Wrapping up the Exact Macola Evolve 2014

We just finished taking down our booth at the Exact Macola Evolve 2014 tradeshow  in Grapevine, Texas. Surprisingly, the booth took about one hour to take down and it all fit into the case. We were unsure what would happen since it arrived in three boxes, and we had never even constructed it before. I guess you can tell how much confidence we had to show up at a show with no experience building a booth. We got a ton of comments on our race-inspired backdrop. Most of the attendees wanted to know what we did. It was our first year to be at the show, so we expected these questions, but as soon as we mentioned Citrix and “Cloud”, peoples’ eyes lit up. We could tell these were topics that were top of mind to many of the attendees.

Scott and I did attend one session, the opening large group session announcing the features for Macola version 10, being released at the end of Q2. They focused on four critical areas, but the one that caught my ear was workflow. Having seen a number of organizations in the same industry operate in drastically different fashions, I’ll be interested to see what the workflows look like, how structured they are, and how malleable they are. We use a collaboration tool called “Podio” for internal projects, and we’ve experienced a number of frustrations with getting it tuned just right. I cannot imagine the meetings and decisions that took place to get workflows decided for the next release, and I’m sure it will be a shock for many of the users as they try to use the tools provided. Trying to use the resources provided to you more effectively is a constant battle.

After the show we headed to Austin to have dinner with a vendor. On the way down I was hosting the first call with the Direct Sales Team. Scott was driving. When I looked over my laptop screen at the dashboard, I noticed he was going more than 100mph. The car was vibrating. I described the scenario to the guys on the call and commented “If you hear my voice tremorring, that’s why.” They laughed.

I’m looking forward to doing more tradeshows with users of software that we have virtualized. I think there’s a LOT of opportunity at these shows, and we can demonstrate our expertise when we comment to them that we virtualized industry/line of business specific software years ago when even the architects couldn’t accomplish it. So many IT leaders at the show were impressed with what we’d done, but they simply hadn’t heard of us before then. That’s what we’re out to change.

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