Last week, SherWeb hosted its annual Accelerate Cloud Summit 2019 in Montreal, Metropolis of our belle province. The three-day event was a great opportunity for them to meet partners face to face, and for partners to learn, network and grow. On top of this, Accelerate was a great place to get direct insight from vendors, whose support was instrumental in making the summit a success.
Officially, #Accelerate19 was only two days, but there was a pre-event day to hold break-out sessions as well as one-on-one meetings between partners and their account managers. The day’s sessions were all about products, how to better sell them and how MPS can get better at marketing.
They kicked off the second day with a keynote by Matthew Cassar, one of SherWeb’s founding brothers. Matthew talked about their newly updated mission that better reflects where the company stands after more than 20 years in the business.
Accelerate Mission
He then went through more concrete topics, highlighting what SherWeb did for partners in 2019 and what’s coming up in the next year. One important piece covered in this area was PSA integrations introduced to their partner portal, starting with heavy hitters such as ConnectWise and Autotask and followed by Tigerpaw, Kaseya and QuickBooks. They are also working on APIs that will allow partners to integrate their platform, simplifying the user experience.
Other 2019 additions to SherWeb’s lineup included SIP trunking, Nimble CRM and BitDefender. Also announced was newly-added multi-factor authentication within the partner portal, as well as Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager, which is coming in 2020.
Lastly, Matthew spoke about another big part of their business: Infrastructure as-a-Service (IAAS). By selling Microsoft Azure as well as their own Performance Cloud, SherWeb wants to help partners create growth for their business, by supporting them with pre-sales architecture training and whiteboarding sessions, as well as sales and marketing resources.
Following Matthew Cassar’s keynote, Karl Palachuk took to the stage. Karl is a pioneer in the managed services world. With more than 10 books and white papers on managed services and small business management, he’s an authority on how to build a solid and healthy business.
After a short yet well-deserved break, Guillaume Boisvert, SherWeb’s director of product innovation, talked about Office Protect and Office 365 security.
Office Protect is a tool built with simplifying Office 365 security in mind. It improves your tenants’ security, augments your security services offering and increases your visibility with clients.
Guillaume closed with a few cool new features for Office Protect such as the initial assessment report, CEO-scam phishing warnings and a 3x forwarding rule detection.
Right before lunch, SherWeb director of partner success Mathieu Leblanc took attendees through SherWeb’s value-added services.
Following a networking lunch, Erik Beauchamp, SherWeb director of (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IaaS products. discussed all about leveraging growth of IaaS. It’s a great opportunity for MSPs to optimize costs as well as set a scaling strategy.
They jumpstarted the day’s celebrations with an award ceremony to showcase partners who shine in three different categories:
Fastest Revenue Growth: Informatique ProContact
Top Cross-Selling Bundles: Microage-DIL
Highest Partner engagement: Aegis Innovators
A week in Montreal is never complete without indulging in the city’s nightlife and local food. After a short bus ride, attendees enjoyed a night of poutine, smoked meat and casino games at La Scena in old Montreal.
The next morning was Michael Calce AKA Mafiaboy’s keynote. It was enlightening to learn how things really worked at the time. Michael drew from his personal experiences and expertise to help us understand a hacker’s mindset. He also focused on explaining how hackers work, and how we can defend ourselves from threats.
Joanne Charley’s interactive session was a refreshing change-up following the previous day’s heavily detailed presentations. She walked through a simple five-step method for a smooth transition from a break-fix business model to one anchored in proactive managed services.
Mark Stuyt’s session was the perfect presentation one to follow after Joanne’s. As chief engagement officer at Neural Impact, Mark knows a thing or two about acquisition strategy, which is a crucial step after building a managed cloud services offering.
After lunch, Eric Lacroix, SherWeb’s product director in charge of partner portal, gave a granular look at what’s new with their partner platform. Eric was followed by VoIP architect Jason Nadeau and VoIP technical solution advisor James Welburn, who spoke to attendees about how to build a VoIP success story.
Accelerate 2019 was a fantastic event! It’s safe to say that everyone had a lot of fun while learning valuable insights, trends and best practices to help them in their practice.
