Earlier this month, the Ivanti team had the opportunity to drop in on our customers and partners in South Africa as part of our Interchange Unplugged series.

Interchange Unplugged consists of short, one-day, free events throughout the world. These events are more condensed, local versions of our flagship Interchange conference (this year held in both Madrid and Nashville). You can take a look behind the curtain of this event series on our Interchange Unplugged Behind the Scenes blog.

In South Africa, we hosted two Interchange Unplugged events, one in Cape Town and another in Johannesburg. Both events were high-energy and fully attended, providing a fantastic opportunity for learning, sharing, and talking about all things Ivanti.

“Joburg”

As you can see from the pictures, Interchange Unplugged Johannesburg was standing-room-only at the Stanton Radisson Blu Hotel. We had some great vistas across Johannesburg’s business district from the seventh floor. The team enjoyed their experience exploring the city and using the local Gautrain to the airport, but the best part was meeting so many Ivanti customers and partners.

“Cape”

Interchange Unplugged Cape Town was just as busy, especially considering that this was Ivanti’s first time hosting an Unplugged event in this beautiful city.

The event was hosted in the Radisson Blue Waterfront Hotel, which had stunning views across the South Atlantic Ocean, along with an impressive view of the eighth natural wonder of the world – Table Mountain. Ivanti customers and partners made sure to sample the local wine, produced in the bordering region of Stellenbosch.

The Line Up

We brought out the big guns for these events – that’s right, we were joined by Chris Goettl, Director for Security Solutions here at Ivanti. Our guests were impressed by his super session on modern cyber threats and prioritising Security Controls to combat them. Chris covered the basics of cyber security from effective endpoint management to having a good patch management cadence, which you can learn more about on his popular monthly Patch Tuesday webinar series.

Questions were posed by our guests around the current threats presented by the recent BlueKeep vulnerability, on which Chris discussed Ivanti's guidance on the patches available to help remediate against the threats before organizations have another WannaCry situation on their hands. Chris and are other experts also had the change to speak with attendees one-on-one in between sessions to give guidance and advice on how to best approach their security strategies.

Security wasn’t the only topic on the minds of our customers and partners. We spoke to many attendees interested in our service offerings from 24/7 support to Ivanti Global Academy online learning portal. We love how much our customers want to maximize their investment with Ivanti!

The People

This is only the second time Ivanti has taken a larger event format to South Africa and the team was blown away by the sheer number of guests we had at each venue. In fact, we doubled our attendees from last year! Delegates came from far and wide, including neighbouring country Botswana.

One of the highlights of the event was our guest speaker, Rickard Chambers from Capitec Bank. Rickard is the IT Service Delivery Manager for Capitec Bank. His presentation looked at the journey Capitec has been on with the Ivanti solution and what they’ve achieved to move their organisation forward by thinking about their users/customers first and foremost.

The events were a team effort, including invaluable contributions from Grant Van Eck, Paul Bornhutter, Stuart Robson-Frisby, Ben Hall, Vijay Mistry, and our Area Vice President Nigel Seddon.

We are so happy with how the Interchange Unplugged events went in South Africa. The events are a great opportunity to help customers maximize their investment in Ivanti and put a familiar face to the brand.

We look forward to our next opportunity to bless the rains down in Africa. See you in 2020!

Check out our Unplugged site to find a location near you. We hope to see you soon!