It was another busy week here at PowerTech, with the majority of my own time spent conducting an important customer audit, several compliance assessments and product demos, and my personal favorite: a customer seminar for one of our business partners.

Personally, I love the face-to-face engagements the most as they let me connect and interact with the people that we only normally get to speak with on the phone. My presentation, hosted at the partner’s office in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, was named the “7 Habits of Highly Secure Organizations.” The content was based on a session that I conducted at COMMON earlier this year, and plays off the name of the famous motivational series. Knowing what secure organizations are doing to successfully protect their environment is something that we should all take advantage of.

We gave away a cool new iPod nano as a door prize, adorned in full PowerTech livery. We also offered to perform free IBM i compliance assessments, and we had two in the works before the day was out, as well as a product quote for a new customer! It seems that there are a lot of folks out there who are still struggling to secure their IBM i environment, and I love to hear that we have helped to solve a number of the challenges they face.

Investing in IBM i customers has always been an important part of our business. Last week we sent out a letter to a number of user groups around the country to see how we can support their efforts. We immediately had several groups take us up on our offer to come to their location and present to their membership for free. As with last week’s seminar, I believe that demonstrating and sharing our expertise is more effective than just representing our products with a call from a sales rep. Sure we have reps as well—good ones—but most customers seem to appreciate that there is an organization that has the tenure and expertise to help guide and advise them on security on the platform, and not just try to sell products.

Part of my presentation included an introduction to a number of no-cost resources available online. The PowerTech website (www.powertech.com) has links to our Twitter feed, and you definitely want to sign up for our free monthly e-newsletter. If you are not attending our weekly Webinars, then you are missing out on a treat! As for tangible resources, we have our famous security study, an open source security policy, and an online compliance guide. I love when we get comments back about how these free resources are appreciated, and especially that we are so active in sharing knowledge through various channels.

I am excited to be able to continue to take the security message out on the road next year. I am already signed up to present 3 educational sessions at the 50th COMMON in Florida in May. Between now and then I hope to meet some of you at regional user group events, and PowerTech-sponsored events across the country.

Have a great week!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.