If nothing else, I ate far better today than I did yesterday. (Did I pig out at the poolside party last night? Yes. Which mostly made up for not getting lunch at all.)

Today featured the bulk of the Kaseya Connect conference material. Yes, there’s more tomorrow, but today we received the keynote speech and the motivational speaker (Jim Abbott, a baseball pitcher born without a right hand, quite a storyteller with a good message but not necessarily the best fit for a room full of people who don’t follow baseball, even if they’ve heard of it at all) and most of the Big Product Announcements.

So, what’s on my shopping list?

• Enterprise Monitoring: They ditched Zabbix (a product I generally like, but admit that the configuration is somewhat arcane) for Intellipool, a company that Kaseya acquired just for this purpose. The demo looks fantastic, and will probably obviate the need for the quirky, cumbersome Network Discovery module. (Um… whoops?)
• Policy Management: If we can get rid of the tangled mess of templates and replace it with policies that we can apply consistently and automatically based on service-level orgs and client groups, I’ll be able to provide a far more consistent management experience. We want it, oh yes, we do.
• Online Backup: We’re using Ahsay right now, but if Kaseya can integrate an offsite folder backup solution and let us pick our own destination, I’ll try to get the bosses to buy it. Right now, however, it’s Amazon S3 only… and we like having end-to-end control far too much to go for that.
• Mobile Device Management: I almost skipped this presentation, but a live demo of deploying the agent to an iPhone and an Android, backing up and restoring contacts, and wiping the iPhone completely convinced me that we may have a chance at selling this to certain C-level types among our clientele.

Meanwhile, staying in a fairly posh hotel provided some amusement. When they came in to tidy up while I was off at conference sessions, they not only made the bed and replaced the towels as I expected, they also took the time to line up and organize the little travel bottles of toiletries I’d left clustered (but upright, I’m not a total slob) on the sink. Cute, guys.

Tomorrow morning I get to pack up, check out, get through the last day of conferences, head to the airport, check through security, wait a few hours, then finally fly home.

I can’t wait to be home. I’ve had some fun here but after tomorrow I won’t want to travel again for a good long time…