2010: The year we make contact: ...with the global economy

As you can probably tell - life is doing a bit of "number" on me right. Trying to get the right priorities in the right order - work/family/me/work... yeesh. When you start-up a company there is a really nice point, where you are successful, busy and things go pretty well. Then, things get busier, and then busier... well, and just a little more busier - so, I am getting back into this blog for 2010 and this year maybe a little more focus on the marketing or business side of things. Don't want to be too, too technical now, do we?

As you can imagine building a global "marketing" footprint can be a long and hefty task. To combine this with building an effective enthused ecosystem  can make the task seem like eating an elephant. For me and ChangeBASE the first couple of months of 2010 has seen an incredible demand from channel partners in the US and Europe..

Our relationship with Microsoft has enabled us to reach out and educate a vast number of potential partners. Last Thursday was testimony to this fact. Microsoft invited us to be their guest speaker to over 50 US Microsoft ACF and MDOP partners.

During the session we reviewed the challenges facing organisations of every size when migrating to a new OS and packaging their applications for effective deployment. We walked through the ChangeBASE AOK offering and discussed the benefits for an organisation using our technology to effectively plan their application migration and most importantly for the channel community we discussed how they can differentiate themselves from the competition with AOK, increase revenue and gain new customers. The result – within 24 hours of the call we had over 5 separate partners contact us, looking to sign partnership agreements and register business opportunities.

How did we achieve this? One could argue the might of the AOK offering. I believe it was 50% our market leading technology which saves organisations hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars in migration and application packaging costs and 50% our close working relationship with the right people in Microsoft and their belief in our technology.

Lessons learned: to eat the elephant you need to have the right instruments (technology), the appetite (an enthused proactive channel) and the right connections (relationships).

That said, I just might be making things even busier for me...