On Partners and Russian Samovar

I flew in to NYC to attend our partner holiday reception last night. It was quite the event. First, it was held in a private room at the trendy Blue Fin restaurant in the “W” Hotel on Broadway. Second, the food was an awesome combination of sushi, lobster rolls, Kobe beef and to-die-for sweets. Lastly, and most importantly, there was an open bar!

Quest has a pretty big push on to get more engaged with partners since the only way we are going to grow from a $0.5B to a $1B+ company is with the help of partners to which I couldn’t agree more. The room was packed the whole night. In addition to catching up various Quest muckity-mucks I managed to spend some time with folks from Avanade, CGS, Conchango, Double-Take, INS, Intrinsic, Evidian, PassLogix, SMA, Mycroft, Microsoft and many others.

It was interesting to hear from Intrinsic how much their migration to Active Directory business is taking off. It seems there are a lot of people who have decided to abandon the Novell ship in the north-east and are using Quest's NDS migration product. In addition, they're working more and more Microsoft SMS and MOM deals and, of course, that means most of those customers will eventually need Quest’s Management Extensions products – the products formerly known as Vintela (VMX and VSM).

We seem super engaged with Microsoft’s NYC office. I spoke to three people from their office including our partner account manager (Hi Susan!) and some of their pre-sales identity management folks.

It was awesome to see Liz Mann and many of her colleagues from Mycroft in attendance. I know we are going to do great things with Liz and Jonathan. Mycroft is so well connected – as we are – and have such a sterling reputation and a great practice in the identity management, infrastructure and migration space. We know the same people.

After the event shut down around 10:30PM we needed nightcaps and ended up at Russian Samovar. Their food specials were listed on the tables and consisted of an amazing choice of about two dozen different, home made flavored vodkas. I guess I wasn’t too surprised that at the RS vodka is considered food. There are big gallon containers along the back of the bar filled with vodka and whatever is flavoring it. There were three of us so we ordered by the carafe with no thought of the next morning. Anyway, in pretty short order we went through four carafes. If you are ever there I highly recommend the pineapple flavored vodka – it was truly awesome. Pineapple was followed by raspberry which was pretty good, lemon which was okay and finally apple-cinnamon which was indistinguishable from Jet-A fuel. There are others I’d like to try like cherry and some I’d really never like to try like horseradish. So if you ever have a hankering for flavored vodka head over to RS, and don't forget to order a chicken Kiev to share!

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Active Directory, identity management, Mycroft, Quest Software, Vintela, vodka