Everything I Forgot to Tell You

I’ve been heads-down with some crazy travel and project work. Fun stuff. But I’m behind on one of my weekly contributions — those “seven blogs I didn’t write.” Here’s everything I forgot to tell you about the managed services industry and MSP chatter the past week or so. Plus, I’ll be back with the usual “seven blogs I didn’t write” this Friday. Here we go…

1. The Big Swim: ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini is set to swim the English Channel on July 20, I believe. Bellini has also competed in Iron Man competitions. As for my exercise, I managed to walk to the end of my driveway to get the paper this morning. But iPad-based newspaper apps may soon kill that exercise routine for me. Kidding aside, best wishes on the big swim, Arnie.

2. Big Dollars: Former Nimsoft CEO Gary Read is busy building Boundary Networks.The company’s SaaS platform monitors cloud applications and big data transactions. Boundary recently raised $15 million in venture capital. For what? Read shared some details with me. I need to find time to write the blog.

3. Next Trips: Here’s my upcoming schedule…

• I’ll be at Schnizzfest, hosted by TruMethods, this Friday in Philadelphia. Lots of chatter from top MSPs expected. Here’s a preview.
• After that, I’m prepping for The VAR Guy Channel Chief Panel at CompTIA Breakaway ().
• Then, I’ll be onto VMworld in August.

4. Geek Squad Changes at Best Buy: Some new thoughts coming soon.

5. Cloud-based Help Desks and Service Desks: Anybody else notice the ServiceNow IPO and some continued enhancements at ManageEngine? Stay tuned.

6. Bankrupt? No Problem: GroundWork is providing free IT management software to bankrupt municipalities.

7. Big Move: NTT America has launched IntelOps, a service that offers automated remote monitoring of third-party networks.

8. Happy Anniversary: Spam Soap, an email security company that works closely with Intel-McAfee, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Also, Maildistiller has celebrated 8 years as a global cloud security provider.

9. Axcient’s Latest Hire: Autotask veteran Steve Noel has joined Axcient to help drive and support the cloud backup and disaster recovery (BDR) company’s partner engagements.

10. Kaseya Certification Discount: Kaseya is offering a 20% discount towards training and certification through the end of September, according to partners in the know.

11. Partnering Up: Tigerpaw Software and Technology Assurance Group (TAG) have launched Tigerpaw Business Academy. The partnership seeks to train IT and telecom businesses to offer complete managed services

12. Hit the Brakes: Nick Bock is not a good driver… or was it simply a piece of **** car rental? Dave Sobel, thoughts?

13. We Do Mac, Too: CentraStage is the latest RMM software provider to monitor Macs.

14. Next Moves: SolarWinds around July 30 will begin to evangelize its 2H 2012 strategy for SMBs, especially those that need to increase VoIP Adoption.

15. SaaS BDR: CharTec is taking some new steps. Stay tuned.

16. Partnership Coming? N-able Technologies and Live Virtual Help Desk. Stay tuned again.

17. Stay tuned: Datto GenISIS … I’ll round back on this topic soon.

18. Attacking WebRoot: Reflexion and Blue Solutions are partnering to embrace the UK channel, especially former WebRoot partners that are seeking email security alternatives.

That’s all for now. Unless… I find some more unopened messages in my inbox. Back soon. And thanks for reading.