Last week, nine members of the Auvik team flew to Orlando, Florida to take part in the 15th annual IT Nation Connect event.
To start the event on the right note, we hosted a kickoff cocktail party on the lower pool deck of the Hyatt Regency Orlando with our friends from Bitdefender.
The next day, the whole team checked in for the conference. Our Partner Programs Manager Ashley Cooper earned her 10+ year IT Nation Connect attendance pin, which only 6% of 2019 attendees can say they’ve done.
Then we took some time to catch the welcome keynote, where ConnectWise founder Arnie Bellini and CEO Jason Magee announced the biggest news of the entire event: the acquisitions of Continuum and ITBoost.
After the welcome keynote and reception, we took to the conference room floor to get some face-time with attendees. Since IT Nation Connect and Halloween overlapped, we decked out our booth with some spooky decor. (You’d be surprised how hard it is to find some purple skulls!)
And in honor of the “holiday,” we also ate some creepy treats.
But the food wasn’t all scary. Just look at how perfect this Auvik pancake from our friends at WatchGuard was:
Side note: It tasted just as good as it looks.
Between snacks, Nanook had a busy few days. He helped our CPO Alex Hoff warm up for a day full of Auvik product demos and graciously acted like he’d never heard anything about network management before.
He reunited with old friends—like the ConnectWise owl—and he made some new ones.
But when he tried to order a custom “Trust Me I’m an MSP” t-shirt, he learned it’s really hard to type when all you’ve got are paws.
Luckily the next set of free t-shirt signups had no issues when choosing their kicking designs.
With Nanook manning the booth—and warning attendees about that pesky keyboard—Alex led an interactive session on network security before everyone donned their Halloween costumes to do some trick-or-treating.
Before we shut down our booth, one lucky attendee, Daniel Stockman of local Orlando MSP i-Tech, took home a 55″ 4K TV. Just look at his smiling face:
And to close out the event, the Auvik crew took the Hogwarts Express to Hogsmeade to drink some butterbeer and celebrate the end of another successful IT Nation Connect.
See you next year!
