We are only a few weeks away from the release of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) if Microsoft manages to stay on track with their release date. The service which has an odd name in my mind combines hosted exchange, hosted sharepoint, office live meeting conferencing, office communications server, and the Microsoft online administration center management portal all delivered to your customers on a monthly basis from the cloud.

While is seems the offering will initially be targeted at enterprise clients I foresee it quickly being asked about by our small business clients as Microsoft starts to turn up their marketing engines.

I would suggest as I have suggested in the past that your business needs to be thinking about how to continue to add value to your clients as they begin to use these service or others like them delivered from the cloud. I can assure you the 12% of the year one value and 6% of the ongoing that Microsoft has outlined as their partner commision structure is not enough to build a business. The traditional service fees for installation, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance and management will be wiped making it time to reinvent yourself.

The million dollar question is what does todays IT service business look like five years from now…..

JC

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that everything is moving towards a hosted model more so than ever in the past. It also is not the first time that industry experts have predicted this shift would happen and in the past it has always stalled out for one reason or another.

The thing that everyone seems to agree on at this point is that this time around it feels real. It feels like it has an unstoppable momentum as Google docs tries to topple MS office and MS office franticly tries to move to a subscription model to keep up with Google docs.

In a recent yahoo news article Microsoft brass made the statement that over the next five years 50% of exchange mailboxes would move to exchange online.

This is a lot of mailboxes considering they claim that MS exchange will run 210 million corporate email accounts in 2008, growing to 319 million by 2012.

So what does all this mean for you and me? Great question!

I am not sure I have all the answers but for those of you who read the blog regularly you know I have an opinion.

The first question everyone asks me is ‘are we going to start hosting exchange for our customers or setup hosted exchange?’ – my answer is no way. What reason would we have to go after running the hosting infrastructure for these applications? I do believe there is technology right around the corner for providers like Everon to be able to immediately compete with the large infrastructure players without needing to make the capital investment. But why they heck would I want to try to keep up with Microsoft and Co as they add “roughly 10,000 powerful computer servers a month to its data centers.”

The answer is I don’t and I would suggest you don’t either. I am still wondering what companies like Group Spark and others that have build their business on this play are thinking – “I hope MS buys me” is all I can figure.

All that said I would direct you back to an article Mike wrote a few months back where he started to use the word aggregator for companies like you and me. We are not nor will we ever be the large utility companies and I sure as heck don’t want to be the low cost onsite guys so we are left in the middle position between the large utility companies and the customer as the aggregator of services.

So I suggest that we all start thinking about how to wrap premium services (ones we can charge a good penny for) around the low cost services that our customers will be choosing from.

The best example I have seen of this to date are the solution providers wrapping services around Google for business – which at the basic level is free by the way in case you have been living in a cave.

At first glance you would think, I will stay away from those services with my customers because I will never be able to make money providing them a free service. But if you take a closer look there are providers that have wrapped some nice packages around the setup and guidance for small businesses using these services. And ultimately your customers will ask for, no they will demand, these services for their business.

This is exactly what we all need to be thinking about and rolling out to the market. Don’t get left behind. Set yourself up in the aggregator position and survive!

Let me know what you all think, am I crazy? Do you have a different take on the strategic position today’s MSP should be taking in the future?

JC

Is it just me or did you notice that there is nothing about partners providing managed services in there?

Normally I would spend the evening writing about how Dell is going to cause themselves a problem with the channel if they continue down this path but I think our friends at MSP mentor did a great job so I have included part of a post from The VAR Guy along with a link to their site.

Historically The Var Guy and MSP Mentor have remained neutral about Dell’s movements in the market so I have to say it is gratifying that even they are pointing out Dell’s shortcomings with the partner channel.

I am working on getting Dell to write a post clarifying their ideas on how the channel will benefit from the SaaS offerings dell is brining to the market as everyone I have talked to is a little hazy on the benefit, stay tuned….

In the meantime check out that The VAR guy had to say in his post:

“With its acquisition of SilverBack Technologies, Inc., Everdream Corp., ASAP Software Express, Inc. and now MessageOne, Dell is architecting an integrated service delivery platform of SaaS applications THAT WILL ENABLE IT to remotely monitor, maintain, troubleshoot and address the majority of routine IT infrastructure issues that challenge businesses of all sizes. “

The VAR Guy emphasized four key words (”THAT WILL ENABLE IT“) on purpose. As currently worded, the release suggests that the Dell service delivery platform is for Dell alone — and not for partners. With a few simple word tweaks, (”ENABLE DELL AND ITS PARTNERS TO…“), the company could have delivered a far more inclusive message to partners.

You can find the full post here:

http://www.mspmentor.net/2008/04/25/dell-misses-mark-on-messageone-announcement/

JC

There has been a lot of talk about Dell and the service providers they have been snatching up (Everdream, Silverback, etc.). Most recently Dell announced they would test marketing services direct to clients but not to worry they would not market to your clients, the channel would be protected.

Guess what we found in our mailbox this morning (names and account numbers have been changed to protect the innocent):

Dear Client Name,

I am compiling some information on topics that may be of interest to my customers.

These topics include but are not limited to:

· Voice over IP (VOIP)

· Cooling of Server Areas

· Security Appliances

· Reducing Spam

· Virtualization and Server Consolidation

· Disaster Recovery and Failover

· SAN Storage – particularly ISCSI

· Converting to a Mobile workforce

If there are other topics you would like information on or if you want me to send info on any of the above topics, please email me or call me.

Company Name: Client Name

Customer Number: xxxxxxxxxx

Thank you!

A whole list of Dell people my client should contact about their services

Now on the surface you may say this poses no threat to my business and I still would argue that Dell will never get the high touch server our clients demand right. But I do believe this will cause some tough conversations with clients as Dell starts to provide my same service offerings at a low price – no idea on pricing yet but I imagine dell is thinking sheer volume for this play to make sense to their business.

So if you are not listed as the main email on your clients Dell account you may want to think about changing that or getting out ahead of Dells message to your client by talking to them first.

JC

OK, so I have to admit that I missed document freedom day but it is incredible to me that there are organizations popping up to support the downfall of MS office and the acceptance of open standard. Now I know this movement has been happening for a long time but document freedom day combined with all of the other cloud computing vendors we have been talking about really drove it home for me! The begging is near, oh wait, was it the beginning or the end? Anyway change is a coming! Get onboard or get left behind.

If you also missed document freedom day you can check it out here:

http://documentfreedom.org/

JC