By Joseph Walker, Contributing Blogger, SMB Nation

Everyone knew the day would come, but now it's finally here. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Facebook is definitely going public, with plans to file its initial public offering papers as early as this week. The Journal reported that the social networking giant's valuation stands at $75 to $100 billion, putting it on par with McDonalds.

Facebook will price its stock between $38 and $40. While the price per share has little meaning for new investors—it's simply a baseline after all—it can make all the difference in the world for current Facebook equity holders, which include most of its employees. Whether or not Facebook will be able to retain its initial share value is another question. Last year's social media IPOs were, for the most part, flops. Only three of the 19 companies' share prices have managed to exceed their IPO price.

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Teo earlier this week announced immediate availability of Teo UC 4, the latest version of its UC platform. Teo UC 4 includes more than 200 enhancements and several new features for both end users and administrators serving SMBs.
 
“Unlike other UC companies who are encumbered by their legacy technology and complex infrastructures, Teo is extremely nimble, allowing us to innovate quickly based on customer demand,” Thomas Beck, Teo’s director of business development and marketing, said in a press release. “The upgrades included in Teo 4 were designed to further take the complexity out of UC and provide the industry’s only truly unified communications solution – from both an end user and administrator perspective.”
 

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By Joseph Walker, Contributing Writer

HP has finalized its plans for the open source release of webOS. While developers are eager to get their hands on the webOS source code, the announcement isn’t a dream control. HP has decided to deliver its now defunct smartphone platform in bite-size pieces (as opposed to all at once).

(At right): Astro Brelsford, SMB Nation's official mascot, with Harrybbb's HP TouchPad.

According to HP’s Open webOS roadmap, individual code modules will be released on a quasi-monthly schedule between now and September. The first piece HP has made available is Enyo 2.0, which provides the framework necessary for coders to write new mobile and web apps. The Enyo toolset includes webOS support but also enables development of iOS, Android, Firefox, and Internet Explorer apps.

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Service contract management provider MaintenanceNet Inc. said that it has high expectations for 2012 with growth forecasted to exceed that of 2011 to drive the company’s global success into the new year.
 
MaintenanceNet also reported a 50 percent increase in revenue in 2011, as well as significant new customer agreements. The company attributes its continued momentum to maturation of the service revenue automation market as manufacturers and channel organizations recognize the importance of addressing the complete spectrum of service contract opportunities available to them.

“We’ve evangelized this market since 2004, and in 2011 saw a paradigm shift take place to fuel fast-paced growth and adoption of our service revenue automation products around the globe,” Scott Herron, CEO of MaintenanceNet, said in a press release. “Manufacturers and channel leaders have come to realize that managing their low-dollar, high-volume service renewal businesses with human resources alone can be costly, and they’re turning to automation to get the job done quickly and efficiently.”

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Polycom said last week that in order to meet the demands of today’s small businesses as it relates to video collaboration, it is now offering a wholesale cloud product designed to help VARs deliver Video-as-a-Service to their SMB customers.

The small business market is probably the market that today is the least served from the video perspective," said Gary Testa, vice president for Cloud and Service Providers, Polycom . "The historical reason for that is that the infrastructure to support video is really large and expensive."

Read the complete article at SmallBusinessComputing: Polycom to Address Easy Access to Telepresence with Video-as-a-Service for SMBs.

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By Joseph Walker

Most MSPs I know are happy to bring on almost any client. The standard MSP business plan involves developing a variety of services with broad appeal and value-add to the largest possible audience. For already-established businesses, that model often works quite well, but for smaller MSPs struggling to establish a strong foundation, vertical markets offer a potentially lucrative strategic focus while minimizing advertising and marketing costs.

Here's a look at three fast-growing vertical markets that make sense for MSPs to consider, along with a collection of resources that will help with initial research, planning and marketing.

Bars and Nightclubs
However dour the country's economic outlook, there will always be a segment of the population unwilling to give up their happy hour predilection. That's great news for MSPs because almost every bar or nightclub I've ever seen—with the exception of a family-owned one in Drummond, WI—uses point of sale software; most of them pay through the nose for it, especially when something breaks.

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Symform said today that it has exceeded its growth projection for 2011, achieving an 800 percent increase in its user base over the last six months. The company also said it experienced a 60 percent quarter-over-quarter gain in license revenue, and more than doubled the number of registered channel partners.

Over the last year, Symform’s Global Cloud Storage Network has expanded dramatically, with users in 46 countries storing over 2 billion data packets. The company also received a second patent for its peer-to-peer data storage network, and secured an additional $2 million investment from WestRiver Capital, rounding out Symform’s Series A funding to $7.5 million.

According to the company, Symform is the first in the cloud storage industry to offer up to 200GB of free storage, and has disrupted the industry by creating a global, peer-to-peer data storage network that allows users to contribute unused, local storage in exchange for free or flat fee cloud storage. With Symform, users decide how much storage space they want to contribute and can receive up to 200GB of free cloud storage for registering, contributing and referring friends or colleagues.

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Ingram Micro’s Services Division said this morning that Axcient has joined the distributor’s Cloud vendor portfolio. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Axcient will offer its unified platform for backup, business continuity and disaster recovery to Ingram Micro channel partners throughout North America.

Available now in the U.S. and coming soon to Canada, Axcient’s all-in-one solution is designed for SMBs and organizations that have a critical need or regulatory requirement to fully protect their data and maintain business continuity in the event of a data loss, server failure, or disaster. 

Delivered through a hybrid cloud configuration, the Axcient solution offers resellers and managed service providers (MSPs) complete data protection that helps ensure application and server availability while empowering rapid data restore.

Furthermore, last year Axcient announced that its platform would be equipped with an on-premise HP appliance, providing solution provides fast local backups with customizable restore points and offers failover for multiple business-critical applications.

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Kerio Technologies said this morning that it has released the newest version of its IP PBX phone system, Kerio Operator 1.2. The new device allows SMBs to improve communication, reduce telephony costs, and stay connected anywhere, while providing ease of use for the user and the IT administrator.

Organizations that deploy Kerio Operator eliminate the need to have a telephony agent on standby to make simple adjustments to the phone network. The enhanced version is built on the industry-standard SIP VoIP protocol and Asterisk 1.8, the software behind Kerio Operator¹s innovative new capabilities.
 
Kerio Operator 1.2 also now supports the Digium TDM410 card with FXO modules to connect to analog phone lines. Therefore, organizations can take advantage of the advanced IP PBX features of Kerio Operator internally, and connect to the outside world the old-fashioned way.

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By Regina Ciardiello, Editor, SMB Nation

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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 busy week prior.

Apologies for the "next-day" edition of our “5 Blogs We Missed Last Week,” but I am just getting a bit of a slow start after being up late watching the NY Giants clinch their spot in this year’s Super Bowl. I am sure many of my fellow NY/NJ area readers are also feeling the same effects!

In addition to big news starting up again, the trade show circuit is also heating up. That said, if you have a few minutes of free time this week, check out what’s in store for our next live event, MVP Nation, to be held March 2-3, 2012, in Redmond, WA. With a focus on the new Windows 8 technology, the two-day event will allow attendees to create their Windows 8 road map. For more information, and to register, go to: http://mvp.smbnation.com/.

Once again, here are 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!

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