This weekend I’m up in Northern New Jersey attending the SMB Nation East conference, spending a lot of time talking to companies and other consultants. Lots of talking, lots of looking and listening to sales spiels for software and new service solutions. The big topics of the seminar seem to be Microsoft’s Response Point, which is Microsoft’s entry into the VoIP PBX with an attempt to tackle the market that Asteriskw is dominating. All in all it’s been a very fun and interesting day helping the guys from Calyptix talk about their product to the several hundred service providers that are attending the conference.

Between the look at the new Microsoft SBS 2008 product and the sheer amount of networking opportunities that have presented themselves from traveling to this conference have more than made it worthwhile. Having had the chance this evening to go out to dinner with Matt Makowicz from Ambition Consulting, numerous members of the SMB Nation staff, people from HP, and representatives from Kaseya made for what amounted to many months of traditional attempts at marketing. And of course that doesn’t count the numerous other consultants that came to dinner with us all as well.
In addition to all the marketing and learning opportunities, I got myself a Google branded pen, got a chance to talk to some of the vendors I currently use in Autotask and Level Platforms. I also stepped into a bit of a sales role today to help attempt to answer all the questions being asked by people at the Calyptix booth. From the time we finally started receiving traffic to the booths it was non-stop till 7PM when the event ended.

All told, it’s been a great day, a great learning event, and a great networking event. If a SMB Nation conference comes to an event near you, I definitely make it a point to travel to the event and spent some time talking to the vendors and meeting other members of the community that are attending. You’d be amazed at the number of cross-beneficial oppurtunities that crop up from all the connections that you can make.

I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow and the second day of the conference. A lot of the same people will be back, and I’m sure we’ll all have more time to chat about stories, and ideas that we all have. Who knows, maybe someone attending has the next great plan for Managed Services or the next evolution there of.