MSPWorld Review By Call That Girl

Transcribed (apparently my cold was lingering but I kept in the sniffling, they caught everything!)

Podcast available http://callthatgirl.podbean.com/e/lisa-talks-about-her-experience-at-mspworld-in-vegas

Intro:                    [00:00][Intro and music] Okay. [00:00][Tapping] Welcome to “Call That Girl Office 365 Show.” Keep up with Lisa’s day-to-day problems and solutions she encounters with Outlook, third-party apps, and Office 365. The learning never ends, folks. Learn from Lisa!

Lisa Hendrickson:   Welcome to “Call That Girl Office 365 Show.” I’m Lisa Hendrickson, your hostess, and this is show number 67. If you want to check out my past shows, you can go to callthatgirl.biz/office365. In the lower area of the page there’s a link to go to past shows, it has all the notes and the links, and all that information in there. Pretty soon here, should be show number 100 that I’ve done, not for this series of shows, but all together since 2010. One hundred podcasts are a lot. So, anyone that’s new to this show, the Office 365 Show basically is about the work I’ve done in the past week, about Outlook and Office 365. Sometimes I have guests, and sometimes I just have me. This week it’s going to be about a new topic I don’t talk about much. In the past three months or so, I’ve been very interested in moving to a managed service plan to offer to my clients but yet, I don’t want to offer the whole MSP.

That’s way too much for me. Where I really excel is Office 365. [01:27][Sniffing] I’ve been working on it on the side while I’ve been working on other projects. I’ve been trying to think about what I need to learn more about MSP for me to be able to offer it. I’ve been doing a lot of investigating online, I’ve been watching the forums, listening to the texts, reading their blogs and posts, and trying to learn as much as I can. I found out that there’s an MSP World event here in Nevada, where I live, so I thought, “Why don’t I go and check that out?” It was a two-day event; it was a couple of hundred bucks and I took off those two whole days. I’ve never been to an MSP event so I didn’t know what to expect, but I’m going to tell you all about it on this show today.

Before we get going, I have to thank our friends over at AppRiver. They do all my Office 365 sales and support. They also do encryption and spam filtering and they have awesome 24-by-seven support. I may partner with them, so that means if my clients have issues they can call them on nights and weekends to do the easy stuff, that isn’t always easy but I try to tell my clients, “Look you can use them because you’re paying their service for some things and some things you do have to come back to me for, like unsupported work like iCloud or Outlook.com and things like that.” So, if you’re interested in working with a vendor for your Office 365 sales and service you can contact my rep, Steve Harris; sharris@appriver.com.

Okay, so I’m going to talk about this MSP World event from beginning to end [03:12][laughter]. I have a lot of notes on this. It was really a neat experience, because I went there all by myself. I didn’t know a single person. I tried to put out the feelers online but no one was going, so I thought, “Here’s my chance to explore and not have anybody there to distract me.” I was a little bit nervous too, because when you go to any event by yourself, and don’t know anybody, it’s hard to walk up to somebody, “Hey, I’m Lisa! Here’s what I do.” It takes me back to the old networking days where I’m there alone when I first started.

Anyway, I went to the event at the Cosmopolitan Hotel which is absolutely, amazingly gorgeous. The whole thing is pretty. What I loved the most is they rented an outlet of one of the hotel areas so everything was in a confined space, and that was really nice. You didn’t have to run 10 floors away to go to one event and then another 10 floors to go to another event. Basically, I got off the elevator and there was a nice lounge area, which of course, was filled with a bunch of techs nerding out on their laptops and phones. Then there was a central hallway and when I got there, breakfast was there. On the right was the breakout session rooms for the speakers and on the left, was the larger room where the exhibitors were. There was a lot of space and it was really nice. It wasn’t too crowded or busy.

I think there were enough attendees to have a constant circulation of people. They had the exhibit tables there all day, which I really liked, because I went to an event in Phoenix a couple of years ago and they only had the exhibit tables there for two hours. It really made it rush and grab. The event I went to two years ago was like everybody went to the cool both and got all the cool swaggy stuff and then they ran to the next one. This one here, wasn’t that kind of event. Let me start by saying, I really didn’t understand [05:27][laughter] a lot of what the speakers were talking about, so I opted to not even go because I don’t do managed services at that level. I wondered, “What should I do now?”

I got there, I had a little breakfast, I went in and registered and then I was like, “Now what? I’ve got three or four hours until lunch.” I figured I’d go get a chair and sit down at each vendor booth because I had time on my hands, I wanted to learn as much as I could about every single person or company that was there. Too, it really wasn’t too busy. There weren’t lines of people at each booth. So, I literally registered and went to the first table there but nobody was there so I went to the next table and that was the ESET table. I know about ESET, they’re an antivirus company, but it turns out that ESET has managed services plans but because I’m new to all that I don’t know it all. Too, I’m not going to be selling antivirus.

One second, folks. I’m getting all my notes off my other desk. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to incorporate that because what I really want to do is stay within my niche.  If I ever had a client who wanted MSP, they would probably already have one I’m guessing, in my opinion. So, I started out at the ESET booth and then I moved on to the next table and I liked it. I sat and talked with people. I don’t know if they weren’t used to people sitting down with a chair, but I can’t stand for eight hours. It’s not what I do. I liked the chair approach because I could take notes, I actually listened to them, I heard about their products, and sometimes we talked about normal stuff.

It wasn’t so busy that you couldn’t take that time and it’s what I liked about the event. I’m going to start my order a different way. The tables were set up around the big room. This is funny. I went to all 30-something of these tables and did the same sit down with every one of them. So, the people I talked to I said I’d talk about them on my podcast show. They’re all going to get a copy of this [07:54][laughter] and maybe remember me because I sat there for five-to-10 minutes and maybe longer if we were enjoying each other’s company. How I decided to start this review of MSP World was with topics; one is network security, another is voice over IP, Office 365, network orchestration solutions, endpoint management, and we’ll go on from there. I want to try to give every company a piece where they should be.

As stated, this is all new to me and it was a really intense experience for me because I didn’t know a lot about it, but I know a lot more about it now. I definitely know a lot more now; I’ll tell you that. We’re going to start with the first company which is kind of my favorite and I’m allowed to say that because they sat there and bullshitted with me for the longest time. [08:53][Chuckling] They were really fun and that company is DataPath. They do network security, managed security services for MSPs so they protect the network. (If you don’t know what MSP folks do, they’re managed services.) They were a lot of fun. They gave me this cool pen with little screws in it, I thought it was a pen and tried writing with it.

A fellow that I talked to, once I told him who I was, he said, “Oh, I watched one of your YouTube videos once.” I said, “Really?” He told me, “Yes, you helped me with an Office 365 problem.” I asked if it helped and he said “yes.” I told him I was glad it worked. [09:40] Like I said, I don’t ever plan on needing network security, but I want to give those folks props because they were really fun, fun to talk to, and sometimes at events people aren’t as open to talk about stuff. They’re focusing on talking to those who want to become clients. While I got that feeling from some people, everyone was very nice. I never felt shunned for the fact that I wasn’t going to be purchasing their very expensive network appliance. [10:13][Laughter] Everyone was cool.

The other company I mentioned was ESET and they do antivirus along with a lot of other stuff, but beyond my interest. I’m sure some of the brick-fixed text they already have ESET or one of the other products. Kaspersky was also there and they told me about their labs and all the things they do. The guy at that table was also very nice. There was also Rapid Fire Tools. They run what’s called Network Detective where it manages the network and watches for instructions. I think that’s right. Next in the groups, is the Voiceover IP Monitoring and IP networking and stuff, is what I wrote. One of the companies was Outpost Sentinel and they were really nice folks to talk to, as well.

The other company that I spoke to was Site24x7 and they are a Zoho company and that fellow was really nice. I thought Site24x7 looked familiar but I didn’t see the Zoho and he said something like, “We’re Zoho,” and I mentioned I’d tried Zoho before. You have to remember though, I tried Zoho about six years ago when it was just a ticketing system. Now, they’ve moved up quite a bit in the world and their little flyer says, “Network server and application monitoring from the Cloud, all-in-one.” It’s got quite a bit of information on that flyer.  We’re going to work into some Office 365 stuff. Now, I may get some feedback on this but because I’m interested in Office 365, I particularly wanted to pay attention to the Office 365 folks that were selling it or supporting it. [12:14][Sniffing]

There were only four companies that were particularly doing that and one is called InBay Technologies. I thought their product was kind of cool. I pull, probably with the MSP services, I’m going to have a lot of logins to protect and I’m sure there are a lot of other tools that manage the control panel for multiple logins, I just haven’t needed to learn them yet. Anyway, they have multifactor protection, multilevel multifactor authentication, the next generation of password lists, and dongle free identity insurance for enterprises of all sizes. Like I said, I tacked on a little note to look into that later because that seems like something I may want on my mobile phone when I have texts eventually.

The other one is Kaseya and I saw them quite a bit at the event. They offer simple and affordable comprehensive Cloud administration for Office 365. To me, looking at this, this is maybe a scale or two above what I will probably want to do, but then again, I don’t know. As I said, I’m pretty happy with my partnership with AppRiver so I don’t plan on moving away. Still, I took it as a note that if you were going to work with Microsoft directly, which a lot of people do, you might want to work with a company that offers this. It looks like they have an intuitive administrator dashboard and customizable Cloud mailbox management and to me it’s a great company they’re representing. For the level that I’m doing, I think it’s a bit too much for me but they were definitely somebody that caught my eye.

Another company is Intermedia. I’m familiar with those folks, I’ve seen them before and I know a few other people use them for Office 365 and other products they sell. A couple of their booth guys, their vendors, I think I’ve seen at CompTIA [14:30][phonetic] a couple of years ago. Now the next company on Office 365 was a company that kind of [14:42][laughter] confused me a little bit. Their name is Adar IT and I believe they’re out of Chicago. This fellow who did the speaking event, his is the only one I really went to. [14:55][Laughter] I didn’t catch his name but it was something about Office 365 and how to make profit. I believe that was the topic; to make more profit with Office 365.

He had a really cute little story. He told about how his business grew from brick-fix to really small managed services, to moving up in the world. As he was telling the story he was telling about the profits and the margins going up higher and higher and he finally said the words that I wanted to hear; “We have a 60 percent profit margin now.” I’m like, “You’re singing the song I want to hear.” The funny thing about sitting in that speaking session of his is he put up this [15:39][laughter] graphic from a PowerPoint that looked exactly like one of the vendor booths there, called Nerdio. Nerdio had kind of a cool project that I think is also a part of Office 365 but it had a spinning wheel of how support services work.

You could tell they put in a lot of time in setting everything up in place to make the managed services work well. I didn’t realize the two companies were the same. So, I poked the guy next to me and said, “Look at my phone.” I had taken a picture of the thing at the vendor booth because I was sort of interested in it and he said, “Oh, they’re the same company.” I had no idea! Funny because the Nerdio was kind of neat. Maybe I’ll put that as a show note with a link to their site because I was really interested in because it was a services model that anybody could probably use. I’m not officially assure that Adar IT does MSP for other texts or just their own; I didn’t catch that in their presentation.

The next one up, and we’re jumping to a whole new scale, is Network Orchestration Solutions which is probably the honey-well level, I’m guessing. It’s one of the biggest companies I’ve worked for. All I know is that we had our own IT, it got bought out largescale and to me it’s probably that. One of the company’s I took note of was Excinda Networks. Of course, I’m not sure if I’d ever call on this company. They have a flyer that says, “Five ways MSPs can grow their businesses with Excinda’s Network Orchestration Solutions.” Again, I’ll put a link in the notes for this company. I’m sure if you guys are listening to this show that already do this, you already have all the knowledge you need about that.

Circling back is that Kaseya company. They had another flyer here for their VSA professional enter-class IT systems management. These things always crack me up because it’s all just stuff that I’ll probably never manage at that level. Okay, then we’re going to talk about end-point management. Now this is where, for me because I don’t know the whole scope of everything, so I tried to part everything out the best I could, here. The end-point management, the company I kind of circled in was this one called Heat Software. They have a Heat Land Rev; most organizations for deployments and it sounds like it’s a network application management thing. So, I’m going to give them a little mention.

Then we have asset management which is Miradore. They secure sensitive data, control asset and cost management, and automated remote install and settings and apps. They’re actually a mobile device management company. Then we had Telecom folks. It’s a really huge company and one is called EcoNet and I believe they had two little companies with them. The other one is Innovative Business Solutions and they are an MSP Broker House. If you’re interested in partnering up with an MSP to find whatever you need, they’ll set you up. I kind of like that because I know a lot of my listeners are running brick-fix companies and they want to get into an MSP and sometimes they’re ready to go all-in and sometimes you need some helpers to do help you do everything right.

This is what this company says they do. They are a Boutique Master Agency with a national footprint. They have 350 partners in 20 states, they have 45 carriers and to me this sounded like a nice little story for my techs if they wanted to. Again, their names are Innovative Business Solutions; innovativebusiness.net. I’ll put them in the notes as well. Alright, then we have the EcoNet, I might have to come back to them because they’re not in my notes. Then we had Lenovo show up and those guys were a lot of fun. Of course, I know about Lenovo, they’re laptops and we joked about that little red button for the mouse pad they just can’t get rid of. [21:00][Laughter] They had a really nice lit up lamp for the side of your computer for your laptop and a really nice notebook. They were just really fun guys to talk to and we actually talked about our history of working with computers and stuff. It was just a nice little chitchat.

Then we’re going to move on to some Cloud service Wi-Fi guys. The one I noticed was a company called Koda Cloud. These guys all wear orange and that’s the point of branding. Everybody who came all wore the orange so you totally knew who they were the whole time. Then, when they were all together in front of their booth, it was a strong representation of the company and that’s what I did at my very first expo ever, I and all my people wore pink so we stood out. I think when I was talking to them, because I wanted to learn more about their stuff, I think what they do is they manage access points. I’m not 100 percent sure about that, but I want to tell you about the little gift they gave me.

They had some cute stuff and they did have a little phone charger that was a little orange Koda Cloud thing you hook up to your computer to charge up and you can take it with you. We get these things all the time at events, but this one, I really loved. It’s orange and it’s something you’re always going to know what it is. It was super cute and their name is right on it. To me it was probably one of the best branded give-away I’ve seen at an event in a while. It was simple. It was orange. It had their name on it. It had a specific purpose. I liked it. So, kudos to you for that. Then they had a nice booth too. The other company was Itopia. These guys do stuff that I have totally no idea; I’ve never even heard of it and this is where I started learning words I never knew. One is WaaS-to-DaaS; w-a-a-s, d-a-a-s for MSPs.

[23:13][Laughter] I had to come home and Google it a little bit because I literally did not know what it meant. I’ve heard of some other things like SaaS but this is work space as a service and I think there’s actually another one called infrastructure as a service. They had some nice handouts [23:39][shuffling papers] and that’s a lot of high-level stuff, I think. I hate to sound so ignorant about it, but to me, I’m a brick-fix technician and I was pretty enlightened by all this. Next up is AetherPal. They do mobile workforce management. This company said, “This is real-time support for your work force.” I jokingly said, “Why does everybody think everything is mobile now days? I still sit at my desk all day and run my command center. I don’t even want to look at my phone except to answer it.” They said, “This is mostly for technicians on the road and what not.” Then I got it because it hadn’t dawned on me that they might have to do management of stuff on their phones because they’re on the road traveling.

I totally got it. [24:31][Sniffing] What their product is here is it has self-service buttons, one-click fixes, device health, remote support, IT chat. They told me, pretty much anything you do with a software program can be implemented into this program and it’s called AetherPal. Like I said, I’ll put this all in the notes because it might be something else that people will like who are mobile. Next up, I was jokingly waiting for this guy who was so busy he always had somebody at his table and you really didn’t expect this company would be doing MSP. They’re called PCMatic and I’ve heard about them for years. They, I believe back in the old days, had just the little tool you could buy from the guy on TV running around. Apparently, they’re really successful with their MSP product and I asked them, “Really? I wouldn’t have even thought that.”

He said, “Well, what happened is that a lot of techs bought it and they liked it so they wanted to run it with their MSP, so they changed it up to have that service.” I was like, “Hey, if it’s working – great!” I won’t be doing it of course, but I wanted to let folks know that they have a lot in there. They have patch management, prospecting tools, automated monitoring, security, and I believe that’s part of LabTech which I’ve heard of that before. Anyway, giving them a little shout out. They have a free 60-day trial of course and I asked him the price on it and was told it’s 88-cents for one user, so there’s your margin. Now on this category I gave them their own because I don’t really know what MSSP is but this company’s saint takes your company from MSP to MSSP and I think the core of their business is delivering quick new resources of revenues proving the bottom-line.

Again, I’m embarrassed I can’t say much more about it because I’m not familiar with it but giving them a little shout out. Alright, then there were a few other vendors at booths. Time Warner Cable and I felt bad for that lady because she was really trying to get me to refer her work and I said, “You’re so sweet, I wish I did but I’m 140-dollars-an-hour and the last thing my clients want at that rate is to hear me pitch a switch-over to another cable company.” [27:14][Laughter] She tried even harder bought I told her I just can’t do it, in fact I haven’t referred an internet service in years. She got it and I told her I’d give her a shout out; you’re going to be on the show. The other one that was kind of funny was IBM.

I don’t know why they still go to marketing events like this but they had a nice lovely white couch that looked very comfortable and they had a nice corner spot. It’s the spot I’d want with a big white couch, I have to say I’m a little jealous but of course I’d have to have a little alcohol and a little more fun stuff going on in my corner. [27:57][Laughter] Anyway, then, I wasn’t sure about the Mimecast folks and for some reason I don’t have any of their stuff, which I’m embarrassed of. The thing is, I sat and talked with the Mimecast folks a few times. They were, I believe, the platinum vendor. I think they won something last year, but I’m not sure, they had stuff all over. You could see it all over, so congratulations to them for doing great branding. Their team was out their mingling with people and I believe on the first day of my lunch the gal sat down with me and we caught up with being new friends and all.

[28:38][Laughter] It’s kind of how it goes at these things. You sit down and hope someone nice sits down next to you, if you’re by yourself. Then there was a company called CoreDial and they do tax automation. It says, “White-level Cloud communications through CoreDial’s switchconnex SaaS platform. I remember them saying they have an interface with a seamless experience to do all this for you. I said, “I bet that’s what people want because I hear techs saying “automation,” all the time. One day I will have it too, with my business.” So I told him I’d remember him for that day. Then I spoke with some guys I just love. I’m going to call it and they’re going to laugh, but they’re like the true nerds out there. This company is called Dynamic Consultant Group.

There were two guys sitting there and I asked them what they do and they said, “We work with Microsoft Dynamics. There are about 15 of us and we’re all the techs and we support that all day.” They were like the only tech-techs and I understand them. I asked if they ever use Outlook and they stated it’s all they use all day long. We agreed to talk afterwards because I want to meet partners there or something. So when I heard them say there’s 15 techs, I knew that was my kind of crew. So, shout out to you guys and if any of my listeners do need Microsoft Dynamics CRM system help, Dustin going to give out his email. Dustin@dynamicconsultantsgroup.com and I’ll also put that in the notes. Dustin, if I don’t here form you after I get this show out – I’m going to be coming for you.

Then we have another company, Hostway. This guy’s name is Jeffrey Coy. I met him at his table. I told you I hit every booth whether I needed you or not and I met everybody. He was a really nice guy and the next day he actually came over and sat by me and said, “Hi, Lisa. How’s it going?” I thought it was cool he remembered my name, I liked that about him. Their little swaggy gift was kind of neat. I don’t get a lot of good ones; those little chargers and stuff, but they had a nice one. They’re real nice guys over there. I’m going to have to whip up their website really quick because I want to give a shout out to what they do. I actually believe they’re an MSP provider. [31:54][Laughter]

If you’re looking to refer a client to MSP services, Hostway would do it. So, they are a managed server dedicated to your success, build exactly what you need for your business, and they have solutions. They kind of cover a lot of stuff. Their website has tons of products for Cloud hosting, managed hosting, domain hosting, website hosting, and email applications. The guys were really super nice and friendly and it really does go a long way when you go to these things because if I remember him, he’ll remember me in a few years and never know if we’re going to cross paths. That to me is very important at these events to go out and try to meet people and remember their names and things like that. We just connected on LinkedIn, which I invited everybody to my LinkedIn as well.

Then, I think this might be the last one, there was a fellow at the very end of the very end of where I was walking. His business was kind of neat. His was Komodo and his product is Komodo Eye and this is kind of where brick-fix companies might like this that manage small businesses with access points. Basically, this is a little tool you connect to your router that goes by the access point so it’s kind of like a managed part of it. If one goes down, you don’t need to send a tech. This is actually managed from another system so you can trouble shoot it without going onsite and what he said was, “This saves a lot of techs driving to a job to fix something quick.” I said, “I don’t go on site but I definitely know a lot of my techs may be interested in this.” It says, “Komodo gives you insight you could only get by sitting onsite watching your network eight hours a day.” I’ll put that in the notes as well. He was a nice guy and I ran into him a few times at the event and I really did like his little product that he had there.

Alright folks, I think that is all of the vendors. I’m going to do a little ending here. What they had was a thing they call a passport so that was really one of the reasons I went to all the vendor booths anyway is because I wanted to get the stamp. Then I had nothing to do all day so I figured I might as well go meet everyone. On Tuesday, I finished up meeting the rest of the people. We had our little lunch, which was very delicious for event food. Then everybody was kind of waiting for the big giveaways and the vendors had their giveaways and out of the blue some guy walks up to me and sits down. Turns out, this fellow works for MSP Alliance which runs the MSP World and his name is Jeff Clemons and we just sat there and talked. I like people that do that for no reason.

He started asking me what I thought of the conference and some information questions and I gave him feedback that I think is good feedback for any event. It isn’t negative, I just think people at these conferences and events forget that some people actually come by themselves, so here’s my take on it. If I had flown to Vegas to come to this thing on Sunday night, it would’ve been nice to have a meet-and-greet to meet people like speed-dating but speed-business networking.

Then if you kick off the conference meeting like 50 people in a two-hour period and you all get to know each other, then you can find out who the other attendees are, you can see their badges, you can remember their faces, and relate to them as you’re mingling around this event for two days. That was the only take away I had. I’m lucky I’m a social person but there are some who aren’t so they might not be as open to approaching and talking to a stranger. He said it was good feedback and I said, “Well, that’s just what I would do in this kind of event. Honestly, if I was going to fly to Atlanta to a convention, that might be something I’d look for if I’m going to spend two-grand or whatever on a flight and hotel on a two-day conference.” He said it was a very good idea and they will consider it for their next one, which I believe the next one is in Louisiana in March.

Alright, let me see what else I got in my notes here. I think that might be it. If you guys have any questions, it’s not going to be a show more than this today so if you have any questions about the vendors I talked to email me: lisa@callthatgirl.biz. Oh! I did have one more take away. I wasn’t trying to listen in on people’s conversations but because they had them where I was sitting I had no choice but to listen. I heard a couple of techs saying some things about Skype for business. Both of them said this and neither were around at the same time, they said their companies don’t even use them anyway. So, I’m going, “Thank God, I’m not the only business that doesn’t like Skype for business to support and sell. My clients don’t even like it. When it gets installed, it kind of ruins their office installation if they don’t like it because then they have to uninstall the whole office. It ruins all their configurations and settings and that’s just my take on it. [37:57][Sniffing]

Most of my clients are like, “What happened to my other Skype?” [38:00][Laughter] They like the Skype they had and to me, the user that didn’t get in to Link, well Skype for Business is just an upgrade of Link so it’s almost like a backhanded compliment for Skype for Business. They can’t do what they want and they can’t connect their old Skype people. So, just a warning that if you install Skype for Business and you have to uninstall it, you could have a real office reinstall going on. It happened to my client last week. But I heard two other MSP fellows talking about it and I was like, “Yeah, I’m not alone in that hate!” I think they’ll eventually change it because they have to.

Forces of the masses.

Alright folks, this week I was all alone so I’m my own host and no guest. If you have anything you want to talk about on the show or want to be a guest, you can email at lisacallthatgirl.biz. Make sure you check out my shows at callthatgirl.biz/office365 and this has been a Hayman Hendrickson Production, audio supported by Mitch Hayman. Thank you to our sponsor AppRiver and Pod Bean for hosting. That’s it folks! See you next time.

Category: Outlook Support