Articles
Inside Autotask Community Live! - Day #1
March 27, 2009
Written by: Gennifer Biggs
| Editor Gennifer Biggs is blogging from the first Autotask partner conference, Community Live! starting Sunday night, March 29. Don't miss her coverage of keynote speaker and Autotask CEO Bob Godgart, plus updates from the dozens of business success and technical tracks being offered to 300+ attendees. Gen will also be sitting down with several managed services vendors as well as Autotask partners attending the conference. Day #1: The Concept Behind Autotask Community Live!  When Autotask decided to host its first partner conference, CEO Bob Godgart knew what he didn’t want the conference to be just another trade show with vendors hawking their goods. Instead, he envisioned a place where the online community nurtured by Autotask for the last 18 months would truly take flight and gain momentum to move from the world of the Internet into the real world.To do that, Godgart and his team worked diligently to build an event shaped in part by the needs and wants of its partner community, but they didn’t stop there. Instead, they have pushed back, challenging the channel to prepare itself for more growth, innovation, and a fresh look at managed services. The event, Community Live! kicked off on Sunday afternoon, March 30, in  Nashville, with a VIP event that brought Autotask’s top strategic channel partners together to brainstorm about how the company could support partners as they strive to grow their managed services practice into a brave new world of economic hardship and tightened IT belts. Evidence of the company’s commitment to its partners can be found not only in its heavily trafficked online user community, but also in the two new products announced as part of this conference. (more on this later!)As the conference prepared for its first round of events, CMO Bob Vogel shared with me the impact that Autotask’s online community has made on the company’s effort to build stronger relationships with its partners. “The idea behind the concept of the online community was to get our partners engaged with each other – plus us,” explains Vogel. “But our goal here at Community Live! is take this to another level because you can create a business relationship with people you have never met through an online community, but it is when you meet people face to face that there is truly a difference.” Part of that difference comes when partners start to talk with one another about the different ways each use the Autotask application, says Vogel. “Unlike many other applications out there, Autotask is the one they run their business with; it touches billing, their projects, their resources – they want to know the best way they can use this application and we want to help them. And I think our customers have a high expectation about what they will learn here about how to better use the application.” One way Autotask will educate its partners is by unveiling two major new software offerings … but we have to wait until morning to chat about that. Day #1: Behind The Scenes With CEO Bob Godgart 
While Godgart waited to do his Sunday night tech practice of his Monday morning keynote
welcome speech, he took a few minutes to talk with me about his
message to the 400 Autotask partners gathered for the conference. “It is about changing the way they do business,” says Godgart. “To win in this economy, you cannot just keep doing things the some way; and we are going to tell them how we feel they can transform their business with new technology we are putting out.” At the conference, Autotask is unveiling two new products – an outsourcing management module for its existing product and Taskfire, a new product that partners can sell into larger clients to manage their own IT staff and projects. (We’ll talk about those a little later) Both support Godgart’s message that MSPs must be willing to innovate and evolve their practice to stay relevant and healthy. He says he hopes three things will happen with the partners attending the conference: they will get jazzed about the online community that helps define Autotask, they will be able to write down one thing in each session they can use in their business – and then go home and do it, they will use the technical and business lessons learned during the 40+ sessions offered at the conference to transform their business. Godgart also told me that because the Autotask understands not every partner could make the trip – although there are those who traveled from as far away as Belgium and Australia – the content presented at the conference over the next two days will slowly be rolled out through a “rewind” program that allows all partners to share the discussions had at this event. Don’t miss our full coverage of the new product announcement and Godgart’s opening comments later today! Day #1: New Products Geared to 'Transform Relationships' With Van Halen blasting through the packed room, Autotask CEO Bob Godgart took the main stage this morning, challenging Autotask partners to innovate and embrace change in order to not only survive the recession, but grow their business into a stronger model overall. He also let partners know that the company is here to stay – growth in 2009 is anticipated to top 30%, all based on the same recurring revenue model Godgart evangelizes to Autotask partners. But Godgart really hit his stride when he tackled the issue of product improvements, unveiling three new game changers as he terms it:
For the details on these new products, check out our industry news section Day #1: Web 2.0 And Your Business I would never have imagined how much fun I would have when Vincent Everts offered to let me borrow his Flip video device on the opening night of the conference. The size of a BlackBerry, this HD video recorder operates with one touch of a red button and the outcome is phenomenal. I am not sure how much fun my ‘video victims’ had, but I greatly enjoyed the chance to capture the enthusiasm Autotask’s product manager, Pat Burns, had about the new Taskfire product. Check back here to watch the video in a few days. In his presentation on using Web 2.0 to build business, Vincent challenged partners to use Web 2.0 to build business, reminding them that their customers were already using cutting edge technology like HD video as well as social networking sites such as Facebook to connect with each other. He predicts Web 2.0 will change the four Ps of marketing into the four Cs – consumer, collaboration, convenience and community. If you want to learn more about Vincent and the video channel creator tool he built – check out www.yubby.com, and to follow his posts about this event, http://www.yubby.com/c/autotask |
