December, 2011
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The Stick-Banana Secret: Understanding Tools, Goals, and Insight
The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolf Flesch was published in 1951, and is written in a style I’d describe as the sort of uncle of modern “self-help.” It’s based on the psychological and scientific research of the day and discusses how people organize information in our brains and use it. It was a highly [...]
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Charge Your Clients More to Keep Them Happier?
When your client makes the decision to sign up for your services they have signaled, psychologically and financially, that they are rejecting all alternatives and committing to you. It’s more than just the contract: they haven’t been sold something, they have made a decision to buy. That may be pretty much common sense, but what’s [...]
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You’ve heard the old adage “failure is not an option?” Well now it is an option, and a safe, affordable one, at that.
We’re technologists; we in this industry may know better than anyone else that business thrives on innovation. We also know that with innovation come two necessary evils: risk and cost. Both tend to be quite high when it comes to the uncharted territory of new ideas – a lot of expenses and a lot of [...]
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Best Buy and MindSHIFT Deal Set to Close Next Week. What Will It Mean for MSPs Like Us?
Back in early November we brought you news of the announcement that Best Buy was making plans to acquire MindSHIFT Technologies, an MSP in the SMB space, for $167 million. MindSHIFT delivers cloud and data center services and professional services to upwards of 5,000 clients in the United States. Folding in a commercial service business [...]
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“When ‘It Just Works’ Just Isn’t Enough: Managing Man Hours Per Gigabyte” with Ted Roller, VP of Channel Development, Intronis
There are hours and costs associated with every successful client backup, every new client set up, and every hour spent managing backups each month. Intronis refers to this as Manhours per Gigabyte™ (MPG). MPG is a quick calculation of what current backup solution is REALLY costing. Intronis is taking the management of client data backup [...]
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This Week’s Weather Report Podcast: The BYOD Post-Holiday Tech Hangover and How You Can Profit From It, with Steve Noel from Bradford Cloud
Steve Noel is one of my favorite recurring guests on the Looks Cloudy Weather Report. He’s been with us on a number of podcasts, and always has great perspective and insight to share on how we can stay relevant to our important clients in the ever-changing world of business technology. In this conversation, Steve shares [...]
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N-Able Releases New Technician Runbook to Help MSPs Get Ahead
As announced last week, N-Able Technologies, the Ontario-based maker of remote monitoring and management automation software for MSPs and IT departments, released a new MSP Technician Runbook at no cost to its partners. N-able’s Technician Runbook (which augments the existing Business Runbook and is available at that link) captures technical best practices — the "tribal [...]
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The Post-Pc Era Is Coming…with XBox 360?
Back in March I wrote a piece called “Tablets or PCs…or Your Room?” in which I reflected on what the “post-PC era” that so many are predicting for our future (and our present, even) might actually look like. According to a research report from October, we have already crossed the “post-PC threshold” in North America [...]
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Facebook Can Be A Surprising Place: Memology 2011
I took a few minutes to review the “Memology 2011” feature that Facebook released last week. Frankly, it was surprising. Here are a few items I would never have guessed that made it onto this year’s Facebook trend report: First, this person called Skrillex was one of the hottest items on Facebook this year. I’ve [...]
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How The Cloud Is Redefining Employment
“Just as the Industrial Revolution shackled workers to their workplaces, so Cloud Computing will set them free.” So said Ian Grayson in his blog post this morning, in which he breaks down the impact of Cloud Computing on employment and the way we work. I wrote back in September about how the cloud is changing [...]
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Rain Makers, The Weather Report
iPad and Kindle Fire: Do They Compete, Or Not?
A couple of months ago we wrote about the rumored release of Amazon’s new tablet and why we believed it stood a chance of taking on Apple’s iPad in the tablet space. None of the others – Motorola, BlackBerry, HP, were able to launch a truly competitive threat, try as they might this year. That’s [...]
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The Delusion of Absolute Performance: Why Business “Success Formulas” Really Don’t Work
Phil Rosenzweig wrote a book called The Halo Effect, which ranks among the most enlightening books I’ve read, ever. It permanently altered the way I view business growth and transformation. I strongly recommend it to anyone who has ever read a “business best-seller” or acted on a management consultant’s recommendation. I first read this excellent [...]
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Looks Cloudy Turns One Year Old Today! And What’s in Store for 2012?
Looks Cloudy went live on December 6, 2010. Our first post was written by Vlad Mazek, the CEO of ExchangeDefender. Here’s a flashback, to quote Mazek in our inaugural post from one year ago today: While nearly the entire IT industry is focused on talking about going to the cloud, the IT Solution Providers that [...]
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Credibility in the Sales Process
What is credibility? Why does a sales person need it? Why does a customer or prospect care about it? Credibility is believability or trustworthiness. The more credible the person or thing, the more worthy of belief and confidence it is. You want your prospects and clients to perceive you as highly credible. This will cause [...]
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Rain Makers, The Weather Report
Apple Getting Set to Storm the Small Business Market: Is This 2011’s Top Story?
It just hit me today that it’s December already. 2011 will be over before we know it. And as I reviewed this morning’s news with that thought in the back of my mind, I also noticed that we in the IT channel (and me here on Looks Cloudy) have spent a lot of time and [...]
