BlackBerry Curve Outselling iPhone 3G in Q1 2009

NPD Group on Monday reported that Research In Motion's BlackBerry Curve outsold Apple's iPhone to become the top-selling consumer smartphone in the US in first quarter of 2009.

According to CNET:
NPD attributed the recent BlackBerry sales surge to an aggressive "buy one, get one free" promotion for the phone by carrier Verizon Wireless. It helped boost RIM's share of the consumer smartphone market 15 percent to capture nearly 50 percent of the market in the first quarter, NPD said in a statement.

We offer hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for partners as part of our hosted services. BlackBerry hosting from Pointivity frees partners from all hardware, software and maintenance costs, plus the expense and time of setting up service.

If you want to sell a solution that's high in demand with great customer retention rate, BlackBerry email is the prefect complimentary add-on to hosted Exchange in addition to the archiving solution we offer.

By the way, we still offer ActiveSync for free, so partners can sell wireless email on iPhone and BlackBerry with our hosted Exchange offering.

One in Five Enterprise to use Hosted Email in 3 Years

According Gartner, surge in hosted email will likely to represent 20% of the commercial email market by 2012 even though it was only at 1% in 2007.

The report stated that:
"Gartner's E-Mail SaaS Threatens Third-Party Vendors report warned that traditional third-party product vendors will suffer in four key areas.

Applications core to the running of on-premise email, such as disaster recovery, and spam and virus filtering tools, will be significantly affected by the move to SaaS email solutions, as will applications that extend the email platform, such as encryption and archiving.

Client-side applications, meanwhile, may not be affected initially, but are likely to decline as the prevalent storage model moves from client to server side, and users access emails via a browser rather than a client."

We have been helping partners to deliver IT smarter with a wide range of products in our hosted model starting with hosted Exchange, SharePoint (collaboration), archiving & compliance and wireless email.

Simply put, on-premise is not looking good as the cloud (hosted) model gains adoption and accelerates in this economy.

Gartner and Forrester: 2009 IT Spending will Decline

U.S. jobless claims surged to a 26-1/2-year high last week, delivering yet another bad news to the economic downturn. Many experts believe that economy will get worse before it gets better.

"Market research firms Gartner and Forrester have both revised their IT spending forecasts for 2009 and now say IT spending will decline this year due to a deeper-than-expected recession. Gartner says the drop will be deeper than after the dot-com bust." according to Channel Insider.

The credit crunch has impacted IT capital purchases very hard and the only area Forrester projects as set for growth is outsourcing.

"Forrester’s forecast calls for computers and peripheral equipment sales to decline by 6.7 percent in 2009, communications equipment sales to fall by 7.7 percent, software sales to fall by 0.4 percent, IT consulting services sales to fall by 1.9 percent and IT outsourcing sales to grow by 2.1 percent in 2009"

Many technology providers have already experienced the decline in business for a while now and the forecast simply confirms the fact that businesses are not willing to spend the big capital investments (CAPEX is dead!) and is looking to cut IT budgets with the combination of moving to lower-cost alternatives, extending the lifecycle of existing products and laying off inefficient resources.

When economy is bad there is a rush to quality, a shift in spending and a higher expectation to do more with less. This is why technology providers must deliver a competitive offering to retain existing customers and to find new business opportunities utilizing the outsourcing IT model. From Pay-as-you-go hosted services to the all-inclusive per user/per month Total Outsourced Solution, Pointivity has been delivering the OPEX IT subscription model for years and we have the go-to-market strategies for our partners to deliver the same successful solution.

Do you have the right strategies to navigate through this perfect storm? Can you deliver more value than your competitors? Contact Pointivity to learn more on how we can help.

Link to Gartner Press Release.
Link to Forrester report.

Outsource IT: The Trend Continues

Traditionally, outsourcing has been seen as a way to rapidly and dramatically cut costs especially with technology. As outsourcing IT matures, companies are also realizing that the technology they outsource still must be woven into larger, end-to-end processes that's cost efficient and cost effective. For example, sales people still must roll up into an organization's CRM system, share sales report with other team members, then dispatch emails to customers efficiently and on-demand regardless of location.

As we move into the ubiquitous adoption of Software-as-a-Server (SaaS 2.0) evolution, one thing is for sure - technology must optimize business to transform how we work in a meaningful way.

From a business perspective, organizations must integrate various in-house and outsourced technology to enable seamless, reliable business process ready to scale (up or down) with minimum complexities while delivering real ROI.

This, in turn, require a whole slew of processes that includes:
- identify infrastructure, software, growth needs
- define IT goals and policies
- purchase hardware and software
- hire and/or train staff to implement infrastructure
- maintain the IT environment
- support internal and external users

Pointivity has unified all the processes above with the best-practices outsourcing resulting in a Total Outsourced Solution from Managed Services to Hosted Services delivered on a simple per user per month OPEX model. The solution enables businesses to maintain control and focus on their core competencies while shifting all IT risks and responsibilities to Pointivity.

Outsourcing can also reduce operating costs, help companies to make efficient use of technology, save on investment in hardware and software, streamline reporting to management and regulators, provide access to additional functionality, improve data security, and the list goes on!

How we do it, click to enlarge

We're now offering "Total Outsourced Solution" to selected partners who qualify to private label the entire solution to their customers.

Business Continuity and Compliance Solution from Pointivity

With business becoming more complex and interconnected, the risk and cost of disruption extends well beyond IT, to every aspect of business processes. Business continuity is vital to business success.

In addition there are many regulations that cover Business Continuity and the overall category of Electronic Media. Some of these are industry specific such as Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), SOX, SEC, FINRA and HIPAA.

Pointivity manages all client infrastructures through a state-of-the-art SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No.70) Type II compliance data center, reflecting a consistent, reliable and secure operating environment to support customers worldwide. Keep in mind that all hardware are owned, maintained, and managed completely by Pointivity.

That's the foundation of our Hosted Services and IT Outsourced Solution. We then add our Backup & Disaster Recovery Solution (BDR) and Messaging Archiving Solutions to deliver a comprehensive business continuity and compliance solution.

This cost effective solution can be tailored to individual business needs on a pay-as-you-go per user per month model while support is available via our Managed Services to provide a complete continuity program.

About the SAS 70 Type II:
SAS 70 is an internationally recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). SAS 70 is an acronym for ‘Statement of Auditing Standards.'

SAS 70 demonstrates that service providers have adequate controls and safeguards when they host or process data related to their customer base.

The audit includes on-boarding policies for new hires, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, IT and physical security policies, data backup and recovery procedures, provisioning of services, asset tracking and inventory management, separation of client infrastructures, decommissioning of servers and services, and other business practices.

High SaaS Adoption + SEC Mandates = Hosted Email Archiving

Email archiving continues to grow in market demand despite the downturn, in December the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sent an open letter to CEOs of SEC-registered firms imploring them to not ignore or cut short of their compliance responsibilities because of the economic downturn. Some of the SEC mandates for these firms includes proper email archiving and email compliance. The message is simple: do not cut corners just because things are getting tough, cut cost elsewhere but not email archiving.

Interesting enough, according to ZDnet last week, Forrester disclosed their Q4 SaaS research report which indicated an accelerated growth with SaaS adoption amongst companies looking to seek cost cutting alternatives.


Combine the two and you get a growing market demand for "Hosted Email Archiving" in a shrinking economy. There is no doubt that customers want the benefits of email archiving but this time they want it on a SaaS (pay-as-you-go) model.

Pointivity partners can now offers email archiving (Global Relay) along with enterprise communication (Microsoft Exchange), collaboration (SharePoint), and wireless email (BlackBerry, ActiveSync) as part of a complete hosted solution with private label capabilities. Our partner program is designed to enable partners to be more competitive and flexible while building a strong recurring revenue stream.

ASCII Success Summit - Los Angeles 2009

Last week I attended the ASCII Success Summit in Los Angeles.

There were about 100 VARs who attended the show. I didn't get to see all the presentations as they divided the group in half in order to fit in all the presentations that day. In the future ASCII should either let members determine which presentation they want to attend or allow speakers to talk to all attending members.

The two best presentations at the event were Kent Erickson (ASCII member) from Pointivity and Ron Gavlick from Zenith Infotech.

Kent Erickson's presentation focused on the shift in the IT industry from traditional hardware sales and break/fix services to hosted services and cloud computing.

To view Kent's presentation online, click here:
http://www.slideshare.net/secret/EKSs1rVyDP1xYb

Ron's presentation focused on Zenith's Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) device and the advantages of the BDR over traditional backup systems.

Other speakers at the ASCII Success Summit included:

• Evolve Partners on Microsoft BPOS
• ASCII Member, John Endter for Microsoft Response Point
• ASCII Member, Dave Seibert for StorageCraft
• ASCII Member, David Lawrence for Efolder
• Autotask
• Storage Guardian
• Matt Makowicz – Managed Services Books
• ARRC – HaaS Strategy
• Reflexion

In talking with the attendees and ASCII members you can still see there's a big divide and difference in the IT market between traditional VARs (break/fix) and the MSP industry. Many of the smaller VARs are just getting into MSP or only entered into the MSP market with the last 6 months. Even fewer VARs are offering hosted services, they are still providing on-premise solutions with large hardware capital expenses which involve labor intensive support and ongoing maintenaince.

I had great conversations with many of the VARs about the value of adding hosted solutions as another sales tool. A handful mentioned they are reselling Google Apps and Google Email to their customers, but when questioned about revenue all them said they are not making any revenue off the sale of Google Apps/Gmail but provided the service to the customer to maintain the relationship and desktop support and desktop sales. The same goes for SalesForce.com and other online applications. The traditional VAR is being squeezed out of the market and companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are providing cloud based hosting services direct to customers with little or no revenue opportunities to the VARs.

It will be interesting to see how VARs move forward and what solutions they adopt, especially cloud or hosted solutions over the next year.

Email Archiving Now Available for Partners

Thanks to all the attendees for our email archiving solution webinar today. This new addition will greatly benefit partners who target the various vertical by bundling it up with other products and services to create a valuable package offering. With the explosion of laws and compliance regulations, partners can use Pointivity's email archiving and compliance solution to help their customers with SOX, SEC, FINRA and other guidelines all on a pay-as-you-go model.

We also appreciate the insightful information on archiving and compliance from the Global Relay team.

If you miss out on the webinar, you can login to our partner portal to get the latest updates on this new addition but you must be a Pointivity partner. If you're interested in becoming a Pointivity partner you can easily sign up here and start offering your customer your own cloud of hosted services.

A Walk in the Clouds

In the February issue of the VSR (Vertical Systems Reseller) magazine, VSR sorted through the cloud hype and asked Kent Erickson, President and CEO, Pointivity, as well as several other VARs and vendors to ferret out these seven facts that VARs should know before breaking into cloud computing. Read the article here

Pointivity Ranked Amongst the Top 100 World’s Most Progressive MSPs by MSPmentor

Thanks to Joe for the great webcast on The MSPmentor 100 (2008-2009 edition).

MSPmentor 100 list rankings are un-sponsored and based purely on research by examining the world’s most progressive managed service providers.

This year Pointivity was ranked at #20 in revenue, #25 in devices managed and #53 in overall ranking.

Instead of ranking MSPs merely by total revenue, MSPmentor calculates an index measurement using such metrics as overall managed services revenue, overall managed services revenue growth, percentage managed services revenue growth, managed services revenue per employee, number of devices managed, and other data points comparing fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2007. This index approach ensures small, midsize and large MSPs from around the world are recognized on the MSPmentor 100.