GFI Max Customer Conference 2014: The Scoop

GFI Max doesn’t seem to be holding anything back at this year’s customer conference; the conference duration has been extended, peer-to-peer breakout sessions are available and event registration has nearly doubled from last year’s event. But there’s a little more to the story than just that.

Following its announcement in July that more than 10,000 MSPs are leveraging its remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform, GFI Max questioned the industry’s buzz around the Internet of things and touted the hire of additional members to its community team. All of this just months before its revamped customer conference.

More than 450 of GFI Max’s MSPs are expected to attend the IT management software provider’s customer conference next week in Orlando, Florida — that’s approximately 150 more attendees than last year’s event.

After making his way back from GFI Max’s customer conference in Australia, Dave Sobel, partner community director at GFI Max, told MSPmentor on the phone that this year’s agenda has more peer-to-peer education than prior conferences. While the number isn’t official, he believes partners will be teaching around 50 percent of the conference’s breakout sessions.

“We’re really proud of how much of that content is delivered by partners to partners,” Sobel said. “We made a really invested effort to recruit our partners to present and share with one another.”

Without giving away too much of what will be revealed during conference’s opening keynote, GFI Max plans on showing attendees how they can “become the perpetually valuable MSP” in today’s market.

“Some of it is our particular vision of the way we think the channel is going,” he said, “and we’re not going to give not just a big vision but actual implementable tactics that they can do to become the perpetually valuable MSP.”

He continued: “We’re a big believer in taking the opportunity to do good research on their behalf, but then I want to be very specific about guidance that we find from that end, so we’ve taken the time to go that complete extent.”

Sobel said he designed the conference agenda by looking back on his years of experience as a solutions provider, in order to help answer questions commonly asked by MSPs.  

“It’s really an element of really showing off that work to our partners and to the larger community,” he said. “This is a conference and an experience that comes from that place.”

For interactive attendees, conference apps are available on the iTunes App Store and Google Play. The conference Twitter hashtag is #MAXCC.

Rumors regarding next year’s conference are already making their way into this reporter’s ears — but that’s all I’m willing to spill for now.

Keep checking back for our coverage on conference insights, rumors and updates.

Follow CJ Arlotta on Twitter @cjarlotta and Google+ for further updates on the story above.