Seven Managed Services Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write: Dec. 10

It was a pretty intense week for MSPmentor and our sister sites, The VAR Guy and our newly launched Talkin’ Cloud. Even as we expand our blogging staff there are still quite a few blog entries that the MSPmentor team didn’t have time to write. So, here we go: Seven managed services blog entries MSPmentor didn’t publish for the week ending December 10, 2010.

7. How About Proper Credit?: Vlad Mazek has launched a web site called Looks Cloudy. Interesting move. But could Looks Cloudy at least credit MSPmentor’s original trademarked content (and link to our original work) instead of rewriting our blogs as alleged original work and pretending not to know where the idea came from?

• MSPmentor, December 8: Should MSPs Outsource Their Help Desks?
• Looks Cloudy, December 9: Settling the Debate: Should MSPs Outsource Their Help Desks?

Rule number one of a media company: Produce compelling original content… or at least properly source your content.

6. Eating Crow: I spent most of 2009 hyping Amazon Web Services as a potential platform for MSPs. But only about 6 percent of the MSPs participating in our fourth-annual MSPmentor 100 survey leverage AWS. (The survey closes Dec. 17.) So perhaps my optimism was misplaced… or at least very premature. More data points to come next week.

5. New Look: The MSPAlliance has redesigned its web site. We’ll be watching to see when/where MSPAlliance conferences (i.e., MSPWorld) will potentially surface in 2011.

4. Interpreter Wanted: Kaseya has received a Patent covering technology that delivers dynamic instruction sets to remote devices from a centralized server. But here’s the problem: I’m pretty bad at describing how the Patent differs from all the existing remote device management technologies out there. If anyone would care to interpret the Patent for me, it’s number 7,827,547.

3. Almost Ready: It’s been more than a month since MSPmentor heard rumors about Synnex, the big distributor, preparing a new partnership in the managed services market. The Synnex grape vine says the news is nearly here… but I’ve been hearing that since before the U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday. Still… stay tuned. Best guess: Synnex will announce the strategy within five business days.

2. In Case You Missed It: Charlene O’Hanlon, one of the IT channel’s finest editors, joined us December 1 as contributing senior editor. She’s working closely with our bloggers on MSPmentor and The VAR Guy, while I continue to set the content direction for all of our sites. Contributing Associate Bloggers Matt Weinberger and David Courbanou have also taken on high-profile blog roles on Talkin’ Cloud and The VAR Guy, respectively. And we’ll be making a few more contributor announcements across all of our sites soon.

1. Executive Updates: Quite a few names in the managed services market are mulling new careers for 2011. I could be wrong but we could hear significant news about executive appointments, new focus areas — and maybe even some new employers — before the New Year arrives. We’ll be sure to cover the potential news as it happens.

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