Autotask Community Live 2012: Everyone’s Invited

A growing number of technology companies are opening up their partner conferences to VARs and MSPs outside of their established communities. The latest example is Autotask, which believes its Community Live 2012 event will provide value to Autotask users and non-Autotask users alike.

“In years past we typically invited our Autotask users and had some special invited guests, but this year we’ve actually opened it up (to be) a more industry-wide event,” said Len DiCostanzo, senior vice president of Community and Business Development at Autotask. ”We’ve got such a diverse program we feel anyone can benefit from attending the event.”

DiCostanzo offers more insights in this FastChat Video:

This year’s event, slated for June 10-12 in Orlando, Fla., is chock full of educational and training sessions focusing on Autotask technology and business strategies. The three-day conference kicks off with the Autotask Accelerator Bootcamp, which introduces Autotask from “soup to nuts … to show how service delivery can be automated and scaled with our product,” DiCostanzo said. “We also have a couple of LiveReports workshops — we want to show our clients our new reporting tool and how they can create fantastic internal reports as well as those that face the customer.

“Really, our goal is to provide the best educational content out there, making sure our users get the most out of Autotask,” he said.

Along those lines, much of the content in the Business Strategy track will come from Autotask users themselves. DiCostanzo noted that of the 70-plus sessions slated for the event, 60 of them will either be run by or will include Autotask customers. “We’re going to have sessions that are focused on what our clients are doing every day and sharing those best practices to their peers,” he said.

All of the sessions, regardless of user participation, will focus on using Autotask in ways customers work, he said. “We’ve got a Sales and Marketing track around how to use Autotask best in those particular business processes that our clients run every day. We’ve got a Service Delivery track around our Project Management and Service Desk components. There’s a Billing and Contracts track … So we try to get our clients to send more than one two or three individuals because we’ve organized those educational tracks around what they do every day and we think that’s going to be a fantastic change.”

Attendees also will get a chance to mingle with Autotask execs, play a round of golf, attend a blowout event Monday night and even earn the CompTIA MSP Partners Trustmark credential — CompTIA will be offering the credential course during the event.

“Autotask Community Live has become one of the industry’s top events and it started right out the gate that way based on feedback from past attendees and vendor sponsors,” DiConstanzo said. “We’ve experienced over 30 percent growth in attendance and we expect this year’s show to be no different.”