Thanks to everyone who made the meeting this month. Our speakers were eagerly anticipated and didn’t disappoint!

Chris Parkes – Microsoft.

Chris is the Territory Manager for the Central region so his job is to look after companies such as AMITPRO members!

The presentation was focussed around Microsoft’s cloud offerings and looked at the how we’ve got to the current definition of “cloud computing”

These offerings are broadly broken down into three core areas.

Examples of each area include

• Software as a Service  – Dynamics CRM online
• Platform as as Service – SQL Azure
• Infrastructure as a Service – Office 365 (Exchange / SharePoint /etc)

Chris covered some of the usage scenarios where Cloud solutions would be advantageous over a traditional on-premise solution.

 

Next we delved into some of the specific solutions with a final focus on the imminent release of Office 365.

Chris gave very honest and open presentation and acknowledged that while Cloud solutions are the current hot topic it may not always be the right solution for every business so on premises solutions won’t disappear overnight and there are still questions customers need to face around security, migration, data protection as well as how solution providers will need to evolve their business models so they can still provide value.

The slides Chris used are available here and here.

Susanne Dansey – Purple Cow Ideas Management

Always a popular speaker at AMITPRO Susanne was hear to give her presentation called “Creative Ideas for ICTs Professionals”.

Susanne started off by explaining the Purple Cow concept, if you don’t know this is a good place to start but in summary – BE EXCEPTIONAL.

 

From here the session become very interactive and actually had nothing to do with technology. It was to do with interacting with your customers, standing out from the crowd, sorting that work/life balance, thinking about your business model and how you can turn it upside down to do more of the fun stuff and much more!

 

The discussion in the room was lively and there were some great little nuggets of information for improving your business from the people around the table.

The end result was a hugely inspiring session that continued in the bar until late into the night!

For some bite size chunks of the areas Susanne was talking about you it’s highly recommended you check out the “The Cowshed”.

Thanks go out to both speakers for making it really interesting meeting!

See you in June!