Living Large, Lying, or Laughing

As many of you know I have taken a new position recently. Now I’m not going to use my blog here to tell you how amazing Axcient is from the top down, but I have never been so impressed with any group of people. Instead I’m going to share my thoughts and feelings of jumping into the shark tank.

Axcient has a fairly new partner that has just taken off doing a huge number of placements. They want to bring the entire sales and executive team up to speed to really drive these numbers. Guess who gets to present to them? That is right, yours truly.

Now this doesn’t present much of a problem for me for several different reasons.

1. 1.       I love to present, I can’t wait to get started.
2. 2.       I’m a geek, I have learned a lot about the product technically already.
3. 3.       I came from the VAR space, I know the needs for Backup, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery.

So to sum it up, if you have knowledge, know how to apply it, and like doing it, you can’t miss. Do you take this approach when you sell? I say sell, because even though I’m talking to a partner, I’m selling them on selling us. Everything is sales. Now I didn’t feel this when I was a wet behind the ears technician trying to get all my errands run between service calls…but I learned…I learned.

As I have said before, sales is about confidence. If you have confidence in whatever you are selling, you have just made your sales process much easier. Hardware, software, or yourself.  If you don’t have confidence, why? Which of the elements are you missing?

Repeat after me, I have the knowledge about my solution, I know how my prospect will use it to solve their issues, I believe I will do my best for the client and my employer. If you can say that line without either laughing or lying, you’re living large.

If you aren’t running to get in front of the next new group to talk to, maybe you need to think about a career change…

Go West young Man, Go West.

Horace Greeley is believed to have given this advice to the men of America in an editorial written in 1865, you can read more about it here. Greeley favored westward expansion. He saw the fertile farmland of the west as an ideal place for people willing to work hard for the opportunity to succeed. So do I.

Go West Young Man, Go West!

Those of you who know me, know how important it is for me to be a passionate advocate for the company and product I work for. I have been fortunate to have been in this position over the many years I have worked in the SMB space. The great news is I get to be in that position again.


I am pleased to announce that I have accepted a position with Axcient. For those of you who do not know them, Axcient is one of the leading providers of Data Backup, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery hardware and software. In my role there I will be assisting Axcient and their partners grow their businesses.

Axcient

My position with Axcient may not be a big surprise to those of you who saw I was supporting them at the Autotask Community Live event this June in Orlando. One of the great things about being with the Axcient team in Orlando was getting to see so many people who were my partners with Autotask, are now my partners with Axcient. I expect those relationships to just continue to get better and better.


I am honored and excited to be working with Agent Less and the rest of the team at Axcient, and I’m looking forward to seeing and talking to all of you about them soon. So if you are a current Axcient Partner, please contact me and let me know why you love Axcient. Or if you are someone who should be an Axcient Partner because you need a Backup/ Business Continuity/ Disaster Recovery solution for your clients, please contact me and let me help you understand how Axcient can meet both your, and your client’s needs. 

Monkey in the Middle

Imagine a monkey with a bunch of bananas. Now imagine a monkey with a bunch of bananas trying to defend them from another monkey. I’m sure he would put the bananas behind him and keep his eyes on the other monkey trying to steal his bananas. Well now imagine a monkey with a bunch of bananas and some other monkey friends helping him to try to defend the bananas from another monkey. The first monkey has his eyes on the monkey trying to steal the bananas, but who is watching the monkey friends? This is the problem with IT network security.

I saw an article today written about a security survey provided by Bit9. You can read the story here. There were a lot of interesting numbers in the survey that stuck out to me. Most interesting to me? Nearly 2/3rds of IT security professionals worldwide think Anonymous or another hacktivist group will attack them in the next 6 months, but only 1/3^rd of the same people feel an employee is a likely threat.

It seems to me we are watching the wrong monkeys. Not that we can ignore the “professional hacker”, of course we have to secure the network. Firewalls, NAC, VPNs, all play a part, but later in the article it is reported that only 11% of the security professionals worry about the common attack methods used by hactivist groups. The biggest fear of attack by 62% of the IT security professionals surveyed is targeted attacks. Targeted attacks are things like malware and Phishing attacks.

So unless an IT department is installing Malware, it seems to me that this is being loaded by the end user. So while watching the monkey trying to steal our bananas, and trying to keep our company off the evening news, we let the other monkeys steal our bananas, and put our company on the evening news.

Ford Motor Company used to have a motto in the 80s, “Quality is job one”. Today all companies should have the motto, “Security is job one”. Security is everyone’s job, not just the security division of the IT department. What do you secure? The PCs? The servers? Hardware? Software? I say the data. We live in a world of always on, always connected, always working.

So however we access the data, wherever we access the data, whoever accesses the data, we have to secure the data. Everyone has the secure the data, from the CEO to the janitorial staff. More sensitive data is viewed inappropriately because of passwords on sticky notes or non-shredded business documents than hactivist attacks.

Watch the bananas Monkey, watch the bananas…

Hard and Soft Where?

I had an interesting day in New York City with Axcient, HP, and others at their roadshow. You can follow the link here to see what was going on. I highly recommend you go to one of their roadshows if the opportunity presents itself. 

One of the things I found most interesting was a thought that hit me while Meaghan Kelly with HP was speaking. Meaghan is the VP of Channel Development within the Solution Partner Organization (SPO) and yes, I did have to look that up.

The thought I had was, all hardware needs software and all software needs hardware, anyware, um… anywhere. I know, pass me the Nobel Prize now. So while it isn’t earth shattering, we rarely hear this message articulated by any vendor.  

Software vendors talk software and where you can run it, on premise, or cloud. Whether it was created as SaaS software, or Sassifyed as Justin Moore the CEO of Axcient stated in his keynote.  Hardware vendors talk speed, power, energy consumption, and other specs. Only one vendor really does both hardware and software and talks about the software and hardware as one thing, and that vendor is Apple. This is why I think Apple has done well in the consumer market. Apple can say, “here it is, buy it”, really works there in the consumer market.

Businesses and home users are going to the cloud. That is a given, like global warming. Now we can argue the reasons for both things, but while we are arguing, they are still happening. Hardware is needed to run the software anywhere. On their site, or in the cloud, or in Axcient’s case, both.

It was refreshing to hear two vendors articulate the symbiotic relationship they have and how important it is to their success.