The organisers of this year's Managed Services & Hosting Summit have released more details about the speaker line-up and the content they will be covering. Staged by IT Europa and Angel Business Communications on 25th September in London, the event has also attracted more high profile sponsorships.
The new speakers will draw on new research to chart the fast developing nature of the managed services sector. The Managed Services & Hosting Summit 2014 is a management-level event designed to help channel organisations identify opportunities arising from the increasing demand for managed and hosted services and to develop and strengthen partnerships aimed at supporting sales.
At the summit, Phil Smith, AVG's New Business Development Manager, SMB, will highlight the changes needed in an era of industrial-scale IT automation, ensuring that there are secure devices, data and people. Drawing on the latest independent research conducted by AVG, delegates can expect valuable insights into the different user priorities in various geographies, as revealed by the research, and an in-depth understanding of the issues they face. The session will conclude with advice on how managed services can best deliver value for users looking to address their concerns of Risk, Complexity and Cost.
Dave Sobel, director of GFI Max's partner community, will look at how managed services is moving beyond the device. For example, how do service providers bill activity across desktops, multiple laptops, phones and tablets for each user? The more sophisticated part of the market is coming up with all sorts of ideas, and discussions with customers may be finally moving on from pricing, it seems. Dave will share information from new research on how service providers are changing to address customers in an increasingly mobile cloud-connected world.
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Rob Rae, VP of Business Development, Datto will discuss how business continuity can be added to the provision of managed services. 'sales' is not magic, he says. "Sales is a process through a series of questions and relationship building. In this session, we are going to share insights that we have gathered and analysed from hundreds of successful MSPs that have added business continuity to their offering."
The strong line-up of speakers for the Managed Services & Hosting Summit 2014 is headed by Tiffani Bova, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research, who will provide the opening keynote. Tiffani's presentation will examine how both technology changes (cloud, consumption and managed services) and new customer demands are forcing technology providers and the broader channel ecosystem to re-examine their sales models.
Other presentation subjects will include: Trends in service delivery and changing customer demands, Hybrid IT, the impact of new technologies and evolving business models, Creating Value with Managed Services and the Future of Managed Services and Hosting and the changing role of MSPs and other channels.
These conference sessions will be augmented by boardroom sessions presented by leading vendors and service providers which will provide further insight into the opportunities for channel organisations looking to expand their managed services portfolios. Throughout the day there will be many opportunities for both sponsors and delegates to meet fellow participants within the Summit exhibition and networking area.
The new sponsors announced - Datto, NaviSite, Avnet, Claranet, Modern Office, QLogic, Virtual Instruments, Webroot and Aurora Kendrik James - join a strong line-up that also includes AppRiver, AVG, Autotask, Dot Hill, Dropbox, GFI Max and EG Innovation, with further major names expected to be announced over the coming weeks.