Houston, We have a Solution
Friday, June 6th, 2008 posted by luxMicrosoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, 2008 will be held in Houston, Texas between July 7 & 10. The exhibit hall will be open between July 8 & 10 and we’ll be there at Booth no. 1063 (yes its a big event; but no, they don’t have 1000+ booths)!
If you’re attending or if you’ll be in Houston (or thereabouts), it would be great to catch up and put faces to names. I’ll be there and so will Sekar Vembu, our CEO!
If you can make it, do let us know here.
While on the subject of tradeshows…
What other events do you suggest we attend? Xchange? SMBNation? HostingCon? We’re planning on attending a few select events and obviously wish to select those where we can meet our (existing & prospective) partners! Please give your suggestions in the comments below.
(someone asked me why we chose this title for this post)
Thank you, Calvin, for a SPARK of inspiration
Thursday, September 13th, 2007 posted by luxWe recently named our partner program SPARK. We decided to give it a name as Vembu StoreGrid Service Provider Edition Partner Program was becoming quite a mouthful!
Why SPARK?
Of course, while we could have named it anything we wanted, it would be nice to have an acronym of sorts. We’ve placed our bets on Service Providers leading the way towards the boom in online backups amongst SMBs - what we call Service Provider Assisted Remote Backups ! But SPARB just didn’t sound right.
Here’s where Calvin & Hobbes come in. One of my strongest memories of the comic is the club they form - G.R.O.S.S.
G.R.O.S.S. is short for Get Rid Of Slimy girlS (Disclaimer: I am not and never will be a member of G.R.O.S.S.)
Coming back to S.P.A.R.B….taking Calvin’s example, we simply made Backups bacKups - and SPARK (Service Provider Assisted Remote bacKups) was born! Click here to know more about SPARK!
If you’ve read them before, you’ll probably agree that Calvin & Hobbes is one of those endearing comic strips that has the capacity to span generations- my sons regularly read it and right now, they love G.R.O.S.S. ; wait till they grow up - I anticipate a trend reversal!
Backup Services are No. 2 on SMBs list, says VAR Business Magazine
Monday, September 3rd, 2007 posted by lux
The September issue of VAR Business has an interesting article on the “Top 5 Tech Segments SMBs Will Spend Money On”. While the first segment mentioned is Network Security, Backup & Archiving ranks number 2. Online Backup Services are especially mentioned and the article says:
Online backup services is also an area where resellers are starting to see increased interest in the SMB market, and vendors are now better enabling resellers to offer such services as part of their managed services portfolios—opportunities that can help them lock into recurring revenue streams.
We recommend that you read the article; however, if you’re strapped for time, here’s a summary…
The “Top 5 Tech Segments SMBs Will Spend Money On” are:
- Network Security
- Archiving & Backup
- Client/Desktop Security
- Network Infrastructure
- Accounting / Supply Chain Solutions
Over half the SMBs polled said they expected to spend more on IT in the coming year. They are expected to spend US$ 13,000 (average per SMB) on IT in the coming year.
Also from the article:
62 percent of small businesses polled strongly agreed with the statement “technology is something that can create a genuine competitive advantage for my company.” That’s incentive for solution providers to show their small-business customers how technology translates to a competitive advantage, several resellers said.
An August Month
Thursday, August 30th, 2007 posted by luxTrue to its name, August has been a great month for us.
August 1: We were a finalist in Windows IT Pro magazine’s awards in the ‘Interoperability’ category, thanks to our ability to maintain a homogeneous look/feel across heterogeneous environments & operating systems - Windows, Linux (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, SuSe), FreeBSD & Mac OS X.
I just realized how much has happened this month - on August 1, the other finalist in the Interoperability category, Xensource, had not yet been acquired by Citrix!
August 7: Red Herring announced their list of the 200 finalists for the ‘Red Herring 100 Asia’ - Asia’s 100 most innovative technology companies. We’d made it to the list of 200 finalists!
Today, August 30: Red Herring just put up the list of 100 winners, and…
WE WON!
From all of us here at Vembu Tech, Thank you dear partners & customers. We’ll save you the pain of reading through one of those ‘Oscar Acceptance’ like speeches, but honestly, with all your feedback, feature requests, brickbats & bouquets, you’ve really helped us stay innovative!
Coming to think of it, its been an August year…earlier this year, we also made it to CRN’s list of emerging vendors for our channel friendly practices!
Hello World!
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 posted by luxGreat! We’ve finally got this blog on the road.
We’ll be using this quite often to keep you up to date with developments on Vembu StoreGrid. There will be the occasional ‘off topic’ post, I’d expect! But by and large, we’ll stick to StoreGrid, backup & IT - in that order of priority!
We’ll update our forum when something ‘important’ is posted on this blog. And if its really big news (like a new release), you’ll probably get an email as well - if you’re in our ‘nearing unmanageable’ database.
There’s an RSS feed here - if you do use a reader (personally, I use Google Reader, even though it’s still in official Beta), please add us to your reading list.
Our first ‘real’ post will be a video providing an overview of what’s coming in the Service Provider Edition v2.2 ; for more on that, please watch this space.
