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.

I don’t know anyone that isn’t hoisting their beverage of choice to say goodbye to 2009 – a forgettable economic year by any definition. So goodbye 2009 and hello to growth and profitability for the entire Service Provider segment in 2010.

The Service Provider team here at Nimsoft does have a lot to be grateful for. We have had another record year – bringing on 70 top-tier, enterprise class Service Providers (across 17 countries) as new Nimsoft customers. When you add this group to our existing roster of SP winners, you pretty much have the brand name, All Star team of the industry. It’s truly humbling.

So thanks to our new customers for putting your faith in NMS and the Nimsoft team. Thanks to our existing customers for keeping us on our game with great product feedback.  Together, we can’t lose.

Cheers!

Yet another Nimsoft powered SP being recognized for innovation and service excellence! Congratulations to the entire team at Troubador for their Bull’s Eye Innovation Award from ChannelInsider. Troubador received the award for their VDC (Virtual Data Center) services – proof that you don’t have to be Amazon to profit from the cloud.

Have I mentioned that Nimsoft is a company that executes at light speed? Here’s a look at my first hundred days at Nimsoft. I’ll skip the details on our comprehensive new employee training program

San Francisco. Gartner Briefing. Ingram Micro Partner Briefing. Webinar. Las Vegas. Tier1 Data Center Conference. First Blog. Unified Monitoring. NUMA. UK. Webinar. Oslo. Toronto. Iowa. MADISON. Calgary. San Francisco. NYC. Atlanta. Raleigh. MADISON. 2010 Budget. 2010 Marketing Plan. Boston. Stamford. NYC. St.Louis. UK. San Francisco. All Star Webinar with Ziff-Davis. Nimsoft Advisory Board. Minneapolis. Phoenix. San Francisco.  Ingram Micro Meeting…

Great customers, great coworkers, great product.  Having lots of fun.  We have openings – jump in!

When civilians (Non-IT folks) ask me what I do for a living, I tell them “I work for a software company headquartered in Silicon Valley”.  When they ask me where I work, I show them this scene from my home office.  Hint:  No palm trees in Madison, Wisconsin.

I have been talking and writing a lot lately about the requirement for SPs to rejigger their offerings in response to Cloud services encroaching on traditional managed services – especially managed hosting.  Repeating the message:  Accept the Cloud as a new IT reality and exploit the different types of revenue opportunities it presents or look out!

Still some SP execs I meet with are not buying it.  Fad, trend, hype – they are waiting it out – cloud will fade and we’ll still be here.  Hey I get healthy skepticism but before you write me off as a Cloud shill, I ask you to do one thing – Follow the money.  Take any one of your traditional managed hosting/services offerings and go get equilvalent pricing from any one of the name brand Cloud providers – Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid – you pick it.  Look at what is costs to host a Linux or Windows instance.  Examine the cost for storage.  Look at other services like load balancing.  Then factor in the flexibility presented by the new metered billing models.  The Cloud providers have magnitudes better pricing alternatives.  Magitudes – not 10%, not 20% – magnitudes.

So I ask you – in today’s economic environment will this huge price advantage get CIO mindshare?   Yes it will and things will change.

The cloud is forcing MSPs to think differently about what it means to be an MSP. Maybe adding Cloud Performance Services to your Service Catalog is a good start.

Say you have a customer using Amazon’s EC2 compute services –  in addition to the managed services you provide – in addition to the stuff they run internally.  What can you do, as an MSP, as trusted advisor, if Amazon’s EC2 performance starts to degrade or fails completely. You may think “It’s Amazon’s problem”.  I can’t send out a bunch of engineers to fix Amazon. You would be right about that, but that’s still old school MSP thinking…

First, just presenting a consolidated portal view – a single pane of glass – for all your customer’s monitored IT environments, including Amazon, is in itself very high value.  Get the customer to your branded service delivery portal and keep them there – one place for all IT service instrumentation – cloud included.

Next, start monitoring Amazon and implement performance thresholds based on customer business requirements. Then when the EC2 service begins degrading - a performance threshold will breach, launch an alarm to your NOC,  and you PROACTIVELY help your customer shift workloads to another provider before the services crash.

Seems like a very high value managed service to me – one that customers will appreciate and buy – and one that today’s MSPs are well positioned to execute.