Last week, PhoneSuite staff David Rafsky, Jerry Moore and Frank Melville attended the IT Expo trade show in Las Vegas NV. The show describes itself as a Business Technology Event and it is attended by a quite diverse crowd of interrelated business communications concerns. This was PhoneSuite’s first visit to the show in many years, but overall, we found the show to be beneficial and connected with attendees and some old friends along the way.
The show Keynote address was delivered by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers. Steve gave a breathless 1 hour presentation of his pre Apple past as a self-admitted super nerd along with some hilarious stories of his youth. He followed that with interesting tidbits from the early days at Apple with Steve Jobs and others. He summed things up with his view of the future and took a few questions from the audience. We were fascinated with the entire speech and Jerry got his picture taken with Steve.
The timing of the show this year was a little suspect as it ended just before the Labor Day weekend was beginning, so that reduced the number of potential attendees. The show has shrank somewhat since we last attended five years ago, but still has a lot of relevance, particularly to the up and coming SIP trunk providers and alternate carrier channels.
Our focus there was to introduce our IP phone system we call Voiceware to a new audience of potential resellers and agents. We found a number of interested parties who can see the value of selling to the hospitality vertical, both our product and related voice and data tech. In fact, our best Voiceware resellers are those that embrace the hospitality vertical not only for the PBX, but for all the surrounding products such as SIP trunking and networking hardware. These enlightened dealers are finding a ready audience among hoteliers and hospitality management groups that can see the advantages technology can bring to their properties.
We will likely continue to attend IT Expo in some fashion. IT Expo is held twice a year, January in Miami, and August in Las Vegas. We plan on continuing our expansion of resellers across the country and the globe with this show and others like it. The attendees of this show continue to progress along with the industry and we are impressed with the overall level of energy and commitment of this channel.
