know…we love news!

AVG today added two new applications in its mobile portfolio-- AVG Cleaner and AVG Image Shrinker. The aspps are now available for free for Android smartphones and tablets.

AVG Cleaner allows users to monitor storage availability on their device and clean cache and unnecessary browser history files to free up memory and make more space. The application includes tools to automatically monitor device memory and storage, remove files, and schedule regular clean ups to keep the device running smoothly.

With email data growing at a rate of 400,000 terabytes a year, email is clearly BIG Data.  Because business is being conducted in email (conversations, contracts, commitments), saving and searching this resource is coming increasingly important, as these communications are crucial to running a modern business and central when trying to solve a problem, resolve a conflict or find an answer.

This morning, IDC released the results of a four-year study on the middleware and business process management market. The study, titled Worldwide Business Management and Middleware Vendor Shares, includes stats from 2008 to 2012, and overall, shows a stunted growth rate for this area.

We heard today that Yahoo! and Tumblr have made plans to agree on Yahoo!’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr…in an “interesting” admission, Yahoo! said in a media statement that it plans to “not screw up” the acquisition!”

Per the agreement and its promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr commitment to empower creators.

Having just come out of its Accelerate partner conference a few weeks ago, where it launched several new products, (click here to see product reviews by our own contributing writer Jay Weiss) Lenovo is on the move again, today unveiling its LenovoEMC portfolio of Network Attached Storage products.

Date: Thursday, May 23, 2013

Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Presented by: Steven Snyder, Technical Marketing Manager, StorageCraft and Harry Brelsford, Founder and Chairman, SMB Nation, Inc.

Minimizing the impact of downtime for your clients’ businesses is critical. We all know disaster recovery preparations can appear to be costly and time consuming. With the StorageCraft® Recover-Ability™ Solution, you can easily put a flexible disaster recovery solution in place for your clients. And, most importantly, this solution gets your clients back up and running within minutes, not days. Plus, it places the recovery process directly under your control, so you don’t have to wait for vendor help when disaster strikes.

Karl Palachuk, President of Great Little Book Publishing Co., Inc. and well-respected SMB IT community author, will be hosting an online-only conference for IT Pros June 25-27. As a nod to his long-time friendship with SMB Nation, he is offering a discount code for $150.00 off the full event price.