Nine Lives Media Inc. Names Sinu to the MSPmentor 100

Second-Annual Research Report Identifies
The World’s Most Progressive Managed Service Providers

February 17, 2009: Sinu has landed on Nine Lives Media Inc.’s second-annual MSPmentor 100, a distinguished research report identifying the world’s most progressive managed service providers.

“Sinu has been defining managed services since 2004, and we’re pleased to be recognized by MSP mentor as a top contender in the space.” – John Christie, COO

The free MSPmentor 100 report, available at www.MSPmentor.net, is based on data from MSPmentor’s global online survey, conducted October through December 2008. The MSPmentor 100 report recognizes managed service providers based on a range of revenue and management metrics.

“There’s no doubting the momentum of managed service providers within the MSPmentor 100,” said Joe Panettieri, editorial director of MSPmentor. “As a whole, MSPmentor 100 companies generated nearly $800 million in managed services revenue in 2008, up a dramatic 46 percent from 2007.”

MSPmentor, produced by Nine Lives Media Inc., is the ultimate guide to managed services. MSPmentor features the industry’s top-ranked blog, research, Webcasts, podcasts and videos. It is the number one online media destination for managed service providers in the world.

About Sinu
Sinu is a Tribeca, NYC based company that offers an outsourced IT Department Service.  Sinu's service is an outsourced technology “department” for small business and nonprofit customers. We are different from traditional IT companies because we provide and support your IT infrastructure for a fixed cost. So we're rewarded for success, not failure.

About Nine Lives Media Inc.
Nine Lives Media Inc. (www.NineLivesMediaInc.com) embraces the changing IT media landscape. In fact, we help to shape it. We focus on highly targeted IT audiences, specialized content and lead generation services. We disrupt established markets and we shape new ones. Our first three destinations (MSPmentor.net, TheVARguy.com and WorksWithU.com) feature the top-ranked media blogs in their specific markets.

Contact:

Sinu
285 West Broadway
NYC 10013
212.380.1230
info@sinu.com

Nine Lives Media Inc:
Joe Panettieri, Editorial Director
631-423-3536 or joe@ninelivesmediainc.com

This should be required viewing at schools:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Gladwell has written about how the military has settled on 150 people per 'company' to ensure that "orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts".   He also mentions that some companies like Gore-Tex have used these guidelines to build an effective organization.  

Gore doesn't need formal management structures in its small plants - it doesn't need the usual layers of middle and upper management - because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective.  "The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plan, if we are not creating good earnings for the company,  the peer pressure is unbelievable." 

If 150 is the ideal size to prevent "unruly behavior" then there might be a ideal team size for smaller subdivisions like a military squad where more detailed interaction is necessary.  This number seems to be around 12.

We have seen this pattern repeated in various team sizes.

• Basketball: 12-15 active players on a team
• Soccer: 11 players on the feild
• US Jury: 12 jurors
• Baseball: 10 starters (AL Rules, Go Yankees! ok, this one might be a stretch..)

I have read one theory that connects these sizes to the nomadic, hunter/gatherer origins of humans where tribes and clans were roughly these sizes.   Our brains might be wired to only "completely trust" 12 people and be best at remembering about 150.

In the meantime,  I am very happy the wiki is evolving.  If you want to understand what it is that is getting all of is Semantic Web groupies excited - watch Tim Berners-Lee explain it.

I was on a cruise and for most of the time had no data service on my Treo 700W, the only device I brought with me.  I used the ship's computer center once which I assume is connected via satellite but paying per hour and sitting in a computer lab setting is not that conducive to getting things done.  So all I really did was shoot off short replies to a few emails and just browsed the rest.

As I walked away from the ship computer after about 40 minutes, I was thinking that those 40 minutes would have been enough to sync up all my email on even the slowest of connections and at that moment I wished I had brought a laptop.  Well since I hate carrying a laptop - I actually wished for a fictional device like the new Palm Folio but one that ran Outlook.   I could have sat anywhere and really worked on some stuff without worrying about 'being connected'.  A lesson I learned a long time ago is that almost live is just as good and 95% cheaper.  I could have gotten a lot of communication done by just syncing up every day or two when I was docked on an island or by stopping by the wifi center for a few minutes.

So as I sat back with yet another of the one too many Arnold Palmers I had onboard I began to think how offline apps are the only answer and what a powerful position Adobe is in right now with one of the first technologies that allow an online apps to go offline and sync - Apollo (or whatever they call it now).  I guess Google through its heavy influence on Mozilla is also working to solve this problem but my sense is that Flash/Apollo has a huge head start and the Mozilla guys are just not good at this creative stuff.

While looking for specialized hosted solutions for our clients, I came upon FreshBooks. This is a small focused application designed for time tracking and invocing. They do one thing and do it well. Their pricing model is superb and simple (while still allowing customization for the control-freak set). They even have a usable free version very suitable for the boutique consultant that has two or three clients they regulary invoice on a time basis.

All said, great company, and a great product. If you need something like it, use it.

Of course, since this is not a paid ad, I will go into what this really is about:

The "Web 2.0" (gosh, I really dislike that term... Then again I still call AJAX... DHTML! ;) was a great movement towards solution development. It broke the focus on total solutions that tried to be everything to everybody and ended up being barely useful for barely anyone.

But an inherent problem of all of these solutions is the lack of interoperability. They solved the problem of generalist focus on specialized needs, but completely forgot that no matter how specialized, people never use a single tool for their productivity: no solution is an island.

For example, we use a tool called Wufoo for some of our customer input needs.

It is very easy to setup, integrates well into the Squarespace CRM we use for this website, and delivers real value to our company. However, it only sends emails and doesn't even have an ecosystem around it to turn the inputed data into usable form.  This isolation is frustating: a great solution becomes less attractive just because it doesn't interoperate easily.

Some companies are approaching this problem creatively:

For example Salesforce.com and Google both strive to develop ecosystems around their platforms, seeing themselves as data repository and interface providers to a whole range of development efforts. These are great ways to approach this inherent problem, and are a step in the right direction.

 However, they also have their own set of inherent issues, which I will dicuss at a later date...

 Carlos R. - Lead Developer

First they buy JotSpot, which has been our corporate knowledgebase since the tool was launched. Fine, Jot was a natural for Google, and I had even predicted this might happen.


Now they are in the process of picking up Postini, which has long been the anti-spam and email security tool we use for ourselves and all of our customers. It also makes perfect sense.

(Eat my dust, Barracuda!) 

Google is changing the way IT is done, switching the application layer to the cloud and off the hands of consultants. Sinu is among the few, if not the only, IT companies that realizes this, and our customers get increased value as the tools our platform runs on get validated by the most dynamic application company out there.

Now, if Google only got around creating an Outlook killer...

-Carlos R. - Lead Developer  

I ended up writing a long comment that I thought I would share here in the sandbox. 

-- 

I think many of these solutions are slightly off target with the way they are approaching the problem. DabbleDB might be the closest.

There are already enough “high level” languages to address the range of programmers from hobby coders to full time coders (Ruby/PHP -> Java/.net)

If solutions are to move to the next level of abstraction then the solutions need to be built at a higher level with the components broken down into stages:

New Information Acquisition ( Data Input/Import )
- New Information Forms
- Questionnaires
- Import of Data using standardized import templates with deduping/updating capabilities

Business Rules
- Simple Logic Statements that dictate how data is processed and when (Filemaker Pro’s Model is a good starting point)

Summaries and Reports
- Drag and drop creating of Reports (Very much like Crystal Reports)
- Report Scheduling
- Report Bursting (creating multiple reports from the same master report which have unique permissions and data for each)
- Ability to maintain the presentation pages for these which can be embedded into other CMS’ like Squarespace
- Export to various formats (embedded html/RSS/XML/RDF )

Workflow/Change Approval management
- Ability to pause for approval during different parts of the workflow through the solution

Note that none of these solutions approach the problem the way a coder would approach this problem - it is more like the way Quicken/Quickbooks approaches the problem of collecting, organizing, processing and reporting lots of information.

In a perfect world, users create their “app” by being guided through the stages of the solution and hopefully having more value on the other side of the experience.

I also think a great solution would try to encourage reuse of data and logic wherever possible by encouraging Yahoo! Pipes like connection of your ’solution’ which others. If all works well, niche solutions should develop, evolve and create more value for the ecosystem than any one person could create. This would let users focus on the piece that matters most to them - their unique data and business rules.

As for the people who think these solutions are not needed, I would say that there are lots of people like myself who understand how a solution should come together - but just don’t want to spend so much time in a traditional programming language and instead want to quickly build a proof of concept that can evolve into a workable solution and if the need arises can have parts of it replaced with more enterprise class code as scalability needs increase.