On the Road Again
Monday, July 28th, 2008 posted by luxWe recently attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference at Houston!
Two interesting things from the conference (that were not directly related to the event itself):
a) The StoreGrid demo we were running during the event had a StoreGrid server running on Amazon EC2 - with storage off Amazon S3. It worked flawlessly! Look out for a Beta of an ‘S3 capable’ StoreGrid - coming soon!
b) We’ve decided to ‘hit the road’ - and attend other relevant tradeshows/events to the extent possible. The best part about the Microsoft event was that it gave us the opportunity to meet many of our existing partners, put faces to names, and to understand their business & its associated requirements even better.
Towards having more sessions like these (and of course, recruiting new partners), we’ll be attending…
Hostingcon 2008 (we’re at Booth #104)
July 28-30, Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois (Click here for more details on Hostingcon)
Comptia Breakaway 2008 (we’re at Booth #222)
August 5-7, Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center, Orlando, Florida (Click here for more details on Comptia Breakaway)
If you’re attending either of these events, please drop by and say hello! You can also schedule a meeting, in advance.
We also have 3 FREE passes to give away to our partners (currently using StoreGrid SP Edition) for the CompTIA Breakaway event (each pass is valued at approximately US$ 695). Partners have been sent an email on this, but here are the details once again…
If you’re interested in one of these 3 free passes, please email us right away at news AT vembu DOT com and type ‘Interested in attending CompTIA’ in the subject line of your mail.
We’ll select 3 names from the first 50 requests we receive or at 11.59 PST on July 29 - whichever comes first. Please ensure that you will definitely make it to the event if you win - we’d hate to see a pass go unutilized!
Please note that these passes cover the event only (a value of approx. US$ 695). You’d need to arrange for your travel, accommodation, etc - on your own. Additionally, if there are any other associated charges/fees levied by CompTIA or other bodies, you’d need to directly take care of these.
From what we’ve heard, these CompTIA events are quite interesting and educative!
Hope to see you in Chicago and/or Orlando! What events are you attending this year? Let us know, and we’ll try and be there
Forget with Confidence, Edit on demand
Thursday, June 26th, 2008 posted by luxAt times, I’m a ‘to do list’ freak!
I’ve even been guilty of writing up ‘to do lists’ consisting of tasks, some of which have already been completed - simply so that I can have the juvenile pleasure of ticking them as soon as I write them!
However, nothing beats the pleasure of ‘ticking off’ tasks that have been languishing in a to do list for far longer than you’d care to remember. We had the opportunity to do this earlier this week - with one of the (many) to do lists for the Vembu StoreGrid Online Backup Partner Zone…
You can now afford to Forget Your Password!
Everyday, we get up to 3 emails from partners who have forgotten their Partner Zone login name/password!
The (long pending) forgot your password feature is now up and allows you to immediately change your password, if required.
What’s more, we’ll also email you details on other members from your firm who are using the same partner zone account - so you can be nice, and let them know that they need to remember another obscure password!
The bigger piece of news: You can now Edit Build-O-Matic on Demand!
For various reasons, we’ve (so far) been ‘manually throttling’ the custom build creation process. As many of you know, each time you needed to make an edit to your custom build or create a new custom build - you needed to email us to get your form back to ‘edit’ mode. In fact, we get an average of two such requests every day - to set the form back into edit mode!
You can now do this yourself, i.e., set your form back to edit mode, as required!
Although the post title says ‘Edit on Demand’, please use your discretion when requesting new builds. We don’t have a formal cap on the number of edits you can do but since it ‘costs us’ a fair amount of bandwidth and storage each time Build-O-Matic churns out a new set of builds, we request you to be judicious about requesting new builds - that way, we’ll (hopefully) never need to place a cap on how many edits partners do.
Partners who have never forgoten their passwords and/or never edited their build settings probably won’t perceive these features to be even mildly interesting. I’m sure the others are probably cursing us for not introducing this earlier!
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!
