Most of our partners are very familiar with our LiveArchive product which is the core of our offering:

LiveArchive is an enterprise-grade business continuity platform that lets you resume work right where you left off if the Internet connection was interrupted or other technical glitches got in the way of getting things done. Powered by Microsoft Exchange 2010 in multiple data centers, LiveArchive delivers a robust and redundant solution that is secure, reliable and free! The best part of all is that LiveArchive is always on, constantly archiving your sent and received mail, so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage.

LiveArchive is of course powered by Microsoft Exchange 2010 and has a fully redundant infrastructure spread across two different data centers for ultimate reliability. It also holds a year worth of email, making it… extremely expensive.

ExchangeDefender Essentials

ExchangeDefender Essentials was built with almost the exact opposite goal from ExchangeDefender. It was designed to be affordable, to be a core of what every business needed to protect, secure email and assure business continuity. To make it affordable, ExchangeDefender Essentials does not come with LiveArchive. Or Encryption. Or Web File Sharing. Or Web Filtering.

Of all those awesome components that should be a basic requirement of any Exchange deployment, LiveArchive is the most valuable one but the reality of small business is that budgets are tight and sometimes you have to make a sacrifice.

It explains why ExchangeDefender Essentials has been one of our best selling products in 2011.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Changes

Earlier this fall we announced that we intend to turn ExchangeDefender Essentials into a market leader.

We will do so with a massive cut to the price.

Why? Because the antispam world has standardized it’s basic offerings around $1/month and we can do much better than that.

But is price enough to make the switch? We didn’t think so.

So we built an affordable business continuity product for ExchangeDefender Essentials.

I would like to invite you to participate in the beta of this new product. If you currently have a client on ExchangeDefender Essentials please email vlad.beta@exchangedefender.com and provide the domain name that is currently running on ExchangeDefender Essentials. We’ll enable the new archiving product for them.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency – e^3

We’re currently calling this product ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency or E^3 (e-cubed).

The idea is, once your mail server or your access to email is interrupted, you can continue to work elsewhere – through the emergency system! (We realize it’s corny, it’s the best we could come up with on a short notice, if you’ve got a better name let us know). Here are some specs:

- Access to past 5 days of email (goal 14)
- Secure Web and IMAP access
- Access to all inbound mail
- Ability to send mail via Web
- Powered by Linux
- Mobile access

… nothing to install or configure, works automatically via MX replication even while your server is down (unlike snapshot server agents or WebDav/API connections) so it works on Exchange, GroupWise, Google Apps, BPOS, anything you can modify the MX record for.

Initially we will offer this product with five (5) days of mail and hopefully increase to two weeks (14 days) over time.

We realize that the major objection is that the product is not based on Microsoft Exchange 2010, that it doesn’t have data center redundancy, that it’s not available for a year, etc – all of which are fair arguments – but they hold true as criticisms of all of our competitors. Most of which will not include this feature free of charge.

We will.

We also believe this is something that will make our partners far more competitive in the marketplace and finally give many of you a good reason to move from our competitors to us or give something to those more budget conscious clients.

We look forward to having another great year and hope this gets you fired up about 2012. If you’d like the details about the price cut coming to all ExchangeDefender Essentials clients please feel free to ping me privately (NDA required; in a nutshell: You’re going to love it)

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Shockey Monkey will be receiving a massive refresh in both features and the business model in early December. Throughout 2011 we have been adding new features, new integrations and have entered several partnerships that just begin to showcase what is possible with Shockey Monkey. With that, we are about to revise the pricing, positioning, marketing and access to Shockey Monkey and want our partners to be aware of the changes that are coming.

Shockey Monkey Media & Partner Briefing

Tuesday, November 22nd. Noon EST.

Contact us for an invitation to the webinar.

Due to the sensitive nature of the information we will be sharing, this event is open by invitation only to vendors in the MSP space and media sites/blogs that cover them. We will be discussing:

- New pricing models
- New support procedures
- Sponsorship options
- Breakdown of user metrics
- Integration overview
- Usage patterns and value

If you’re interested in attending let us know, we are on pace to launch 2.0 in the first week of December. At that time we will be holding a user-facing webinar to announce all the cool new stuff that we hope is a real game changer for our users as well as for our partners.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316       x500
(407) 536-VLAD

In August our core data center in Dallas Texas suffered its worst outage in the past 8 years after an ATS power failure. Since the power outage was due to the ATS, backup power was not able to be routed to the redundant feeds to all our servers and as a result critical services were knocked offline. ExchangeDefender’s core focus is on-time clean mail delivery, and inbound mail delivery speed was impacted but was still available and processing mail for all customers. One of the most beneficial features of ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive which acts as a continuity solution for ExchangeDefender clients by keeping an additional copy of all client inbound and outbound mail. During the outage, LiveArchive was knocked completely offline for the first time since release. The full scale outage of LiveArchive prevented clients on Hosted Exchange and ExchangeDefender from being able to reach their continuity solution, creating lots of issues for partners and their clients. The outage caused us to reevaluate the redundancy in our solutions across the board starting with additional ExchangeDefender nodes and implementation of LiveArchive in our Los Angeles Data Center.

Today, I would like to update you on what we’ve done and announce the immediate availability of the new solution that will work even if one of our  data centers is offline completely for an extended period of time.

Complexity & Size Problems

The biggest complexity of the additional LiveArchive network was accepting mail between multiple datacenters and routing it to the nearest network, and finally synchronizing the mail between with remote networks. Due to amount of mail processed by ExchangeDefender on a daily basis, we were prevented from using the built in redundancy in Exchange 2010 like Database Availability Groups and Microsoft software load balancers for OWA and SMTP.

On average our Dallas LiveArchive network processes and stores over 115 million messages a day. By adding redundant LiveArchive networks we will automatically double our message processing count on our Exchange transport servers due to synchronization between networks. The additional overhead would also create immense load on our network if we utilized Database Availability Groups as our Dallas network is already storing over 382 TB of data. The notion of having a desynchronized network or increasing LiveArchive mail delivery time was not a viable solution as LiveArchive would then fail as a continuity solution.

The Solution

To overcome the obstacles and limitations we faced, we started to develop custom solutions to tie in with our LiveArchive networks and redesigned our network layout and made minor changes to the LiveArchive storage length in Los Angeles to one month.
The first issue to tackle was the Active Directory layout as we could not tie Active Directory into our already established and quite frankly rock solid Dallas Active Directory network. In the event of another catastrophic failure in Dallas the inability to contact the primary Active Directory network would render the Los Angeles copy useless unless we create them as unique sites. Although this was possible, we felt with the power of our automation between ExchangeDefender and LiveArchive was better suited for the job as the above solution would cause too many changes to occur during a failure, including many DNS changes. We decided to have unique Active Directory domains between sites and we hooked user account creations for Los Angeles into our ExchangeDefender provisioning.

The second issue was mail delivery design between sites. The original design of LiveArchive mail routing would cause the LiveArchive copy of inbound mail to always be routed to Dallas for delivery to LiveArchive. The Achilles heel of the design was always in mail that was delivered to Data Centers outside of Dallas as it would cause the original mail delivery to be delayed a few seconds as a copy was dispatched to Dallas.  Up until a few months ago our original design was acceptable and was only cause minor delays about twice a year. As the amount of mail processed increased, the delays became more noticeable. Mail delivered to networks outside of Dallas began to see increased processing time and eventually took twice as long compared to mail that was accepted by Dallas. By adding an additional LiveArchive network in Los Angeles we were able to route mail that arrived in Los Angeles to our Los Angeles LiveArchive network.

The final issue was mail synchronization between sites. We took advantage of the powerful extensions into Exchange by creating a custom Transport Agent that would copy submitted messages from each ‘local’ LiveArchive message to the remote network for processing. By utilizing custom routing and Edge servers we were able to successfully copy mail and provide real time processing and delivery between both LiveArchive networks.

In the event of a failure in either site, ExchangeDefender mail will automatically fail over to an additional DC and all LiveArchive mail will route to the network with available heartbeats.  Upon creating an outage notification, our team will modify the DNS records for https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com to route to Los Angeles. To access the Los Angeles LiveArchive network directly users can login at https://la.livearchive.exchangedefender.com

Bookmarks:

LiveArchive: https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com

Los Angeles LiveArchive Cluster: https://la.livearchive.exchangedefender.com

Please make sure your clients are

Sincerely,
Travis Sheldon
VP Network Operations, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x757
travis@ownwebnow.com

Happy Monday folks, Vlad here with something very exciting to share with you regarding this blog. As some of you may know, I run an extremely successful personal blog on which I cover topics relevant to the industry, technology and day-to-day joys of owning a business. Far more people follow that blog than this one and even internally, it is followed to see which products are coming out, what we’re working on and what different sides of ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy and so on are up to.

The exciting news today involves the announcement that we’re aggressively expanding this blog to include ExchangeDefender VP’s that actually work on the products, services and you!

The subject areas will include support, technical development, product updates, marketing, community and even business development advice.

One of the main reasons my blog is so successful is because it connects the dots. Even when we look at our most successful partners we find that they are plugged into our support NOC blogs, that they integrate Shockey Monkey with their PSA, that they rely on our marketing collateral and that they communicate with us as they build their business. Why are they successful? Because we build our business model around things that make sense. So as our partners perfect their model using our services, we perfect our services using our partners feedback. It’s a progressive cycle and we all win.

It’s my sincerest hope that you tune into this blog and follow it.

Send your employees to http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog and tell them to put it on their list.

We will soon add a podcast to sum it all up.

Honestly – I know what you’re thinking. It seems like it’s a huge time commitment. It is. But I can tell you with 14 years of company history as evidence that the returns are much higher than the investment.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
(407) 536-VLAD

ExchangeDefender 7 is officially less than two weeks from going live and you need to prepare your clients for it. While the new user interface is more intuitive than ever before, faster and simpler, people hate and resist change. Take a moment to download the user guides and send them along to your clients. We have ExchangeDefender branded PDFs that are ready to go:

Download ExchangeDefender Branded PDF Guides:

ExchangeDefender User Guide

ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007/2010 Agent Guide

ExchangeDefender Email Reports

ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing Guide

ExchangeDefender Encryption Guide

ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Guide

If you have some time we recommend that you customize these guides for your client base. Below are PowerPoint 2007/2010 versions of the documents listed above. Make sure you replace “ExchangeDefender” with your product name and “your IT Solution Provider” with your company name.

Download Brandable PowerPoint Guides:

ExchangeDefender User Guide

ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007/2010 Agent Guide

ExchangeDefender Email Reports

ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing Guide

ExchangeDefender Encryption Guide

ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Guide

Please make sure your clients are aware of the changes and familiarize them with the new look and feel of the site. This is the largest UI change we’ve had in the past 8 years and from prior experience, giving your users a heads up will make all the difference in the world when it comes to product and service satisfaction.

Thank you for all your support and your business, we’re counting down the days till May 30/31 when the new product officially goes live!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

On Wednesday we held our largest webcast ever and the amount of praise we have gotten from you is astonishing – not surprising though, considering that all but 3 features you requested made it into the product. We want to make sure we meet the expectations and make the product as perfect as possible – so we’d like to invite you to test drive it and tell us what needs to be fixed.

We are less than a month away from the launch of ExchangeDefender 7, the largest product and the largest upgrade in the company history. With ExchangeDefender 5 we changed the way you think about communications security and we made it affordable for everyone. With ExchangeDefender 6 we upgraded the entire backend of the network to sustain your growth and the emerging threats and market demands. With ExchangeDefender 7 we are introducing a brand new, unified, user experience.

So, are you ready? Here you go, URLs and instructions are in the document:

http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog/media/ExchangeDefender7Beta.pdf

Sincerely,
Vladimir Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Chief Software Architect

This Wednesday we will be holding a webinar to introduce you to the ExchangeDefender 7 beta launch. The one hour show will be recorded but you really should attend the live event as we’ll be answering questions after the show:

Please click below to register:
Wednesday, April 6th, 1PM – 2PM EST
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/120736520

The first part of the event should be attended by the business decision makers, sales and marketing personnel. We will be discussing the new business model behind ExchangeDefender 7 and the key changes that will make the new product a lot more profitable for your existing sales. We are making a lot of changes based on feedback and market demands.

The second part of the event should be attended by the technical employees that will be a part of the product deployment.

Important: The only way to gain access to the beta sites is to attend the live webinar or watch the recording. Future sales of ExchangeDefender will only be supported through companies that go through the free product training and going through the beta process will allow you to skip some of the required training.

Yesterday we held a webcast to announce our messaging portfolio for 2011. If you missed it, the recording along with the webinar and podcast is now available.

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

The biggest news of the day was ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging, combining all the services necessary to go to the cloud in one affordable package. The second biggest announcement was regarding CloudBlock.

Why?

In the past few years we have seen Microsoft and Google commoditize the entire enterprise email solution space. These moves were not welcomed by the reseller channel partners, even as both companies stepped up their efforts to become more partner friendly their primary goal was ownership of the client.

Indeed, many partners have lost clients to BPOS and Google Apps.

Sometimes the price is the only thing that matters. Given the economy, and the relative lack of appreciation for the more complex messaging needs, the low-cost commodity email has become quite popular.

What is CloudBlock?

CloudBlock, Inc is a third-party solution powered by the technology licensed from Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Exchange 2010 hosting management in particular.

It’s primary goal is to be simple to use. It’s secondary goal is to be cost effective.

There are two solutions in the stack: Mail (Exchange 2010 hosted in the cloud) and Security (SMTP security in the cloud, filtering SPAM and viruses as well as providing for business continuity).

Simplicity: Anyone can sign up at any time.

Cost Effectiveness: $2.99 for Exchange 2010 Mbox (5GB) and $0.35 for SMTP security.

What isn’t CloudBlock?

CloudBlock is not a channel-centric solution, it does not come with the flexible branding, centralized multi-client management or worldwide presence. But it’s simple to sign up and it’s cheap.

CloudBlock is not backed by a professional services business, support is limited to covering the basics.

The Strategy

CloudBlock was designed to be simple and cost effective. As such, it will not meet the needs of many channel resellers, MSPs or VARs. However, it provides for a level of differentiation. There is a huge difference between CloudBlock and an ExchangeDefender powered Exchange solution. There are tons of benefits when it comes to working with a local IT Solution Provider.

Unfortunately, sometimes the only thing that matters is the bottom line price. If the client is not willing to consider anything but the price, now you have a differentiation strategy. If you cannot clearly explain the difference between your various offerings, you cannot help your client choose the correct one for them.

When IT Solution Provider is pinned against Microsoft and Google, and the client only cares about the price, it’s a loss-loss situation. With CloudBlock, there is at least a hope of keeping them in your solution portfolio so you can fit your other solutions in their business.

You now have a better alternative to BPOS and Google Apps – it’s simpler and cheaper – and we’re confident we’ll help you win.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

To be continued with ExchangeDefender Essentials. See previous entry about ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging.

Earlier today we held a webcast to announce our messaging portfolio for 2011. This solution stack is directly driven by partner feedback and is designed for service providers. Here is an overview, answers to some common questions and some ideas on how to position this.

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

Why?

Before we get to the actual announcement, I want to personally share the feedback that we have received from so many of you that prompted us to consider a change in our business.

• Many MSPs and VARs found the cloud (serverless) environment “foreign” to their business plans and could not imagine their solution stack existing without the server anchor.
• Many MSPs and VARs complained that they were confronted by retail offerings that were significantly cheaper than the realistic costs of going to the cloud. Licensing and monthly fees are dwarfed by the migration costs that large cloud mail solutions do not talk about.
• Nearly all the MSPs and VARs could not fit the cloud in their margin models. Frequent question was “How do we turn hardware margin dollars into cloud margin cents and stay alive?” Sadly, the answer is: You don’t, without overhauling your salary structure and talent.
• Finally, the client still needed to be managed regardless where the email was. Unfortunately, this too was not a major point of consideration when companies decided to move to the cloud. Cost was.

Unfortunately, MSPs and VARs lost way too much business. I cannot count the number of times that I’ve heard partners talk about losing their clients to Microsoft, or only reaching out to me when they lost their deals to someone in the cloud.

We had to do something. I will agree that our solution is not perfect and does leave a ton of room for improvement, but we needed to act now. Starting with January 1st, we’ll be offering the following solution.

What is included in ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging?

Quite a bit. Actually, everything we do is built in: from security (ExchangeDefender) to email hosting (Exchange 2010 Mailbox, SharePoint 2010 web site) as well as migration, billing and support all under our partners brand.

• ExchangeDefender
  • Email Filtering (Antivirus, Antispam, Corp Disclaimers & Policies, Reporting, PSA Integrations)
  • LiveArchive (Exchange 2010-powered business continuity solution with 1 year rolling archive)
  • Encryption
  • Web File Sharing
  • Web Filtering
• Exchange 2010 Mailbox with 10GB Storage
• SharePoint 2010 Portal
• Billing & Collections
• Technical Support
• Migration
  • DNS modifications
  • Shockey Monkey Remote
  • Profile (email) move

It sounds like a lot but it’s the bare essentials. In the cloud, you cannot abandon your clients – they only pay when everything works. So we wanted to make sure that our offering worked from the day it was configured and continues to work through all the surprises with the Exchange, Windows and other fun stuff in between.

Does this mean Competition?

Not at all.

First of all, we are not competing for this business with our partners, it is only offered as an alternative to our award winning platform that no changes are being made to. So if you’re already happy with what you have, Exchange pricing for you will not change neither will the cost of the service.

Second, we will not market this directly. The partner (MSP/VAR) still owns the client. We will not take the client and reassign them to a partner we like more. We will not allow one partner to take over the service from another partner if the client wants to switch IT service providers.

Finally, we will remain a partner-centric organization. There are no plans or agenda to go direct, partners are still a core part of our market strategy, something we have been building for the past 13 years. This is not a prelude to a bigger, more direct offering.

What does it mean?

It means that we’ve idiot-proofed the cloud.

It means you now have 0 excuse not to embrace the cloud, at least for messaging.

It means that you don’t have to do any technical labor to offer Exchange 2010 or SharePoint 2010, we’ll do all the hard work for you.

It means that you don’t have to establish a full billing and collections process, we’ll do that for you as well.

Most importantly, it means you don’t have to do the hard work – from configuration to migration to ongoing management. We will manage the solution end to end.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time a large service provider and software developer has taken full control of the entire 360 degree service delivery and done so under partners own branding. This is key and a critical differentiator: We are not competing with the partners that made us successful, we’re providing another way to build a business.

Long term, strategic view is even more positive: This helps MSPs and VARs that are uncertain about the cloud a way to start profiting from it immediately. Because it is still your client, you can take over all the responsibilities at the end of the contract and realize even higher profits when you can prove that the cloud can indeed generate significant margins.

Most of the skepticism around the cloud is due to the hype. The rest of it is out of the fear and uncertainty about how to actually go to market and succeed.

I’m proud to say that we are taking a big step with our partners in alleviating a lot of those concerns and helping as many as we can as quickly as we can – we’ll help you win.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

To be continued with ExchangeDefender Essentials and CloudBlock.

By now nearly everyone has received an email invitation to attend our Holiday Special webcast to close out 2010 and hopefully make December the busiest month you’ve ever had. We wanted to showcase what we’ve been working for the past two months and give you some tips and tricks to grow your business – proven by our most successful partners.

http://www.ownwebnow.com/Holidays2010/

I’ll apologize for the cheesy newsletter but that’s marketing. Now on to business – following the launch of Shockey Monkey I tasked my team at Own Web Now to reorganize the company. We have done this several times in the history of our business and it’s always dictated by the opportunity and our ability to push our partners in the right (read: profitable) direction.

The problem with any good idea is that the catch usually involves doing a ton of training, reading, videos and hard work. Lots of trial and error – across technical, sales, support and marketing fronts. We have worked hard over the past few months to produce documentation, webcasts, seminars even books on the matter so that you can easily plan your cloud approach, know exactly how long it’s going to take and what it’s going to be. Today, things are a mess – between predictability of service levels, documentation that is clearly understood from level 100 to 300, ability to get a very complex situation evaluated in order to provide a simple answer – simply put, we cannot thrive on complexity in order to grow.

Mark my words: What we have developed is bigger than last years announcement of Autotask and ConnectWise integrations. The incredible amount of work we did to make our platform work with the way you run your business is just the beginning. The question now is – how do you grow what you already have, how do you market and differentiate yourself, how do you reposition yourself and find a real partner in helping build your business?

Recently I asked the readers of my personal blog to tell me how they would go about building an MSP if they got a do-over. Starting an IT business is easier than ever and for the most part it’s a process of assembling solutions from vendors who have agreed to play nice with each other. If it’s so simple, you will be facing a much tougher and much cheaper competition – soon. Combined with efforts made by major software companies trying to wedge and dislodge IT solution providers, now is the time to get serious.

December’s webcast will include our business model for the coming years and an announcement of resources you can take right now. We look forward to building this new business with you.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp