NSi’s Vice President of Marketing Mike Morper can barely contain his excitement. He’s all worked up about ENGAGE 2014, NSi’s first ever end user event in the U.S. scheduled for June 4-5 at Baltimore Harbor in Baltimore, MD. Unlike other industry events where sales pitches come fast and furious during general and breakout sessions alike as well as on the exhibit hall floor, NSi is taking a different approach, and corralling the hype, ensuring that the event is rich in content.
“We view this as an educational opportunity for our end customers and our partners alike,” says Morper. “It is not going to be a product pitch, it’s going to be a share and learn opportunity. We’ve made certain that the major presentations are not presented by us.”
NSi has recruited several existing customers to share their success stories. “They’ve done some clever things to solve some of their business problems and we want others to learn from them,” notes Morper.
Mike Morper
The ENGAGE 2014 agenda includes a keynote address from Bob Larrivee of AIIM on the macro trends taking place in the content management and business process automation world. Attendees will also hear from Feri Clayton, director, enterprise content management, IBM Software Group.
Morper recommends that anybody with responsibility for a particular business practice in their organization should be there as well as lines of business managers and those who work in State and local government.
What does he hope these folks will take away from the event?
“Our guests are going to learn a lot of different ways to reconsider some of their existing business practices,” reports Morper. “We’re not asking them to reengineer their businesses, but see how they can layer on top of existing business practices software that may be able to accelerate their business processes and help them conduct business with their customers faster. Or they might [discover ways] to reduce costs within their businesses by reducing output or electronically converting documents and routing them that way as opposed to paper-based flows.”
In addition to several General Sessions for all attendees, the agenda includes breakout sessions targeting difference disciplines within an organization. Some will be business owner centric where those folks will be able to hear about the business challenges others like them have faced while a parallel session in a different room will focus on the technical aspects of those challenges.
“Someone running a large county in VA will speak about how they’ve been able to expedite and cut costs in the county government by considering workflows that originate from multifunction devices and also how they’re leveraging print management to cut down on unnecessary costs within the organization,” adds Morper. “We’ll also be talking about security and how to secure your information, about PCI compliance and making certain that person identifiable information is under controls and best practices for that as well as different areas to look in your business to optimize that.”
Another session will find NSi systems engineers talking about the details of securing their information and what products can help them do that.
“If business owner shows up with a technical counterpart they can each split off into a different room and hear about the same problem, but each will have a different education and interaction at the same time,” notes Morper.
What are the must-see sessions on Morper’s list?
“If I could only do two sessions I’d sit in our security session for all the reasons I just shared. The other is mobility and the mobile employee. We’re going to have a technical and business session on implications of a mobile workforce.”
NSi has an impressive list of partners signed up as sponsors, including Ricoh, Konica Minolta, Fujitsu, and EGP. Not only are they helping sponsor the event, they’ll also be in attendance and are soliciting their customers to attend ENGAGE 2014.
NSi hosted a similar event in Frankfurt, Germany last November for its European customers. Although this is the first NSi event of its kind in the U.S., Morper expects this to become an annual event. “It’s our intent to always do an event in America and in Europe,” he concludes.
