Join Us January 20: MSPmentor Live
Posted January 4th, 2010 by Joe Panettieri
Our first MSPmentor Live webcast of 2010 is scheduled for January 20. Our guest speakers — representing three top managed service providers and Nimsoft — will cover key questions for growth-oriented small, midsize and large MSPs. Here’s a closer look at the webcast.
The event will emphasize a “top-down” approach to business success. We’ll cover three key topic areas:
Aligning managed services to improve your customers’ business (translation: pushing beyond the IT benefits of managed services).
Proving your worth to your customers (through customer portals, dashboards and other visual techniques).
Unified Monitoring (the move to a single dashboard for monitoring all on-premise and cloud systems).
Our guest speakers will include:
Jason Caras, CEO, IT Authorities, based in Southern Florida
Tim Hebert, CEO, Atrion Networking Corporation, based in Rhode Island
Oli Thordarson, CEO, Alvaka Networks, based in Southern California
Phil LaForge, VP and GM, Service Providers, Nimsoft (the event’s sponsor)
I look forward to moderating your questions — and getting you the answers you need — throughout the webcast. Please register now and mark your calendars for this upcoming event, January 20, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. eastern.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.