With Rimo3 launching their new website and messaging based on customer and partner feedback, this AppManagEvent was the perfect opportunity to get some of the best and brightest to validate our platform, direction, and vision. And as always, they did not disappoint!
Seemingly, I am one of the “lucky” few that have spent much of their career with the opportunity to work from home. And for the most part, it has been absolutely amazing – being home for school drop off and pick up, being able to start prepping meals throughout the day, getting gentle reminders from my wife that there are chores that need to be done around the house, etc – all while being more productive than most of my counterparts that were headed into the office on a daily basis. So, when the world changed, I thought I would be prepared. But I wasn’t.
The thing that I took for granted is that while I worked from home, I also would jump on a plane several times a month to visit my customers, partners, and employees to get a pulse on their challenges, our platform, their successes, and their feedback. That was gone. And I hated it. I had never felt more disconnected from my ecosystem.
Needless to say, I was very excited when the PDS team announced that the AppManagEvent was going to be in person this year. Now, this is a very special event to me for a couple of reasons…Firstly, the PDS team does an incredible job to ensure that the speakers, partners, customers, and the agenda remain pure to their space (it’s all about delivering relevant content to help customers with their challenges). And secondly, when I participated in their inaugural event (nearly 15 years ago), I presented and demoed on a giant screen from the center of the pitch at the AFC Ajax stadium. One of the coolest experiences that I can remember as a presenter. So, when they said they were going back to a live event this year, I was definitely onboard and the timing couldn’t have been better.
Personally, my favorite part of the event was getting to see some of the smartest minds in the application management/packaging space position their solutions and where they fit into the overall ecosystem. I have known Roel (Liquit), Bogdan (Advanced Installer), Bob/Kiran (Flexera), Ryan (appCURE), etc for many years. But being in person gave us the opportunity to sit down over a coffee/beer/more beers and hear more about their challenges and successes over the past couple of years since we had last met. It helped us validate some of our own challenges, and mapped to exactly what the partners and customers had been experiencing in the field. And just as importantly, it gave them the opportunity to hear about the enhanced Rimo3 message and vision, what immediately sparked up old partnership conversations and opportunities that had initially gone stale due to the pandemic, or even start new ones based on directional and ecosystem shifts dictated by the market and customer challenges.
Needless to say, we came out of those sessions with more than just a dull headache…a truly reenergized sense of engagement.
Engagement…that’s a strange word. People speak of being connected and being engaged in the same breath. I can assure you, that is not the case. I have been in more meetings in the last 2 years than ever before in my career, but they feel a bit like I am on a hamster wheel, going through the motions. People are multi-tasking. There is no concrete excitement to drive a follow-up. But in the 10 hours of the AppManagEvent, I was more engaged and productive with the community than I felt that I had been in the last couple of years. There were operational workflow whiteboards, verbal conversations about where handoffs would occur, conversations about joint value prop validation with customers, and most importantly…genuine engagement and excitement.
During our session, I was speaking about how people can effectively manage change today while keeping an eye toward embracing change in the future with:
I quickly learned that people have challenges manually testing patches and releasing them before the next Cumulative update comes out (that would be T+30 days for those of you counting at home). Another person mentioned that our platform provides great insight into application behavior, but it could be more complete. In fact, one partner (thanks Sharath) validated an area around our automation where it would be useful to see how quickly a dialog box or service launches upon the execution of a click that ended up taking me down an amazingly fulfilling wormhole around process mining to measure perceived performance. These are things that just could be able to happen organically, virtually.
I left the AppManagEvent feeling energized in a way that I hadn’t felt in a long time. We re-engaged with the community, received some valuable validation and feedback, and will ultimately be able to serve our customers and partners better. Let’s hope that this was the first of many to come.
Cheers.