What’s Up This Week: October 31st to November 4th

ChannelPro and Spiceworks conferences, earnings updates from Carbonite and Symantec, and the longest Sunday of the year are all on the SMB channel’s agenda this week.

Monday, October 31st

• The Q4 HTG Peer Group meetings get started in Championsgate, Fla. They conclude on Friday.

Reader ROI: The fourth and final gathering of 2016 includes four days of peer group sessions and a “community day” of shared content. Speakers for that general session include Justin Hale (pictured) from corporate training firm VitalSmarts, who will provide practical advice on changing bad habits, as well as Brian Stann, president and CEO of veteran’s advocacy organization Hire Heroes USA, and channel pros Nate Austin (of Mytech Partners) and Steve Riat (of Nex-Tech), who will discuss sales metrics and sales team motivation.

Tuesday, November 1st 

• Spiceworks kicks off its annual SpiceWorld event in Austin, Texas. The show closes on Thursday.

Reader ROI: The 2,800+ IT pros and tech marketers expected to attend will get expert insights on a variety of topics from over 60 speakers in more than 50 sessions. Keynoters include a selection of Spiceworks leaders bearing roadmap updates for 2017 and Jay Baer, a business strategist and author of Hug Your Haters, a guide to customer service in the age of social media.

Wednesday, November 2nd 

• The last ChannelPro SMB Forum event on our 2016 Channel Fitness Tour gets underway in Newton, Mass., just outside Boston. It ends tomorrow.

Reader ROI: The conference begins this evening with a pre-day cocktail party sponsored by CompTIA and continues Thursday with a packed agenda featuring presentations by keynoter Gary Pica (pictured), of MSP advisory firm TruMethods, thought leaders from the MSP and VAR communities, and top industry consultants. Topics covered include underappreciated managed service revenue opportunities, proven cloud sales and marketing techniques, operational best practices, critical business finance metrics, and more. The whole ChannelPro team will be there too, so stop by, say hello, and stick around. The actionable insights you gain on running and growing your business will be well worth the time you invest.

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and corporate vice president of Office marketing Kirk Koenigsbauer host an invitation-only media event in New York City.

Reader ROI: No one knows precisely what Microsoft plans to discuss at the event, though a company spokesperson told VentureBeat that the agenda would focus on “the changing nature of collaboration and how we can empower every team to achieve more.” That suggests we’re either in for a new collaboration-focused addition to Office 365 or the addition of new collaboration functionality to existing components like SharePoint and Skype for Business. Let’s see if Microsoft surprises us with some unexpected news, like a few of the products revealed at last week’s launch event for the company’s Surface and Windows products.

Thursday, November 3rd 

• Arrow Electronics, Carbonite, and Symantec all report their latest quarterly earnings.

Reader ROI: Arrow, which grew net income a little over $10 million on a year-over-year basis last quarter, will undoubtedly be asked to chime in about Tech Data’s acquisition of Avnet’s technology solutions group during its earnings conference call. Carbonite, which posted a 57 percent year-over-year revenue jump three months ago, will let us in on whether or not it’s maintaining that torrid pace. And Symantec, finally, will fill us in on how all the effort it’s pouring into integrating its org chart and product line with that of Blue Coat, the security software maker it acquired in June, is impacting the company’s top and bottom lines.

Friday, November 4th

• It’s time to fall back!

Reader ROI: Or rather, it will be time to set the clocks back an hour Sunday morning at 2am when daylight saving time (and it’s “saving,” by the way, not “savings”) for 2016 comes to a close. Which is great news for those of us desperately in need of an extra hour of shut eye, but less great for anyone traveling via Amtrak when the time change hits. To avoid showing up at their destination an hour early, Amtrak trains stop dead in their tracks, as it were, for an hour every year when DST ends. So that overnight journey you’re taking, while officially on time, will actually last an hour longer than usual.