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.