Arlin Sorensen and others from HTS will share a series of sales and marketing ideas that leverage vendor and distributor programs allowing your company to attack the market. The presentation will showcase a variety of campaigns and events that HTS has utilized followed by a mini customer evidence case study featuring one of the resulting sales that occurred as a result of successful execution. The goal of this session is to provide ideas you can take back and put to use in your market next week. Details will be provided on how to take advantage of the marketing investments that key vendor partners like Microsoft and HP have invested in and provide to their partner community, many at no cost.

Clinton Gatewood and Erick Simpson will conduct a session focused on identifying the traits of successful proactive Service Providers. Attend this session and learn:
- How small MSP’s emulate much larger organizations in terms of efficiencies, processes and profits
- Effective methods to gain access to the knowledge and resources required to reap the benefits of a much larger organization
- How to leverage partnering relationships to increase your core competencies and scale your services to your Clients

Stay ahead of all the big changes that are coming in software and services! Come see how Microsoft is building an integrated solution for small businesses taking software + services and delivering one integrated experience. We will show the latest features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, and Office Accounting. Get ready to save time, organize your workload, manage information, stay connected, and collaborate better.

The journey to higher profitability and managed services can be difficult, lengthy and expensive. Change your sales people? Manage your sales process differently? Learn to sell and deliver solutions? Restructure your financial business model? Managed services? Execute a better marketing plan? Recurring revenue? Restructuring your vendor relationships? Who has the time or money to figure out where to start? The CompTIA Solution Provider Roadmap is a web-based portal that supports business model transformation by providing robust, flexible change management tools and end user support resources. With the Roadmap IT channel business owners and managers can assess their current business, build plans for growth and engage proven resources to support priority areas of the transformation. The Roadmap can be viewed at http://roadmap.comptia.org

Every day, your small and mid-sized business customers rely on Microsoft® Windows-based technology to support their business goals and daily operations. As their technology needs increase, so do their risks—not to mention IT costs and complexities. Conditions like these make it harder than ever to protect and manage their Windows environment. Like many small and mid-sized companies, their IT staff and resources are limited. Symantec offers a straightforward blueprint for acquiring, deploying, and managing solutions that protect their data, systems, and applications. In addition, we have an array of partner benefits that Symantec offers to help you build your business

For centuries, merchants were at their most vulnerable when outside the walls of their establishment. The images of brigands at the crossroads, train robbers and pirates are iconic in all of our memories. But that was then, and this is now. Money is no longer coined in precious metal and carried in a strongbox. Money has become entirely symbolic.

Today's businessman faces his greatest danger whenever he connects to the ultimate crossroads, the Internet. Join David Perry from Trend Micro as he outlines the new and evolving threats facing businessmen today, and a whole range of strategies for figthing them.

If your business is not growing fast enough, you are facing a high potential growth phase, your profits are shrinking or you have leveled or stalled out; this fast paced workshop has been designed for you. The purpose of this content rich event is to assist organizations develop the right strategies and align specific tactics to accelerate their growth and ensure the execution of the agreed to business planning process.

- Learn to build accountability into your management style and management team.
- Learn to focus and operationalize strategy and goal achievement.
- Facing the Truth About What It Will Take to Break-Out
- Making Continuous, Clear, Effective and Timely Decisions

The purpose of a business is to give you more life, not to suck the life out of you. Yet the reality is that most business owners face demanding time challenges and try to fit in "life" when they have a moment. Louis Barajas, author and nationally recognized expert in financial planning and business consulting will show you how to re-think and re-structure your business to allow you to bring back balance to your personal life. Louis will demonstrate two successful consulting tools that will help you gain more control of your businesses and more control of your personal life, no matter how big or how small your business is today.

What are the factors of your success? Money, product or service offering and a catchy trade name? No! For the entrepreneur the factors of success come from eight areas all within your control. Many of them will require the IT professional to stretch beyond the confines of what they know. However, the same walls that protect you stop you. Reach outside your boundaries and begin the journey to a successful, fulfilling business.

TBA

Microsoft is busy with several upcoming products in the SMB space. The SBS Product team will help simplify what you should know about the upcoming releases of the next version of SBS (Cougar), Home Server, Centro and Longhorn Server. Get in sync with the next wave of Server products, and make sure you know what you need to know when you need to know it so you can staff up and train up!

A Round-Up of Best Practices for Organizing and Running an Efficient and Profitable SMB Consulting Practice

Proper procedures and consistency are key elements in growth, reproducible success, higher profits, and more personal time with your family! In this session, you'll see one consultant's perspective on building a successful practice. We begin with a review of the current market environment for SMB consultants. After that, we cover a variety of topics ranging from employee management to creating successful procedures. We'll cover personal and professional development as well as a bit on sales and marketing. We'll describe procedures at KPEnterprises and lead a discussion of other successful practices shared by audience members. While there are some technical topics, this is primarily a business-related discussion. We will cover the how and why of technical procedures, but not dig into the details.

The Forms
If there's one thing KPEnterprises does to be successful, it's develop forms and procedures. We'll show you some of our "best practices" with regard to using standardized forms for everything from network migration to weeding out your clients once a year. Don't miss the unique opportunity to see how one successful SMB consultant has built his practice. Plan to Thrive. Because you can't thrive without a plan.

In this interactive session we will examine how to effectively position managed services to both your customers and employees. We will demonstrate how IT Solution Providers have successfully adopted and transitioned their business to an annuity based services model while simultaneously increasing project work and overall peripheral sales

Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 provides security and usability improvements for mobile access to Exchange data from Windows Mobile and other compatible devices. This session discusses and demonstrates these new mobility enhancements, including direct push, configuring device password settings, remotely wiping a device, as well as other mobile enhancements added in Exchange 2003 SP2. The focus of the discussion is on security, deployment, and management of these features.

In this session you will learn about the key business indicators used to manage and optimize an infrastructure focused IT consulting business. We will discuss:

- which indicators to monitor
- what they mean to your business
- how to measure them
- how to automate data collection
- range of values for a healthy business

The presenters will use examples from their own businesses and best practices from industry groups to help you get the insight you need to maximize your consulting practice profitability.

Growing a business from start up to several million dollars of sales each year offers lots of opportunities to learn what works -- and what doesn't. Stuart Crawford brings you the inside track on how to separate you and your business from the mainstream. See why attracting the best possible clients should be a top priority. To get this caliber of business, you need to project an image that attracts potential customers and clients rather than repels them. Become aware of how to use this image in your networking to create relationships with businesses that serve your same market—up, down and sideways. You want to be the person everyone remembers and calls first. You will get three strategies to effectively close more business.

Exchange 2007 marks the most significant overhaul to communications in SMB in over a decade. This session will give you a brief overview of the changes and elaborate on the opportunities, strategies and course of action to prepare you to advise your clients on coming global messaging evolution. With email becoming more critical to the small business corporate infrastructure, combined with large investments in modernizing phone and PBX systems, this is perhaps the most exciting and profitable convergence of opportunities for the savvy SMB consultant!

SMB customers today have major pain points around data protection and recovery. IT departments need to resolve storage and backup issues, network storage is now an affordable answer. Learn how network storage technologies are strategic to smaller firms and the money saving benefits it provides. Discover how an all-in-one network storage solution with support for NAS, iSCSI SAN, and Fibre Channel SAN is the best SMB solution. Understand how to build a solid network backup strategy and solution using disk, tape and software technologies

This session will detail how to leverage a resource that is helping partners grow their businesses like never before, the Microsoft Business and Technology Assessment Toolkit. (Version 3 of the Toolkit just released at the end of January 2007). Based on the best practices of Microsoft Partners, this valuable toolkit offers a step-by-step guide to identifying your customer’s business goals and technology requirements so you can create a plan that addresses immediate gaps and maps out a plan for future needs. New templates enable assessments covering Business, Technology, Vista, Office, Mobility, Messaging and SWOT analysis.

This seminar will break the toolkit down for you and demonstrate key new features for Version 3 in order to give you a jump on how to use the tool to enhance your sales. Partners are having a field day with this toolkit, offering customers business assessments through demand generation, following up with proposals that are two times larger than previous proposals and sealing the deal with Microsoft Financing. If you are not doing business and technology assessments, you are leaving money on the table for another, more strategic, partner to take.

Read Article: Microsoft's Updated SBS Toolkits Help Partners Land Deals