Tomorrow TSIA’s Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas at the Mirage kicks off with my Innovation Tour of the Recognized Innovator Finalists at 12:45. Today we are heads down in final preparation, and we also held our very first in-person meeting of the newly formed Partner Advisory Board (PAB). Lydia Zaffini, our senior director of partner programs, and I chair the PAB, which consists of senior executives from Astea International, Compuware Corporation, Pretium Partners, Consona CRM, RTM Consulting, Convergys, ServiceMax, Coveo, ServiceSource, DG Associates, Sykes Enterprises, IGLOO Software Inc., Verint Systems Inc., and ISOdx Solutions LLC.
I opened the meeting with a discussion of major trends for 2012, including the impacts of Consumption Economics on technology buyers, pending 2012 budget cuts and of course, my favorite topic of the moment, mobile and video (more on that in my blog tomorrow!). We also had a presentation from Julia Stegman, our new research vice president for the brand new discipline being launched at this conference, Service Revenue Generation (SRG), on service revenue trends. Diane Brundage, our senior vice president of sales, and the executive sponsor of the PAB, led the group in a very interaction session on building better relationships between TSIA members and partners.
Cindy McCombe, TSIA’s director of marketing, gave a very informative session on marketing plans, including the new world of marketing via social media. It was great to hear input from the partners on which social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) each of them is using, some with great success, some not so much. Webcasts and white papers continue to be effective ways to reach people, but both are changing. Some partners are having good results with shorter webcasts (bite size chunks packed with content as opposed to a one hour presentation) and ebooks (electronic content perfect for smartphone and table consumption as opposed to traditional PDFs of reports).
I’d like to give a personal Thank You to all the partner advisory board members for giving up part of their weekend to attend the meeting, as well as a big Thank You to the TSIA team members who made time to attend the meeting and make presentations.
I’ll be back tomorrow with updates from Day 1 of TSW! Hope to see you there!
Ragsdale’s Eye on Service 