By Regina Ciardiello, Editor, SMB Nation

In case you missed our November/December issue, our cover story discussed what is on the wish list of tribal members for the holiday season. Since we always want to continue in the spirit of giving, especially to you, our loyal readers, we have come up with a special gift that will surely be a conversation piece at your next holiday party as a cool stocking stuffe. The gadget in question is the SQUARE mobile application device – a credit card with built-in technology to process MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover cards on a smart phone or iPad device. However, there is one catch – you must take and complete our Annual Salary Survey, which will be published in the January/February edition of SMB Nation magazine.

(At right): The SQUARE mobile application device in action at a local coffee shop.

So now you are probably wondering how you can sign up to take our survey (and receive your free gift). It’s simple – just click to: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RT99B5Q, and you will be taken to our full survey questionnaire housed on Survey Monkey. All we need is no more than 10 minutes of your time, and unlike other surveys, the Square device will be distributed as part of our gift to you—it’s not a raffle—so there is 100% chance that you will get your free gift, just for spending a few minutes of your day to provide us with important data.

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Awareness Technologies, Inc., (ATI) said today that it has expanded its Partner Program and will now offer the opportunity to qualified partners to self-host their own data. In addition to already offering the ability to co-brand the client portal (reports and settings), ATI Partners will now have the option to host their client data directly, and thus significantly increase their account control.

“Our Partner Program is experiencing significant growth, and we’ve added more than 150 partners in 2011, including a cloud distribution relationship with Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Many of our Partners want to own the client relationship more completely and, while our standard partner enablement allows significantly more branding opportunities already, we are now offering a complete autonomous relationship by allowing partners to self-host,” Ken Totura, Awareness Technologies’ Chief Channel Officer, said in a press release.

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By Regina Ciardiello, Editor, SMB Nation

Autotask Corporation said today that it will be holding its annual Autotask Community Live 2012 event at the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes in Orlando, FL. Held in Miami, FL, in previous years, Autotask Community Live attendance has grown an average 35% per year, attracting Autotask users and IT professionals from around the world. The three-day conference features multiple, concurrent education tracks including both product-centric and broader business-building courses.

Having attended the event previously, Harrybbb and I know first-hand that Autotask Community Live delivers an event that is packed with vendors introducing new products, quality partners looking to make deals and educational sessions that will keep attendees ahead of the learning curve. In fact, Autotask Community Live 2010 was where Harrybbb and I first connected when I was working for a competing channel publication. Who knew that we would be working together 2 years later!

The product training tracks includes a range of role-based and business process sessions, from basic to advanced training, to deliver tips, time-saving workflow automation techniques and best-practices for optimizing the use of various Autotask Pro modules and features.

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ShoreTel Inc. said that as part of its strategy to further its cloud presence, the UC provider plans to acquire M5 Networks. As a result of the acquisition, ShoreTel will be positioned to provide customers a choice between on-premise and hosted UC solutions.

The acquisition of privately held M5 enables ShoreTel to expand its solutions into the cloud and reach a large and growing market segment of customers that are looking to deploy IP communications through a hosted model. Industry trends such as cloud computing, virtualization, data center economics and the flexibility of services-based models are driving the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, which provides businesses another way to bring unified communications to their workforce.

“The acquisition of M5 positions ShoreTel as a leader in the fast-growing cloud UC market and delivers a suite of hosted telephony solutions that is unmatched in the marketplace,” Peter Blackmore, CEO of ShoreTel, said in a media statement. “This acquisition is a critical step in our evolution and enables the company to capitalize on trends in cloud computing and advance our enterprise communications strategy.”

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D&H Distributing said today that it has launched a Partner Services Program, giving its customers access to a versatile, web-based library of marketing materials to help them publicize their own offerings and grow their businesses. The program includes a series of centralized links to vendor logos, product images, collaterals, resource libraries, tutorials, training videos and details regarding specific programs from D&H’s vendor partners.  D&H VARs can visit the Partner Services web site at www.dandh.com/partnerservices. 

As part of the program’s line-up, resellers can make use of a series of brochure templates addressing popular topics and hot markets.  Some of these pieces may be customized by the VAR to reflect its own corporate branding.  The available templates will change over time, enabling VARs who frequent the site to deliver new collaterals on a regular basis.  This is particularly important, especially as many of today’s VARs do not have the bandwidth, time or funds to hire an in-house marketing specialist or outside firm to help with these efforts. Oftentimes, the VAR ends up trying to handle the company’s marketing strategies on their own, along with everything else they need to be responsible for.

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By Joseph Walker, Contributing Blogger, SMB Nation

The fourth quarter of 2011 saw executives from IBM, Microsoft, Dell, HP and Cisco all affirming their commitment to the SMB channel and its importance to future revenue growth. Now Xerox has jumped into the fray with three new cloud services for its fleet of VARs and other partners. As Xerox often does, it will rely primarily on channel partners to sell its new services. 

The three cloud solutions are "click-and-pick" easy IaaS provisioning, cloud backup, and disaster recovery. Each service boasts high-performance, high-reliability features (and will be priced accordingly). While Xerox noted that their target market is SMBs, the company's press release specifically mentioned organizations with $10 to $250 million in annual revenue.

Xerox's decision to target that revenue band somewhat puzzles me, as most companies within their indicated range have already made substantial investments in on-premise IT infrastructure. Except in the case of businesses with aging equipment, I would expect IT departments to lean towards hybrid cloud solutions that allow for the easy integration of existing servers with newly deployed cloud ones.

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This morning, GFI Software said that more than 5,000 of its MSPs are now using GFI MAX RemoteManagement™ to support more than 65,000 networks worldwide. As a result of this number, it will more than double the GFI MAX customer base over the last two years, with strong growth both in the U.S. and internationally.

“We’ve successfully grown our partner base by focusing on what MSPs need to profitably grow their businesses,” Dr. Alistair Forbes, general manager of the GFI MAX Business Unit, said in a press release. “That starts with an easily deployed RMM platform, competitive pricing and simple billing, and a commitment to enhancing the solution through the integration of new services to create incremental revenue opportunities for our partners.”

Through the GFI MAX dashboard—with which MSPs remotely manage all of their customers’ networks in one consolidated view—MSPs can also deploy managed antivirus, patch management and vulnerability scanning, as well as remotely controlling desktops and workstations.

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Level Platforms said its Managed Workplace RMM platform will now be pre-installed on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform and included in the Intel AppUp Small Business Service.

With Level Platforms Managed Workplace, Intel service providers can now remotely manage all IP-based technologies throughout their end-customers’ networks, address and remediate any issues, and improve uptime. This results in lower services costs, recurring revenues, and faster, proactive response to customer issues.

Now through Level Platforms, Intel AppUp Small Business Service customers will be able to leverage the full functionality of Managed Workplace through the Intel AppUp Small Business Service RMM Service Center dashboard across their entire customer network at no cost for 30 days. This includes detailed asset discovery and management, remote monitoring, alerting, remote control and remediation, automation, reporting, warranty status, patch management and Network Audits, used by many MSPs to engage prospective clients and discover customer issues in need of attention.

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Zeacom reported today that its Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) contact center software is now available for Lync – Microsoft’s software telephony platform. The announcement follows a successful beta program that saw ZCC deployed at Lync sites in Northern Europe and Asia Pacific. Zeacom is known among Microsoft Managed ISVs for Lync with the resources to help organizations build out their helpdesk, call center or multimedia contact center to the Lync platform.
 
Zeacom has more than 4,000 customer sites worldwide and had been delivering enterprise-class contact center functionality on 3 of the world’s most prevalent telephony platforms for 17 years. With the release of ZCC for Lync, organizations now have more choices when it comes to moving their existing contact center solution from one voice platform to another. Targeting up to 400 seats on Lync, ZCC allows contact centers to control the delivery of every contact – from voice calls and email to SMS and social media alerts.
 
Since its inception, Zeacom has maintained a channel-only sales model and has a team of subject-matter experts committed to supporting its partners worldwide, allowing them to build profitable relationships around Business Process Automation.

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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 late-afternoon edition of our “5 Blogs We Missed Last Week,” but I am also working on the Q1 edition of our print publication…it’s the first one for 2012, and will be distributed at our MVP Nation event held March 2-3. With a focus on the new upcoming Windows 8 technology, MVP Nation will be held at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, WA. 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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