Commoditization Commode

What makes you or your company unique? What services or products do you provide that are really different? Have you added products and services just because the other guy has them? What makes you stand out from the herd?

I have noticed a trend in the IT Services/Managed Services space that I find disturbing. Not disturbing like childhood obesity, disturbing like we are making it harder for the consumer to tell us apart. It is a bad case of the me toos… You do that? Me too! You sell that? Me too! You have a widget? Me too!

http://www.zazzle.com/i_hate_thinking_me_too_postcard-239189165718421518

I understand that imitation is the highest form of flattery and if something is working for one vendor in the industry, it should work for another, however... If you are adding a marketing plan, Facebook page, Google+ page, Pinterest, training, or anything else because the other guy is doing it, you need to stop, take a breath, and make a good business decision for your own business.

Maybe following the herd leaders isn’t the right thing to do, and maybe is. They may have discovered the tried and proven path to market. If so, still try and be unique. Do not become a commodity. When you buy milk, do you always buy the same brand? 2%, organic, in a paper carton, but whose? I don’t generally care, and that is their fault for not making me care, or telling me why their milk is better and worth the extra 45 cents a gallon.

So what is the real issue here? Money. It is easy to extract higher profit from a client when you wrap products and services together is an easy to pay subscription model. Unless, brand X seems just like yours and it is 15% less… Once you are perceived as a commodity you will be shopped.

This is the huge trend in IT Services and the rush of products moving into the cloud only makes it easier. Bad news, all the major players are spending millions marketing their solution to your clients via mass media. Your solution is being compared to what they think Microsoft, Cisco, Apple and Google can offer them, how are you different? Better? You better have an answer when your prospects ask you.

Don’t allow you and your company to be flushed with the other companies acting like commodities out there. Know your clients, know your products, know your services, know your costs, and know your uniqueness.

On a Personal Note, Part Two

It was less than 2 months ago that I shared the news with you that I had decided to pursue a new career, leaving Autotask after nearly 6 years to join Bradford Networks.

The decision for me was not an easy one, as I had built many friendships and ties into Autotask, their customers, and the industry, but I felt the need to grow personally and professionally.

The great news was that I would get to build a brand new channel with my friends and peers in the MSP/IT Services space. This was a true win win for me.

The more I explored the needs of the SMB channel for the security features that a NAC solution could offer, compliance checks, guest management, dynamic vLans, etc.,  I saw a huge potential for Bradford and the channel as I have shared with many of you.

Sadly,I am no longer with Bradford.

To say I am disappointed is an understatement. I saw, and still see, such a need, as well as a business case for these solutions in our marketplace and for our customers.

My biggest disappointment? Not being given the chance to fail. By that I don’t mean that I would have failed, in fact I think it would have been a huge win, but the chance. Isn’t that all any of us want? A chance. To win or lose, succeed or fail, but just a chance.

This has left me with a hunger, a feeling of incompleteness that feels worse than failure. I have been feeding that hunger with lessons learned, the good and bad. So as in all things in life, the only path worth taking leads forward.

Now it is time to get back to work and feed that hunger with a new challenge, a new goal, a new position.

When Too Much is Too Bad

Ever wanted less interest in your services? Wish I had that problem too, but it is possible. Have you seen Flipboard today? They released the iPhone version of their product today and it overwhelmed their network.

The Good? People what to use their stuff, or at least try it. People wanting to look at your services and products are not bad...unless.

The Bad. People may be so interested in the idea of using this type of product that they can’t access, they may look for an alternative that will work today.

Way to build you competition's pipeline. Building market awareness is awesome if you are the one filling the orders you generate. Not so good if you are marketing for your entire industry. Can you hear me Cloud providers?

Building awareness is great, closing business is better.

After a Week

Well All, after a week at a brand new position with Bradford what do I have to say? In a word, WOW. Have you ever stepped into a moving clock? If not, watch The Great Mouse Detective. It is a lot like that without Ratigan. I had forgotten what is like to learn a new solution while juggling.

Part 2 of the WOW is what a fantastic team of experts we have in the NAC space. From the Sales amd Marketing team helping our partners drive revenue, to the Support team providing expertise, to the Development team who has put together a product that gives amazing viability and control over the network devices and users, and last but not least, a Management team that will drive growth.

Part 3 WOW? How much the SMB space has been missing. Missing control without having to jump through hoops. Missing reporting for compliance. Missing a solution for ease of  BYOD and guest registration. I used the word missed, but really it was overlooked. Not the SMB space overlooking NAC, but NAC overlooking SMB.

Well no longer. If you are an SMB provider with customers who need compliance, and that means you, there is a cloud based, affordable, 100% channel solution available for you to deploy.

The only thing that stays the same in our industry is nothing stays the same. Providing the best solutions for your clients requires that you stay informed.

On a Personal Note

Those of you who read my blog on a regular basis know this is not a blog where I write about myself. Instead I have always written about lessons I have learned in business or life in a short easy to understand way (I hope). Today’s blog is different.

Today I want to tell you about my decision to accept a position with Bradford Networks.

Bradford Networks is a Network Access Control (NAC) provider that is transforming the market by developing and delivering a cloud based NAC solution for the MSP and SMB space. (http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/cloud)

I was fortunate enough to have a real icon in our industry, Amy Luby, ask me to join her in developing this offering for our channel, and I was honored to accept.

I see this as a huge opportunity to provide our partners a service that has been missing from their managed services offerings. It has been missing from their offerings primarily because this service has not been available in a format or price point for this market. Now it is.

I am so excited about this opportunity and I am looking forward to sharing more information about it with all of you.

Apple of Your Customer’s Eye

Amazing buzz today over the the upcoming announcement by Apple. I have seen several posts by people wondering how Apple is able to get everyone all worked up about their announcement. I look at it another way. I always see the excitement around Apple announcements as a grass roots movement. People are just that much in love with Apples products. I bet you wish your customers felt that way about you. So what has Apple done right to create this and how can you take advantage too? Lets look.

1st
They aren’t Microsoft. They were able to draw a line between them and Microsoft and declare that their side of the line was cooler, less evil, hipper, less corporate, and power to the people. Whether you believe this or not, they have been able to sell it to their customers and society at large. How does this help you? It tells you that you should define your business ethics and lead with them. Make sure the entire company believes, or at least behaves with that philosophy. Make sure your customers see you as Luke, not Darth.

2nd
They limited outside innovation for the sake of control and security. It damn near killed them in the beginning, by limiting outside developers and manufacturers early on. But they had a vision of how they wanted tome products and company to be, and were willing to bet the company on it. They also secured a stronghold in several verticals. Graphic design comes to mind, and we know how many of those people helped build Internet companies. Well played Apple, well played. How do you do this? Have a plan. Don’t blow in the wind and jump for shiny object and dollars. Believe your vision and follow your plan, don’t let the naysayers stop you.

3rd
They understand what their customers want. They see a need, make a product and a market. Till the iPad was released, what was the last tablet you saw? My guess is some clunky laptop with a convertible top. Heavy, slow to boot, hard to use. They defined the market, defined the device, own the market. How do they do that? Superior UI design and styling. Hand an iPhone to someone who just got off a call on their old flip Razor phone and ask them to call someone, they will be able to. It works like they think it should. So how do you do this? Get to know your clients and provide what they need. Not only provide what they need, provide it the way they think it should be provided. you need to work the way they expect you to work, or they will look for a new vendor.

Spotifying the Gap in Your (Social) Life

Spotify took some heat from privacy advocates for the way they were handling the interaction with Facebook. They quickly patched that by allowing you to listen privately. So if you do want to listen to, oh I don’t know, Boy George or “disco hits of the 70s”, you can do so without seeming to be uncool to your friends, real and virtual.

Got me thinking about other things you might do that you might not want a digital trail, but isn’t the lack of a digital trail going to raise a red flag? If you wanted to ditch your girlfriend and go to the football game with your friends, how you going to do that? Even if you don’t check in, tweet, post, take a picture that is geocoded, how you going to stop your friends? Even if you stop them, where did you say you were? Where are the check ins from there? Groupon? Foursquare? Even if you said you were sick, you should have checked WebMD. You my friend, have a digital gap that needs to be filled.

This reminds me of the the way the Russians used to find our quietest subs, by looking for places in the ocean that had no noise. Those areas had no noise because our subs were so quite they made no noise, and so big, they blocked the background noise. We solved that by placing mics on each side of the sub that picked up the ambient noise and broadcast it on the other side of the sub through a speaker. Effectively filling the gap with noise. That is what we need, a gap filler.

So if we, the digital social generation, ever want to do anything cool on a “sick” day again, we had better develop a way to post ambient life noise, or the lack of  a digital trail may get us in trouble.

Circle Share, Not Circle Jerk

An amazing thing happened yesterday, Google+ started allowing the sharing of Circles. This seems like such a small thing, but it has made an amazing difference in the number of people who are getting their message out.

I started following Robert Scoble nearly from day one of my Google+ usage. Robert has many contacts in the IT world and he has shared most of them by sharing his circles. Some people who are in circles he shared, posed that they had 4,000+ new people who added them to a circle, LAST NIGHT.

I am constantly amazed at the unique, high quality information that is posted on Google+. There is information that I find on Google+ that I do not find anywhere else. Today I noticed the difference between my Facebook News Feed and my Google+ Stream.

Facebook was telling me stuff I knew, or would discover, a circle people talking to a small subset of friends, family, and associates. Google+ was showing me stuff I needed to know, unlimited information feeds. What a difference. This doesn’t diminish what Facebook does, but it highlights what Google+ can be. So I look forward to more circle sharing, and less circle jerking.

OnStar, What’s your Facebook Account?

Well not yet, but with the announcement of the agreement with Facebook and Spotify (here), how long can it be? I read the story about OnStar tracking subscribers after the support call has been terminated, read it here. Where does it end?

I’m a full blown social media freak. I love the interaction, I love the way that data fits into more data and then can be shared. I love it when I know about it, but I don’t need my car updating my Twitter account for me if I exceed the speed limit, or pull into a drive through. What is the difference between social media and social tattle tailing?

For me it is sharing verses telling. I can share anything I want. If you know something about me and share, that it is telling. Information is power, power equals wealth, so telling is like stealing. Not steal moments of my life, I’ll share the good parts.

We Ain’t There Yet…

Mashable reported yesterday that Gmail was down for some users. Story HERE. I guess my take is so? I am a believer in internet based services. Software, hardware, infrastructure, anything as a service, in fact I’ll even let you call it cloud. But just because some service I use is not available all the time is not news. The fact that someone thinks it is news tells me, we ain’t there yet. We still think it is a voodoo fad.

Without checking, I’m sure somewhere in the United States today, power, internet, cable, and water are out somewhere. Mashable did not do a story on any of those. Why? Those are accepted technologies. We know, even understand that the cable will go out, we are only really pissed if it is on game day. Being geeks, we might even Tweet that we are upset with the cable Gods, but we don’t question the decision we made to move from over the air network TV.

I would also guess, (without checking), that most companies who switched from an in-house email solution to a hosted solution have had less downtime with their hosted solution, than the reboot time for their previous email solution. My point? We are there, it is time for the media to treat these web based technologies the same as installed technologies.