Articles
ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini Kicks Off Partner Summit
November 5, 2009
Despite the lightheartedness surrounding the opening of the 2009 ConnectWise Partner Summit in Orlando last night – flair for the badges, swag bags, glow sticks and more – the message CEO Arnie Bellini delivered at the 8 a.m. kickoff presentation on Thursday, Nov. 5, was serious.
"We are used to those lifestyle businesses, to not wanting to change, and we all must be ready to adapt, to modify, or else we're going to face hard times," says Bellini, addressing a sold-out crowd of about 1,200, including more than 900 channel partners. During his keynote, he talked about the impact of cloud computing and the threat from vendors that might be willing to hopscotch over the channel to sell to end users.
The answer, in part, says Bellini, is relationships. Not only do VARs and MSPs — he prefers the company's newly coined term "IT Nation" — own the last-mile relationship with the millions of SMBs out there, but those channel partners also have each other and vendors to tap for support. Bellini's message includes using your peers as a support system, taking advantage of what those peers know through networking and outsourcing.
To empower those relationships, Bellini says ConnectWise will continue to offer users groups — ConnectWise has 9 around the world that meet quarterly — and partner with peer groups such as HTG, which just held its annual meeting at this very hotel, closing just in time for its members to swap their HTG badges for ConnectWise ones. In addition, the vendor is building out its worldwide cloud infrastructure and adding shared best practices functionality to its 2010 release.
In fact, all the talk of networking led directly to his presentation about ConnectWise's next release, version 2010. Many of the features included — which Bellini ran through — brought applause from the nearly 1,200 filling the room. But I'll talk more about that later.
Listen to ConnectWise CMO Hal Edwards discuss Version 2010.
Coming next — what vendors are planning for 2010, including Reflexion, N-able, itControl Solution, SonicWALL, CA, Level Platforms, and Google.
