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posted 03/12/07 by Anthony Governanti Where or Where could Anthony be?

So it has been a long time since my last post, and I ha hoped it would have been less, but last week was YAWLV - that means Yet Another Week in Las Vegas.

I know; woe is me; but in this case, it really was a long and tough week. We had our annual Sales conference last week called One Team at the MGM Grand hotel and Conference Center. It was a blast, but probably not as fun for me as it could have been. Two reasons; one my laptop died on the plane ride out there; two I was pulling double duty as both the tech marketing guy and the rookie sales guy.

Laptop woes:
So there I am on my 6 hour flight to Vegas, working away on my laptop putting the finishing touches on what I hoped were going to be some great demonstrations of Civil 3D 2008 for our sales team. I shut down my machine to change batteries, because even with power save mode, I still only get about 3 hrs from this boat anchor. I change batteries and restart - except the machine won't boot - it just hangs there on the IBM ThinkPad startup screen. Hmm, this is interesting, let's try that again. After several more failed attempts, it finally comes up with an error - _System Start Failed - Check system date and time.

This is not good.

So after messing around with the bios and seeing that indeed my system time and date have been reset, I give up and put the machine away, hoping that maybe some alone time will do it well and that it will decide that it feels better after we've had some time apart.

So we land in LV, rush to get a private care cause we are running late for a rehearsal for one of the 5 presentations Dave and I are involved in this week, and we get to the hotel, where I try to boot again, only this time plugged in to see if its a power issue. No such luck, so I am stuck with a laptop and no OS. Luckily, Dave is there to save the day, as he has recently installed a build of Civil 3D 2008, and I have an Ultra-bay adapter that allows me to put my hard drive in as a data drive. All is not lost, but more on that later.

Tech Guy vs. Sales Guy
So the other difficult part of last week was managing what worked out to be a split personality for 6 days. As many of you are now aware, I'll be transitioning to a new role as a Sales Territory Manager in the coming weeks. This made for an interesting dynamic for me at the conference, as I was torn between being the tech guy for all these presentations, and also being a rookie sales guy who needed to meet-and-great all his new resellers and various sales folks within the organization. Anyway, it was quite a challenge, but I want to express my deepest thanks to those of you who attended and helped me ease into the new role by introducing yourselves, or at least didn't mind when I asked you name for the third or fourth time.

It was a surreal experience in the end; as on Thursday afternoon, I did my last technical presentation during the CAD/GIS sales session. I came to the realization that it is going to be something I will miss, as I really enjoy presenting these products to an audience. It was also surreal to talk to all the folks who knew me from that role and the great compliments and encouraging words they had for me. I was truly lucky to have been involved in some of the cool things over these last several year, and I want to thank all of you who were there for the great and not-so-great times.

Ok, so enough reflection; time to start looking ahead, and in doing so, I want to begin to share how truly excited I am for the year ahead! We have a lot going for us this year.

A rock solid product; this year is the year, we worked really hard to get this thing ready to for prime time, and despite a bit of a false start last year, I think the momentum is still strong, and 2008 will be well received.

New opportunities; with my new role comes some new opportunities for me to grow and learn. In the short time I've been the sales guy, I've already seen some great opportunity to do some cool things, and I can only say at this time to stay tuned in for future updates.

A growing business; despite a downturn in the housing market here in the US, the economy from a Civil Engineers perspective is still very strong, as the public sector is starting to rise, with more state and local government projects coming up for bid. Other parts of the private sector are still growing as well, with commercial development continuing to grow. This all means great things to come for us all; more projects mean more work for all of you, which means more need to be efficient and productive; this is where Civil 3D will fit in and be and integral part of the entire process, and this is where I hope to make a difference (well at least for the Northeast states anyway).

Ok, enough of my ramblings for today - I still owe you a post on how we go about building technical demonstrations that you see out there, so I hope to get to that this week before I'm fully transitioned to the new role.

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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