Greetings!  

When our Director of Marketing came banging on my door insisting I get started on my feature for the May Newsletter two things immediately came to mind; the first, I should have listened to her when she subtly reminded me I needed to get started two weeks ago and the second, I could hardly believe another month has come and gone.  So long, May (and spring).  Hello, June (and blistering summer).  

Hopefully everyone enjoyed their long holiday weekend, Memorial Day and the 90 degree weather it brought along with it!  As I spent my weekend with friends and family, summer plans 2011 was all the hype.  While my summer is already jam-packed full of "to-dos" my wife has conveniently prioritized accordingly, I started to wonder how we ever did it when our kids were younger, juggling work and summer commitments.

There's no doubt about it, summer is the busiest time of the year for most of us.  It really becomes a balancing act- a balancing act between baseball practice, management meetings and family vacations.   

The month of May for us was about prepping for these busy summers and of course making sure we have the resources available for our customers facing the same cliché, "There's just not enough hours in the day."  So, we re-defined our Managed services offering, titled it e-Suite and developed some bundling options available to fit your particular environment and situation to take some of the work out of well, work. 

In a nutshell, Erb's e-Suite elite Managed Services, leverages leading RMM (remote monitoring tool) features but also includes a unified web-based dashboard, managed e-mail security, data backup and recovery services, power management and Symantec endpoint protection.  It also consists of 24 hour NOC and Hosting service provided by industry guru and partner, SYNNEX.  This allows for more uptime across the boards for all of us.

The idea was to be able to offer a complete, fully-integrated service offering that makes sense to our customers, from the SMBs to the Enterprise to the Government agencies. Our teams collaborated, consulted with industry experts, asked questions and re-examined our current offering to deliver a suite we could support and that was compatible for our diverse market.

Obviously there is much more to this offering than a single paragraph can define, but that's a 500 word limit for ya!  The offering was really designed for ease-of-use without requiring massive investments into IT infrastructures and staff for both VARs and end-user alike.

As your summer speeds up and your responsibilities pile-up, it might not be a bad idea to look into a cost-effective Managed Services contract that can take a lot of the dirty work from your work load.  You can go on your family vacations without worrying about down-time; you can make this weekend's baseball tourney without fear of what Monday morning might bring and you can do so without feeling like you've lost control of any of your resources.

Summer use to be about care-free nights, fun-filled weekends and relaxation; those times may seem long gone but they also may be closer to reality than you think.      

Cheers,

Mike Brogan, President