From The Editor
Inside Autotask Community Live! - Day #2
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 #2: VARs Here To Learn (click here to read a recap of day #1) The first full day of Autotask Community Live! wound down to the rocking blues sound of the Michael Holloway band at BB King's in Nashville’s historic downtown. I got the chance, between ribs and fried dill pickle chips, to catch up with Craig Tribuno, CFO and VP of Systems Engineering, a Portland, MN, systems integrator.  Craig and I chatted the first night of the conference about his expectations for the event and his history with Autotask. His company landed with Autotask after his first experience with the vendor’s hands-on approach to business. “We were looking at tools, and when we got to Autotask, they came and saw us,” says Craig, who added that his company felt they aligned well Autotask’s business culture – attention to detail, customer service, and community. Since then, Systems Engineering has become a big part of the vendor’s community, working on beta testing of Taskfire, Autotask’s newest product. When I asked Craig what he hoped for out of the conference on Sunday, his answer: "I want to find the smart people, find out what they are doing, and find out how I can do the same and improve my business.” As we stood at BB King's on Monday evening, I asked him how the conference was going. His comments echoed most of what I have heard – for a first conference, Autotask has done well with networking and learning opportunities at every turn. Like Craig, Brian Leach, owner of BlueWater Consulting, traveled a long way to get to the Autotask conference, all the way from southern California. But unlike Craig, who is highly networked into the IT community, Brian has never, in 14 years as an IT consultant, attended a conference. But he says that after the impact Autotask GO had on his one-man shop, in his first year as a user, he wanted to learn more. “I looked at how this product had changed my business, and I am only just starting to learn all it can do – I wanted to learn more,” says Brian. He says before getting Autotask GO, he was one of those guys with sticky notes and a notebook and billing was a chore he put off, sometimes for weeks. “I was so inefficient, I mean, I couldn’t have been any more inefficient,” says Brian with a laugh. “Now, I am efficient, and I am learning how to do more, and work less. It was the single best thing I ever did in my business.” He tells me that he is nearly overwhelmed by what he has learned in the last two days, and was excited to head home later today and start applying those lessons in his business. “I’m a boutique shop; I know every one of my customers, they all know me, and I need to be able to manage those customers at the level they expect,” says Brian. He adds that a side benefit of the conference has been learning about what other products could help in his business from peers and the vendors in attendance. “They not only are teaching me how to better use Autotask, they are opening up all this to me,” says Brian, waving at the vendor showcase area that featured sponsors: Reflexion, OnForce, CompTIA, Google, Xerox, N-Able, Level Platforms, itControl Suite, eFolder, XiloCore, Virtual Administrator, Kaseya, Dell, OnwWebNow.com, MSP Partners, and MSP University. I’ll have more later about some of the product announcement from those vendors, including Xerox and OnForce. In the meantime, check out the great photos of this event at http://www.autotaskcommunitylive.com/ |
