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General

General

Earlier today we sent a newsletter announcing the launch of ExchangeDefender 7, the integration between Shockey Monkey and Kaseya as well as the educational content that we’re creating for everyone looking to get to the cloud.

Unfortunately, one line caught the eye of many of you:

“Over the past month and a half we have been working with so many of our partners on ExchangeDefender 7 that I’m really sad this will be the final newsletter as Own Web Now Corp.”

Apparently, some of you stopped reading at that point Smile

Allow me to explain: Over the past 2 years we spent significant resources into promoting and marketing ExchangeDefender. It is the backbone of our communications infrastructure, business continuity as well as our biggest and most popular product. Everyone we talk to knows about ExchangeDefender, nobody knows about Own Web Now Corp.

So we’re rebranding and retiring Own Web Now Corp and going forward will consolidate our brands and sites under ExchangeDefender. This has been announced at a number of blog posts and previous newsletters so I feel silly having to state it here again but for the record, we’re not going out of business.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

ExchangeDefender General

Later this week I will be sending invitations for an exclusive webinar covering ExchangeDefender 7. We will be doing a preview on March 17th, beta the week after that and full ExchangeDefender 7 release roughly 2-4 weeks after that depending on how broken things are. The beta window is very open and we will not ship it until it is perfect.

I, however, wanted to offer you a direct update on how things are going at Own Web Now because we are getting a ton of praise but also some concerns about the changes we are making and how the marketplace in general is developing. In particular, I wanted to address the areas of our service that are not perfect and what we are doing to address them:

1) Phone Support – The good news is that we have a lot of new staff to help you around the clock. We also have more personnel dedicated to the portal operations and one frustration many of you have experienced is our VoIP service. There have been reports of bad call quality, extensions not working, phones ringing dead in Australia and so on. We’ve made adjustments to all of these areas and I hope you’ll start to see significant improvement here.

2) NOC Alerts – We have been asked over and over again to provide an email feed in addition to the NOC blog postings. I want to make it clear that we will never do that. However, we will soon start delivering service alerts via SMS, online service monitor as well as to your RMM and PSA software. We simply have to have a failsafe way of contacting you and email is just not the way to deliver service alerts. This will probably be the biggest improvement that will come from the Managed Messaging part of our product that will be available across our products.

3) Client Software Support – Typically, this has not been an issue but we have gotten some louder requests for help with Outlook troubleshooting, DNS troubleshooting and connection troubleshooting. This part of the service is not something that Own Web Now is responsible for, workstation side of the management is our service providers responsibility. Since we make all our revenues with our partners, I have always encouraged my support staff to go above and beyond when the partners encounter an issue in the field but there is a limit to that as well.

4) Client Training – This is an area that we will dedicate a lot of our resources to going forward. We (all of us) simply must do a better job helping the clients understand all the failovers and redundancies that are built into the system and how to use them. Anyone that honestly expects a Microsoft environment to be foolproof and have a 100% reliability, respectfully, must not have been around Microsoft software for more than a month. Every month we deal with a slew of security and performance patches released by Microsoft along with a ton of other vendor partners that are continuously releasing security and bug fixes. Keeping this entire infrastructure at an optimal level is a job (for a lot of folks) that work around the clock testing, deploying, managing and addressing problems. Outsourcing the email infrastructure does not mean those problems are eliminated, it just means someone else (Own Web Now) is dealing with them around the clock. We all have a vested interest in helping our clients understand the many failsafes and alternatives in the system and I can honestly tell you that we’ve spent and incredible amount of money to make sure that email is always available.

I appreciate the feedback, good or bad, at all times and encourage you to keep it coming.

We’ve been working extremely hard on ExchangeDefender 7 and the Managed Messaging and all the support infrastructure behind it (Exchange 2010, Shockey Monkey… yes, even SharePoint). I hope you like what you see in 10 days, all but 3 feature requests have made it into ExchangeDefender 7 UI and the feature board is blank!!!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

General

We are very excited to introduce another product to the ExchangeDefender outbound network:

Outbound JR is a new highly-redundant high-speed outbound SMTP network designed to quickly deliver automated messages and system notifications.

The way email is sent and processed has changed over the years as we have become more dependent on it. It is used for conversations, receipts, marketing, monitoring, file sharing and more. The more that people rely on a communication system the more attractive it becomes for spammers and hackers – and SPAM filters that serve to protect those networks.

In the recent years we have seen many email providers adopt an “IP Reputation List” process of filtering SPAM. Protocols such as DCC, Pyzor, Razor and other checksum houses monitor the volume of real mail coming from systems and adjust their SPAM scores according to the likelihood that the message is SPAM. If we only receive SPAM from one IP address we are more likely to believe that the next message will be SPAM as well, so additional scrutiny is placed by organizations that by design don’t trust one another over SMTP.

Technical jargon aside, it has become impossible to assure quick delivery of real mail when it’s accompanied by all the legitimate junk: marketing, newsletter subscriptions, out of office responses, read mail receipts, delivery notifications, etc. Organizations that insist on sending automated notifications at the same time as they carry on regular conversations impact their reputation and can often cause false positives to happen.

The Solution

ExchangeDefender is now offering Outbound JR as an additional gateway for automated mail. This way you can send your notification and system management mail through a different gateway and help improve the IP reputation. By enabling our partners to help clients tie in their systems to the proper way of email delivery, we hope we can improve everyone’s email experience.

What can I not use it for?

You may not use this system for anything that violates our AUP. Outbound JR is not a system that can be used for unsolicited email, junk mail, viruses or any other violation of our Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service.

What can I use it for?

You can use Outbound JR if you need to send:

  • Out of office responses
  • Delivery receipts, read receipts, postmaster notifications
  • High volume email services for network monitoring (Kaseya, LPI, etc) or support ticket notifications (Shockey Monkey, ConnectWise)
  • High volume receipts, mailing lists, distribution groups, web site notifications, event invitations, etc.

Great, what else do I need to know?

First, the implementation. Just change your outbound SMTP relay to outbound-jr.exchangedefender.com

You will notice that this is a redundant network and it is designed for speed. You will still be able to send encrypted email through it and use all the functionality of ExchangeDefender with the exception of LiveArchive archiving of outbound mail. Your inbound mail will still be archived free of charge with LiveArchive, but your outbound mail will not.

This is the compromise we had to make in order to make the system lightning fast.

What now?

Evaluate your usage patterns and start moving your clients to outbound-jr.

We will start contacting our partners that will have to move to this system if they are sending a lot of automated messages or marketing mail to this new system.

We believe this new addition to our portfolio will help our clients with the choice of being able to route system notifications, marketing messages as well as human-to-human email more efficiently.

Thank you for using ExchangeDefender!

Oh, by the way – it’s free. Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

General

Yesterday we held a webcast to announce our messaging portfolio for 2011. If you missed it, the recording along with the webinar and podcast is now available.

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

The biggest news of the day was ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging, combining all the services necessary to go to the cloud in one affordable package. The second biggest announcement was regarding CloudBlock.

Why?

In the past few years we have seen Microsoft and Google commoditize the entire enterprise email solution space. These moves were not welcomed by the reseller channel partners, even as both companies stepped up their efforts to become more partner friendly their primary goal was ownership of the client.

Indeed, many partners have lost clients to BPOS and Google Apps.

Sometimes the price is the only thing that matters. Given the economy, and the relative lack of appreciation for the more complex messaging needs, the low-cost commodity email has become quite popular.

What is CloudBlock?

CloudBlock, Inc is a third-party solution powered by the technology licensed from Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Exchange 2010 hosting management in particular.

It’s primary goal is to be simple to use. It’s secondary goal is to be cost effective.

There are two solutions in the stack: Mail (Exchange 2010 hosted in the cloud) and Security (SMTP security in the cloud, filtering SPAM and viruses as well as providing for business continuity).

Simplicity: Anyone can sign up at any time.

Cost Effectiveness: $2.99 for Exchange 2010 Mbox (5GB) and $0.35 for SMTP security.

What isn’t CloudBlock?

CloudBlock is not a channel-centric solution, it does not come with the flexible branding, centralized multi-client management or worldwide presence. But it’s simple to sign up and it’s cheap.

CloudBlock is not backed by a professional services business, support is limited to covering the basics.

The Strategy

CloudBlock was designed to be simple and cost effective. As such, it will not meet the needs of many channel resellers, MSPs or VARs. However, it provides for a level of differentiation. There is a huge difference between CloudBlock and an ExchangeDefender powered Exchange solution. There are tons of benefits when it comes to working with a local IT Solution Provider.

Unfortunately, sometimes the only thing that matters is the bottom line price. If the client is not willing to consider anything but the price, now you have a differentiation strategy. If you cannot clearly explain the difference between your various offerings, you cannot help your client choose the correct one for them.

When IT Solution Provider is pinned against Microsoft and Google, and the client only cares about the price, it’s a loss-loss situation. With CloudBlock, there is at least a hope of keeping them in your solution portfolio so you can fit your other solutions in their business.

You now have a better alternative to BPOS and Google Apps – it’s simpler and cheaper – and we’re confident we’ll help you win.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

To be continued with ExchangeDefender Essentials. See previous entry about ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging.

General

Earlier today we held a webcast to announce our messaging portfolio for 2011. This solution stack is directly driven by partner feedback and is designed for service providers. Here is an overview, answers to some common questions and some ideas on how to position this.

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

Why?

Before we get to the actual announcement, I want to personally share the feedback that we have received from so many of you that prompted us to consider a change in our business.

  • Many MSPs and VARs found the cloud (serverless) environment “foreign” to their business plans and could not imagine their solution stack existing without the server anchor.
  • Many MSPs and VARs complained that they were confronted by retail offerings that were significantly cheaper than the realistic costs of going to the cloud. Licensing and monthly fees are dwarfed by the migration costs that large cloud mail solutions do not talk about.
  • Nearly all the MSPs and VARs could not fit the cloud in their margin models. Frequent question was “How do we turn hardware margin dollars into cloud margin cents and stay alive?” Sadly, the answer is: You don’t, without overhauling your salary structure and talent.
  • Finally, the client still needed to be managed regardless where the email was. Unfortunately, this too was not a major point of consideration when companies decided to move to the cloud. Cost was.

Unfortunately, MSPs and VARs lost way too much business. I cannot count the number of times that I’ve heard partners talk about losing their clients to Microsoft, or only reaching out to me when they lost their deals to someone in the cloud.

We had to do something. I will agree that our solution is not perfect and does leave a ton of room for improvement, but we needed to act now. Starting with January 1st, we’ll be offering the following solution.

What is included in ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging?

Quite a bit. Actually, everything we do is built in: from security (ExchangeDefender) to email hosting (Exchange 2010 Mailbox, SharePoint 2010 web site) as well as migration, billing and support all under our partners brand.

  • ExchangeDefender
    • Email Filtering (Antivirus, Antispam, Corp Disclaimers & Policies, Reporting, PSA Integrations)
    • LiveArchive (Exchange 2010-powered business continuity solution with 1 year rolling archive)
    • Encryption
    • Web File Sharing
    • Web Filtering
  • Exchange 2010 Mailbox with 10GB Storage
  • SharePoint 2010 Portal
  • Billing & Collections
  • Technical Support
  • Migration
    • DNS modifications
    • Shockey Monkey Remote
    • Profile (email) move

It sounds like a lot but it’s the bare essentials. In the cloud, you cannot abandon your clients – they only pay when everything works. So we wanted to make sure that our offering worked from the day it was configured and continues to work through all the surprises with the Exchange, Windows and other fun stuff in between.

Does this mean Competition?

Not at all.

First of all, we are not competing for this business with our partners, it is only offered as an alternative to our award winning platform that no changes are being made to. So if you’re already happy with what you have, Exchange pricing for you will not change neither will the cost of the service.

Second, we will not market this directly. The partner (MSP/VAR) still owns the client. We will not take the client and reassign them to a partner we like more. We will not allow one partner to take over the service from another partner if the client wants to switch IT service providers.

Finally, we will remain a partner-centric organization. There are no plans or agenda to go direct, partners are still a core part of our market strategy, something we have been building for the past 13 years. This is not a prelude to a bigger, more direct offering.

What does it mean?

It means that we’ve idiot-proofed the cloud.

It means you now have 0 excuse not to embrace the cloud, at least for messaging.

It means that you don’t have to do any technical labor to offer Exchange 2010 or SharePoint 2010, we’ll do all the hard work for you.

It means that you don’t have to establish a full billing and collections process, we’ll do that for you as well.

Most importantly, it means you don’t have to do the hard work – from configuration to migration to ongoing management. We will manage the solution end to end.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time a large service provider and software developer has taken full control of the entire 360 degree service delivery and done so under partners own branding. This is key and a critical differentiator: We are not competing with the partners that made us successful, we’re providing another way to build a business.

Long term, strategic view is even more positive: This helps MSPs and VARs that are uncertain about the cloud a way to start profiting from it immediately. Because it is still your client, you can take over all the responsibilities at the end of the contract and realize even higher profits when you can prove that the cloud can indeed generate significant margins.

Most of the skepticism around the cloud is due to the hype. The rest of it is out of the fear and uncertainty about how to actually go to market and succeed.

I’m proud to say that we are taking a big step with our partners in alleviating a lot of those concerns and helping as many as we can as quickly as we can – we’ll help you win.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

To be continued with ExchangeDefender Essentials and CloudBlock.

General

By now nearly everyone has received an email invitation to attend our Holiday Special webcast to close out 2010 and hopefully make December the busiest month you’ve ever had. We wanted to showcase what we’ve been working for the past two months and give you some tips and tricks to grow your business – proven by our most successful partners.

http://www.ownwebnow.com/Holidays2010/

I’ll apologize for the cheesy newsletter but that’s marketing. Now on to business – following the launch of Shockey Monkey I tasked my team at Own Web Now to reorganize the company. We have done this several times in the history of our business and it’s always dictated by the opportunity and our ability to push our partners in the right (read: profitable) direction.

The problem with any good idea is that the catch usually involves doing a ton of training, reading, videos and hard work. Lots of trial and error – across technical, sales, support and marketing fronts. We have worked hard over the past few months to produce documentation, webcasts, seminars even books on the matter so that you can easily plan your cloud approach, know exactly how long it’s going to take and what it’s going to be. Today, things are a mess – between predictability of service levels, documentation that is clearly understood from level 100 to 300, ability to get a very complex situation evaluated in order to provide a simple answer – simply put, we cannot thrive on complexity in order to grow.

Mark my words: What we have developed is bigger than last years announcement of Autotask and ConnectWise integrations. The incredible amount of work we did to make our platform work with the way you run your business is just the beginning. The question now is – how do you grow what you already have, how do you market and differentiate yourself, how do you reposition yourself and find a real partner in helping build your business?

Recently I asked the readers of my personal blog to tell me how they would go about building an MSP if they got a do-over. Starting an IT business is easier than ever and for the most part it’s a process of assembling solutions from vendors who have agreed to play nice with each other. If it’s so simple, you will be facing a much tougher and much cheaper competition – soon. Combined with efforts made by major software companies trying to wedge and dislodge IT solution providers, now is the time to get serious.

December’s webcast will include our business model for the coming years and an announcement of resources you can take right now. We look forward to building this new business with you.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

General

Allow me to welcome many of you to Orlando for an exciting week of IT conferences.

Tuesday and Wednesday we will be at the HTG All Summit for some lunch and learns, seat at the table and the vendor expo in the evening.

Thursday we’re sponsoring the CharTec UnHerd Conference where we will be all day to give you info about ExchangeDefender, Cloud Service Separation and more.

Finally, on Friday and Saturday we will be at the ConnectWise IT Nation, working the vendor expo and anytime before and after you wish.

We’re spending the whole week there, get in touch with us if you want to chat privately: Stephanie Hasenour (Email | Blog) and Anthony Fernandez (Email | Blog). Vlad Mazek, our CEO, will also be around.

We look forward to talking to many of you and we have something special to share with our partner base. If you actively work with us, we have some prizes and incentives for working even closer with us. Last week Vlad Mazek announced several changes coming to Own Web Now that would give our partners more power and work closer for a win-win. Specifically:

  1. We would like to know which of our upcoming ExchangeDefender features are more relevant to you so we can focus more development efforts towards them and ship sooner than later.
  2. We want to get a general sense of how we are doing, both for marketing purposes and for training purposes (with as big of a product as ExchangeDefender it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks and documentation not to be read)
  3. We want to know what we could do to be more instrumental in your success in the cloud. We have partners that are making thousands of dollars in the cloud with relatively few resources and other partners struggling. We’d like to share the wealth 🙂

If you would like to help us, please come and see us and let’s figure out a more profitable cloud for all of us.

General

Own Web Now owes a lot of it’s success to you – our partners.

Nearly all the features in our products are suggested, sold and conceptualized by our partners who also beta test, document and help us position our products in the marketplace. That has been our secret to success in the marketplace, we don’t try to do it all and as a result we have the insight to what our clients really need. It has made us tremendously successful.

As we continue to grow and offer more solutions we want to both recognize the partners that help us as well as be more diligent about collecting feedback and acting on it accountably. Those of you that have worked with us for years have seen the company mature and fight through the growing pains – so we want to make sure that our next growth cycle is more rewarding and more focused.

We are organizing an advisory council for ExchangeDefender and I invite you to fill out the following survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RPTBRYC

Please fill out the survey and work closer with us on our new projects.

Important: Own Web Now Corp is sponsoring the long list of events in Orlando next week: HTG, CharTec and ConnectWise. I urge you to stop by our booths, collect some swag and see what’s driving our success. I will not be present in my usual capacity (family comes first) but I would love to meet with our partners throughout the week – Monday through Friday. If you wish to meet with me in person, fill out the survey and I’ll gladly sit down with anyone in person that wants to discuss our business.

General

The most frequently asked question by folks I meet with at IT conferences is about the general company activity. What is new? What are you guys up to? Truth is, our most profitable and successful partners work very closely with us on projects, promotions, service upgrades and updates and we certainly have a very open and thorough notification, support, forum and NOC system in the business that is designed to serve it’s partners.

Yet, most partners don’t participate. Unfortunately, you get the most out of your relationship with Own Web Now when you work with us on the entire portfolio of solutions we have. There isn’t much we can do about those who don’t invest in making a close relationship – but we can do a ton to benefit those that do.

With that in mind, I’m proud to introduce you to the OWN Staff Blogs:

Support: The Monkeys’ Tackle Box
Teaching other tech monkeys how to fish, one blog post a time.
http://monkeys.ownwebnow.com

Development: The Monkey Wrench
OWN Development
http://tmw.ownwebnow.com

Marketing: The Marketing Match
Marketing to “match” your business!
http://marketingmatch.ownwebnow.com

Sales: That Sales Blog
http://thatsalesguy.ownwebnow.com

Everything else: The Schism
Work and personal separation
http://theschism.ownwebnow.com

These blogs are written by our teams and people you’ve talked to on the phone, support portal, forums or even met in person at a conference. The content is completely up to them and the opinion is solely theirs and is in no way associated with Own Web Now Corp or it’s many brands.

Typically, the information at OWN, much like any other corporation, is from the bottom up: topics are suggested from interaction with partners, prepared and eventually released here. There is a bit of latency and a lot of consideration when writing stuff on behalf of Own Web Now and it’s partners.

With staff blogs, we hope to change all that. By empowering our staff to talk to you directly, in the manner they consider valuable, we hope to connect you closer to what we do here. We’re all on Facebook, Twitter and we’re very easy to find at nearly every conference and on the phone – so we encourage you to check us out and what we’re all working on.

Every day we come to work trying to make everything we deliver better – faster – efficient. We invite you to take a closer look at how we do it all.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

General

In 2010 we have aggressively addressed every bit of negative feedback and constructive criticism that has been sent our way. We’ve hired additional support staff, improved documentation at every level, improved marketing programs, improved response times, addressed concerns with the software and pricing, opened up forums, improved communications and ship times, literally everything that has been reported has been addressed.

As a result, we’re doing more business than ever and by proxy our partners are doing better than ever.

I want you to know that we are not going to rest.

surveying

As a matter of fact, some of you may already be aware of what I’m about to address: surveys.

For the past few weeks, every support request that has been closed included a survey that was sent a day later.

These surveys are reviewed directly by me and my board.

We expect to hear when things go really good and when they go really bad – and I want you to count on us. We have a long history in the IT solution provider industry and a great reputation that we’ve earned through the years. As we’ve grown we’ve had more than a fair share of bumps and bruises – so again, I want you to count on us because we care and we are going to be aware of every significant or insignificant issue that gets reported.

When things go great – please tell us, teams are rewarded on their performance.

When things go bad – please, please, please, please tell us. We strive for perfection with every interaction.

As we grow and add more services there are going to be challenges – in business the first movers are rewarded and you, as our partner, have to be competitive in order to earn your clients business. You have my promise that we are going to treat you right and put you in a position to win. All I ask is that you work with us and take a few seconds to fill out a survey when things go far in either direction. It will keep us on our toes and assure you get the best possible service.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
(877) 546-0316 x500