ConnectWise IT Nation: A Community Experience Unlike Any Other

Cloud, ConnectWise, Kent, Order Porter, Partners, Proposals, Quotes, Sales No Responses »
Nov 082010

 

Our team returned yesterday from a very full week at the ConnectWise IT Nation event in Orlando, Florida. This was our third trip to the event, and our best experience yet. Combined with our participation in and sponsorship of the HTG Q4 meetings at the beginning of the week, it was an incredibly, richly powerful experience.

Our levels of engagement with this event are unique in my experience. We are a ConnectWise user, AND a sponsor of the event and community, AND ConnectWise is also our customer and a user of Quosal. We’re not unique in this; the community has many such ties within the ecosystem that ConnectWise represents. It is one of the reasons, I believe, for the intense levels of energy-times-energy that I have not experienced in other communities – ever.

The event leaves one so overflowing with its vibrancy that the energy must have an outlet — therefore I blog, plan, strategize, sell, discuss, compare, analyze. The energy well has been replenished.

Among the standout experiences was the number of our Quosal clients that attended, and the rather amazing number of them that found me in the halls or in our booth, and related some version of, “Thank you for creating this product. You don’t know how much you’ve helped our business.” The sincerity and intensity of our customers was really somewhat moving, and surprisingly frank. This didn’t happen just a couple of times – dozens of our clients had this message for me. It was really a powerful experience.

Keith McFarland, author of “Bounce” and “The Breakthrough Company” was a real energizer. You know you’re listening to a good speaker when you want to launch out of your chair and enact the ideas that are cascading through your head, put fear aside and make bold moves into the future. This, combined with a general feeling of confidence among the ConnectWise partners, makes me feel great about the future.

I’m heading to Australia in Q1 2011 – and now it’s in writing. This is a big item on my bucket list, and a lifelong dream. It was an Australian-themed event, in any case – we dined with the Australian contingent of HTG (as well as their UK brethren) and had many great conversations and interactions with our good friends from Down Under (who universally feel that we are extreme lightweights in the partying department. I’m afraid.).

We had a great experience with Order Porter on the iPad in our booth at the vendor solutions pavilion. We processed more than 80 quotes, delivering them right then and there on the show floor. ConnectWise (who also uses Quosal and Order Porter) was doing the very same thing for add-on sales in its own booth. It was a great sales experience to do this, and we were delivering a great customer experience as well. It’s always a fun moment to see the startled look on a prospective customer’s face, when their cell phone vibrates as they receive their quote and Order Porter link. The revelation that they can do this themselves, for their own customers, is an “a-ha” moment for them.

A customer related to me the workflow he’d built into his sales process between Quosal and ConnectWise: “We’ve got it down to a science. I tell my salespeople, ‘Just mark the opportunity as Won in Quosal, and walk away!’”

I do not fear the Cloud, and I don’t believe information technology providers need to fear it either. On a high level, “The more things change the more they stay the same.” On an even higher level, imagine how many iterations we’ll continually go through over the years. From mainframes and timeshare to the disconnected PC to the Cloud and back again. I can hardly wait until my grandkids tell me about this awesome new technology called Local Area Networks. Arnie Bellini had a good message for the IT Nation on this very topic.

You know you’re getting old when you’re standing in the lounge thinking, “Who let all these kids in here?”

There were some terrific speakers and presentations at both the ITN and HTG events. The former, I witnessed; the latter, I heard about, as I’m not actually an HTG member. I definitely get presenter envy, as my own skill set in this area stopped progressing in the last century. I’m amazed at how much information can be presented in an hour with the preparation and technology brought to bear by talented people.

It goes on and on, the buttery goodness of such a well-executed event with the energy of true community. It’s great to witness and to be a part of it. I think a lot of people feel the same way. Congratulations to all involved, to the hosts and attendees alike. Can’t wait until next year.

Kent McNall

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

Posted by Kent at 5:54 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Putting Your Data in the Cloud Has Many Advantages

Cloud, Kent, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes 1 Response »
Jul 282010

 

Our Quosal quote and proposal automation application delivers many advantages to our users. One of them is extremely flexible deployment, including the ability to host your data “in the cloud,” securely and reliably, for as many users as you need. This capability has been in the application since its release in 2008 – initially with our own servers, and later with the added option of hosting through Microsoft’s SQL-Azure cloud infrastructure.

Quosal is a Windows application and is always installed on a PC or virtual PC environment (Citrix, Terminal Server, etc.), so the ability to seamlessly host the data for the application in the Cloud is unusual – but it offers many advantages and benefits. We have always hosted our own use of Quosal in the cloud, at first as a way of “eating our own dog food,” but I wouldn’t change how we use our own product in this respect – it really offers significant benefits.

First, it’s great to be able to access my central quote and proposal database no matter where I am, without reliance on a corporate VPN or other infrastructure. Several times, I’ve simply downloaded the client application on a new PC, activated with our internal key, and been up and running with my central database in a matter of minutes, without the need to install VPN and other infrastructure that would be needed even for an RDP session. It’s great to not be “tethered.” Whether at home, at the cabin or on the road, I’m always able to access my cloud-based data.

Second, my remote employees around the country have instant and excellent access to the shared quoting database with excellent performance – which is unfortunately not true when they’re on the corporate VPN. With the way our PSA works, a remote employee has full-speed, full-function access to our two most important applications just with an Internet connection.

Third, the “zero administration” of our cloud database is a great benefit even for our own product. While Quosal’s administrative requirements are low even for an internal database, you can’t get away from the fact that any database server has an administrative load that almost disappears when your data is in the Cloud.

For our customers, a Cloud-based deployment provides an excellent and elegant solution in many situations:

  • Multiple offices that all need access to shared central data for quotes and proposals.
  • Many remote users and road warriors that require the same, especially from high-latency connections.
  • Companies that are virtualizing and don’t want to set up a physical database server.
  • Companies without a dba or internal database resources that want the hassle-free setup and management of a shared database.

We’ve found that the deployment model that a customer wishes to choose should be separate from the billing model (Licensed or SaaS) that a customer might wish to choose – so we have many customers that have licensed the product, but still run their data in the Cloud as a deployment option. Far from being just a “pay as you go” alternative, Cloud-based data deployment is a highly advantageous way to go for customers large and small.

Both as a Cloud developer and as a user of an advanced desktop application that can store its data in the Cloud, I’m a big fan.

Posted by Kent at 5:46 pm Tagged with: , , ,

A Cloud Tale

Cloud, Kent No Responses »
Jul 122010

 

We’ve all been hearing about “the cloud” for quite some time now. I’m guessing that a lot of people are like me – I’ve had “some” idea of what the cloud is about, and the details have been filling in gradually. I feel I have a reasonable handle on it, but I learn more every time I read an article or talk to a knowledgeable person on the subject.

At one point a few years ago, when such a knowledgeable one gave me his take on the cloud, I thought to myself, “Oh, back to timeshare!” Yes, I’ve been around long enough to remember timesharing – paying exorbitant rates for mainframe access and resource time. No, cloud computing is of course far more.

One of the things that has brought the essence and potential of cloud computing home to us here at Quosal was our Microsoft Azure integration. Since Quosal is a database-centric and driven application, virtually every implementation requires the creation and setup of a central database. This is not a significant obstacle for most of our customers, and in any case we are available to assist. This is definitely a task on our project plan, however – not a no-brainer, and it is important. As our team has always been involved with enterprise-class, database-centric applications (SQL Server, MYSQL, Informix, Oracle, etc.), this is a fact of life we’ve always dealt with.

Along comes Azure, and Microsoft has done such an incredible job with this platform that in less than a day we had made the changes necessary to our application to be completely compatible with a cloud-based database server. In LESS time than it takes to configure an on-premise database server, our customers are hosting their data in the cloud, with seamless integration to our application. Really seamless. Now, it’s true that this was only possible because of the modern architecture and development environment of our application – but still, this was amazing.

Suddenly, our clients could host their data in the cloud – securely, reliably, and with high speed access with no servers, no DBA, no specialized knowledge whatsoever – and about ½ hour of total setup time. A real database. Their own database. Accessible from anywhere, as long as they have an Internet connection.

This was most definitely an “a-ha” event, and really brought home the impact of just one aspect of cloud computing. A few short months later, we have hundreds of users with their Quosal data hosted in the Azure cloud, on Azure servers all over the world – very happy users that are enjoying the benefits of this deployment option.

Timeshare?  Not exactly.

Posted by Kent at 9:24 am Tagged with: ,

Moore's Law vs. The Cloud

Cloud, Kent, Moore's Law, Proposals, Quotes, Technology No Responses »
May 132010

 

Having been around the technology biz for a few decades — :( — I’ve observed with great interest the reality of Moore’s Law. In (very) short, Mr. Moore made a prediction back in 1965 that essentially stated our computing power would double every 18 months or so.  This has held remarkably true, the result being that we all have very fast computers for our personal and business use.

Ironically, now that we have all of this computing power (and operating systems that begin to harness it), we’re moving many of our applications OFF of our incredibly fast computers and into the Cloud — where our incredible computing power is being shared with X number of other users.  We’re now pointing all of the power of our personal computers at our web browsers, remote desktop utilities and Internet access.

Naturally, there are other forces at work on our current migration to the Cloud, but if Moore’s Law continues to hold true, it seems to me that we’ll see a long-term “vacillation” of the market between Cloud applications and local applications that take better advantage of the incredible personal computer power that we’ll all have.  Other forces will drive this as well … such as the revenue produced for the information technology industry by change itself.  In other words, once we get good and settled in the Cloud, we’ll find some very compelling reason to migrate back to The Desktop.

As we migrate our own applications and internal infrastructure into the cloud, we find ourselves adopting a mixed strategy to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, yet retain those of rich local applications.  Our own sales quoting software, Quosal, is a great example of an application that represents the best of both worlds — the richness of a desktop application, yet one that can be hosted in the Cloud and is continually accessing Cloud-based resources.

I will continue to watch with interest the dance between Moore’s Law and The Cloud.  In the long run, I think we’ll all win.

Posted by Kent at 6:36 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,
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