Cranel Partner Event

Over here in Columbus for a couple days at value-added distributor Cranel's annual North American Executive Partner Event. I was invited to give one of the keynotes and discussed "How not to Choke on Your Alphabet Soup:  Your guide to successfully navigating emerging trends in the areas of MPS, IDR, and BPM," which I consider to be three of the most important acronyms facing our VAR community. I think about 80 VAR representatives in all will be attending the event. Talk seemed to be well received, even if no one in the room could come up with the answer to the question of what IDR stands for. That just gives you a little idea of the disconnect between the vendor and VAR communities.

I received some good feedback on my talk, especially from one gentleman who is the president of a copier dealer brokerage that is transitioning to "document solutions." He explained to me some of the difficulties that copier dealers have with the up front investments and long sales cycles associated with taking on a document management practice. He was lucky in picking up a salesperson with several established accounts that he brought over from his former employers, so he hit the ground running.

Chad Stigall, a product marketing manager for Cranel, spoke before me. His focus was SharePoint (which is also part of my focus as well). His comment about VARs needing a SharePoint strategy, even if they don't necessarily build SharePoint imaging solutions, struck me as especially poignant.