Cranel Event Follow-up

Had a great time at Cranel's annual North American Executive Partner event held this past week in Columbus, OH. This was the second year in a row that I attended - having keynoted the event in 2010. There were almost 70 resellers and a dozen vendor partners at the event, which VP of marketing Scott Slack said was about 20% larger than last year's event.

According to Slack, Cranel continues to grow despite a challenging landscape, which included losing Fujitsu as a partner in the past year. Cranel is a value-added distributor that focuses on the document imaging market with a combination of hardware and software products. In our next premium issue, we'll have an article featuring some insights from Slack on how Cranel has managed to stay ahead of the game.

For the second year in a row, the weather was beautiful, which was nice, because quite a bit of the Cranel event centers around golf. If you're a PGA fan, you know that Jack Nicklaus' Memorial Tournament is being held this week in Columbus. Cranel shared a house off the 12th green (a tough little par 3) where attendees were able to network and watch some great golf. We also had passes to head down onto the course.

I ended up following the Mickelson, Bubba Watson, and Ricky Fowler group for several holes, which was certainly interesting. Unfortunately, I can't disagree with Phil's complaints about the noise and the cell phones. I saw an huge amount of cell phone activity, including pictures, going on throughout the tournament with the marshals (as well as caddies) being asked to do an inordinate amount of policing related. Yes, it's a great convenience for spectators to have cell phones, but I'm thinking tournaments need to go back to banning them if that's how fans are going to act. It really was a huge distraction.  - Anyhow, that's my non-DI thought of the day.

Cheers.