Out of the Box IT
Osama M. Faris brings out of the box thinking about information technology into focus.
Osama Faris: Autotask Most Valuable Partner for 2010!
As many of you may have read in my Twitter feed or on LinkedIn last week, I won an award. Not just any award, but a Most Valuable Partner award from Autotask for 2010. It was a pleasure to win. I was in Miami for the Community Live! conference after my trip to Egypt.
If you’ve never been to Miami, it’s a terrific city to visit. It has a lot of history and culture, as well as beautiful art deco architecture. The conference was great for Autotask partners, and I highly recommend it. I was just digging into my salad at lunch the first day of the show when I realized they were calling my name.
Osama Faris!
They called me a couple of times. I imagine people were having flashbacks to Ferris Beuller’s Day Off by the time I realized someone was calling my name. As an IT managed service provider, someone shouting my name is not always a good sign. But then I realized: they wanted to give me an award!
I’m not sure why I won. I have a lot of ideas on what makes me and FAR a valuable partner. Maybe it’s because I’m an extremely satisfied customer and I like to let other people know. Or maybe it’s because I provide a consistently positive but objective view of Autotask products to anyone who asks. Or maybe it’s because I work with my clients to help them understand the value of Autotask. Maybe it’s because I’m just that good looking. Or maybe it’s all four.
Either way, I’m very grateful to have won (look at how grateful I look in this candid photo!). So, I want to thank everyone at Autotask, as well as many of the great folks I met at the show. It was amazing. Autotask has a very vibrant partner community with a a diverse, third-party product ecosystem.
I wasn’t the only award winner, and you can learn more about the show from the press release. I met a lot of very talented and interesting Autotask partners, each with their particular niche, learned all about additional products I could add to FAR’s Autotask to better help serve our customers, won an award, got some wonderful Miami sun, bought myself a guayabera. I left inspired!
When I arrived at the airport on Wednesday, the woman behind the check in counter said: you’re going to have to check that. At first, I thought maybe she meant my head. It had gotten a bit bigger since my win. But she just meant the trophy.
But now it’s back to work and back to serious blogging. Coming up, I’ll be returning to my series on The Cloud to focus on whether or not hosted Exchange and other email solutions. Be sure to check back soon!
