Want to learn from the best and brightest? Attend our second annual MVP Nation, March 2-3, 2012 in Redmond, Washington. It’s “Grad School For Geeks,” and we’re back on the Microsoft campus at the vaunted conference center. This year our focus is on Windows 8 – it’s a deep dive with lectures from the Microsoft MPVs and other industry gurus. Give us two days and you’ll be armed for the next major server, desktop and mobility Windows 8 operating system. Learn more at mvp.smbnation.com. PS – NO WIMPS ALLOWED!

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If you are responding to the Las Vegas radio ad to attend SMB Nation, call our main office at 1-888-SMB-NAT1 or 206-201-2943 (press 6) to register and learn more about our special promotion. 

For more information at the upcoming SMB Nation Fall Conference – click HERE.

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Don’t miss the 9th Annual SMB Nation Fall conference coming up – end of month. Your VERY BEST RATES expire September 9th – this Friday!!!

More MVPs, More Technical Content , More Advanced Sessions…you told us what you wanted and we delivered! If you’re serious about improving yourself as a technical professional, take the first step and visit our Fall site for more information.

BONUS! Qualify to enter to win a HARLEY! Awarded by OKI Data – this is THE BEST PRIZE EVER and someone’s riding into recovery!
 
HURRY and register for the SMB Nation Fall conference at fall.smbnation.com

See ya’ there…harrybbbb

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Attend SMB Nation Spring - June 10-11, Toronto

Great news! The well-respected SMB Nation spring conference for computer resellers, consultants, techs and others is heading back to Toronto, ON Canada in early June 2011! This is an opportunity for professionals to come together to collaborate peer-to-peer style and consume magazine technical and business content.

Learn more about SMB Nation Spring HERE.

Deferred Maintenance
Trust me when I share this truism with you. Economic cycles, up or down, invoke a set of behaviors. Coming out of the “Great Recession” has actually made us better computer guys and gals serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

Foremost you worked in a sector, SMB, that largely escaped the full force of the contraction. That is, you out performed the homebuilder and the automobile manufacturer. Second, economic dips present an opportunity to recalibrate your workforce. Good times hide many sins. Bad times expose deadwood and provide visibility into redundancy.

Third, you likely became more efficient internally. Speaking as the CEO of SMB Nation, I can attest that our technology investments in hosted Voice-over IP (VoIP) and cloud-based e-mail actually saved us money and improved our performance. Properly positioned, technology investments generate handsome returns on investments (ROI) and a recession is just the excuse you and your customers need to upgrade your infrastructure.

But there is a dark-side to a recession known as deferred maintenance. At your SMB customer sites, you’ve likely seen folks eek out more use from depreciated technology than you are comfortable with. Case in point. How many of your small business customers are still running the 10+ year old Windows XP desktop operating system and have not upgraded to Windows 7?

Now I want to challenge you.

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March 13-15, 2011

Las Vegas

(Inside Channel Partners)

BE THERE!

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Sign up for FREE BlackBerry solution training in November (while places last) … and the chance to win 1 of 10 BlackBerry smartphones at your chosen event!

Sign up https://spn.blackberry.com/web/guest/roadtour2.

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It’s that time again, folks! We’ve teamed with the SMB Technology Network trade group to undertake the well-received SMB 150 list project. Last year, quite frankly, we were OVERWHELMED by the response, excitement and enthusiasm!

This year the SMB 150 program has some exciting improvements:

•    Nominations accepted! Click HERE to nominate yourself or a like-minded accomplished SMB IT leader. You know how you are; you know who they are! Just do it!
•    Voting. In early 2012,

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Wow – Florida sure is nice in the winter. I didn’t want to come home and Seattle snows delayed my trip by three days. So here’s the net-net-net on IBM’s Lotusphere conference focused on Social Business: The end of the story? I’ll be back next year – it’s a must-do!

1.    Partners See Opportunity – Minimal Channel Conflict. Mike Ostrowski (pictured right), vice president at Ascendant Technology, is the closet “thing” I found at Lotusphere to an MSP/SMB Nation channel partner. He’s on the “other side” from our traditional Microsoft crowd, working for a large consulting practice that is IBM-centric. His firm is nationwide with a focus on technology services and digital services (the latter being like an agency with soft skills and design and planning). His firm has 40 percent of its customers in the SMB space with the balance in enterprise. Focus areas include: health care, financial services, insurance and retail. His firm is embracing IBM’s Social Cloud initiative and he likened his consulting business model to a ladder. The technology consulting team that Ostrowski oversees is good at scaling up the ladder; the digital services team makes sure the ladder is attached to the right wall. Finally – he shared that IBM does a great job of managing the channel conflict. IBM bids directly on work – something Microsoft doesn’t really do yet in its partner program.
 
2.    The “Strategy Guy” Speaks.

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This started as a simple executive interview at last week’s Lotusphere 2012 conference on a telepresence product. Later in the week, evidence mounted that the telepresence market is maturing very quickly and the landscape is also changing quickly. Call it “telepresence time” and hang on fast. First
I’ll share the facts and then the rumors.

Facts – Market Maturity
Gotta love free markets even though Republican candidates are attacking Mitt for exactly that! In technology, it’s always a case of early adopters ascending a curve through general acceptance and final market maturity. Clearly telepresence has ascended very quickly from early adopter to general acceptance and as such, the big boys are getting in the game. At Lotusphere, I talked with both a major player and a well-known second tier player, both making their mark.

I had an exclusive interview with Polycom’s Susan Hayden, an impressive executive vice president in the telepresence area. She shared some very interesting trends, insights and predictions: “Polycom wants conferencing and visual communications to be unambigious. Our vision is to make it pervasive and available everywhere.” Hayden shared. “Harry, in SMB, we are seeing extreme price sensitivity. Polycom understands that things like travel cost reduction means something when implementing telepresence. For example, for the costs to travel to San Francisco for a meeting, you could seriously evaluate a Polycom telepresence solution.”
Hayden went on to recite research about telepresence. She was preaching to the choir as she shared:

•    Telepresence changes and increases productivity and the way people work. It’s inherently more productive than calls.
•    If “we” talk for an hour, we are inherently more productive with the notion that if I see you and you see me, we have a better understanding.
•    You should also watch my video interview (above) with Hayden for more points.

Specific to Polycom’s Real Presence Platform is that

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