By PartnerTalks Staff
Directions North America, an upcoming Partner-built Dynamics conference, is an opportunity for business competitors in the Dynamics space to learn from one another, its organizers say.
Kate Pinyan, an ISV marketer who sits on the conference’s volunteer board, says the conference’s creators conceptualized Directions as neutral ground where information can flow freely.
“In 2005, a group of Partners felt like they needed some additional training and wanted to come together to create a not-for-profit conference,” she told Microsoft Dynamics 365 MVP Rick McCutcheon in a recent episode of PartnerTalks.
“There’s a different level of education you get when you take a group of Partners and stick them in a room together. It’s a bit rawer, a bit more unfiltered and even though many of these companies are competitors, they are willing to share information that helps better each others’ businesses.”
Pinyan’s observations about how Partners interact at Directions North America likely indicate that Directions is a well-organized conference, a 2011 report by the University of Technology, Sidney suggests.
Effective conferences “assist communication that promotes the effective diffusion of knowledge,” the report reads. In addition, good conferences’ networking offers attendees “new business and research collaborations, which can generate innovation, ideas and research agendas for many years to come.”
That Directions is helpful to Partners is perhaps unsurprising. Partners developed Directions, and Partners tend to know what other Partners – even their competitors – want and need.
Directions North America’s current showrunners, for their part, seem to be happy to deliver.