SmarterTools 2012 Conference Meetups
January 24, 2012
Photo courtesy of the HostingCon Flickr feed.
As many of you know, the SmarterTools ownership team came from the Web hosting industry where we provided services to almost 100,000 businesses worldwide. In those days, it was difficult to find solutions that provided the features that small and medium sized businesses required while offering the high availability, security and ease of maintenance that our fairly large-scale enterprises required.
For example, the mail server options available were expensive and incredibly unstable and often resulted in daily downtime. In fact, at one point we had employees whose sole responsibility was pushing messages through our mail server spools.
As for help desks, we couldn’t find any that were able to handle the amount of data we pushed through them and besides, they only offered a single function – we had to have different solutions for call tracking, email tickets and internal tasks.
Plus, there weren’t any stable and reliable options for providing customers with analytics on how their online businesses were running. The products that were available provided very limited information. There was no single product that offered features like data mining, search engine optimization and analysis and limited server health reporting.
As a result of all this, SmarterTools was born. We decided to build our own applications that provided small to medium sized businesses with the tools they needed for business communication and analytics, but that also had the ability to be provided through hosting and service providers. Over the years, the products we created have grown to offer a variety of features that are important to enterprise organizations while keeping with our focus on the small and medium business. In addition, our philosophy of being able to install and set up any of our products within minutes and keeping management/administration of our products simple and convenient remains intact and is a key component of our success.
Photo courtesy of WorldHostingDays.
Although we are no longer in the hosting business, we are firmly embedded in the small and medium sized business community. We use every one of our own applications and continue to enhance them based on our needs, to solve problems we see in the SMB market and to address the needs of thousands and thousands of customers. We continue to communicate directly with our customers through social outlets such as our community forums, our Facebook page and our Twitter account, as well as via various focus groups. We also enjoy meeting face-to-face with customers at conferences and local industry events.
This leads me to the point of this blog post. In 2012, SmarterTools is making a concerted effort to make ourselves available to you — our partners, customers and potential customers across all industries, including hosting companies, service providers and small businesses. To this end, we’ve compiled a list of the conferences we’re attending this year, along with information on where they are and the dates we’ll be in the area. We’d like to set up face-to-face meetings with as many of you as possible, whether it’s at the conference or even at your place of business.
So don’t be surprised if you receive an email asking if you’d be interested in sitting down with SmarterTools CEO Tim Uzzanti, our Manager of Internal Development, Grady Werner, our Manager of SmarterMail Development, Bryon Grosz, or even me, Derek Curtis, the Vice President of Marketing and Communications, and other SmarterTools development staff. We’d love to talk about your business, your goals and how SmarterTools can help get you to where you want to be. If you’d rather not wait for us to contact you, simply send us an email at sales@smartertools.com and we’ll set up a place and time to talk.
We look forward to meeting you all and hope to see you at one of the following events:
Parallels Summit – February 14 – 16
Gaylord Palms, Orlando, FL
http://www.parallels.com/summit/2012/
WorldHostingDays – March 20 – 23
Europa Park, Rust, Germany
http://www.worldhostingdays.com/eng/index.php
FutureInsights Live – April 30 – March 3
MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, NV
http://www.futureinsightslive.com/
Microsoft TechEd – June 11 – 14
Orlando, FL
http://northamerica.teched.com
Busy week for us here at SmarterTools…
better known to most as “the WHIR”. We mingled with partners and peers alike. It’s always nice to attend these types of events and be able to talk one-on-one about business…because, of course, that’s all that ever really happens at these types of events 
. I’d say from the number of people in attendance (and the length and breadth of discussions heard and overheard) that the event was a huge success. Kudos to the WHIR for putting together such a well-organized event. We’re looking forward to this becoming a regular occurrence. From what we hear next year’s is already scheduled, so that’s a start!
