Yes – those that know me know that I am a big fan of Trend Micro products in the SMB Space. I’ve used their products for our clients for about 5 or so years now and have been pretty happy with not only the product, but the company and the people that work within it. To me, these are the components of a good business relationship. To me, Trend really do focus on the SMB market space by trying to understand how we as resellers work, what it is that we go through and then they try to build their products to meet that need.
So it’s therefore not surprising to know that I’m heading off to Taiwan next Sunday to work for Trend in their Taipei office. They have organised a cubicle, business cards for me – the works. My title will be Community Evangelist. My role will be to take the things I know about the community, the SMB IT reseller channel and my experience of 11 years running and SMB IT consulting organisation deep within the hearts of Trend’s development team. I’ll spend some time giving them a real world “day in the life of an SMB reseller” expose and telling them like it is. Then I’ll be working across a number of departments spending time in the development team, the QA/Testing team and the UI/Documentation team. At the end of my time, I’ll be giving them some suggestions on what they could do better to help us as SMB IT Resellers to better sell, support and maintain their products in our patch of the world.
Oh – did I say I’ll only be working for them for a week? Yup – that’s right – a week and then I’m back to my normal job being a reseller/community person etc 🙂 I’ve been very lucky to be invited to go to Taipei as a guest of Trend to work for them for a week and help infuse a little of our world into the behind the scenes world that they run. I did this 2 years back for 2 days and in those 2 days, found that they really opened up to me, and they allowed me to help them better understand the issues we face day to day. This return trip is designed to help them take that knowledge to the next level.
I’m really excited at this opportunity and would welcome input from you all as to the things you like and don’t like about any aspect of what Trend do, their people, their products, their marketing – anything really. Nothing is off limits. So please feel free to tell me what you want them to know. Email me [email protected] and I’ll take your feedback direct to them – happy to provide the feedback anonymously too if you prefer.
I’ll be doing a number of blogs of my time there and hopefully a video interview or two as well. I’d like to really expose the people behind the scenes if I can. Watch this space for more exciting news.
Leave a Reply