Business Trip

So, I’m just heading home from what’s really my first official business trip. (There’s not a lot of business travel associated with my job normally.) Pretty cool!

I flew out to Chicago for a Virtualization Summit being put on by PC Mall, one of our newer vendors and the one that helped us put together most of the equipment for our recent server virtualization project. (Quick plug for PC Mall – my rep Jason is super helpful. If you need someone to help you with your IT purchasing, let me know and I’ll get you in touch with him.) The summit was pretty good, and gave me a chance to discuss our project with some other IT managers who were looking to do the exact same thing. It was also a good chance to see where some of the big players in the virtualization space are going with their products.

As an awesome side benefit, I got to hang out with my friend Charley, who I grew up with and now lives in Chicago. It’s always fun to get to hang out with old friends, especially when they’re doing really well. Charley got to attend the summit as well, and we got to talk shop a bit (he’s also an IT Director for a non-profit).

One thing the summit definitely solidified for me is that working for a non-profit is an entirely different ball game than normal enterprise level IT. We still have a lot of the same needs as other companies, but generally the IT funding isn’t there for those needs. I’m actually on board with that, as there are way more important things we can do organizationally with the money we’re blessed with than sink it into IT, but it does mean that we have to get pretty creative sometimes.

Thanks for the great trip and the awesome information PC Mall. Now it’s off to Ontario to get home to the wife and boy!