After a 36-hour travel adventure I have arrived at Phantasialand. No I’m in not Amsterdam, wise guys. I’m in Bruhl about 20 km south of Cologne – the site of webhostingday 2010. Just finished helping the Nimsoft crew with exhibit construction – brute force assigned by Tara.  My role as designated tall guy was brilliantly executed. I do enjoy mindless work from time to time. I guess that’s why I blog.

The agenda for this year’s event is dominated by cloud.  So attendance is off the charts.  Expected 2,000 registrants – got 3,500. There is a great speaker lineup with a bunch of different takes on making money in the cloud. Our own Mark Rivington will be speaking on Thursday in the Confucius Room. The event planners must know Mark well.

Anyway I’ll leave all the smart lines about cloud hype and Phantasialand to the amateur punsters out there – too easy.  I’ll follow up tomorrow after the keynote and first few speakers.

Now we can service more MSPs in more places while taking even better care of our existing customers.Its simple but very elegant math. Moreover we are reporting into the new Cloud and Products and Solutions biz unit – so we can keep doing what we’re doing. Read more about it here: http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=230426

Interesting exchange during today’s Nimsoft MSP All Star Webcast with CRN.I asked our esteemed panelists whether their cloud customers were clamoring for the type of incremental billing that the public cloud guys make such a big deal about – by the day, by the minute,by the second? The answer – absolutely not! What to make of this? Maybe customers want predictability in billing – they don’t want to live with the ups and down of perfectly elastic invoicing.If this is the case then one of the big barriers to cloud entry doesn’t really exist.

With all due respect to the Nimsoft  marketing department, more and more Service Providers are finding us first.It’s fantastic to enjoy the type of market position that drive prospects to find you.But with those great expectations,comes the burden to over deliver on value and innovation.We embrace that burden. New customers…you have come to the right place!

I thought I would be enjoying somewhat milder weather on this trip to Europe. The bar for “milder” is pretty low – living in the frigid Wisconsin Northscape.  So here I am watching the snow blowing hard in Hilversum, The Netherlands. I do feel right at home – cold and wet!

Joe Panettieri, Editorial Director of MSPmentor emerged from his New York snow cave today to announce the 3rd Annual MSPmentor 100 list. Check out these long time Nimsoft customers that made into the MSPmentor Top 10!

• LongView Systems:  #2
• CDW Hosting and Managed Services:  #4
• The Revere Group:  #9

Congratulations are in order and, of course, sincere thanks to LongView, CDW and Revere for being great NMS customers!

Irrational cloud exuberance is slowly morphing into boring, normalized risk adjusted business decision making. Market segmentation is well underway.  I am especially jacked up about the service providers that are staking out the high ground at the “enterprise ready” end of the market. Enterprise ready = standards based, secure, compliant and fully supported by human beings that can spell ITIL.  Bluelock and Enki are Nimsoft customers operating in the enterprise ready cloud segment. They are poised to deliver on high stakes cloud computing.

Customers want choice on the “really cheap” to “high value” cloud continuum and they are getting it. What does it mean?  More buying, less window shopping – the cloud opportunity rationalized and realized.

Even though cloud adoption is taking off, there are still plenty of concerns out there. Where is the high availability? Where is the  security?  Where is the customer service we are so familiar with from the best of breed managed hosting providers?  You know, the kind of service ethic that gets engineers on a conference bridge at 3AM to crack root cause on a customer outage. There is a real opportunity out there for a Service Provider to create a public cloud offering that caters to high stakes environments.  Is there a hybrid business model that combines the beauty of cloud elasticity with more robust engineering support?  Can it work?

Who’s doing this?

Another “packed house” for today’s Nimsoft MSP All Stars Event. Go figure. Where else are you going to get first person MSP best practices from the trenches – not a white board!

Extreme gratitude to today’s Nimsoft All Stars (our customers are not only great people, they are also the most knowledgeable MSPs around):

• Oli Thordarson of Alvaka Networks, Irvine, CA
• Tim Hebert of Atrion, Warwick, RI
• and Jason Caras of IT Authorities, Tampa, FL.

Report from the 2010 Nimsoft Sales Kickoff in Las Vegas. We are exploding with new sales talent – experienced, top tier account executives with extremely relevant industry experience. Couple the new guys with the existing team that blew the doors off our 2009 sales objectives and WOW! The best product now has the breadth and depth of sales capabilities required to cover the Service Provider world from A to Z.