The Business Solutions Network

In the May issue of Business Solutions magazine, Jamie Brenzel, CEO of KineticD, discusses cloud pitfalls VARs and MSPs should watch out for in, "Do You Make These Cloud Security Mistakes?" Brenzel offers practical advice on topics such as choosing between public cloud and private cloud offerings, and he also gets into the importance of protecting your customers' data from the point it leaves their facility to the point it gets to a SAS 70-audited data center.

In June 2010, we featured Richard Anderson, CEO of Next Level Café on the cover of Business Solutions magazine. This managed services provider (MSP) had experienced 21% sales growth in 2009 over the previous year, and it was projecting up to 20% growth by the end of 2010. In this feature story, titled "The Price Of Success," Anderson shared that changing from the traditional pricing model to a headcount-based pricing model that allows for the impact of cloud and hosted models was a key factor in his current growth. His future growth was going to be dependent on his ability to have deeper business strategy conversations with his existing customer base. I caught up with Anderson recently, to find out how his goals played out over the past two years.

In the next few weeks, I'm going to be sharing a pretty unusual and amazing story about a small MSP that had its BDR (backup and disaster recovery) skills put to test in a big way last year when an EF5 tornado (the strongest category) ripped through its hometown. Before then, however, I wanted to give our blog readers a sneak peak and to share a key takeaway you may be able to apply to your businesses.

While attending Ingram Micro's SMBA Invitational event last week, I met with several small to midsize VARs and MSPs that shared some of their business challenges with me. One recurring theme that emerged time and time again was vendor management.

One of the things I love about what I do is getting to talk to business owners and getting to hear first hand about what it takes to make it in the channel today -- including the struggles and pitfalls that seem to always precede any big payoffs. One such story that I think you'll enjoy in our May issue, which will be available at BSMinfo.com by the end of this week, is titled: "A Marriage Of Network Security And Higher Education." It's a story about an MSP that's has been in practice since 1996 and is operated by a husband and wife team, Nate and Kelly Freeman.

In our February 2010 issue, we featured KT's Office Services , an office services VAR that was projecting 20% growth by the end of 2010 due in part to selling MPS (managed print services). (Check out, “Copy Managed Print Sales”).

In our upcoming issue of Business Solutions magazine, we feature a special supplement called the Partner Program Insider. Within this special insert, my colleague Mike Monocello and I highlight trends we're seeing in the top four vertical markets our channel readers are selling into: education, government, healthcare, and retail.

Earlier this year, I would have predicted that 2012 would have been the year tape media made the same transition that film-based picture cameras made a few years ago.  At a couple of trade shows I attended, storage vendors offered up analyst stats that further confirmed this hunch, with some claiming “42% of data restores from tape fail” and others claiming that number to be as high as 71%.