With the StoreGrid’s recent  granular integration with cPanel for domain backup and WHMCS for billing and provisioning automation, we headed straight to HostingCon 2011, San Diego to get feedback on these integrations from the hosting community. What we got was more than feedback; we received insight into how the industry is shifting. We personally spoke with more than 150 attendees who mostly comprised of hosting providers, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and VARs. Many of the hosting providers who are currently offering pure hosting services that includes dedicated hosting, managed hosting, shared hosting, web hosting and VPN said they are looking at offering managed services including fully outsourced network management arrangements. During the show one MSP even asked “Hey! Do you see some convergence in the industry between hosting providers and MSPs?” Yes, many of the hosting providers whom we spoke with said they are planning to include managed services as a part of their short term business strategy. Of course there are hosting providers, who already have managed service offerings, but I am talking about pure play hosting providers stretching their business towards managed services and are optimistic about the lucrative opportunity.

So, what does this mean for Vembu? Hosting providers jumping in the managed services market have two major requirements. One is to backup the domains through their hosted control panel and the other is to offer a fully managed backup service for not just the data hosted in their data canter, but also for customers’ on premise data.

Below are some of the recent additions and enhancements in StoreGrid which makes it a compelling solution for both hosting providers and MSPs.

1. Granular integration with cPanel with the ability to perform restore from cPanel client console
2. Billing and provisioning integration with WHMCS
3. Comprehensive reseller management
4. Support  for Disk Imaging, Bare Metal Restore and P2V (physical to virtual) on all windows machines
5. Ability to backup Virtual Machines (VMware and Hyper-V)
6. Integration with PSA and RMM platforms like ConnectWise and Autotask
7. and lot’s more….

We still have a long way to go to satisfy all the needs of both hosting and managed services industry and our team here at Vembu is hard at work to ensure we meet your needs. Soon you will hear about additional integrations and strategic partnerships that will benefit our partners including integration with Parallels Plesk, Level Platforms, Ubersmith etc…With our ever growing partner base it is important for us to understand even a small change in the industry and at any point in time we want our partners to stay ahead of competition. Please let us know your thoughts and needs.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

Choose Partners Who Listen—Find partners who evolve their features and define their roadmap based on the specific requirements of their customers.  These partners will have regular communication with their customers through a variety of interactions.  First, the partner’s support organization should have a formal feedback mechanism into product management and engineering to ensure that the customer’s voice is being heard.  This goes far beyond fixing bugs and includes usability and functional evolution of the product.  Second, look for partners who have formulated formal customer advisory boards and proactively reach out to their active customers to gather feedback on existing usability and functionality as well as input on the priorities of future releases.  Finally, look for partners who have executive-to-executive interaction so they can stay apprised of the macro business issues and other factors affecting your business.

Channel Commitment Means Everything—Many companies like to talk about being channel focused, but the proof is in the pudding.  Avoid working with companies that try to sell direct and through the MSP channel because invariably those companies will find themselves staring down the barrel of channel conflict.  It is important to partner with companies that is transparent while dealing with channel partners.  In addition, the company needs to understand the margin requirements of its channel partners and ensure that the discounting structure is clearly defined and handled in a consistent manner.  Select partners who understand services and the MSP community.  They need to appreciate recurring revenue and SLAs and the way YOU need financial and support arrangements to work.

The good news is that there are vendors who have a great reputation working with the MSP community.  Vembu was founded on a culture of close communication with its partners.  We realize that our MSP partners are living and breathing the customer experience every day and our goal is to support the product and drive the product roadmap based on what our partners need to grow their business.  We established a Customer Advisory Board several months ago and we have had several very successful meetings where 70+ Vembu partners have shared their feedback on usability, new releases and future requirements.

Vembu understands the MSP marketplace and our pricing reflects the goal of consistent discounting with high margins to maximize the revenue for our MSP partners.  We also live and breathe the MSP experience having built up a partner base of over 2500 MSPs.  We know your business depends on your reputation and your ability to provide high quality service to your customers.  Our commitment continues to be providing leading edge technology, great support and a roadmap that will keep you meeting the needs of your MSP customers now and in the future.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

Some of the features that might be of important to you as a Managed Service Provider are listed below

• Disk Imaging and Bare Metal Restore on all Windows Servers and Workstations
• P2V capability where you can convert a physical machine to either an VMware or Hyper-V file
• Support for backing up virtual machines (VMware and Hyper-V)
• Centralized monitoring and management of clients and backup servers
• Integration with leading PSA and RMM platforms like Connectwise, Autotask etc..
• and lot’s more…

As a Managed Hosting Provider, you might be interested in knowing what’s cooking in here for you

• Granular integration with cPanel and WHMCS
• Ability to backup multiple domains / databases / files / settings hosted through cPanel
• Single click restore of domains either through StoreGrid web console or cPanel console
• Ability for billing and provisioning through WHMCS
• Extensive support for backing up Linux and FreeBSD environments
• and lots more…

For more information, please contact storegrid-partner@vembu.com or call us at 1-432-558-0055

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now

 
1. Expand Your Customer Base—Data Protection is one of the key strategic services you can offer and the SMB market is wide open for grabs. Every SMB would need backup solutions to protect their valuable data and most struggle with cumbersome, ineffective and insecure solutions.  In addition, data protection is a strategic service that allows you to add value by providing one of the most sensitive and critical aspects of a company’s business.  You can help your customers understand the trade-offs between RPO and RTO and the importance of understanding how to build a business continuity plan.
2. Generate Additional (Recurring) Revenues From Your Existing Customers — For break/fix customers as well as customers you have provided professional services, data protection services allow a natural expansion of your relationship to a model of recurring revenue and value.  Many customers are looking for alternatives to traditional backup solutions and a managed service presents an attractive alternative.
3. Create Sticky Customers by Protecting and Storing Their Data — When you are protecting your customer’s data you have become an indispensable partner in their business. Hiring a new break fix VAR is easy; moving their data to a new data protection service provider is not. What’s more,  if your customer finally gets a data protection service that works well and meets his RPO and RTO objectives they will not want to leave you.
4. Evolve Your Customer Relationships — Selling a strategic service like data protection allows you to completely change your relationship with your customer from being “another” vendor selling hardware/software, to being his “virtual CIO” making strategic recommendations and delivering critical business systems. When developing a business continuity plan, you will gain deep and broad understanding of customer’s business. This allows you to deliver even more value down the road.
5. Ride the Wave of Growth— One of the beauties of any service tied to data is that data typically grows at a minimum of 20% year over year.  This means that your data protection service will grow by an average of 20% even if you don’t add new customers.  That is why it is important to create a business model that is able to capture the data growth.
6. Increase Your Brand Value by Selling a Customized Offering — Promote the look and feel of your colors, your logo and your brand.  This includes all customer-facing UI components as well as reports.  This helps establish domain expertise for your company even if the majority of the technical expertise is coming from your service partner.
7. Leverage Existing Infrastructure— If you have made an investment in infrastructure you can leverage that investment by pointing your customer’s data to your data center.  If you haven’t made that investment and don’t want to, you can point your customer data at your service provider partner and let them provide the hardware, software and operations staff, while you focus your energy on professional services engagements and sales.
8. It’s easy – An integrated console provides easy remote administration. Whether you want to be a master MSP managing other service providers or an MSP managing multiple customers, a centralized client management interface is crucial.  The web-based console provides a wide range of control over both backups and restores.  You can designate which functions are automated while still maintaining the ability to manage and monitor the entire backup and recovery process from anywhere and at any time.  In a disaster situation, you can restore files over the web or perform complete bare metal restores of desktops or servers.

Summary

Data protection services are one of the most strategic and broadly applicable services you can sell.  Vembu StoreGrid provides a world-class platform with tremendous flexibility for you to put together a flexible data protection practice with a suite of different packages meeting the needs of a range of customers. All of the solutions are fully brandable so you can present a single image to your customers and continue to build the value of your company.  As customers look to move away from legacy backup solutions, your ability to provide a path forward for this ever growing space (both in terms of number of customers and data per customer) will make you the partner of choice for your small business customers.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now

With the release of StoreGrid v3.1 SP1, StoreGrid now supports Exchange Server 2010 database backup and restore. The v3.1 SP1 patch should be installed on both the backup server (and replication server) and in the client machines running StoreGrid v3.1. Remember this patch installs only on top of StoreGrid v3.1 installations.

Exchange 2010 Backup Restore

VSS based backup of Exchange 2010

Unlike Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 where StoreGrid uses Exchange Server’s ESE API (Extensible Storage Engine) for backing up live Exchange databases, in Exchange 2010 StoreGrid uses VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) based APIs. StoreGrid invokes the “Microsoft Exchange Writer” (comes with the Exchange 2010 Server) which provides the backup of the live Exchange databases in a consistent state.

During the Exchange 2010 Server backup, the VSS is used to create a snapshot of the database and log files pertaining to the databases configured for backup and those files are then saved locally in a temporary location. Once all the relevant files are saved in the dump location, StoreGrid will report to the VSS that the backup is complete and the VSS will then purge the log files. StoreGrid will then backup the dumped files to the backup server and will delete these files from the temporary location.

Efficient as always..

Though the way Exchange provides its backup data may be different in Exchange 2010 server, but to StoreGrid users, Exchange 2010 Server backup and restore will work exactly the way Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 backup and restore work. The process continues to be slick and efficient as always:

1. Only incremental changed data is dumped during the incremental backup and not the entire Exchange database

2. Even within the incremental data that is dumped, StoreGrid backs up only the changed blocks by running StoreGrid’s Intelli-Delta on the incremental log files

3. Backup data files are deleted from the dump location once the backup is completed.

What is next in StoreGrid for Exchange Server Backups

We continue to make enhancements to Exchange Server Backups since we know that it is one of the most important service offerings for our MSP partners. Here are some the enhancements that is in near roadmap

1. Mail Level Restore – Specific emails from can be restored and attached into the Exchange Server.

2. Synthetic Exchange full backups – During additional full backups only the incremental backup data with respect to the previous full backup is sent to the backup server. Large Exchange Server data can be first seeded from the Exchange Server machine to backup server using StoreGrid’s seeding (export/import) feature and then later all additional full backups can be Synthethic Full Backups.

3. ‘Copy Only’ local backup – StoreGrid client can be configured to do regular weekly or monthly full ‘Copy Only’ backup of the entire Exchange Server, while it continues to run its incremental/differential backups to the offsite backup server. The ‘Copy Only’ backup will not set the archive bit on the Exchange Server, therefore letting the offsite backup to continue running its incrementals.

4. Incremental/Differential Exchange backups both locally and to remote backup server – We have also started working on providing the ability for the StoreGrid client to backup both locally and to a remote backup server in the same backup schedule.

Want to learn more about Exchange Server Backups and Restore using StoreGrid?

Please refer the following URLs:

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-backup-configuration.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-server-restore-configuration.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-recovery-database-restore.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-mailbox-rights.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-mailbox-backup-configuration.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-mailbox-restore-configuration.html

The above post was written by Arul Prabhu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

While the U.S. and the world economies are still trying to come out of the economic crisis, companies have been trimming their work force. The luckier employees who still have their jobs intact now spend much longer hours at work, making up for the reduced work force. It has not been easy for the business owners either. A survey conducted by Grant Thornton International (http://www.gti.org/Press-room/stress2010.asp ) found that 76% of the business owners have reported increased stress levels over the last year, majority of them citing economic climate and increased work load as the reason for it.

In such a global environment, it is only natural that the companies now look at their investments and try to adopt newer ways to reduce their excesses, introduce more efficient processes and improve their ROI. Among the frenzy of changes, one of the knee jerk reactions for businesses would be to scale down their services/expenses towards their smaller customers while focusing primarily on their larger partners. Jennifer Walzer ratifies this in http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/can-we-afford-to-continue-serving-small-clients/

But is it really that simple? Can one just sift away the minnows? Consider also this:

Smaller companies are nimble. They adapt to changes much better. They spend their resources carefully and efficiently. Small companies can therefore weather the bad economy better than some of the larger ones. This means they probably would continue to remain as your customer even when economy conditions are worse.

Peter Bergman in his blog: http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2009/03/why-small-companies-will-win-i.html makes a very interesting point. According to him one important factor that makes it possible for smaller companies to thrive better, especially when economy is bad, is trust. According to him, customers prefer smaller companies because it is  easier to trust them. This factor could actually fetch the smaller companies new opportunities from their large competitors. This might be an important factor and you could expect your smaller customers to actually grow. And you grow when they grow.

In tough economic conditions, you cut marketing expenses and look at organic growth for your business. You might just not have enough resources to aggressively pursue larger customers. But it might not be a bad idea at all to reach out to smaller customers, sign them up one at a time and earn their trust. These small customers can then be the catalyst to spur your organic growth further within their community without you have to significantly increase your marketing expenses.

Therefore, take another look at your smaller customers. Runs some numbers and see if they really are consuming 70% of your resources while fetching only 30% of your revenues. You may be surprised to discover the opposite. Not to sound cliché, but you could admire the mammoths but please also give some credit to the ants – after all they are still around with us.

The above post was written by Sathish Subramanian of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Why it is difficult to reach SMBs.

Every adventure trip has its own challenges. SMBs are typically run by tight entrepreneurs, who are conservative in terms of budget and may not venture out into adopting new technologies without getting absolutely convinced of its ROI.  SMBs are slow adopters of new technologies and require expert assistance on lots of IT-centric business solution areas. Despite these problems, every IT vendor wants to crack the SMB market by spending lots of marketing money ($$$) in online advertising and other mediums trying to reach the SMBs directly – Hold On! – Is that the right path? Truth is, even the mighty Microsoft and Dell realized that the effective way to reach out for SMBs is through the Channel.

Why Channel Partners have an upper hand with SMBs.

The Channel Partners, also known as, IT Service Providers, Managed Service Provider, Value Added Resellers and System Integrators etc… provide an effective way to Garden the IT requirements of SMBs and are in the best position to service them. The SMBs who don’t have the necessary resources in terms of time and money in managing their in-house IT rely on a trusted service provider who can act like their internal IT department. This local trusted service provider is in the best position to understand the SMBs business and provide the most suitable and cost effective IT solution and tailor them to to suit the customer’s business goals.

Only the local service providers can be the link between the vendors like us and the SMBs because they are in the best position to understand the SMB customers business needs to deliver the most relevant and cost effective IT solution by providing the necessary service in terms of the installation, training, on-going maintenance and support.

With that said, we may conclude that the best way to crack into the SMB market is through the channel!  But even for the service providers, there are many challenges  in growing their business – Let’s explore it!

Are the Service Providers always successful in reaching out to SMBs?

Most of the Service Providers consider ‘Marketing or Selling’ their services to SMB customers a critical pain point. Even though the service providers mostly do relationship selling to their SMB customers, there still seems to be some challenges in marketing relevant IT solution to them.  Mentioned below are some quick tips that might help the service providers to identify some common mistakes and areas of improvement in their marketing activities

• Service Providers are prone to overstuff customers with loads of information and technical specifications, while what businesses look for is a solution that will make their task of running their business easier. SMB’s don’t have time to sift through marketing materials and pages and pages of descriptions. A marketing message to SMBs must be simple and straightforward.  This point is succinctly put by Justin Crotty, Vice President Services North America at Ingram Micro Inc., in a guest blog post titled “Managed Services: The Value Is the Service” at the MSPmentor.

• The Pain Points for SMBs is how to sign up more new customers thus increasing the revenue and also how to reduce their operating cost . Focus your marketing message on these Pain Points and show how you can either help them  improve their process of signing up new customers or  how you can help them reduce their operating costs.

• Focus on how you are going to implement a solution and its impact on ROI instead of how exactly the product or service functions. For example if you are marketing an online  backup solution to your customers, one thing that you need to focus on is how backing up to an off site location is better in terms of protecting critical business data and also how the total cost of ownership is much more attractive than a traditional backup solution.

• Avoid buzzwords like cloud hosting, Grid Computing etc…, many a non-IT domain SMB may neither understand nor care to learn

• Include customer testimonials on all your marketing messages demonstrating on how a local business is benefited from your service. This will have a notable impact on your marketing efforts.

Like every adventure trip, the path for reaching out to SMBs is full of traps and pitfalls. If you discover the right path you can win big.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Vembu StoreGrid and Amazon Web Services have been working closely on a new technology – and the time is right for us to talk about StoreGrid’s support to Amazon’s QC2 service (Quantum Computing Cloud).  This ground breaking solution makes use of qubits (or quantum bits) for manipulating the data states probabilistically and using them for backing up data.  This enables users to achieve unprecedented levels of RTO’s and RPO’s using StoreGrid QMI (Quantum Machine Image) for data backups.

Amazon’s Quantum Computing Cloud (QC2) will be hosted on select Availability Zones within Amazon Data Centers. The core of these qubit-enabled backups has been implemented using StoreGrid’s new technology called StoreGrid ET^TM (StoreGrid Entanglement).

This technology relies on Quantum Entanglement phenomenon that allows transfer of data as quantum energy from the client over to the server without traversing the intervening space by manipulating the data states probabilistically.   This means that data transfer will take place a whole lot faster to your Quantum Backup Server without being hampered by bandwidth restrictions like T1 lines.

With this new technology, StoreGrid allows data to be transferred to Amazon Quantum Cloud at very high speeds without requiring any internet or physical data connections.  This new version of StoreGrid is currently under Beta and is already available to some of our MSP partners who have been actively testing it out.

Here is what our VP, Storage Systems; Sathish Subramanian has to say about this new release.

“We consider this innovative usage of qubits for data backup to be a giant leap in data communication & storage technology and will change how the industry looks at data backups and restores.”

For Service Providers, this new release means that their customers can now backup ANY data to Amazon Quantum Cloud without worrying about storage space and bandwidth etc.   We are working on the pricing model for this new technology and expect to release the pricing for this new release by end of this month.

What are you waiting for!

Click here to download your 360 day free trial today!

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Why many SMBs are reluctant to Cloud?

“Cloud Computing” – a buzz word that’s on the peak of Hype Cycle for quite some time now is still a ‘jargon’ to many SMBs and Mid Market Companies. It was interesting to see the results of the ‘cloud hosting awareness survey’ conducted by RackSpace that more than two thirds of the SMBs in US are not familiar with the term “Cloud Hosting” – Wow!

Now, two questions immediately arise in our mind. Is that the Small Businesses failed to grasp the cloud computing technology or the Cloud hosting providers done a horrendous job in marketing to that segment? I can understand why cloud hosting providers are more catered towards the ‘enterprise segment’ expecting some big deals ($$$) instead of focusing on mom and pop services which are typical of SMBs.

Now that even if the cloud hosting providers turned their flash light on SMBs and started to focus on this segment, they are faced with two big questions (barriers) that needs a fix.

1) Security and privacy concerns
2) Benefit over existing hosting service

A recent Forrester survey reveals that 51% of SMB survey respondents cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not adopting cloud computing yet. Small Businesses need a TRUE value proposition on why they need to move their data out of their premises and the real business value they derive out of it. These are some prime reasons on why many SMBs are still reluctant to cloud.

Why SMBs need the cloud?

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Time frame) is one(four) good reason on why Small Businesses need the cloud – Sounds like a typical sales pitch?

Budget – The cost of running and managing an in-house data center is increasing exponentially year by year and more than the hardware cost, it’s the support & management cost and business app cost etc… that are the real pain points. On top of it, increasing cost for the maintenance required for the datacenter, electrical power supplies, cooling, bandwidth etc… are some prime factors on why SMBs need the cloud.

Authority – When small businesses require a business app, it has to go through lots of stages especially when maintained in-house. Right from staging, development, testing, production and fail over environment, the in-house IT department will be working on lots of other items as well in order to bring up the business app. Now if there should be a technical problem with the storage devices or servers, SMBs typically don’t have the situation under control and have to rely on the hardware vendor’s technical support.

Need – SMBs usually do not have remote data centers for managing their offsite data backup requirements. Data Backup is more than a need – a mandate for running successful businesses. Businesses without proactive backup and recovery policies are likely to be OUT OF BUSINESS within 2 years of a major disaster. Replication to a cloud platform is an effective data backup and recovery strategy and helps Small Businesses to withstand a data disaster.

Timeframe – Small businesses don’t have to go through a typical two week purchase order process and additional two weeks of configuration, staging, testing etc… in order for a Business Application to be available for production use. With Cloud Computing, they can get up and running in few days and this quick process will have a profitable impact on the business.


Small Businesses have always more reasons to shift their data out of their premises and move it to the cloud. But they are reluctant and held up and what they need is the right message that “Your Data is Safe and Your Business is Protected” to get them up and running on the cloud.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

“Thought Leadership centers on earning trust and credibility. Thought leaders are noticed by offering something different – information, insights and ideas, for instance.”

For IT service Providers who are wondering what this TLM can do for them, here is the answer. According to the recent press release by Gartner , Thought Leadership Marketing can be a powerful tool for IT service Providers.

Also Gartner defines TLM as giving of information or advice for free or at nominal charge that a client will value so as to create awareness of the company’s product and stimulate demand for it in the market. Below are some of the key benefits of Thought Leadership Marketing.

1) TLM shortens the sales cycle
2) Change the pattern and terms of how people buy from you.
3) Diminish price resistance
4) Prospects experience your value before buying
5) Buyers invested in your service before purchasing
6) Growth in Social Media Placements
7) Assistance in SEO and SEM activities

TLM is one good piece of advice or information that can expressed via blogging, public speaking, writing articles and through various social media activities. According to Mark Peshoff, Senior director of Cisco, “Once Thought Leadership is established, the rest of the industry, the media, academia, government policy makers and the broader business community turn to that company for ideas and insights into where things are going”.  There are various programs employed for implementing TLM. However Gartner Analysts say that the company’s brand and positioning must form the basis for the development of TLM strategy.

Below are the Five Keys to successful TLM as per marketingsavant.com in the IT Service Provider Industry.

1) Be Generous with your knowledge – Share information beyond marketing
2) Be consistent in delivering information – Calendar your activities – daily, weekly etc.
3) Always deliver value to your clients – Listen, think, revise and teach
4) Take your strong positions in the market
5) Track your results in Months & Years.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.