SMB Nation Blog

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.

Earlier this week, HP announced its pledge to assist government agencies to maximize storage investments with new offerings that include the next generation of its MSA entry disk array, enhancements to the HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio and a new program for HP channel partners.

The new HP MSA 2040 Storage system simplifies management and improves performance up to four times faster than traditional external disk storage solutions. The enhanced HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio enables SMBs to efficiently manage and protect increasing amounts of file data without the need for special skills.

By Ian Moyse - Sales Director, www.workbooks.com  

The need for change and acceptance of the fact that your “status quo” for business may be no, has never been truer.  I have been speaking on the effect of the cloud for the past 8 years, and the past two have provided much comment on the visible effects we had and are seeing.

Before commenting on why IT supply chains have to adapt and why now is the time to take action I would like to draw context from other sectors and the customer experience they deliver that is causing a well-publicized demise.

Inspired by this week's news that Google is unifying storage across its products, Barracuda Networks announced is getting bold with a new program designed to increase the amount of free cloud storage for its own Copy users from 5GB to 15GB. Copy is a new online file syncing, sharing and storage service built on the secure Barracuda Cloud. Since its public debut less than 90 days ago, Copy already is approaching half a million users worldwide.

Spiceworks revealed in a survey that while SMBs show strong support for BYOD initiatives, they still see the technology as a security threat due to employee loss, theft of misuse of mobile devices.

The Spiceworks study “As BYOD Becomes Mainstream, Complexity Increases for SMBs,” revealed that 61 percent of SMBs have implemented a BYOD policy. However, despite this shift toward greater support, only 37 percent are managing or plan to manage mobile devices using a mobile device management (MDM) offering. The independent study was sponsored by Fiberlink, a leading provider of mobility management solutions for businesses.

Long-time SMB Nation friend Matt Landis, a Microsoft MVP in the Lync telecom/UC area, posted up the results of an informal survey about higher education and the computer guy. The results are disturbing and warrant further analysis. When asked about graduate school, his IT experts universally replied NO THANKS! You can read his original work here.

I disagree. Consider the following...

Last week we blogged that Microsoft is making changes to its Windows 8 OS, reportedly naming it Microsoft Blue. Today, we heard that the company has now renamed this initiative Windows 8.1.  

Small Biz Thoughts recently announced that Founder, Karl Palachuk and his brother, Manuel Palachuk, both of whom are well-respected voices in the IT industry, will be presenting sessions for the company’s IT Business Reboot 2013 online conference between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm PDT June 25-27. The two brothers each have over 25 years of experience in the SMB field, and in 2009, they co-authored a how-to guide for zero-downtime network migrations.

Many of us remember when Intel launched its Intel Hybrid Cloud device and the Intel AppUp Small Business Software Service with much fanfare just about two years ago, with tons of promise. It was ahead of its time pioneering the “devices and services” paradigm so popular today. It was the “third-way” in the polarizing argument(s) asserted by on-premises extremists and Cloudies. Many MSPs that I know had signed up for the service, and had high hopes for what it could do for both themselves and their SMB end users. Intel even went ahead and put together a launch platform held at SMB Nation’s Fall Conference in 2011 to target its sweet spot of SMB MSPs who largely attend our events…from what I understand, they came in droves to check out this new game-changing cloud product.

(Pictured at right): Karl Palachuk, Founder and CEO, Small Biz Thoughts / Great Little Book Publishing Co., Inc., said he doesn't feel there is a correlation between the end of SBS and the end of the Intel server.

The role of IT in setting strategic priorities and achieving business success is growing for companies around the world, according to new research released today by CompTIA. According to the trade organization’s research, more than three-quarters of businesses say technology is important or very important to their success; the majority plan solid increases in IT spending this year; and four in 10 have expectations of hiring new IT staff in 2013.

CompTIA’s International Technology Adoption & Workforce Issues study is the result of a survey of more than 1,250 business and IT executives in countries around the world, some with mature economies and others, maturing.

Birch Communications alerted us this morning that it has signed an asset purchase agreement to acquire select customer and network assets from Lightyear Network Solutions, Inc.

As a provider of data, voice and Wi-Fi telco services to SMBs, Lightyear is expected to close this, its 18^th acquisition since 2006, during Q3 this year.

At the start of its BlackBerry World event this week in Orlando, FL, BlackBerry introduced its new Q5 smartphone that is part of the new BlackBerry 10 family. The BlackBerry Q5 smartphone features a QWERTY keyboard with discrete keys in a new design that aims to provide a fast, effortless experience for users on the go.

As part of my political exploration and participation in the Microsoft “Voices for Innovation” (VFI) political trade association and its closely related PAC, I’m invited to the best free lunches on the block. Seriously – VFI works with the PAC to bring in super speakers to Microsoft Redmond. This is my third such lunch event and the featured speaker this time was Sidney Rittenberg.

Microsoft today released news that they are running a 48-hour “Refer-a-Colleague” program for the upcoming WPC event in Houston, TX. Under this program, current registered attendees are eligible to receive a $100.00 refund for referring a new attendee to the event. In addition, anyone who is referenced will have $100.00 taken off of the final conference price.  

VaultLogix is now offering a free trial of its business-class MobilePlus service, which provides backup, recovery and data protection for mobile workers’ Windows and Mac laptops and desktops.