Blog | November 16, 2015

IT Nation 2015 Recap: By The Numbers

By The Business Solutions Network

IT Nation 2015

Last week was the 7th straight week of travel for me as I returned to Orlando for IT Nation. If you aren’t familiar with this event, it’s brought to the IT community by ConnectWise. Without a doubt, it’s the best channel event of the year if you’re interested in amazing education. I attend a lot of shows each year so I feel confident when I make this statement.

Over the two-day event, I had an opportunity to interview ConnectWise executives, and attend the keynotes and numerous breakouts. A lot of interesting metrics, numbers, and data were shared during these sessions. Following are some “numbers” that stood out when I look back at my notes.

  • 3,000+ — the number of attendees at this year’s event, making it the biggest IT channel event of the year.
  • 9,600 — the number of ConnectWise/Labtech/Quosal partners, according to Matt Nachtrab, president and COO, ConnectWise
  • 5 — the number of new ConnectWise GMs under the company’s new restructuring. The restructuring, with Arnie Bellini sitting in a coordination/oversight roll, ensures all the separate products continue to move forward.
  • 100 — the number of vendors exhibiting at the show
  • 200 — the mind-blowing number of education sessions distributed over just two days. That means for every hour, you have about 15 sessions to choose from. My one criticism is that there are too many good sessions and not enough time. This is definitely an event to divide and conquer with a co-worker.
  • 50 percent — according to ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini, the number of SMBs that will run everything from the cloud by 2020.
  • 1.2 billion / 25 billion — the number of IoT (Internet of Things) objects in 2015 and the projected number of objects by 2020. This represents a big opportunity for the channel.
  • 2016.1 — the newest version of ConnectWise Business Suite, intended to blur the lines between the ConnectWise PSA, Labtech RMM, Quosal, and other tools.
  • 1 — as in a single user interface for the ConnectWise Suite. ConnectWise is going for a unified platform from here on.
  • 3 — the number of weeks you have to wait to get an early release of 2016.1
  • 70+ — the number of new reports and dashboards in the 2016.1 Suite
  • 8 percent — according to speaker Paul Dipple, CEO, Service Leadership, the median profit margin of MSPs
  • -1 percent — the profitability of the bottom quartile of MSPs, according to Dipple
  • 18 percent — the profitability of the top quarter of MSPs, according to Dipple
  • 0 — the number of speakers, excluding IT Nation 2015 keynote Marcus Lemonis, who’ve made me cry with their presentation. Lemonis talked business in a very human way and got the audience to open up in ways I’ve never seen. Truly amazing.

I'll have a couple blogs on the breakout sessions in the coming weeks. Great stuff. This week I'm at Ingram Micro's ONE event in Nashville. I'll be covering that as well. Stay tuned...