Scott Spiro Blog

Thanks go out to Autotask CEO Bob Godgart for asking me to say a few words about Autotask here at CompTIA BreakAway, 2009.

I enjoyed sharing (with the 300+ in attendance at the session) how Autotask has helped CSG move our business into the “cloud” while automating our workflow. Using this PSA tool has helped CSG increase our service capabilities resulting in higher quality service for our customers.

From a Sustainable/Green IT perspective, or even from a general environmental standpoint, the Kindle makes sense.

For example, it costs the New York Times about twice the amount of money to print and deliver its paper than it costs to deliver to the Kindle. According to the Times’ Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million on raw materials and $148 million on salaries and benefits. Wages and benefits for just the newsroom run about $200 million.  Now, multiply the quarterly costs by four, then subtract 200 million. A rough estimate puts the Times’ annual delivery costs at $644 million per year. If the subscriber base of 803,000 loyal readers switched to a Kindle, their delivery costs should drop to $297 million according to the Business Insider.

And I’m not going to even speculate in regards to the number of trees saved if an electronic delivery method was implemented by every major newspaper in the US alone.

It’s ironic then that Amazon releases the Kindle DX the day after my informal sit down chat with Ingram Micro’s own Jason Beal.  Now, the DX offers a larger screen, and allows for automatic landscape viewing (similar to an iPhone) for reading newspapers and books. With a $489 price tag, I have to ask myself, “who is going to buy this new device?” (we’ll get to the DX in another blog post).

Jason is the Director of Sales for the Seismic Services division at Ingram Micro. As with most folks who own a kindle, he is a “big fan” of the device. And he’s busy. Really busy. I caught up with him in Dallas on the last day of the Ingram Micro Seismic Partner Conference. Putting Jason’s schedule aside for a moment, I recognize that everyone is different; however I’ve noticed that Kindle users are what I’d call “intelligent purveyors of knowledge”. That is, they typically are success driven people and they see the Kindle as a tool that allows them to harness and scale the power of reading to new levels of efficiency and convenience (for example being able to carry many, many books with them at any time, or download books on the fly).

I scheduled 10 minutes with Jason to discuss the changes in the Kindle 2, as well as how he uses his Kindle for business and personal use. Jason explained that he’d received the Kindle as a gift and was hooked.  Not only does Jason use the device for reading books, but he also enjoys magazines and even a journey onto the internet utilizing its built in browser.

If don’t have a Kindle you may not be aware of the web portal that Amazon provides to manage single or multiple Kindle’s (and iphones). Your books are backed up and ready to be sent to your device of choice. Magazines and newspapers work in the same way, however they are delivered daily, weekly, or monthly to your device automatically; ready to read. You can also send your own documents (Word, PDF, etc.) to the device via e-mail for later viewing. In fact, I am working on a method to have our CSG Reports as well as our free monthly technology newsletter delivered directly to Kindle! (wouldn’t that be neat!)

Go ahead and check out the HD video above for some “real world” commentary on Amazon’s “WhisperNet’, the Kindle 2 re-design as well as Jason’s recommended reading list. If you have any questions regarding the Kindle, go ahead and post them here.

I want to thank Marie Rourke (Meoli) from WhiteFox Marketing and Herman Mehling for quoting me in today’s IT Channel Planet article “Ingram Adds Managed Services For Seismic Partners”. Click on this link to read the article.

The 3rd Annual Ingram Micro Seismic Partner Conference in Dallas, TX was a resounding success according to the many partners that I spoke with.

Ingram has been instrumental in providing services for CSG including Remote Backup, Business Continuity and DR, as well as RMM tools utilized with our own TotalCare Managed Services.

Scott Spiro speaks at the panel podium

On September 23rd, 2008 I had the opportunity to speak at a joint event sponsored by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Adobe, Premiere Global Services,and UCLA Extension. The event was held at the UCLA Faculty Center on campus.  Focusing on new web 2.0 technologies, the panel featured representatives from Adobe, IBM, UCLA Extension, CSG and Sapient. The event was well received with over 200 attendees. It was very interesting to see how these folks were leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to enhance the on-line user experience in a variety of ways. Adobe’s focus was on their Adobe Connect Pro product line. IBM discussed how Web 2.0 technologies were utilized by their internal HR department to provide a portal for internal company use. I spoke about CSG’s upcoming initiatives to deliver a customer portal allowing our customers to manage their support tickets in real time and participate in current projects CSG is working on for their companies.

Event Attendees

After the event, a mixer was organized and both Mark Fitzpatrick and myself had the opportunity to meet many of the attendees that stopped by our booth. Thank you to Gary Patten at Premiere Global Services and everyone that made this event a success and we look forward to the next one.