Has there every been an industry – any product or service – with such a confusing and inexact nomenclature?  YES, I am talking about Managed Services.

Shared Host. Dedicated Host. Web Host.  Managed Host.  Colocation. Collocation.  Remote Services.  MSP.  xSP.  SSP. SaaS. IaaS. HaaS. PaaS… And now for the very first time..Drum roll please! We welcome you Cloud Providers to the mass confusion.

We have got to stop reswizzling the taxonomy for MSP types every two years if we want to be taken seriously by buyers.  It reeks of a biennial hype cycle.

Apologies to Johnny Cash for my exaggeration.  I haven’t hitchhiked along the dusty Winnemucca road…BUT

I have logged about 25,000 miles in my first month aboard at Nimsoft.  So I’ve earned an opinion on the state of air travel and like everyone else who blogs, I intend to get that opinion out there.

1)  Flight crews get a bad rap.  99 out of 100 flights that I am on, the fight crew goes out of their way to help the flying public out of a myriad of weird situations.

2)  The flying public is dense.  Even the most rudimentary safety instruction is misunderstood or goes unheeded.  Pay attention on any flight and you’ll get the fact that people don’t/can’t read, and even worse, won’t listen to the people on the hook to get us safely from point A to point B via metal tube at 35,000 feet.

3)  Gogo Inflight Internet makes air travel 1000% better.  When will I be able to select my carrier and flight number by whether the aircraft features wireless connectivity?

4)  Who else would like to get their hands on the throat of the bean counter genius that thought to start charging for checked bags?  You don’t need a PhD in logistics to know that this pricing model represents the single biggest threat to on-time departures and arrivals – to say nothing of flying civility.  Who hasn’t cringed watching the dude in a Brioni suit or woman exec in Chanel sweat bullets over a 18″ x 24″ overhead slot for their Versace bag?

OK, I kinda liked watching them sweat.  Their goes civility…

Despite the crummy economy around the world, our MSP business has been brisk – I mean real brisk – Q3 looks like a home run in the making!  I am meeting every day with MSPs that have reached critical mass: maturing their operational methodologies, satisfying customers, generating MRR, becoming EBITDA machines.  They need our help moving to the next gen enterprise monitoring tool to support hyper growth.  Unfortunately some of these firms are feeling trapped by sunk costs associated with their first, second or third monitoring purchase.  If this is your dilemma, write to me, please.  Our sales team has been magnificent in shaping relationships that will support your current financial success.  We can get responsibly creative so you won’t double pay for monitoring and blow up your income statement.

That’s one of the advantages of being a private company.  We can do what’s right for your business instead of being slaves to 10-Qs.

Meeting with the leaders of fast growing MSPs around the world (UK and Norway this week) is the best part of my gig at Nimsoft.  We sit down together, get overly caffeinated and compare notes on running critical IT for hundreds of demanding customers.  It’s a room full of stressed out crazy people swapping customer war stories.  What goes on the calendar as a one-hour meeting ends up rolling for two hours or more – then I am in the taxi overtipping the driver to get me to the next appointment on time!  What makes these get togethers even better is we are usually developing a strategy on replacing their legacy mash up of basic monitoring tools with NMS.  So business meets pleasure…

After 48 hectic hours at Tier1’s Hosting Transformation Summit it was “Mission accomplished” .

I wanted to meet with our current MSP customers, socialize a little  (We were in Las Vegas!) and learn more about how we can work together to grow our respective businesses – CHECK . I wanted to meet with MSPs that are thinking about ditching their Big4 monitoring installs for NMS – to feel their Big4 pain – CHECK.  I wanted to get a good understanding of what established MSPs were doing to integrate cloud offerings into their service catalogs – CHECK.

Every MSP I talked with had cloud offerings in market or solid plans to get cloud delivered services in market soon.  This is no surprise to me.  MSPs have been delivering on demand computing based on shared infrastructure for years.  So for some this is simply a twist in product branding along with a change in the way they meter and bill for services.  Others are rolling out brand new offerings with the help of cloud platform developers that focus on enabling MSPs to get in market quickly.  Both Parascale and Mezeo were hot destinations for MSP attendees.

But I still have two open switches on the cloud:

First, metering and billing for highly elastic cloud services is non-trivial for most MSPs.  I still remember what a stretch it was for VARs turned MSPs to get their accounting folks good at billing for simple monthly recurring services!  So while the technology may be ready for market now, if I am running an MSP, I’d like to know that the invoices are going to be generated correctly and that we are going to get paid!

Second, enterprise IT is going to want to monitor the availability and performance of the cloud solutions they purchase from MSPs.  Just like they would for any other IT service they consume.  How is that going to get done?  Well maybe we can help.  Stay tuned.

Nice to be back home in Madison.

Kids are off to Camp Randall to watch the U of Wisconsin Badgers football game.  Patricia and I are relaxing away from Badger craziness walking around the Dane County Farmers’ Market.

We’ve had a beautiful summer – California weather for the most part.  Moderate temperatures, low humdity and no mosquitoes!

I’m Vice President and General Manager of the MSP business at Nimsoft.  I’ve been with the company for about two weeks.  So I am in the “knows enough to be really dangerous” phase of my  job. Fortunately for me I have great new colleagues that are keeping me out of the ditch.  I’m writing this note from our HQ in Redwood City, California.  I’ll spend time here, on airplanes, and at my home office in Madison, Wisconsin.

Prior to Nimsoft I spent several years growing the MSP business unit at one of Nimsoft’s larger customers.  We built a great company through the efforts of about 200 smart, and very committed sales, engineering and support professionals.  Our customer roster spanned SMB to Fortune 500.  But we spent most of our time servicing mid-market companies.  What an exhilarating ride that was!

At Nimsoft, I will leverage my experience to help our MSP customers make more money with Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions.  I’ll do that the old fashioned way – meeting customers and prospects face-to-face to talk about their business challenges.  I’ll also use all the tools in Web 2.0 toolkit (like this blog) to get feedback direct from the folks who are making it happen in the space – providers and consumers of managed services.