Ingram-Micro Cloud Summit 2014

On Monday afternoon, I walked by the beautiful 3 story atrium and into the conference center attached to the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, FL. It was torturous. After experiencing a March in Seattle which had 3x the normal amount of rain, I was so excited to see the beautiful blue sky and feel the 70 degree temperatures. And it was just a few feet beyond me as I walked down the long hallway to the Conference Center.

Minutes later, I headed into my first session titled “Effective Executive Leadership Skills” led by Gary Beechum of SPC International. If you haven’t met Gary, you really should. He’s no-nonsense, direct, inspirational and articulate. He often references he time in the military and even uses some of the tools he picked-up while in the Army in his presentation. I definitely learned some things to bring back to our Leadership Team. One of the best parts of his presentation was the 14 Traits of Leaders.

At the reception that followed our classroom sessions I met a ton of new people. Many were from across the country and wanted to work with a firm like ManageOps, and some who wanted to partner with us to deliver new bundles to customers. Our story really resonated with the attendees. There are a number of MSPs looking for a white-labeled cloud offering, and people would actually overhear my conversation and ask me for a card. I think one of the great benefits of this conference was since it was focused on “cloud” there weren’t MSPs who didn’t have any idea about how they were going to deliver cloud services. Many had come to the conclusion that they would rather hire-out a solid cloud vendor instead of re-invent the wheel and build their own hardware. Our story was like music to their ears. And we’ve even written about it recently here.

All-in-all, the first day of the conference has been so valuable that I’m excited not only for the rest of the conference, but for working more closely with Ingram Micro over the coming months.

Karl Burns

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