Top Day 1 Quotes From ASCII Chicago

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

A crowd of nearly 100 channel executives enjoyed Day 1 of Wednesday’s ASCII Success Summit at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chicago. I wanted to share with you some the best quips and quotes from the day.

Stuart Selbst, Vorex

• “You wouldn’t drive with your eyes closed. So you shouldn’t run your business without seeing key data.”
• “Understanding the true cost of your operations allows you to know how much to charge.”

Jim Lippie, Itopia

• “The best prospects for cloud desktop services are companies with older servers, multiple offices, remote workers, a high growth rate, compliance issues, and BYOD.”
• “Every 53 seconds, a laptop is stolen or lost in the U.S. With Desktop-as-a-Service, your data is safe.”
• “If you are good selling managed services, you should be great selling cloud services. It’s an easier story to tell.”
• Lippie also shared a neat slide that showed the progress of the solution provider. My photo of the slide doesn’t reproduce well, so I’ll reflect it here in text: Hardware reseller à professional services à managed services à cloud services à business analytics

Mark Winter, Rapid Fire Tools

• “A free assessment is a powerful offer. A lot of your competitors are getting their foot in the door with free audits.”
• “Free audits should be less than one hour. They should be automated, provide brandable reports, and identify poor practices and security holes.”
• “Be sure to have an executive summary from your free assessment that ties back in with your proposal. And talk in business terms.”
• “Don't just ‘send over the reports’ to your customers. Talk with your clients and show them what you're doing.”
• "Documentation demonstrates your credibility and helps you sell."
• “HIPAA can help you make recurring revenue from regular Compliance-as-a-Service. The opportunity is 700,000 ‘covered’ entities that need a regular audit. I think this is a tremendous opportunity. You can charge $1,000 and up.”

Art Gross, Breach Secure Now and HIPAA Secure Now

• “2014 was the year of the breach. The big companies make the headlines, but most of those breaches happened to SMBs.”
• “SMBs have weak security in part because they spend their time worrying about security but they don’t spend any money on it.”
• “Cloud is an MSP friend! It requires less engineering skills and offers the ability to scale more clients.”
• “Cloud is an MSP foe! It has caused shrinking margins and lost revenue on hardware, software, licenses, and labor.”
• “Selling on FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is dead. You need to show clients their actual risk and liability — actual gaps in how their data is protected.”

Jamie Zajac, Carbonite

• “Security risks, compliance issues, and incompatibility will be the result of Microsoft ending Windows Server 2003 support July 15th this year.”
• “Don't ever choose the option that lets Microsoft hold your data hostage. You need to stay in control of the data.”

Random MSP

• “Da Bears!” Yes, a managed services provider exclaimed this in the middle Wednesday afternoon’s session. We’re in Chicago after all.

The ASCII Success Summit – Chicago is being held May 27-28 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chicago. It is one of eight solution provider-focused conferences ASCII will host in 2015. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII.