ASCII Group’s six-city 2012 SMB I.T. Success Summit tour is still in full swing, last night wrapping up their Chicago event. Channelpro was onsite for the event, speaking with VARs and vendors, and even doing a little impromptu acting and judging.†
The Chicago summit drew great attendance numbers, filling the presentation room with nearly 125 to 150 channel professionals from all over the country. The day was packed with informative sessions covering cloud, security, sales, and other topics. Examples include “Could Security Services that Rain Profit” from Bradford Networks, and Datto’s “Becoming a Recurring Revenue Rockstar.”
Lectures were broken up by two entertaining profit pitch events, where vendors worked with resellers in small groups to create a presentation or skit based on the vendor’s offering to be presented to the group at large and judged by a panel. Naturally, the cash prize incentive greased the wheels and got everyone involved.
I won’t go into great detail, but the resulting skits ranged from clever to outright hilarious. Feline backup and restortaion brought Fluffy back to life, a distribution center showed customer service at its ‘best,’ and an RMM game show contestant proved he ‘knows exactly how you feel.’
Meanwhile, a veritable who’s-who of SMB vendors, like Symantec, Intronis, HP, and Lenovo were on-hand to present products and channel solutions… and give away tons of stuff after the awards ceremony.
Nearly all partners and vendors after the show called the show a success. VARs and MSPs noted the informative sessions focused on making their businesses better, stronger, and profitable, while vendors noted new partnerships and great opportunities to share insight on their new and existing products.
The ASCII Success Summit ‘Best of Show Awards’ are voted on by the Solution Provider attendees at each of the six ASCII Success Summits.
These fun and prestigious awards are presented to the companies that are deemed to have the best solutions, new products, channel programs, promotions – incentives, best sales and support from Distribution for the Solution Provider community and ‘Best of Show’, all of these honored awards are voted on by the Solution Provider attendees of the event.
ASCII Group 2012 Success Summit Award Winners
- Best Software Solution: Level Platforms
- Best Channel Incentives: Lenovo
- Best Hardware Solution: HP
- Best New Product: Highly Reliable Systems
- Best Cloud Solution: Datto
- Best Channel Programs: CharTec
- Best Revenue Generator: GFI Max
- Best Partner Commitment: Reflexion
- Best Customer Support: Intronis
- Best Distributor Sales & Support: D&H
- Best In Show: Level Platforms
