News Releases

Tampa, Fla. – Jan. 31, 2018 – ConnectWise continues to reinforce its strategy to build a comprehensive open platform for technology teams with lots of choices. Today, the company is rolling its popular IT Nation conferences into its Open strategy. ConnectWise has Open APIs, an Open platform, and now Open conferences. The recent acquisition of HTG is evidence of ConnectWise’s belief that an Open ecosystem includes an open exchange of ideas and business best practices, as well as software.

Arnie Bellini, CEO, ConnectWise, said, “A completely open ecosystem is essential in this world of digital transformation. Every technology team is unique, so a one-size-fits-all stack of solutions makes no sense. Technology teams, whether as an MSP or internal IT, need to tailor their services and solutions to meet the unique needs of their customers; they MUST have choices.”

Bellini went on to say, “Taking an open approach to our conferences, is a natural extension of our Open philosophy. Our conferences are growing quickly and attract over 5,000 technology workers each year. They are becoming the “go-to” event for Tech Operators and Business Operators around the world.”

The strategy is designed to connect technology teams to the solutions, services and people that allow them to thrive, which is achieved by providing choices and allowing participation from every solution in the ecosystem. Technology teams need, and should have, access to a wide menu of choices for backup, disaster recovery, security, networking, monitoring, collaboration and cloud computing solutions.

Some of the changes that the industry can expect to see in 2018 are:

• IT Nation Europe (April) and IT Nation (November) will be completely open to customers, prospects, and all interested vendors and will be the premier conference for business and technology team leaders who are looking for insights on how to run their operations more efficiently as well as grow their business.
• Automation Nation (June) will be focused on Tech operators, including, but not limited to, Service Managers, Technicians and Developers. Attendees will receive deep technical training of the ConnectWise platform. Developers will gain insights on using the Developer Kit to integrate any solution to the ConnectWise platform.

“As we’ve talked to partners about their experiences and looked at who attended, we found that technical operators loved the product training, labs and hands-on learning. On the other hand, the business operators attending November’s IT Nation conference were more interested in a deep-dive into how they could meet their business goals. Better separation of the content between the two events allows attendees to determine which event is the best investment for their employees and for themselves,” said Bellini.

Gregory Zolkos, CEO of Atlas Professional Services, said he and his colleagues are especially excited about ConnectWise’s plan to incorporate training for more solutions at Automation Nation. “Every year, my technical team returns from Automation Nation with great new ideas about how to better use ConnectWise Automate to increase efficiency and provide better customer service to our clients. I am so pleased that they will have access to the same level of training for additional ConnectWise solutions, while I can concentrate at IT Nation on learning best practices to grow our business.”

ConnectWise’s major industry conferences this year include:

• IT Nation Europe 2018: This conference, which is in its second year, takes place April 18-20 in London. Registration for IT Nation Europe is open now.
• Automation Nation 2018: The June 18-20 conference in Orlando, Fla., is now in its seventh year as a standalone event. Visit the Automation Nation website for more information about the upcoming conference, which had more than 1,000 attendees last year. Registration for June’s event is now open.
• IT Nation 2018: Approximately 3,500 attendees came to IT Nation 2017. This year’s conference is Nov. 7-9 in Orlando, Fla. Sign up for updates about the agenda and registration as it becomes available.

In addition to these conferences, ConnectWise also conducts more than 50 User Groups and meetup events across the globe each year. For more information about User Group meetings, visit the online ConnectWise Event page.