Published this morning…..

Could it be that blogs have become online fodder for the — gasp! — more mature reader?

A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.

“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things.”

Those channels might include anything from social networking sites to others that feature games or video.

The study, released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that 14 percent of Internet youths, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with just over a quarter who did so in 2006. And only about half in that age group say they comment on friends’ blogs, down from three-quarters who did so four years ago.

Pew found a similar drop in blogging among 18- to 29-year-olds.

NMS replaces multiple monitoring systems, reducing complexity while ensuring application performance and availability

Redwood City, Calif. – February 2, 2010 – Nimsoft, Inc., the first provider of Unified Monitoring™ solutions, today announced that Securex is using the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to monitor its entire IT infrastructure. Securex specializes in providing specific expertise, consulting and innovative solutions in all areas of human capital management to individuals, start-ups and self-employed, as well as small, medium and large enterprises.

For the full release……click here

Noticed this yesterday. I don’t know Dev but from all accounts a very impressive leader of Bladelogic and the agent of change at BMC.

Wish him well…

A huge thank you to all our customers and our employees that made 2009 a banner year for Nimsoft.

We put our results release out this morning; some of the highlights….

Over 40% growth in new bookings

We broke the $50m barrier in total bookings

70% growth in recurring revenue

130 brand new logos throughout the year AND fully half of those were brand new Managed Service Provider logos

We did all this while making money – we were cash flow positive every quarter during the year.

Our customers should feel really good about their decision to choose Nimsoft….we certainly feel really proud to have you as our customers and humbled at the success that you have enabled us to achieve so far.

But….there is a lot more work to do. We’ve increased the size of our sales, marketing and engineering teams significantly over the last couple of months….we have a ton of new and enhanced products coming to market this year – pushing this discipline where nobody else is going and driving more and more customer value.

Thank you!

#1 Sharks hockey tonight hosting a number of our customers in the Penthouse.

An airline, a major cloud provider, 2 security vendors, a social networking company, a major telecoms provider, a service provider, an application provider, a major network equipment manufacturer. Wow!

#2 Nimsoft 2009 results will be posted Monday….(hint: they are very, very, very good)

#3 Not traveling next week (so far)

#4 Pay day tomorrow (yes, they actually pay me to do something that I love)

Even after getting off the redeye to Boston, I still think they’ve just got some cool touches – like their cousin Virgin Atlantic.

Speaking today at a symposium hosted by one of our managed services partners – Atrion. Talking about the importance of IT to our business.

Then immediaty back West later today. I may even visit my office tomorrow which will be the first time in a few weeks.

Ooh Apple announcement coming up. Hype overdrive – but I bet it’s worth it. I want one already!

NMS reports on end-user experience in real time to ensure performance and availability

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. —January 26, 2010—Nimsoft, Inc., the first provider of Unified Monitoring™ solutions, today announced Health Dialog, a leading provider of care management, healthcare analytics and decision support, has deployed the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to perform real-time end-user monitoring of its Collaborative Care Center (HDC3) Web-based application. The solution helps ensure performance and availability of HDC3 to a user base of internal and external health professionals who provide disease management and wellness services to over 20 million members.

“Nimsoft offers a single, unified solution for monitoring our mission critical applications,” said Ken Holton, Director of IT infrastructure. “NMS doesn’t take an army to support or require additional infrastructure. It provides us with out-of-the-box end-user response monitoring capabilities that let us hit the ground running. With NMS, we’re getting the information we need to ensure application performance and availability and to take proactive steps to reduce the risk of downtime.”

Holton said Nimsoft was selected for its ease of use, cost-effectiveness and its rich feature set for monitoring Web-based applications. IT staff can experience what application users experience. Holton said, “Being able to see what our users see can make the difference in terms of uptime and productivity for our health coaches.”

“Health Dialog has a significant Web presence with multiple external websites and critical applications,” said Gary Read, Nimsoft president and CEO. “With NMS, they are able to consolidate into a single monitoring solution, thereby reducing licensing costs, hardware and infrastructure while benefitting from the end-user response information they need to keep their external-facing applications up and running smoothly.”

I cannot believe what is going on right now. All of the hard work and effort that everyone has put into Nimsoft over many years is paying off.

I spent the week in New York this last week. I met four of the world’s leading financial services companies in 2 days….every single one of them want to look at our solution.

Why?

Because…they are all looking at the impact of Cloud (private and public) and they are all realizing very fast that their legacy management solutions simply don’t work in the new world.

I spoke to a Financial Analyst this last week as well, he said “6 months ago people were still attaching the hype word to Cloud whereas today, if you don’t have a Cloud strategy then you are already behind”.

Nimsoft is so perfect for this….our future is incredible. But….we’ll always keep the focus on customer satisfaction!

Leading Financial Institution Leverages NMS to Improve Service Levels, Simplify Operations

Credit Agricole Deveurope is a Dutch subsidiary of the French bank Credit Agricole, one of the largest financial institutions in Europe. Credit Agricole Deveurope has deployed the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) across its network infrastructure to monitor systems and applications that serve more than 11,000 brokers. NMS allows Credit Agricole Deveurope to reduce response times to loan inquiries and improve service levels to its customers with around-the-clock, Unified Monitoring.

Read more here

Last chance to get on this amazing webinar featuring 3 CEOs of leading MSPs.

Sign up here

MSPmentor Live: A Top Down Approach to Boosting MSP Sales
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 2:00 PM EST

Webcast Overview:

Whether you’re a small, midsize or large MSP we’ve got you covered. Join us on January 20th at 2pm eastern for this unique event — where three MSPs (representing three different revenue segments) describe their keys to sustainable growth.

Want to push to $10 million (and beyond) in managed services? Our experts have you covered.

Our Guest Experts will include:

-Jason Caras, CEO, IT Authorities, based in Southern Florida
-Tim Hebert, CEO, Atrion Networking Corporation based in Rhode Island
-Oli Thordarson, CEO, Alvaka Networks, based in Southern California
-Phil LaForge, VP and GM, Service Providers, Nimsoft
-Joe Panettieri, EVP, Editorial Director, Nine Lives Media Inc. (as moderator)

Topics Covered will include:

1. Aligning managed services to improve your customers’ business (translation: pushing beyond the IT benefits of managed services)
2. Proving your worth to your customers (through customer portals, dashboards and other visual techniques)
3. Unified Monitoring (the move to a single dashboard for monitoring all on-premise and cloud systems)
4. Your questions answered throughout the webcast

Given that this is not available until Q2 2010, why would BMC announce this today?

Pretty obvious to me…..they are getting their lunch eaten by certain other players in this space and they need to get some marketing spin out there to stop the rot.

But…just like with IBM’s strange announcement of Tivoli Live, you have to question whether these vendors really get it or whether this is just jumping on the band-wagon.

The beauty of SaaS is….simple to use products, very low services, subscription based pricing but scalable to the largest Enterprise.

Tivoli tell us there is a maximum of 500 managed nodes on their Tivoli Live offering, an upfront installation fee and….the head of Tivoli said that customers can be “up and running in 7 days” (Nimsoft customers are wondering what takes IBM so long). Of course they limit it to 500 nodes, because they are scared of cannibalizing all that services revenue from the real Tivoli.

Face it guys, you cannot take overly bloated products that have been designed to drive huge amounts of services revenue for you over the years, make them hosted and suddenly claim SaaS – it just doesn’t work that way.

My prediction – just like IT Director, Tivoli Director, Tivoli Express….this will have zero impact.

For Remedy as SaaS….zero impact.

It’s just marketing.

Sales kickoff progressing well.

Tremendous amount of training for our sales and technical team around Cloud; I’ve got to believe that we’ve got the best educated field team in the management space around new architectures for IT and businesses.

Fair amount of social activity going on as well….but that will stay in Vegas.

Meanwhile, take a look at this link.

Amazing….I can use a slider bar on a web site to tell them what my server should look like.

Another Nimsoft customer that’s leading the way with Cloud technologies.

Monday we saw CA acquire SLM provider Oblicore. Looks like CA is starting to make moves around managing Cloud?

Tuesday we saw VMWare acquire Zimbra, looks like VMWare are going up the stack in the services that it can provide to its customers.

Wednesday we saw HP and Microsoft form an alliance around Cloud. Now, did I read something wrong or did the announcement state that HP would be bundling MS Systems Center on to their servers? I think I read that and if I did, it’s the clearest indication yet that selling management software is a much lower priority to HP than selling more hardware (but then we already knew that right?)

Thursday will see Nimsoft announce it’s sales kickoff meeting…..only kidding but yes, sales kickoff starts in exactly 4 hours from now. Our theme this year is “Welcome to Tomorrow”. The summary slide of my opening presentation says:

“It’s a special time, we are at a special company, maximizing that opportunity is down to us”

We’ve managed to “catch up” our website with the product reality – the new solutions section is up and running today.

Take a look at www.nimsoft.com/solutions

Much better reflection of what we do and much more visually appealing as well.

Feedback would be great. Anything broken? Any other improvements?

Well, what a surprise!

Hot on the heels of HP winning last year’s award for the vendor that was replaced most often by Nimsoft (they came second this year), this year’s winner is Microsoft.

That may come as a surprise to some (and was initially to myself as well) but, when you think about it, Microsoft are dumping SCOM into every account that they can, and many times as part of an unrelated ELA. So, customers get SCOM whether they want it or not, then they try and use it and realize that it’s time to buy a serious solution.

HP came a close second, and if we looked at the $$ value of maintenance that we replaced then I’m sure HP would have won. Some very large replacements – customers telling us that HP support is very poor.

Interestingly, while we didn’t replace IBM that many times (although we did some VERY high profile replacements), we actually competed and beat IBM more times than any other of the Big-4.

But….the real story is that over half our new customers in 2009 were upgrading from low end solutions. Open Source, Nagios, Solarwinds etc. These customers that “hit the wall” with these limited solutions and yet are looking to grow their business…..Nimsoft is a perfect home.

For MSPs, Dell took the award with 7 large replacements of its Silverback platform.

Reducing cost, increasing capabilities, moving to cloud, scaling your business, growing revenues….Nimsoft is your management solutions provider.