Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Comptia Looks Cloudy

A couple of events conspired to put Cloud Computing on everyone's radar today at the Comptia Breakaway.

Bob Godgart from Autotask ascended into the clouds at his keynote with some great perspective on making money in the emerging cloud-based environment.

One of the consistent fears from VARs and MSPs is about their future when the desktops and servers disappear.

After all, if you make your living installing and fixing servers, what do you do when the servers don't exist. We've covered this many times, and we'll revisit it many more times in the years ahead. You can't be in the hardware fixing business if you want to make money. You need to be in the technology business.

Bob spelled out a great set of opportunities involving the architecture that does remain on-premise, the management of technology within the cloud, the coordination of various (hosted) packages, and a series of other consulting roles that need to be filled.

One of his coolest suggestions was to think about how YOUR CLIENTS can sell or provide cloud services to their clients. Who's going to help them design and set that up? You!

The question is NOT whether there's work for technology consultants, it's whether you'll make the transition or hold on the past as it fades.

As you can imagine, I recommend the future.

Bob did not know that about fifty people spent time this morning in a Comptia working group talking about the same issues.

How do we deal with legacy applications? Is there bandwidth enough? If not now, when? How much more secure do the data have to be? Etc.

- - - - -

Bob Godgart and Bob Vogel are already scheduled to be on my SMB Conference Call tomorrow - Wed. 9:00 AM Pacific / 12 Noon Eastern.

We'll ask them about cloud services and how this fits in with their business model.

(No big surprise here. From the stage, Bob G mentioned the benefits of using a hosted line of business application. If we're moving all of our clients out to hosted services, he says, shouldn't we do the same thing?)

Anyway, we'll also discuss the details of the super-cool tool for providing helpdesk capabilities to your clients.

. . . And whatever else comes up.

We have seats left. Join Wednesday by registering now:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/826162256


:-)


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