Since I wrote my first piece of code in middle-school in 1981, I have had this strange desire to start off everything new with these two simple words, which are far more appropriate today, because back then we had only the hope (vs today’s reality) of inter-planetary communication that was free and ubiquitous (ala Star Trek).
Purpose of this blog:
As the CEO of a cloud startup, I am exposed to a great deal of new thinking and new products in Silicon Valley and San Francisco – the two dominant regions for technology startups which I wish to share with the MSP community.
And as the retiring CEO and CTO of a leading MSP to enterprise companies, I know I have spent more than a few hours wondering how the cloud was going to disrupt my business, and wondering how could I “get atop this tiger” and where I should invest limited R&D resources.
The reality is the cloud is going to fundamentally disrupt enterprise IT. For you old timers like me, you remember mainframes and micro computing and watched the PC, and then client-server computing disrupt MIS (Managed Information Systems).
But here is the good news; this wave does not have to a tsunami which destroys your business. If you learn to surf, it could take you to new levels of prosperity. My goal is to help you check out which surf-boards might be useful.
So my goal is to help you by highlighting startups and new markets worthy of your attention, as well as providing you my counsel on the pace of change. Both are crucial – what’s new plus how long this new widget will take to displace the old. A lot of times we forget that people are slow to change. How many PBX systems with POTS are still deployed? Plenty.
I’ll do my best to classify new products as “bleeding edge” (which won’t generally make this blog), “early adopter” – which addresses the lion’s share of startup customers, “main street” e.g. most of your customers, and “laggards” – the 20% of organizations who just got off XP last month, or are still running it.
But this isn’t a product review blog. I’m not going to use all this software and share my opinion. My focus is on the underpinning architectural technologies and offering you my informed opinion as to how this technology might benefit you, or how it might disrupt you.
And in the spirit of the MSPAlliance, as I discover MSP’s who are implementing these new technologies, I’ll make you aware of them. Bygone is the era when MSP’s managed every aspect of technology, except perhaps for those who focus exclusively on small business. As the economist David Ricardo proclaimed a long-time ago, we make more profit when we focus on a handful of things we do very well, and then trade, or in our case outsource, for the rest.
