…you could deploy the premier monitoring solution on the market with ZERO infrastructure hassle? Surf to nimsoft.com on Tuesday to find out who is delivering the quickest “time to value”.

Having a stellar time with customers and coworkers in San Francisco. The customer buzz on Nimsoft/CA is largely positive. People are jacked up about the Nimsoft product roadmap. Good peer to peer collaboration happening. The Anchor Steam is cold and the weather is absolutely brilliant. Nimsoft customers:  If you aren’t here this year make it a priority for 2011.

Driving down 101 to our Redwood City office from the San Francisco airport I spotted a big billboard selling some massive new, better-faster-cheaper storage frame from EMC or Hitachi – what brand doesn’t matter. What struck me was how absolutely weird it looked. Maybe I’m a little jet lagged – but the ad for raw infrastructure just looked so dated and kind of irrelevant. Are end users really buying this stuff?

There is an entire ecosystem of channel enablers set up to help VARs transform themselves into the MSP operational and financial model – the quest for MRR and sticky customer nirvana. Ingram Micro’s Seismic program does great work like this with their customer base. So it’s more than a little bizarre here at webhosting2010 to hear Microsoft ask established web hosters – long time masters of the MRR model – to drop what they are doing and resell MSFT cloud services like BPOS and Azure. Free advice to the webhosters. Covet your core value adds. Covet your trusted advisor status. Don’t trade these items away lightly to Google, Microsoft, Amazon or whomever comes calling with their massively scalable cloud/SaaS infrastructure for channel resale. All of their compute inventory is waiting for one thing – customers. You have them and they don’t.

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!