By Simon Gamble
The first day at the National Restaurant Association Show has been a productive one for the Mako Networks team, with some key insights from the show floor after chatting with people that stopped by our booth.
Grabbing people’s attention at a tradeshow is never easy, but that challenge is doubly difficult at a show like NRA when there’s delicious food to sample and try. Presented with a choice to talk networking or sample ice creams, I know which one I’d pick!
Those that chatted with us at booth 5764 impressed me with their knowledge of PCI DSS and the way it will impact their business. In contrast to other markets around the world where Mako operates, in the U.S. there is more general awareness of PCI DSS, likely driven in part by the pressing need to address credit card security in the world’s largest transaction market. When we start talking about PCI, most people were right there with us.
A second key learning was that people are impressed with the feature set of the Mako System when we start talking about easy VPN setup and rich reporting that administrators receive to help understand their network traffic. When describing how it only takes three clicks to establish VPNs using the Mako Central Management System, you could see people’s eyes light up. Clearly this will help solve some management pains for our customers here in the future.
Our third takeaway from the first day of the NRA Show was one about Mako – we love our new tradeshow booth display. Now that we’re attending more events in the U.S. this year, we’ve had a new booth specially constructed to represent the Mako brand and show how the system operates. We’re pretty excited about the new look and feel, especially the network diagrams that make it easy to see how Mako can fit into existing networks.