Profitability Best Practices

Profitability Best Practices

As a benefit of being a partner with Own Web Now we offer you the ability to receive brandable marketing collateral. You can get brandable marketing collatereal in one of two ways. You can either send your log in either a .jpeg or .png file to stephanie@ownwebnow.com and a list of services that you want branded or you can brand collateral right here by yourself!

Based on feedback of thousands of ExchangeDefender resellers, the most profitable partners are the ones that fully embrace ExchangeDefender as a part of their managed services stack. Because the product is so versatile in terms of reporting, functionality, archiving, LiveArchive and more there are many opportunities to both differentiate yourself in the message hygiene marketplace and address client-specific problems. Here are a few key ideas to consider when integrating ExchangeDefender into your business plan:

ExchangeDefender LiveArchive ExchangeDefender LiveArchive will store messages for a year and then automatically discard the oldest messages. ExchangeDefender policy management console allows you to configure the interval per-user and scale ExchangeDefender benefits according to the service plan the customer is signing up for. You can disable LiveArchive for your entry level plans, offer 7 days on the silver plan and perhaps 30 days on the gold plan. For longer term archiving, such as three months or a year, you can actually charge a significant amount for this service. Currently, our competitors at Google and Microsoft are charging approximately $18.00 per month per user for one year of archiving. Their system is further limited by the fact that they are not powered by Microsoft Exchange. The profitable part of the equation is that ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is not an optional addon; it is included with every mailbox that we protect free of charge for a full year. Keep in mind that LiveArchive is designed for business continuity; it's what you turn to when your infrastructure is unavailable to resume business. For compliance with government regulations and long term archiving, see ComplianceArchive.

Partner Quote: "I love LiveArchive!! LiveArchive isn't only useful in a disaster. We also use it for network moves. Since a physical move could take days, but a client can't afford to go that long without email, LiveArchive is the perfect business continuity solution in that situation!" Howard Cunningham, CEO Macro Systems LLC

ExchangeDefender Annoyerizer and ExchangeDefender Outlook Addin

Deployment and training of staff to use these solutions should be considered a premium solution because no other company in the marketplace offers it. Business owners and managers are highly sensitive to missed or untimely delivery of email messages and ExchangeDefender tools that can be the key to differentiating yourself from other solution providers.

ExchangeDefender Annoyerizer can be deployed through Microsoft Group Policy (GPO) framework and ExchangeDefender Outlook Addin is fully brandable giving you another way to present your solution as unique for the client.

ExchangeDefender Pricing Policy

ExchangeDefender licensing can be leveraged to help you win competitive deals. Because we offer all the features in a single monthly license cost per user, you can give your clients the peace of mind that they are being fully protected from online threats instead of putting them into an uncomfortable position of calculating the risk of not opting for the additional features. With ExchangeDefender, you can add as many domains as you wish. We do not charge for vanity addresses, aliases, domain names or distribution groups. We do not charge extra for LiveArchive or outbound filtering. This upfront, all-inclusive offering has been the key to our success in competitive bidding.

Own Web Now's Hosted Collaboration is meant as a building block for the collaboration that a business needs. We have found that our most profitable partners focus on using Exchange and SharePoint as the tool to launch projects and adapt their organization to Office 2007 and business productivity suites.

Exchange 2007 comes with a 10GB quota but it can be sized to adjust to your plans, giving you room to create a very profitable solution. Our control panels are fully branded and customizable, allowing you to create entry level 1GB mailboxes that are standard on the market and charge premium rates for the additional services. We are among the only providers to provide all the features of Exchange 2007 including ActiveSync, Public Folders, Outlook Web Access as well as spam protection all included in the low cost.

For BlackBerry fans, we offer BlackBerry Enterprise Server on the hosted model as well as give you differentiation points from Microsoft's solutions and other direct-to-consumer vendors. See BlackBerry Enterprise Server section.

Split Domains

Own Web Now enables partners to split a domain and host some mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange 2010 and others on secure POP3/IMAP/SMTP/Webmail. Just like all the users in the company do not require advanced features of BlackBerry Enterprise Server or an iPhone, some organizations may have users that do not require rich calendaring and Public Folders. In some instances, it may make sense to offer a hybrid model in which split domains can be used to deliver a more cost effective solution.

Deployment and pricing is very simple. Refer to Partner Guide for pricing - there are no surprise charges or setup costs. Simply point your MX record to the appropriate server and create your Exchange and POP3 mailboxes.

Selling against Google Apps and BPOS

Microsoft and Google have spent a lot of money attempting to market their business platforms as business solutions. In our partners' experience, Google Apps & BPOS solutions are more in tune with the consumer market and their support does not make them suitable or flexible enough for business purposes.

While these solutions offer attractive pricing and are often considered by our partners prospects as an alternative, Own Web Now's Exchange + SharePoint product often wins with the following:

• Enterprise grade SPAM filtering and security with granular controls and ability to whitelist senders
• Support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, remote device wipe for ActiveSync phones (iPhone, Windows Mobile) and free "push" sync that conserves battery life.
• Business continuity (LiveArchive) built into the product and designed to keep you in business during routine maintenance intervals or unscheduled service interruptions
• Globally redundant infrastructure with ability to pick where information gets stored (for EU concerns)
• Own Web Now's focus on security with SAS 70 Type II audit and solution audited for HIPAA, SOX, PCI and SEC compliance.

The critical point of differentiation is the product design: Google Apps & BPOS are designed for consumers and Own Web Now solution is designed with business requirements in mind. We often find it that while the pricing is attractive, business concerns for security, reliability, redundancy, regulatory compliance and overall solution control & management are more important than the marginal savings.

The cost of Own Web Now's Offsite Backup solution is lower than comparable server backup software alone. In our experience, we have found that our most profitable IT Solution Providers only offsite the most critical of data (financials, communications, contracts) and store the bulk of their local data on the local network.

Many Offsite Backup providers will force you to purchase expensive systems for on-premise backups. With our Offsite Backup solution you can use anything - from the most expensive PowerVault systems to the affordable Western Digital network drives. Because Own Web Now does not impose any restrictions on the offsite/onsite ratio you can create large backup sets locally and move only the critical data off site.

For larger institutions, our seeding and triple replication makes a huge difference. The ability to create an instant triple-redundant disaster recovery plan and have it fully functional by the weekend is something that guarantees a large premium for this solution.

Pricing and Competition

Utility computing storage has become a popular consideration for backup data storage recently but has not been taken seriously by our partners for the following reasons:

• Utility companies have not yet come up with a good business model for seeding data and large backup sets can be difficult / expensive to seed over the Internet.
• For recovery purposes, it is inconvenient and often impossible to have a backup set mailed to you (if you experience a data disaster and have to wait weeks or months for the entire set to download)
• Most cloud data storage providers do not state how or where the data is stored, how it is backed up, how many redundancy options are built in or with what speed you can expect to retrieve large data sets. Due to emerging state laws and regulatory compliance statements, resellers are put in a position of having to assume liability if these questions are not answered clearly - something that Own Web Now provides in clear detail giving partners confidence to offer this solution.

We often hear our partners pricing the offsite backup product at 100% to 200% margin along with the service charge to set up the software. This model is highly successful because it is on par in security and quality with Iron Mountain's offering but does not require any additional software or hardware to be purchased or deployed.

Own Web Now's Virtual Hosting solution is used by thousands of customers who rely on it for web presence, email, databases and more. Most of our customers have been with us for years, even decades. It is important to understand that as your organization matures, its' needs do as well.

Own Web Now has been there for countless organizations that have outgrown the limits of basic web hosting. When you need to move your application to a virtual or dedicated server solution, we can help. Here are typical scenarios in which you can move above & beyond Virtual Hosting.

Virtual servers are intended for web sites that have outgrown the restrictions of shared web hosting. Because they offer a significant amount of resources and flexible controls of a dedicated server, they have become very popular among clients that want to completely remove a need for an on-premise server. Here are a few things to consider:

• Virtual servers are tuned for web hosting applications, not for high I/O demands (hard disk writes)
• Many "shared desktop"virtualization platforms for Windows XP or Windows 7 are illegal and violate Microsoft EULA
• It is not possible to have more than two remote desktop sessions (and one console connection) on a Windows Server.
• We cannot install Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server, Active Directory or Hyper-V roles in a virtual server environment. We also cannot install a Vmware ESXi in a virtual server.

While some of our partners are tempted to do the above, we have heard from partners that clients demanded a Virtual Solution due to it's pricing advantages but ended up blaming their IT provider when performance was not satisfactory. While the pricing may be appealing for terminal services, SQL servers and line of business applications, we recommend using a dedicated server solution that is designed for this use.

Dedicated Servers tend to fit the high-end customers the best as they provide a reliable environment combined with massive bandwidth and processing power. There are however many situations in which the servers are sold in the SMB market as well for hosting of business-critical tools that cannot be isolated to a single location. Many of our partners leverage this offering for their own practice and their own application rollouts. Over the past 12 months we have seen a major increase in demand for virtualization platforms, allowing our IT Solution Providers to deploy virtual servers and host several clients on the same system.

If none of the server configurations seem to fit the bill, we can build anything you need. Our teams specialize in creating on-demand clustered configurations and load balancers to fit the bill and every need. If that is still not good enough, just ship us a server and we will rack it up for you!