World Globetrotting – A Visit With Our Partner Systems Link

As I mentioned previously in my post on April 15, 2010 I have been doing quite a bit of traveling lately.  One of the places I visited was the Dominican Republic for the Systems Link 5^th Annual Customer Conference entitled Seminar of Innovation of Technological and Scientific Information.  Systems Link sells our federated search solution in Latin America.  The conference was fascinating.   Though my Spanish is rudimentary at best I was happy that Systems Link provided translation so that I could follow the presentations and discussions.  Here are two highlights of the things I most enjoyed:

Robert Wing presentation – Bob runs Systems Link and is a fascinating individual having taken IHS (link) through its enormous growth phase he is a business leader who really done it all before.  He clearly understands how to grow a company.  During the presentation he thanked several of the individuals who helped him get Systems Link started.

TurnItIn – I was impressed with Dr. John Barrie’s presentation on how he was able to found and get TurnItIn started.  TurnItIn sells itself as an anti-plagiarism platform but the message is not that Dr. Barrie’s vision was to catch plagiarism rather he set out to develop a tool that would help teachers enforce the ideas of individual creativity particularly in this day and age of easy access to pretty much any content you want.  Essentially, he leveled the playing field for aspiring and creative students.  It sounds altruistic (and it is) but at the same time an effective business model was born.

All-in-all I have been very impressed with the individuals I met at the Systems Link seminar.  Systems Link has a great team of individuals and the setting in the Dominican Republic was beautiful!