There’s nothing like tapping into a new community and making new professional friends. Such was the case this week at the Cloud Summit 2015 conference in Phoenix, AZ. Visually, there were over 800 attendees who were mainly SMB resellers (I was told this number was up from 500 last year). Throw in 30 vendors supporting the cloud play (e.g. Parallels) and heaps of well-known speakers (yours truly, Howard Cohen, Ken Thorsen, Keith Lubner) and you’ve got the formula for an impactful event. I will repeat.
Because Office 365 is my niche, I heard what I wanted to hear. In the Cloud Selling Best Practices panel, my colleagues Tommy Wald and David DeCamillis did a masterful job of expanding the conversation to be a broader cloud discussion. Left to my own devices, it quickly would have turned into “How to Make Money with Office 365” speech. More importantly, the event was very diverse, with participation of vendors beyond Microsoft, such as IBM, VMware, Cisco, and a host of others.
What I liked, in addition to making a lot of new friends (I’ve said it before that that cloud crowd is a whole ‘nother brother from a different mother), is that I did bump into a few acquaintances. Nothing like renewing existing friendships and meeting online friends in-person for the first time. Such was the case with Tom McGee (left) and Eric Shorr (right). McGee is a long-time friend of the SMB Nation/O365nation family niched on mobility and telecom. Shorr participated in our Pocket MBA program a few years ago and directs a thriving MSP practice in Providence, RI, despite local economic challenges. Shorr’s secret sauce is to stay in front of the technology curve. He has actively embraced Office 365.
So that’s my high-level report from the field. You can discover more about the Cloud Summit 2015 event here: http://www.ingrammicrocloudsummit.com/
