Last week GTRI held its annual sales kickoff meeting in Denver, and I wanted to share some of my observations from the event. First, it’s important to understand that GTRI’s kickoff is no ordinary sales meeting. In fact, it felt more like an industry conference complete with multiple tracks of educational sessions, a partner fair, thought-provoking and inspiring keynote speakers, collaboration with colleagues and partners, and, of course, lots of fun.
This year’s theme was “One Forward,” which I liked because it captured the team spirit that was evident throughout the event. Building on last year’s theme of “One Team, One Vision,” this year’s event was all about where GTRI is headed. It was about moving forward – enacting progress and executing – as a team.
Given this theme, the two non-industry keynote speakers certainly captured the mood. World-renowned mountaineer and leadership development expert Luis Benitez shared stories of leading expeditions to summit Mt. Everest (he’s climbed it six times!). And Sgt. Matthew Eversmann, a 20-year Army veteran, told of the ultimate challenge in teamwork as part of the contingent of soldiers who survived the Mogadishu operation in 1993 (depicted by the movie “Black Hawk Down”).
Both speakers underscored the importance of teamwork (albeit, in less harrowing situations for most of us). At GTRI, we continually strive to high levels of internal teamwork. Plus, as a consulting solutions integrator, we strategically partner with top players in the industry including Cisco, NetApp, Citrix, EMC, VMware and Splunk.
These partnerships were on full display during the kickoff event, which got me thinking more than ever about the unique solutions that GTRI creates and delivers. Our customers tell us that GTRI provides the most value when we combine leading products from different vendors along with expert-level consulting services to solve a business problem.
One specific area where GTRI will be developing new solutions in 2014 is security. Our customers have realized that focusing on traditional preventive technologies such as antivirus, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and simple stateful firewalls is not enough. In fact, most of our security-savvy customers tell us that they now view security as though their organization has already been breached.
To enable a broader approach to organizational security, GTRI — along with partners like Splunk, Cisco, Solutionary, and others — is developing security intelligence solutions that will allow organizations to have a much broader view of their security posture than ever before. These solutions will focus not only on the basics — like detailed, automated hardware and software inventories — but also monitoring for the type of advanced and nuanced attacks that are so often successful in today’s threat landscape. These solutions will allow customers to respond to attacks earlier and ultimately stop them before the real damage is done. We believe this shift from traditional prevention to detection and response is critical, and we look forward to helping customers meet the challenge. Watch this blog for more details on our new security solutions.
Kudos to the GTRI marketing team for putting together a great sales kickoff event, and thanks to the GTRI executive leaders, our partners, and the keynote speakers for demonstrating the value of teamwork!
