Dave Sobel

I’m gearing up for a vacation. On Tuesday night, I’m flying out with my wife for a week of vacation. It’s some much needed time away from work, and the only “vacation” we’re taking this year. We had the opportunity to travel together, but it was always connected with something work related, either for her […]

I gave a talk at the recent SMB Nation show about delivering a complete solution with the new Windows Small Business Server Codename “Aurora” system combined with the new HP microservers to deliver a complete service. I recently got a great question from someone who was in the audience via an email. “In the Aurora […]

Dear Hosted Exchange Provider, My name is Dave Sobel, and I’m CEO of Evolve Technologies in Fairfax, Virginia, just outside of Washington DC. We’re a small managed services provider, delivering solutions in the SMB space. You probably haven’t heard of us, and that’s OK. What’s more important is that we’re representative of a typical small […]

I’m appreciating process a lot this week. In a badly planned set of leave requests, my Service Manager was married to his (now) lovely bride on the same week that my V.P. of Sales is camping in Yellowstone. I’ll begin this by noting that I want my team to take their vacations, and I encourage […]

I had a closing kind of day. There’s a scene in The Boiler Room where Ben Affleck talks about closing. He asks “Who’s going to close? You or him?”. Alec Baldwin does it even better in Glengarry Glen Ross. Besides “Coffee is for closers”, Baldwin says “Only one thing counts. Get them to sign on […]

I cheated.   I wrote the blog piece about PR compared with marketing compared with social media, and before it was even posted on Channel Insider, I was in a conversation with my fellow HTG5 member Cohen Barnes of TBC Net in DeKalb, Illinois, and he was specifically asking about PR versus marketing, and I […]

The topic of public relations (PR) has been on my mind. It came up as a discussion point in my HTG meetings recently, and there certainly was some confusion. Is it marketing? Part of marketing? A stage of marketing? Is social media PR or marketing? Marketing is often the dark art of our businesses. As […]

While I was in London recently to attend the third quarter HTG meetings, I had the opportunity to also speak to the Association of Midlands IT Professionals in Birmingham with my good friend Susanne Dansey of Purple Cow Ideas Management. Susanne and I had a lot of chance to talk about both events, and one […]

I have this crazy idea. The idea of breaking apart a business and reforming it into something new is fascinating, and leads to some new critical thinking. Could you imagine a service provider in a cloud world that employs no service personnel? I suggested this once in a room of solution providers and was practically […]

The cloud buzz continues to cause some angst around the channel. The buzz is both unnerving yet strangely empowering. An HTG colleague, Reed Wilson from Palmetto Technology, recently sent over some notes on a marketing pitch he saw for a cloud software provider in the healthcare space. The pitch boiled down to essentially: "You were […]

Channel Insider’s own Larry Walsh recently interviewed Cisco’s Keith Goodwin. Goodwin and Walsh hit on a pair of topics I have been watching closely: virtualization and video. Goodwin outlines a lot of the mid-market strategy for virtualization adoption, and highlights the successes they have experienced with mid-market over large enterprise: “Some of the first wins […]

I’m going to rant a little about data plans. AT&T has made major changes to some of its data plans for coverage, with Verizon doing the same. Sprint is making similar changes. In an unrelated move, Starbucks is opening up its WiFi access points to be unlimited for customers within its stores. Bandwidth is a […]