Having once again safely escaped Vegas, I’m back at the office reflecting on my first experience with the SMB Nation conference. In summary, if you want to connect with the IHVs, ISVs, IT consultants, and trusted advisors in the SMB market, this is the place. It’s not a huge conference – I heard an attendance number around 700 – especially relative to the number of independent IT consultants out there servicing the SMB market, but it’s effective.

Other vendors that have cool products that I haven’t already blogged about:

StorageCraft ShadowProtect – looks to be roughly equivalent to the latest built-in NT Back-up (now known as wbadmin) if you’re running Windows Server 2008 R2. If you’re not, or if you’re using virtualization technologies other than Hyper-V, this product is worth considering, and it has an excellent reputation among the SMB IT community.

SoftLayer – this is a cloud computing infrastructure company. I mention it because they seem to be competing against Amazon/AWS, and in some ways Microsoft and Google. But if you’re looking for more of a hands-on service, you won’t get that directly from the big guys.

BackupAssist – notable because they have marketing material specifically targeting the Hyper-V back-up scenario.

Cloud Services Depot – outsourced help desk. After all, what IT technician has time to answer every end-user question? (Or is that like admitting that all software has bugs?)

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