Back By Popular Demand: Three More Common Questions About ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange, And How To Handle Them

Last week we presented the four most common questions or objections about ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010, and some advice for how to turn those objections into more reasons for the client to say yes. As I said then, we want all of our partners to be successful.

Over the years we’ve worked with many thousands of partners, some who have sold a lot of our products and at least as many who haven’t sold many…or any at all. The experience of many years and many partners illuminates important patterns, trends, and some critical lessons about how those who succeed at selling our Hosted Exchange services do so.

In other words, we’ve learned a couple of things from our partners about how to sell our own solutions, and we realize that sharing these lessons might help more partners find more success. So it makes sense to share them.

First, the same questions and objections seem to pop up time and again. Second, the way that you address them can mean the difference between closing the deal and losing it. The first installment about objections got a great response, so today we’ll address three more common questions that your prospects are going to come up with as they consider whether or not the solution is right for them. They’re more “How does it actually work?” questions than true objections, but you’ll get them all the time. And the way you answer is still very, very important.

So here they are:

1) Do they read all of my email?

No. The reality is that the staff in our data centers where the email is kept, while they are managing the hardware administering the services, does not have access to message content. The data is encrypted when it’s transmitted, it’s encrypted once it arrives in the data center, and as I already mentioned, data center staff never has access to it.

This question should tell you that your prospect or client is a little bit privacy-conscious, or perhaps very privacy-conscious. It’s a question that should lead you to inquire more deeply as to why they are concerned with privacy.

2) Are they backing my email up?

Not exactly, or in the traditional sense of “backup.” But Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 comes with ExchangeDefender built in, including compliance archiving capabilities and Live Archive, which enables you to access a year’s worth of your messages at any time, if anything goes down, so clients always have access to their important messages.

3) Is my email going outside the US?

No. Further, it’s only managed by US citizens in the USA under standard SEC disclosures. To be more accurate, mail is limited to its geography. If the client is in Australia, their email stays in Australia. In the UK, it stays in the UK. All in accordance with the specific regulations in each unique location.

As with the question about whether anyone else is reading their email, it’s important to step back and find out why this matters to them. Often the answer is a really important business consideration you’ll be very glad to know about.

There are a few more security-oriented questions we get quite frequently, which we’ll be addressing in another blog written by the technical team. Stay tuned for that, coming up – the guys will be bringing some great talking points to explain to clients how cloud security works to keep email even more stable and secure than clients could on their own servers.

Do you find this information useful?

If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Sincerely,

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

“Find a Need, Fill a Need.” Is this the right way to go to market?

Companies invest a lot of time, money, and resources into the creation of their products and services. Yet, these valuable resources usually dive deeply into how their product works or what its function is – while often ignoring or rather wrongly focusing on how to attract clients to what they are selling. This is where marketing plays its role.

Any outreach that comes into contact with a prospective client in any way, shape, or form is performing a marketing function. The question is, do companies know how to perform marketing functions in a way that accurately represents their organization while effectively reaching their target market?

My hope with this post is to paint a vivid picture of the difference between a client’s needs and wants and also layout some common problems or challenges that businesses face while trying to figure out the best strategy that they should use when marketing to their client base.

Let’s start with the idea behind the title of this post…

“Find a need and fill it – Is this really the key to successful marketing?”

In the past, businesses were built on satisfying customer’s needs.  While this is still the case, however, now, it’s more about customer’s wants.  The real question is if people actually understand what they need vs. what they want?

Need – Loosely defined as something that is necessary for survival.

Want – Loosely defined as a wish, craving, demand, or desire for something.

Many needs can be translated into wants when the right message is sent to consumers. People may not need to get the latest brand new thing, but they want to feel that sense of security, excitement and success that goes along with having something shiny and new to show off.

As with everything in life, there are always multiple opinions on theories or ideas and marketing is no exception. Just because some marketing advice is repeated often, doesn’t necessarily make it true or applicable in all situations especially in business. I both agree and disagree with this statement and will explain why.

“Find a Need, Fill a Need”

If you follow the “find a need and fill it” marketing strategy you will be inviting commodity pricing. Think about this… People need a computer network set up … but they want someone who understands their business, and that will suggest things to make it run smoother before an outage occurs.

People price shop for what they need. Most things that people need have multiple alternatives and competition in the marketplace. Therefore, people tend to buy things that they need based on cost by going for the most cost-effective option. Alternatively, people will pay premium prices for things that they want without even thinking about it. Take Apple for example, Apple understands that people will buy what they want regardless of the price that they have to pay to get it. There is a certain allure and sense of satisfaction when purchasing something that one wants. The “Find a need and fill it,” approach is great for getting in the door with a client, particularly if you’re the first to knock and their need is urgent…nonetheless, that approach may not always win you the client or retain the long term business that you are inevitably going for. After that point is when you market to clients based on their wants.

People will pay for the intangible things – are you proving these?

“Find a Want, Fill a Want”

On the flipside, if you follow the opposite “Find a want, fill a want” strategy it could lead a new marketing revolution for your company. Of course there is always a process in finding both needs and wants, it is essential that both be filled. To fill a need is not just about filling the gaps but to really provide a solution – and a lasting one at that – thus creating a long-term revenue stream. To satisfy your customers you must both fill the need and keep your customers happy by giving them want they want. But the trick to this is…When finding what they want; you can turn that want into a need by offering the solution to their problem. Think about Technology.  Everybody NEEDS it, but if a company also provides stellar support and excellent customer service, you fill the need and also provide a premium service making it a want and therefore more attractive to a prospective client.

How do you find your customers’ needs?

It is not always easy to find one’s needs. Watch for trigger phrases from your clients – People will rarely say that they need your product or service. What they will do, however, is lament the lack of something, or talk about a specific problem or even state an aspiration for something. For example, Instead of a customer saying “I need some new accounting software” they will say something like “I can’t ever get a handle on my receivables.” This then will open the door for you to offer a solution to their problem thus making your offering both a want and a need for them. Also, this will make your company stickier to your clients because you will be providing them with more than just a commodity that the “next guy” could offer them. They will find value in your offering thus making client retention much easier.

ExchangeDefender’s Approach

At ExchangeDefender, we go to market with both strategies in mind – filling needs AND wants. For example, ExchangeDefender’s LiveArchive product is an enterprise-grade business continuity platform that lets you resume work right where you left off if the Internet connection was interrupted or other technical glitches got in the way of getting things done. The best part of all is that LiveArchive is always on, constantly archiving your sent and received mail, so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage. So, when doing marketing for LiveArchive we market it as a feature that you want to have to make your offering more attractive to your prospective clients and it will most definitely be something that you need in the event of an outage. We look to fill the essential needs of our clients while also providing them with intangible things that they want like, great customer service and technical support, and also the intangible satisfaction of knowing that if an outage were to happen that they will already have business continuity built-in and in place that they can rely on when they need it.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is very “cloudy” because there is not a right or wrong strategy. The bottom line with marketing is that people buy and will continue to invest in products and services that solve their problems. People don’t necessarily buy something just because they need it or want it. Naturally, price, or ‘value’ will always be an issue with most people but if you have the best solution to solve their problems, then price will be much less of a concern. The goal should always be to create win-win situations for both you and your clients – so find your niche and protect it!

How can I help?

Please let me know if there is anything that I can do in terms of helping you about with marketing.  We have a ton of resources to offer our partners including marketing collateral so please take advantage of that and don’t hesitate to contact me!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP, Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

Tips For Handling The Four Most Common Questions And Objections About ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange

We want all of our partners to be successful. Over the years we have worked with many thousands of partners, some who have sold a lot of our products and at least as many who haven’t sold many…or any at all. Just as you’re interested in the differences between the clients who spend and those who don’t, we’re very interested in why some partners consistently close new business and some don’t. The experience of many years and many partners illuminates important patterns, trends, and some critical lessons about how those who succeed at selling Hosted Exchange are doing so.

In other words, we have learned a couple of things from you, our partners, about how to sell our own solutions, and we realize that sharing these lessons might help more partners find more success.

First, the same questions and objections seem to pop up time and again. Second, the way that you as the VAR or MSP address them can mean the difference between “don’t call us, we’ll call you” and “where do I sign?” Here we humbly present the four most common questions or objections about ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010, and some advice for how to turn these objections into more reasons for the client to say yes today.

1) Why should I get this?

This one’s pretty interesting, because the answer should have been made clear in your presentation that showed how ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 addresses their business issues or challenges. For example, downtime and support costs when email goes down are common issues that the solution addresses, so the reason that a business with downtime problems should get it would be to reduce downtime and the costs for email, and take that worry or cost off their mind and their books. The answer will differ for every business of course, but it will lye in the benefits that ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 will provide them.

2) How is this different from what I’ve got?

Rather than actually pulling a “Ben Franklin” here, breaking down a line by line comparison of our solution versus their current solution, what you really want to do is go back to a key problem or issue that they told you about, and pick a feature or benefit comparison to highlight. Discuss a point where their current solution is falling a little short, or is maybe too expensive, or is unnecessarily complicated for what the business needs, and then focus on some differences there relative to what makes ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 the better solution for the business.

3) How does this compare to the other really cheap thing?

It depends on specifically what the other really cheap thing is, but what you want to do with this one is focus on the value of a business-class solution. The free or really cheap hosted email alternatives out there are usually not designed for a business, or are designed with very limited features. Maybe there’s no support, maybe there are compatibility issues with other things running in the environment, no guarantees or recovery options in the event of a disaster. The point is that cheap does not always equal better. A business needs a business class solution, especially a business that depends on its email to run.

4) I don’t have that big a problem and it seems like a lot of money.

A question like this is an indicator that there’s been a breakdown somewhere along the way in the value escalation process. Your job is to help the client connect the dots, to see exactly how ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 will help make their lives and business better, and if you go through all of that in your discovery and presentation process, and then get this question afterward, you clearly lost them somewhere. The dots aren’t really connected, so the answer to this question should involve going back and re-affirming the client’s biggest challenges and the connections.

If you hear that it seems like a lot of money, that’s just another way of saying that the value they see in the solution doesn’t offset what it’s going to cost them to get it, so you need to go back and remind them, build up some more of those benefits.

Do you find this information useful? 

If you would like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Sincerely,

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

Improving the Compliance Archive Core

This week has been dedicated to improving the core mechanics behind our Exchange Defender Compliance Archive software and increasing the functionality it offers. This product was originally designed over two years ago, with limited functionality. This product has definitely been one of the more challenging software platforms to design and implement on a large scale. However, it’s been a very enjoyable program to design and launch. This week has been very productive and we have got a lot of new features and new tools to talk about!

· Misc. rending issues have been resolved.

· Elevated domain level access.

· Message download (.msg format).

· Import Tool ( Still being developed )

One of the biggest challenges when creating front-end GUI browser software is getting things to look and respond the same way across several browser platforms. It seems (chrome, Mozilla, opera, IE) all have their own recipe when it comes to rendering different component. One of the first issues we addressed this week was minor rending issues, increased performance and logic loops for displaying messages in the browser. None of these were huge issues, but an eye sore none the less.

We’ve had this request for a while and we finally implemented (Elevated Domain-Level Searching). This new feature allows domain admins to examine messages inside any user’s mailbox that is within the selected domain. Using this feature, you have full control inside of that mailbox just as if you were signed into that compliance mailbox. However, there is currently no way to wildcard search all mailboxes within the same domain at the same time. The processing load that would generate would be tremendous and would not be a pleasant searching experience.

One of the more elaborate features, (at least behind the scenes) is message downloading. In the past you could download messages in .eml format, which left a lot to be desired. Well, we’ve changed that this week. Now when you request a message download, it will generate the file in .msg format! Looking at this from a developer’s perspective and for anyone who has ever worked with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook controls will understand the heartache in this area of development. The control exposes a lot of information, if you just want to look at elements and examine a message contents. However, the second you want to use the component to perform any useful operations that’s when it becomes a challenge.

The last and most important area of concern was importing mailboxes into the compliance system. This is something we’ve been working on and it should be ready in a few weeks. We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress with this tool and are very excited for its launch. When designing this tool, we’ve put message integrity at the top of the list. Some of the concerns we had about this software was handling duplicate messages and keeping them from being inserted into the archive mailbox. We also added the ability to handle program/internet crashes while messages are being imported and the ability to resume the import process.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com

Upselling Downtime–How to Properly Position Business Continuity

Let’s just face it – downtime happens.  In the past three months almost every major cloudy service, from Microsoft Office 365 to BlackBerry, Amazon Web Services, the Sony Playstation Network, and Netflix, has suffered an outage for one reason or another.  There’s no reason to try to hide this reality when you try to sell hosted solutions to your clients.  It makes more sense to set an accurate expectation that a reasonable amount of downtime is to be expected, then to help them decide whether they can accept it or what they could do about it.  It’s a bit like “under promise and over deliver” with a twist, and it can often help you to upsell a higher value solution. 

Costs and Benefits

Purchase decisions are all about a cost/benefit comparison, and always will be.  What clients seek when making cost/benefit comparisons is very simple:  good enough.  Most want neither the bottom of the barrel, nor the top of the line, but a solution somewhere in the middle that addresses their core needs at a reasonable price.  As your client’s Trusted Technology Advisors, you get to give that “Goldilocks advice”—what’s too little, what’s too much, and what’s just right. 

Often email and messaging are among the most important services to a business, tools they depend on every day.  With hosted messaging solutions from ExchangeDefender, you can help to protect your clients from suffering downtime their business can’t afford.  Downtime can be the key to upselling a client from Exchange 2010 Essentials to Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010.  It’s just a matter of finding out what’s “good enough.” 

The Power of Good Enough

In many cases clients are willing to trade off a few features or accept a lower service level for the benefit of a lower price, but only to a point.   The question becomes:  how important is email to the client’s business?  How much downtime can they afford?  An hour?  A day?  Can that client justify the cost of guaranteeing that their email will always be available? 

If the possibility of an occasional bout of downtime isn’t the end of the world to the client, and they really just need a secure email-and-only-email solution, then Exchange Essentials 2010 is the right fit.  With a cost difference of a mere $4 per mailbox per month, though, it can be quite easy to upsell the LiveArchive feature of Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 to those clients who cringe at the thought of prolonged downtime. 

With Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 from ExchangeDefender, the Live Archive service is always on, constantly archiving sent and received mail so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage.  So let’s say the power goes out at the client’s office.  With Live Archive, all those users have to do is go home and log on to their secure Outlook Web Access portal and pick up work right where they left off.  The cost of the outage just dropped to almost nothing. 

Help to protect your clients from downtime they can’t afford by setting accurate expectations about the reality of downtime, and by offering them the right ExchangeDefender solution to meet their real needs. 

Do you find this information useful?

If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more. 

Sincerely,
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

The Persuasive Power of Discounts and Trials

With the holiday season quickly approaching, people start to browse the web for sales and deals. Being in marketing, I couldn’t help but notice and think about all the different techniques and approaches that move prospective clients further along in the purchasing decision. This is one of the most important areas that we as marketers and business minded people can and should focus on when marketing to potential clients.

The purpose of this article is to shed some light on ways to attract clients to your service and get them to go further into the buying decision.  Another reason is to give you ideas as to how you can position your products and services and more attractively offer them to your client base.

Market Discount Trends

Currently, the marketplace is experiencing a growing trend in sales and marketing promotions. Recently, there has been a high success rate with promotions that offer free trials and discounts.

There are two types of sales and marketing promotions that are growing trends that I see success in the marketplace is quite often a free trial and offering discounts. Online vendors are beginning to offer a 7-day or 30-day free trial of a product or service. When signing up for an offer, you are asked to enter your credit card information. Upon trial expiration, you are then charged the full amount for your product or service. That is how they get you – and hook you in! Typically people end up liking the service that they are testing out and do not cancel the trial…so in this regard it is a good way to draw people in and actually get them to use the product or service. Many services are subscription based too, charging your credit card a recurring fee and subscription sites are a great way to deliver information and provide a great deal of value for both the buyer and seller. Companies are providing free trials to allow you to experience the product or offering before any actually exchange of money takes place. Those who continue on with the product or service are more loyal and better informed about what they are buying.  Discounts are also very beneficial when a client is cost conscious or bringing on a large volume.

So now the question to ask yourself is how I can apply this methodology of a free trial or discount to my own products and services?

Think about the products that you are currently marketing or selling. Is there a way to give your prospective clients a sample of what you offer them? Free trial for a month of service?  Free trial of consulting services or technical support? Free marketing materials? Free training sessions? Discounts on a service? These actions will help to get your clients hooked on your product by making it a more attractive offer to start with the service and by showing them that you want to help.

On a side note, free trials are not ideal for every company or every product. However, they do force you to reconsider how you expose your products and services to your target market. Rethinking the value of a trial can help boost your marketing to the next level. The key is to experiment with different offers, discounts, trials, etc. and see what works for both you and your clients. You should measure how many prospective clients partake in the initial offer and then show interest in the upsell or continue to purchase services. It is very important to focus on customer value, not just the initial purchase price or getting the sale and promotions can help to accomplish that.

How can ExchangeDefender help?

Since ExchangeDefender offers you a free 30-day trial on new services and discounts on services, it is easier for you to do the same to your clients!

Currently, at ExchangeDefender, in addition to our normal free trials, we are introducing a new promotion for Exchange 2010 Essentials and also ExchangeDefender Compliance Archiving.  Any accounts that our partners sign up during that promotional period with the corresponding coupon code will receive Exchange 2010 Essentials for $5.99/mailbox and thus far the promotion has been wildly successful, for both our company and in turn our partners!

Action Plan
– Visit our Promotions Center to stay up to date with all of our current and upcoming promotions that are available to you!
– Contact me for any help with marketing collateral or visit our Marketing Center.
Also, we always offer free 30-day trials for all of our products that you should take advantage of. This is very appealing for our partners because they get to try out a service and are then more apt to continue using the service. I would guess that about 99.999% of the people who sign up for trial accounts end up keeping them. These are all promotions that you could use with your clients. Remember some people just need a little push to do something…so help make the decision for them – Offer a discount or trial!

Let me know if or how you are using free trials and how successful they are for you! As always, please let me know if there is anything that I can help with!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP, Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

New Bloggers Better Communication

Happy Monday folks, Vlad here with something very exciting to share with you regarding this blog. As some of you may know, I run an extremely successful personal blog on which I cover topics relevant to the industry, technology and day-to-day joys of owning a business. Far more people follow that blog than this one and even internally, it is followed to see which products are coming out, what we’re working on and what different sides of ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy and so on are up to.

The exciting news today involves the announcement that we’re aggressively expanding this blog to include ExchangeDefender VP’s that actually work on the products, services and you!

The subject areas will include support, technical development, product updates, marketing, community and even business development advice.

One of the main reasons my blog is so successful is because it connects the dots. Even when we look at our most successful partners we find that they are plugged into our support NOC blogs, that they integrate Shockey Monkey with their PSA, that they rely on our marketing collateral and that they communicate with us as they build their business. Why are they successful? Because we build our business model around things that make sense. So as our partners perfect their model using our services, we perfect our services using our partners feedback. It’s a progressive cycle and we all win.

It’s my sincerest hope that you tune into this blog and follow it.

Send your employees to http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog and tell them to put it on their list.

We will soon add a podcast to sum it all up.

Honestly – I know what you’re thinking. It seems like it’s a huge time commitment. It is. But I can tell you with 14 years of company history as evidence that the returns are much higher than the investment.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
(407) 536-VLAD

Massive Network Infrastructure Updates

Over the course of the next few days Own Web Now Corp will be undergoing massive upgrades to our network infrastructure across our Dallas and Los Angeles data centers. We will take every precaution to limit service interruptions and while all maintenance will be performed well outside of business hours, many users will not even notice any issues as upgrades are being made to redundant systems.

Even with the best plans and best intentions, there can be brief service interruptions as we go along. We will continue to communicate with all of our clients and partners here: http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

9 PM EST – ExchangeDefender in Los Angeles will be receiving new processing clusters for mail logs, inbound and outbound mail as well as LiveArchive.

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Noon – ExchangeDefender in Los Angeles will receive a new redundant LiveArchive network to improve geographic redundancy of our business continuity systems.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Midnight EST – Power maintenance. We will be upgrading our power feeds, PDUs and UPS infrastructure across ExchangeDefender, hosting and more. We anticipate the work to be completed by 9AM EST.

Saturday Noon EST – ExchangeDefender inbound network upgrade. We are adding 25% more capacity to compensate for the growth in subscriber base.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

3 AM – 8 AM EST – ExchangeDefender will introduce geographic redundancy to our encryption, web file sharing and inbound mail routing capabilities.

All of these enhancements have been on the drawing board for months but were obviously reprioritized after the outage our Exchange 2010 network experienced in August. We moved extremely aggressively to make sure we provide a full geographically redundant network. Yes, experiencing one outage in 10 years related to power is not bad but we expect 100% uptime and this upgrade will help assure it.

To reiterate: We expect to minimize any issues and all maintenance will be done well outside of business hours. To stay informed stay tuned to http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc or @xdnoc

ExchangeDefender USA cloud outage incident report

Dear Own Web Now Partners & Clients,

At approximately noon yesterday the data center hosting the hub of our US operations suffered a major power failure that momentarily interrupted all network services. More redundant services resumed operations immediately (ExchangeDefender) while others started recovering through emergency systems around 5 PM EST. We are incredibly sorry for the impact this has made on your operations and promise not just to compensate you through service credits but also enhance service redundancy so that this never happens again.

On behalf of the whole ExchangeDefender team, I am sorry we put you into this situation. Much like you we’ve spent a part of yesterday in the dark with no clear ETA on when the services would be restored or how this failure could have happened in the first place.

The facility that our main US operations are in boasts N+2 redundancy, over 30 days of generator fuel and is one of the largest and most reliable in the world. As a matter of fact, we consolidated our central operations here due to the issues we had in California and Florida. The facility has had an incredible service record and has allowed us to provide the same level of service to you. Yesterday the facility experienced a failure in Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) equipment designed to switch the power feed from live utility power to the power generators in the event of power loss. This was the piece of equipment that was designed to keep power available and while it is also redundant with A/B feeds, the data center distribution routers were not connected to both power banks. While our equipment remained powered on, the network connectivity remained down. This was the technical root of the issue.

Thankfully spare ATS was available and the utility, data center and supporting vendors were all available on site within the hour and completed the replacement within 5 hours of the service interruption. We did our best to keep everyone informed of everything we knew every step of the way through our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ExchangeDefender) and our Twitter @xdnoc and @ExchangDefender.

Our operating procedures also call for use of emergency failover systems should the primary systems be down for more than 4 hours. At roughly 3:30 we began restoring services to our web sites, redundant Exchange clusters and continued restoring services well into the night as the data center facility restored full operations.

ExchangeDefender inbound service was not affected by this incident as it’s massively redundant through multiple data centers. However, a disruption to the major central control in Dallas effectively flooded the failover sites and some of our partners reported email delays from minutes to even two hours. Worse, our Exchange hosting clients were impacted for 4-6 hours and with the lack of ExchangeDefender LiveArchive to back them up, it completely failed them. Again, we are sorry for this issue and will address it immediately.

At approximately 10PM EST I held a webinar for all our partners to explain in detail what happened, how we responded, what we learned and what we intend to do to fix it going forward. You can watch the webinar here (requires GoToMeeting codec)

Going Forward

First of all, we will be providing service credits to everyone that was affected which includes our entire USA client base.

Second, we will begin deployment of redundant control systems for ExchangeDefender: placing additional admin servers across our failover sites, adding more capacity to the existing ones and most importantly providing geographic redundancy to ExchangeDefender LiveArchive.

Finally, we will be adding redundancy to our Exchange 2010 networks in USA.

Expect to see major changes this quarter. While this issue never occurred before and we don’t expect it to occur again, we have learned the hard way that we need to greatly improve certain areas of the product in particular LiveArchive.

Personally, I put my name and reputation on the product and on the service we deliver. I believe we are the best and the solutions that we offer in LiveArchive and ExchangeDefender feature-wise are without comparison. We will make sure that all of the features, not just the inbound mail processing, live up to the 100% uptime expectation you should have and we have maintained on our inbound service for the past decade.

My staff has worked tirelessly throughout the day and night to keep you informed and restore service as fast as possible. I want to personally thank you for your professionalism and the way you treated us during this difficult time. While it’s easy to lose composure and patience when services are down and there is limited visibility/ETA on resolution, almost universally the comments included “Well that sucks but I’m glad it’s you dealing with this and not me.” While I appreciate it, I do feel we failed you.

Our operations will remain in Dallas at the existing data center facility because simply put – they are the best. Even with the power incident which was the first one that we’ve experienced in nearly a decade of working with them, this is the kind of an issue Microsoft, Google and Amazon experience on a weekly basis. Cloud services are about providing an affordable IT solution through massively scalable equipment which is incredibly complex – it is not foolproof nor easy to fix when it goes down but the benefits are that you and your clients are not on the hook for a repair bill, equipment or the amount of manpower required to manage it all. Best of all, problems such as those experienced yesterday can be minimized and we will begin to work on that today.

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and your clients. I know we are fortunate to earn your business and the trust you put in us and our features that are designed to keep you up and running when your systems are affected. I’m attaching some resources that you can pass on to your staff or your clients as you see fit. I look forward to talking to everyone that was affected by this and while I work my way through the messages, emails and callback requests I hope the videos and resources we provided so far offer some clarity as to what happened and what we intend to do next.

Thank you for your business.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO Own Web Now Corp

Resources:

ExchangeDefender NOC: http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc

XD Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/xdnoc

ExchangeDefender Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/exchangdefender

Partner Webinar about the incident: http://www.ownwebnow.com/media/Cloudpocalypse.wmv

ExchangeDefender 7 Upgrade

In a few moments we will begin the upgrade of our network to ExchangeDefender 7. The process will be seamless to our users and we don’t expect any issues. We are prepared for the unexpected issues and here are some suggestions:

1. Sign up for the Network Operations Blog updates (http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc)

2. If you don’t like web / RSS feeds, check out our Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/XDNOC)

3. Make sure you have distributed the User Guides to your end users so they can navigate the new User Interface. Link to end user collateral is here.

During The Upgrade

Check the NOC first (web / @xdnoc). We will be posting updates there and to the Twitter feed as soon as we identify and document a bug.

If you see an issue that has not been addressed, open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com

Call us at +1 (407) 209-3276 if the issue is urgent. Note: This number will be discontinued after the launch on June 1, 2011.