By Elaine J. Hom
Autotask is hitting the road, and it’s coming to a city near you.
The IT business management software provider has announced a 15 city tour of the U.S., known as Autotask Community On Tour. Each city will be treated to a day of education in sales and technical training. But unlike most conferences, the day has been broken up specifically for busy IT service providers who are concerned about workflow in their absences and ca
n only attend certain hours.
“These events can be long and some of the parts are not applicable to all attendees,” says Jay McBain, senior VP of community and channel development at Autotask. “If someone wants to come in the morning and grab two hours, they’re free to leave after. If they need to get back to their business, they don’t need to stick it out to the end of the day.”
When developing the Autotask Community On Tour road show, McBain took user feedback and comments into consideration to ensure that it matched up with users’ desires.
“Sometimes, a conference can be too sales-focused,” he says. “I may be a customer already, I don’t need to sit here for four hours and get sold. And then on the flip side, it can be too technical and too educational, so it’s about striking the right balance and delivering value.”
For Autotask, this is just another way to reach its users and provide education, in addition to the company’s larger annual event, Autotask Community Live. With social media, webinars, podcasts, and a number of other ways to reach users, the road show is simply another way to spread the Autotask message and bring users together in a forum.
“It’s a real place for people to connect,” says McBain. “It’s a time of change. When things get unpredictable, people tend to gravitate together. I think we’ll learn more from this than any other focus group or our forums or anything else that we run.”
So what should attendees expect to come away with? McBain warns that we are entering an unprecedented time of technological shift and business model shift. While the industry has undergone both technological and business model shifts in the past, it’s never happened at the same time.
Cloud computing is changing both how technology is used and how channel partners strategize their businesses, so Autotask is using this road show to ensure that its users capitalize on this shift. As services become subscription-based and profits-per-user begin to decrease, channel partners must look at different ways to make a profit.
†”At the event, you’ll get to hear from major players in the industry and how they work together from a channel partner point of view,” says McBain. “How do I profit from this? How do I aggregate it or broker it? That’s what we’re trying to drive through. How to do it, not just conceptually or theoretically, but here are the pieces, here is how the platform works. In the end, you’re delivering everything to your customer on a single bill.”
Autotask is planning for 75 to 100 attendees per city, and you can register for a city near you at http://www.autotask.com/ontour/.
