The ASCII Group Inc. has kicked off the latest round of its IT Success Summit live event series.
The first of nine conferences the Bethesda, Md.-based membership organization will hold in 2018 took place Wednesday and Thursday in Anaheim, Calif. All of this year’s shows are designed to help VARs and MSPs capitalize on big new opportunities and sidestep big new threats during a time of extraordinary change in IT, according to ASCII Group President Jerry Koutavas.
“The way that the industry works right now, everybody has to up their game,” he says. “We’re trying to help MSPs go beyond the standard nuts and bolts conversations that are happening in the industry and really understand more from a field perspective things that they may not expect.”
Those include legal dangers that many channel pros don’t even know threaten them. “Contracts are absolutely opening up more risks for MSPs than ever before, and it’s all because most MSPs may not use not only the right lawyer but any lawyer,” Koutavas says.
Indeed, Bradley Gross, an attorney based in Weston, Fla. who specializes in representing managed service providers, warned Summit attendees during a Thursday morning presentation that the master service agreements, statements of work, and other legal documents most of them rely on are filled with potentially business-busting flaws.
“You’re all headed for legal disasters,” Gross said before highlighting some of the contractual mistakes IT providers frequently commit. Those include making broad or vaguely worded promises that read more like marketing collateral than realistic commitments and failing to set limits on the services they provide.
“Never give away an all-you-can-eat plan,” Gross said. “[Clients] will try to take advantage of you.”
One of The ASCII Group’s members shared battle-tested advice on another issue many IT providers don’t contemplate fully until it’s too late: what to do when a natural disaster hits. Lamar Curtis, president of Houston-based IAG Business Technology, learned some lessons about that topic the hard way last year when Hurricane Harvey struck his home city, knocking six of his employees out of their homes and stripping three of them of everything they owned. Following rigorously standardized processes, Curtis discovered, can be a welcome antidote to chaos and uncertainty under such conditions.
“It adds a little stability to everyone’s life,” he said.
Security expert Theresa Payton, this year’s Success Summit keynoter, addressed the even larger, more imminent hazards that channel pros and their clients alike confront in the era of ransomware, distributed denial of service attacks, and other sophisticated threats.
“We are at war,” said Payton, the first female White House CIO during the George W. Bush administration and a former star of the CBS series Hunted who is now president and CEO of Charlotte, N.C.-based of security consultancy Fortalice Solutions LLC and co-founder of Alexandria, Va.-based network security vendor Dark Cubed.
The Internet of Things poses particularly grave perils, observed Payton, who recommended mitigating those risks by separating highly vulnerable IoT devices from the rest of a client’s infrastructure.
“Think about creating a segmented domain that is not your regular domain” and assigning it an entirely different user ID and password, Payton said.
Of course, the Internet of Things isn’t just an enormous security challenge but an enormous business opportunity as well. According to Koutavas, though, most channel pros struggle to exploit it at present.
“It’s a little bit early for people to get their arms around it,” he says.
With that in mind, Koutavas recruited Tim Martin to speak at this year’s Success Summits. Martin is business development manager at Action Point, a software development house with offices in Ireland, the U.S., and the U.K. that has had success collaborating with hardware makers and service providers on IoT solutions for manufacturers.
“Industrial IoT is a real partnership,” Martin said.
At the conclusion of this week’s event, Koutavas revealed the winners of the show’s audience awards:
Pre-Day Awards
- Best Education: Vertical Axion
- Best Partner Incentives: CARVIR
- Best Presentation: Duo Security
Main Day Awards
- Best Rapid Pitch: RapidFire Tools†
- Best Keynote Presentation: Pax8
- Most Innovative Solution: Mailprotector
- Best Market Opportunity: Pax8
- Best Partner Support: Datto
- Best Channel Program: Datto
- Best Revenue Generator: Cytracom
- Top Distributor: Pax8
- Best Partner Involvement: Datto/Pax8/Cytracom
- Best of Show: Pax8
The 2018 ASCII Group IT Success Summit tour visits eight more cities this year. Some of those stops, including Ann Arbor, Mich., and Charlotte, N.C., were selected as destinations specifically because they don’t often host technology conferences.
“Some of the markets are underserved for the MSPs, so we wanted to reach out to those particular MSPs in those areas,” Koutavas says.
The next ASCII Group show takes place March 21st and 22nd near Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
