This last week was great meeting up with old friends and making new ones as well. To me this week really echo’s what our CEO Sumir has said for a long time – 1E has friends, not customers. It’s a journey that we take together and you can only do that with friends. This can be seen by the fact that not only do we work together with our friends in business but we also socialize and have fun away from the keyboard together as well. To us this is the only way to do business. You can also see that everything we do work or play is 100%.
I’m personally glad that I got to catch up with many people that I haven’t seen in a while and I would also like to thank my friend Rod for letting me run the Panel of Experts for him while he got better. To me sharing knowledge is the true essence of what community is all about and getting a chance to do that is just brilliant.
One of the great partnerships that 1E has is with Microsoft. It’s never more evident than during MMS when we have multiple Microsoft employees mentioning our tools during their sessions or coming to our parties so that we can catch up with the events over the past year. Our stand also seemed to always have a line of people waiting to talk to us about tools or work that we have done together in the past. One of the things that I noticed when socializing with both Microsoft as well as our friends this week was the amount of time that we spent talking about each others lives and non-computer related events.
To me what I really took out of MMS was how the management space is maturing when compared to other industries. I’ve long thought that management has been an afterthought in organizations and that is partially due to the lack of development in the toolset. 3rd party vendor or native feature set its rare that there isn’t an answer to someone’s problem today. Yes there is still much more work to do in the management space (if there wasn’t then the world would be a boring place) but when we all take a moment and look back its amazing how far things have come in just a few years.
Looking forward to seeing everyone again soon.
-Richard
(richardt@1e.com)