Hello from Toronto, it is an early morning as I prepare for the 4 hour journey back to Calgary today after a very exciting 36 or so hours back in my hometown. I always love coming back to Toronto to visit and see many friends in the Canadian IT industry. This is where everything happens for this industry and I struggle to find the reasoning why many leaders of technology firms still don’t invest the time and effort to come out here at least 4 times a year to reconnect with people. People are at the heart of business and I make an effort and a serious effort to connect with my partners and friends as much as I can.
Yesterday I attended the Microsoft Partner Tour kick off here in Toronto and manned the IAMCP booth, during the day was a total IAMCP committed day, if you are unsure what the IAMCP is, it is a partner community for Microsoft Partners across the globe, we have chapters from one corner of the globe to the other. The International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners is one of those professional organizations that is very near and dear to my heart. I would rank it up there in importance just like HTG or my Chamber of Commerce. We invited 15 new members yesterday into the Canadian Chapter of IAMCP. Welcome to you all, if you would like more information on the IAMCP in Canada, visit our website at http://www.iamcp.ca.
During the evening, my good friend Paula from Microsoft and I attended the 6th Annual Channel Elite Awards put on my great friends at CDN Magazine. Paolo (or Pedro) and Joe do an awesome job with this publication that goes out across Canada to all the IT shops. It was great to link up with my friends from Tech Data, Symantec and of course DELL. DELL Canada was a new sponsor at this year’s event. Thanks to Kevin, Cecil, Miye and Ryan for coming out, it was the third week in a row that I ran into these guys and they are just awesome. DELL is a wonderful company to partner with and I can’t think of another computer manufacturer that I would invest so much time and effort into creating a relationship with. They are up there with my Microsoft, SonicWALL, Tech Data, Synnex and my other leading vendor relationships. They are more than vendors they are friends as well.
You gotta love this picture of Kevin as an angel. Kevin is a VP at DELL and a great friend of mine, he really summed up that DELL are good to deal with and not the devil that Arnie Bellini at Connectwise showed at the Connectwise conference a couple of years back.
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