Managed Services: Seven Blogs MSPmentor Didn't Write, May 11

I'm somewhere in the Bahamas with my wife -- oh, and I'm managing to cover the Kaspersky Lab 2012 North American Partner Conference, where lots of chatter about secure virtualization, managed security services and mobile device management has emerged. But my focus here means we missed stories elsewhere. In fact, here are seven managed services blogs and MSP news stories the MSPmentor team failed to write for the week ending May 11, 2012.

7. Data Center Monitoring: Datalink (Nasdaq: DTLK), a provider of data center infrastructure and servers, has launched a monitoring service enabling data centers to outsource time-consuming system monitoring, alerting, problem identification, and performance analysis activities to Datalink's managed services staff.

6. The International Scene: Brennan IT, a cloud and managed services provider to Australia's mid-market businesses, has unveiled a three-year growth strategy and is seeking to fill 50 new positions across sales, client services and technical support. Meanwhile, Accel Frontline, an IT infrastructure services company based in India, has selected Nimsoft Unified Manager to provide proactive monitoring, incident ticketing and reporting to customers.

5. Cloud Monitoring: Zenoss is promoting CloudStack ZenPack to service providers that are running VMs on CloudStack. Much of the chatter occurred at this week's Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco.

4. Italian Food? How About Tex-Mex for a Change?: Anybody else seen the Cinco De Mayo videos emerging from ConnectWise?



3. Video Conferencing: Vu TelePresence and Vidtel have launched a multi-vendor video conferencing capability, which means Vu TelePresence now interoperates with third-party telepresence solutions. Separately, Cisco Systems this week said it has been experiencing some softness in the telepresence market, though Vu's technologies generally cost far less than Cisco's portfolio.

2. Follow the Money Trail: Ziften Technologies recently raised $5.5 million in Series B financing, while focusing on Desktop Quality of Service for physical and virtual desktops. No sign of a partner program here -- yet -- but it sounds like a potentially interesting play for MSPs.

1. HTG Dallas - That's a Wrap: I didn't have a chance to attend this week's HTG Peer Group gathering in Dallas. Among the highlights founder Arlin Sorensen mentioned to me: The organization has announced HTG Online, plus sales management and service management summits. Plus, a closer working relationship with VARVid included a live video broadcast out to members working back in their offices. "The main message was around celebrating member success.  As entrepreneurs we seldom stop and celebrate our accomplishments.  We finish a task and are on to the next one.  Our teams need to be be celebrated.  So we did that for HTG today."

Sorensen's conclusion to me: "God is good, I am exhausted but very pleased.  The HTG team has been unbelievable, our new venue is fantastic, and I am one blessed guy. Enjoy the time with you bride.  You are blessed too my friend.  Take time to celebrate!"

That's all for now: Time for me to take Sorensen's advice and sign off to spend time with my wife. I'm going to try to relax a bit this weekend before our team unveils the second-annual Top 100 Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) list and report on Wednesday, May 21, during a webcast.