Kerio's Partner Advisory Council has just completed its first year. We took this opportunity to sit down with Partner Program Manager, Elise Hymes, to see how that year went.

The Partner Advisory Council (PAC) just completed its first year. What does it look like to run a PAC?

The PAC already had its first meeting by the time I joined Kerio, when the group was in its infancy. The members were still getting to know each other, and in the beginning the conversations were much more one-sided, being pushed from Kerio. There was also hesitation to speak, due to some language barriers.

Maxim Gavrilov with Soft Management has really increased his participation and provided unique insight from the Russian partner perspective. Our newest member, John Preisig from ImageText in New Zealand, has been a great addition, instantly providing feedback and insights from a long-standing Kerio partner perspective.

Our most common challenge has been deciding what topics to review and how to better focus the meetings, encouraging participation, and making this a valuable use of time.

Recently, we brought in Pavel Suk, Kerio's VP of Engineering to talk about Samepage security, which was very beneficial to both sides. The members enjoyed having a guest speaker from Kerio, to give a better understanding of our strategy. Pavel was able to gain insight into global needs of partners regarding the hot topic of Cloud security.

One year and nine meetings later, we have lost a couple of members, and gained another. The seven members that now make up the PAC have developed a camaraderie amongst each other and even talk on the side, outside of PAC meetings.