Day 1 for SysAid at Pink14 Conference and Exhibition

Sunday, Feb. 16^th – Along with my Dream Team, wake-up time was early, Yes, we’re in Las Vegas but I didn’t really care what everyone was doing the night before because we are first-time exhibitors at the Pink Elephant show and I wanted to be sure that we would be 100% ready when the exhibition doors opened at 5:00 pm.

Needless to say, we were more than ready, and absolutely amazed by the throngs of people passing through the aisles and by the positive and enthusiastic reaction to our booth/presence at PINK14.

The SysAid booth was bursting with people eager to know more about us and wanting to take photos with the famous Joe The IT Guy. Check out some of the photos on our Facebook album.

I was surprised to hear so many people tell me that they have no idea about our customer numbers, specifically in the USA (where 40% of our customers reside).

I was also surprised by the number of people who said they have no ITSM tool at all and manage everything manually or via an in-house built-in tool. A lot of people said the reason is cost. The truth is managing service is all about the process, so with a good process you can probably even manage a service without a tool. Last year we encountered a customer who was providing excellent service and did not use any tool at all. They had three different sheets of paper in different colors, representing the priority of the case, and they managed just fine without a tool. For the most part, these types of organizations do this because of some historical reason, kind of a “status quo”. But it can’t fulfill all the needs. Manual processes or in-house built-in solutions end up at a point where they are able to deliver the process itself, but there are so many surrounding supported processes and functions that just don’t exist, such as reports, KPIs and measurements, integrations and more. It is not worth the organizations’ resources to develop and maintain such solutions – it is not their core business! So they develop ticket management, then they want to grow to request management, and then maybe change and problem management. Basically, they end up forcing a system to do something it wasn’t designed to manage.

Here’s my advice: With excellent tools and alternatives available in the market by vendors that focus on creating ITSM tools, with an attractive pricing and even as a SaaS offering – there truly is no reason to use and maintain your own home-made solution.

But it wasn’t all serious business…the atmosphere was very relaxed…lots of fun and giggles.

Lines were forming for demos and people asking for price quotes, which our sales guys were happy to take care of on the spot.

Our ALL ESSENTIALS bag – filled with water, potato chips, granola bars, candy rolls, Kit Kats, and chewing gum – was a huge hit! We totally zipped through the 1st day’s batch super quick. But don’t worry, for those of you who didn’t get – we’ll have more on Day 2.

We’ve already met so many incredible people passionate about IT service management and it was only the first evening! We’re hoping to meet even more fabulous ITSMers over the next days. And here is hoping that the #PINK14 Twitter stream will be filled with more than just other vendors tweeting booth numbers. Come on practitioners, start sharing what you’re learning in the Twitter stream!

Please share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook where we are always listening.