AMITPRO

We have two speakers this month!

Mat Thomas – Kerio

Kerio are mostly known in the Small Business Specialist Community for their email server – Kerio Connect but they also have firewall, online collaboration and VOIP products.

Matt will spend some time introducing Kerio and their products to the group before giving a technical demonstration of a product of the groups choice.

Martin King-Turner – National B2B Centre.

“IT Suppliers: The Customer Perspective”

Martin will introduce the National B2B Centre to the group and present the results of the a recent survey NB2B recently put together to understand the views SME’s have about IT suppliers followed by a discussion about how we can all better meet the needs of our customers – and hence all win more business!

Full details are available on our sign up page

We normally meet in the bar of the Arden Hotel between 17:00 and 17:30.

Should be a good one! Hope to see you there.

Our speaker this month is Clinton Walker from Security Aware

"Clinton has over 10 years experience in the IT & Security arena, most of which have been spent in Security dealing with Vulnerability Management, Security Systems Administration, Business Continuity, Compliance, Auditing, Risk Management, Training and Awareness and Ethical Hacking. Prior to his current role, he worked for well-known companies such as Lotus Cars, Experian as a Senior Security Analyst, E.ON as the Vulnerability Manager, New College Nottingham as a Web Developer, Gatwick Airport, Logica and Peoples College as a Lecturer. He is also a Director at Don Ebony Productions (film Production Company) and has been a board Director for AsiliCom Ltd (a telecoms company) and Reach Training Institute.

Clinton is an active member of British Computer Society (BCS) & Co-ordinates the Young Professionals arm of BCS and regularly organises networking events in the Nottingham and Derby Region.

Clinton holds a Masters degree in Information Systems Security, a BSc (Hons) in Business Information Technology, ISO27001 Lead Auditor, trained Paralegal, ITIL Foundation Certificate, Member of the Institute of Learning (MIfL) and a School Governor."

He’ll be talking to group about Cloud Computing Security & Best Practices

"Are you ‘if-ing’ about floating to the clouds? Are you hesitant about losing control and become weightless, having to deal with the hassle of changing, tapes, refreshing equipment, costly overheads?  It’s not as bad as you think…you just need to plan and look ahead and don’t let anything cloud your vision. Just focus on what really matters to your business (longevity, cost, overheads, and the risk).  Be aware and understand the pros and cons of migrating to the cloud. Knowledge is power!

Areas to cover include:

What is cloud computing?

The drivers

Barriers to adoption

Approaches to Cloud adoption

The risks and issues

Top Concerns as quoted by CSA – 7 threats to cloud security

Compliance and security best Practices

Second session will follow our current format of having a group discussion: topic to be confirmed.

Just a heads up about an event that’s coming your way soon.

Level Platforms have a road show coming called “Managed Services Education & Collaboration Road Show 2012”

The agenda is pretty packed with all sorts of names and vendors from the industry speaking on a variety of topics around improving your Managed Services business.

One specific speaker you’ll be interested is friend of AMITPRO and huge contributor to the SBSC community, Dave Sobel.

Dave has spoken at our group on more than one occasion and shared his thoughts and experiences around Virtualisation and Cloud computing and how they had an impact on his business (EvolveTech)

At end of last year Dave sold his business and has taken up the position of Director of Partner Community at Level Platforms.

Dave certainly knows all about community and It’ll be great to have him in the area again whilst the whole event looks like a good learning and networking opportunity.

Full details of the event agenda are here and dates and locations with sign up links are :

London, UK

Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill
Tuesday, 20 March, 2012

Manchester, UK

Renaissance Manchester
Thursday, 22 March, 2012

Birmingham, UK

Warwickshire County Cricket Club
Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Dublin, Ireland

The Shelbourne Dublin, A Renaissance Hotel
Thursday, March 29, 2012

Our next meeting is on March 13th

Event page is now live at http://amitpromarch2012.eventbrite.co.uk
If you’re planning on attending please sign up so we can get a good idea of numbers.

Full details are on the sign up page but in short the sessions we be

Session 1:
Alex Macindoe – Symantec – here to talk about what’s new with Symantec and specifically Backup Exec 2012. A very different looking product to their last release!

Session 2:
Group Discussion
The feedback so far has been that having a second session that can continue discussions from the first session or talk about a different “hot topic” seems to be working well.

To Be Confirmed but the second topic is currently

“SharePoint…..you’re doing it wrong”

This isn’t going to be a technical demonstration but a group discussion around use cases for the product and to think about how you should be getting involved with SharePoint deployments with your own customers.

Hope to see you all next week

Our first session will be presented by Dominic Gill who will be filling in the group on the current developments with IT  Apprenticeships in the UK.
Dominic should be well to know to many of our group members as he’s visited on behlf of Microsoft on many occasions previously.

Our second session will be a group discussion – to pick up the postponed topic from last month we’ll be talking about the Microsoft Partner Program.
The goal of this session is to gather some feedback to pass back to Microsoft – what’s good and bad about the partner program and what changes would be beneficial for everyone.

If possible it would be great preparation if you could have an approximate figure of Microsoft software you have sold in the last year. This way we can determine how much as a group, AMITPRO attendees generate for Microsoft – I’m expecting it to be a significant amount!

It doesn’t have to be “to the pound accurate” and if you’re not comfortable sharing with the open room we can add this to the total privately

We meet in the bar at the Arden Hotel between 5.00 and 5.30 or if you ask at reception for the Microsoft event they’ll point you in the right direction.

If you’re planning on coming to the event please sign up at http://amitprofeb2012.eventbrite.co.uk

Happy New Year!

Our speaker for this month is Craig Sharp from Birmingham based Abussi, providing a presentation on ‘Introducing VoIP to your MSP Business’

Craig will speak to the group about his experiences in deploying VOIP solutions over the past 6 years, from early adoption of unfit solutions through to the present when VoIP can be a vital part of the MSP toolbox for helping clients remain ‘sticky’ to you, while adding revenue to your business.

Some key areas he’ll cover :

A background to the varied VoIP solutions on the market along with an explanation as to their purpose, value and benefit to clients, and a check list of pre-deployment considerations. Starting from ‘Is VoIP right for this client’ through to what DSL services to use with each solution and how to manage client expectations. There will also be some technical background on setup for handsets and features on typical Hosted PBX systems.

Abussi is similar to many of the MSP businesses attending the AMITPRO event and so this is a unique opportunity to hear how an IT provider and MSP has added VoIP into their portfolio of services, with both positive and negative results. If you are looking to start 2012 with a VoIP offering, then come along and learn what does and what doesn’t work and find out how VOIP could add value to your business.

Our second session will be a group discussion – as voted for last month we’ll be talking about the Microsoft Partner Program.

The goal of this session is to gather some feedback to pass back to Microsoft – what’s good and bad about the partner program and what changes would be beneficial for everyone.

If possible it would be great preparation if you could have an approximate figure of Microsoft software you have sold in the last year. This way we can determine how much as a group, AMITPRO attendees generate for Microsoft – I’m expecting it to be a significant amount!

It doesn’t have to be "to the pound accurate" and if you’re not comfortable sharing with the open room we can add this to the total privately

We meet in the bar at the Arden Hotel between 5.00 and 5.30 or if you ask at reception for the Microsoft event they’ll point you in the right direction.

If you’re planning attending the event you can sign up here

Just a quick reminder that our November meeting isn’t on it’s usual second Tuesday of the month.

We’re hosting the SBS MVP Road Show on Monday 14th. We’ll be starting at 17:00 promptly so please get there as soon as you.

Also a reminder if you are coming please remember to register on the MVP page itself as they’ll need to know attendance figures, etc.

Please invite anyone you think may be interested as all are welcome and since these guys are flying into the country to come talk to us it’d be great if we could get a good turnout.

Full details are on a previous post here —–> http://amitpro.org/2011/10/04/november-special-eventsbs-mvp-roadshow

Hope you all have a good week and look forward to seeing you Monday night!