Q & A with Autotask president and founder Bob Godgart -
Channelpro-SMB Publisher Michael Siggins sitting with Autotask president and founder Bob Godgart at Autotask Community Live 2011 in Miami this week. Bob stressed the importance of building community and stay with IT trends that affect our business and our customers' businesses
Michael Siggins :. Autotask is all about the community and is therefore Channelpro-SMB. Community is really a mortar that holds us together and really drives our success and I know that Autotask is very important for your customer base and your staff. Can you tell us a little of the event --- Why is it important to bring your clients here and your suppliers and your team partners
Bob Godgart: Well, we have more than 750 partners here in the event and for us it is very important to bring everyone together and get energy. Get the feel of the Autotask community because I think it is very special. For me it is so important that our customers get to talk to other customers and for us to Autotask it is really important that we get the feedback we need to grow the business.
Michael Siggins: Yes, the feedback is critical. This morning, in your speech, you laid visionary interesting points to go ahead. But first, look back at the event last year --- what are some of the most important things you want to have this event this year that built on what the community has Autotask since last year?
Bob Godgart: Well, probably the most important element is that we wanted to build a very good training program. It is really important for us and as CEO Mark Cattini said in the speech this morning, we want to ensure that people use over the Autotask platform. In 2010, we saw that the average person using only about 25 percent of the product and it is a huge product. You think of Microsoft Office, you really use a fraction of it, so it's the same kind of thing with our product. So we've worked hard over the past 12 months and now we are able to get people to the point where they use about half of it on a regular basis.
Second, we have begun to standardize education and get people to share things. We went ahead and worked with CompTIA this year to provide part of CompTIA content so that we should not create ourselves. So now CompTIA to help with the business side and we get to focus on the side of the product formation Autotask
Michael Siggins :. What about your partner suppliers here to this event? What is the most important thing that you think you have them here with high visibility to your customers
Bob Godgart: Well, we have almost double the vendors we had the last year, which is quite exciting to see the growth of this. But more importantly, for each of the vendors, they need a complete solution. Autotask not the solution itself. You need all parts of the battery, especially if you are a managed service provider to run your entire business. And if you need network monitoring, you need companies that give you the back-up systems, spam and all parts of this battery control are major rally and if so why are we really excited about the number of people here, sponsors and suppliers.
We even have some companies doing some third development work around Autotask. And Cloud is the key now. Coming into this year's Live Community, we wanted to ensure that cloud providers and next generation seller was well represented here as
Michael Siggins :. in your morning meeting you described a number of technologies and trends that you think really critical to the success of all partners in the room. Can you give us some highlights of those
Bob Godgart: course. The seven technologies or what I saw is IT trends were mobile, social, what we call the intelligence service that is business intelligence for solutions providers and three C conversion, Cloud and Community . So I was talking to everyone, so that six. The seventh we called "Your Next Business" and for vendors that we wanted to ensure they were really preparing for it is easy to do things day to day, to run your business and not think about planning and so that is one of the things that is near and dear to my hear and I wanted to make sure they have at heart as well
Michael Siggins :. We go to a lot of these events and we take great networking happens to them, I think one of the biggest challenges for a busy partner is when they come back on the plane that they go back, then jump right into their jobs again. What advice can you give to partners on how they can benefit from energy to such an event like this, how can they really put that into a concrete plan that they can perform once they get to the House?
Bob Godgart: I'm really glad you asked that question. We gave everyone a Autotask laptop and in my session, I said look, at the end here, please go ahead and write one or two things of each session you will, of all conversations you have and get a good diary of those then make a commitment when they return to the office to do at least once a week. Because if they do, they're just going to be so much further ahead and it's funny because so many people came to see me after the keynote and said you know what, Bob, you're right. We go to these conferences; we return; we are all hype and it is business as usual and we do not want that to happen again
Michael Siggins.? Any advice separation for us
Bob Godgart: I think the most important thing they have to do is they have to automate their business. So if they do things manually, if they are using home grown tools they use point solutions that they will get much more out of it if they go ahead and put in an integrated system .
Autotask More coverage here ...
0 comments:
Post a Comment