AMITPRO Meeting – October 2009

I’ve been meaning to post about the changes at AMITPRO for a little while but I’ve been a bit on the busy side recently. I’ve started the post about three times and never finished it!

So the changes…if you’re a regular attendee to AMITPRO you’ll already know that Steve Wright has decided to stand down as group leader

He’s done a great job over the last twelve months and will still have input into the group via his Partner Area Lead role

As of this month the new leader of the group is Guy Gregory of Peak Support and me!

Both Guy and I had shown an interest in taking on the group lead role and decided a joint effort would bring more to the group and sharing the responsibilities can only be a good thing

Since I’ve been involved with AMITPRO there has always been a great spirit of collaboration so it makes perfect sense from my perspective to take this on with someone else

If Guy and myself can keep up the great work from Steve and Vijay before him AMITPRO will continue to be a great resource for IT Professionals in the Midlands area

Tonight’s meeting was our first as joint leaders. Steve had already organised the speakers so we were able to hit the ground running!

Our first speaker was Zoe Russell of ZHR Marketing

She gave a great presentation about marketing specifically for the small business. It took a while for the group to warm up but once they did there were lots of questions and ideas about different marketing ideas. Hopefully it will have given everyone some new ideas!

Next up was Cécile Cathala and Richard Zinner from StorageCraft Europe

While StorageCraft isn’t a new name over in the States they are only just branching out into the UK.

StorageCraft is a backup imaging product for grabbing snapshots of servers and PC (competing products are Backup Exec System Recovery and Acronis TrueImage) that can also restored to dissimilar hardware or even a virtual environment

They have editions for Desktop PCs, Servers and Small Business Server

There is also a managed service provider licensing model if you would like to provide backup and recovery as a service

One of their unique features is their IT Edition. This is a technician license that allows you to create images of as many servers as you need. You can also run this directly from a CD or USB Drive while the system is running

There are trial versions of the products available so it’s definitely worth a look

Just a quick overview of both speakers. They both did a great job

Afterwards we retired to the bar and continued with our usual mix of chat about business, life the universe and everything!

Next month we’ll be organising speakers of our own…that’s when it gets really serious!