This year was a great one for 1E at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), but then it generally always is. After 10 years of attending this great techie convergence, it was a real honor to be recognized by Microsoft during the keynote on Wednesday.
Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Management and Services Division at Microsoft commented, “By working together with 1E’s best-of-breed energy efficient IT solutions, we offer customers a powerful combination of automation, reduced infrastructure and power management. As a result, customers can gain a deeper insight into their operations and drive efficiencies across their physical and virtual IT environments.” He then introduced a great video featuring our own Sumir Karayi and some lovely 1E solutions - take a look here.
This got me thinking about our efforts at MMS 10 years ago when we were a relatively unknown small UK company. Sumir and I flew into Vegas not quite realizing the scale of this event. We knew that there was interest in our products and that people wanted to meet us. We knew this because of our participation in the very active online technical forums , where system admins exchanged ideas, problems and inspiration around Microsoft's emerging management technologies. These forums were a great way of introducing our new products and getting feedback from a core group of people who really mattered (and still do!) - the systems admins who manage their desktops and servers day in, day out.
Anyway, we were finding it hard to meet up with people at this event in Vegas, so Sumir had the inspired idea of having some 1E t-shirts printed up with a giant logo. We drove out to a print shop somewhere on the outskirts of town with our floppy disk (yeah really, remember them?) containing the 1E logo and returned to the conference with some very unsubtle looking attire indeed. And I still have mine!
Most of those original systems management forum contributors are still around, and some of them, such as the legendary Ed Aldrich now work with us at 1E. Many of them I am proud to count as friends, and one of the most tireless and hardworking among them is Rod Trent. He's the founder of myITforum.com which sprang out of those early forums and conferences, and who celebrate their 10th anniversary this year. As a platinum sponsor of myITforum.com, it's great to see 1E still in the thick of the mighty Management Community.
So congratulations to Rod and to all of the contributors to myITForum - you know who you are - and here's to the next 10 years. If you are new to the Microsoft Management community, you're lucky, you have a great support network ready and waiting!
Read the complete post at http://www.1e.com/bizblog/post/2010/04/28/10-years-of-the-Microsoft-Systems-Management-community.aspx