The future is revealed

I spent last week representing Harbor Computer Services at the world-wide partner conference where we were honored with the Small Business Specialist of the Year Award. We beat out 3,000 eligible companies world wide. I want to thank all of our customers for making our job challenging and for being such amazing business owners. While my peers had up to 50% of their clients go belly up in the recession, because of your amazing business skills we didn’t lose a single one. In fact a loss of clients was so common that the very next question out of everyone's mouth after the obligatory handshake was “what percentage of clients did you lose last year?” Seriously, I was shocked. I believe that if we are all doing our jobs working toward the common goal of making your business the best it can be that we will not only survive but thrive. In 2008 we started our program of offering you free meetings so that we can play our role better in helping you make good decisions and make sure that we are all reaching for the same goal. Since that time I’ve spent a good deal of my days in meetings. I’ve decided that we’re going to keep doing that. Free meetings are now a permanent part of our contracts.

At the WPC Microsoft trots out its vision of the future and tries to convince partners to go along with it. Some are resistant to the major shift in technology that is upon us and to that Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (Bill Gates replacement) literally said “blah, blah, blah” during his keynote. The interpretation of blah, blah, blah, is get over it, quit complaining, the tech world is changing. He angered a bunch of people. Honestly because of our close relationship with the small business server development team and others within Microsoft nothing was said that surprised me. We’re very fortunate to know what the future holds before it gets here.

The tech world is indeed changing. Pretty much all software is now being designed to run “in the cloud”. Which is to say on someone else's server, sitting who knows where and managed by who knows whom. There are two things I am certain of when it comes to cloud based software:

1. Software hosting companies have not cornered the market on great IT people.
2. Not all clouds are the same.

Because of this we know that mistakes will be made by these software hosting companies, servers will go down, personal information will be hacked and data will be lost. The trick is going to be chose your cloud carefully and remain in control of your data. We are offering some cloud based software now and we will offer more in the future. As always our concern will be for your business, your data, and your security. The cloud is an opportunity, not an answer and the secret to opportunity is to grab it and make it work for you. What we all know is we can’t fight change. To those that do, we’re with Mr Ballmer, blah, blah, blah. We will make change work for you.