Viva Las Vegas

I've come out to Las Vegas for the Ingrian sales conference this week, and I have to say I don't really like it. The atmosphere in the casino under the Mandalay Bay Hotel is completely fabricated (apparently they pump oxygen in to keep you awake, but there are no clocks or windows so you don't know what time it is... nice). The atmosphere in the sales conference was all together much more positive. Profits are at an all time record high, partnerships are rewarding, product management is working, support is good, the SEs are fantastic, etc.
In fact, so good has our last quarter been that I'm once again looking for someone to join me in an engineering capacity. It seems that I attract such growth wherever I go at the moment. If only it were all me...

Our success as a key management solution is of course all down to the requirements of PCI, it has been a huge driver and something which not many people were able to predict. Listening to the conversations around the table tonight, I don't even think anyone at Ingrian quite predicted it in fact, but some people with a passion for technology built something that they believed in, and after a lot of hard work and just a little luck, things are looking really very good.

We discussed our competition, and will go into more detail tomorrow on this, but the reality is, there's nothing that quite matches up. It would be easy to get complacent in such a position, but there is still more development going on, and more partnerships being forged. I'm even managing to get involved in this business development on the UK side, which is going to be great fun, even if nothing else comes of it, which is unlikely.

I've only been here a short time (Ingrian I mean, although I haven't been in Vegas long either) but I've already gone through a steep learning curve, and have worked very hard to get where I am. That hard work is already paying off, and now I'm getting to see some of the rewards.

However, tonight I'm jet lagged, feeling sore and missing my wife. It just brings home to me all the more how the shiny dice and flashing lights really mean nothing. So when I won $400 this evening, again it meant nothing, it was the taking part that counted.