The Growing Puget Systems Community

If you’ve been following us over the past few months you are probably well aware that we have been travelling quite a bit and have a lot of new projects going on; recommended systems, case studies, webinars, customer visits. Since the beginning of the year we have travelled to Dallas, TX, Portland, OR, San Diego, CA, Orlando, FL, San Jose, CA, and Las Vegas, NV (in the image below, the black lines are where we have been so far this year and the blue lines are where we are going in the second half of the year).

That’s almost 15,000 miles so far.. For comparison, we travelled about half of that distance by this time last year. Don’t worry, we all have Alaska Airlines Mileage Memberships now.

So what have we been up to?

Mostly, tradeshows. Lots of tradeshows..

We attended SOLIDWORKS World (SWW) in January, the American Chemical Society’s National Meeting (ACS) in March, and the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) as well as the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB) in April. These events have given us incredible insight into the state of the industry, the workflows and the pain points of engineers, content creators, scientists and developers.

While one of our major goals for these events is obviously to get people familiar with our products and what we do, two of our biggest objectives we have at these events are 1) to learn and 2) to engage with these communities. As we continue to expand into providing solutions for those in content creation, post production, 3D modeling, engineering, and scientific computing, we have to familiarize ourselves with the workflows of those users and what their needs are.

To further this goal, we are now using these tradeshows as opportunities to reach out to user groups in these fields. In fact, after attending SOLIDWORKS World in January, we worked with some of the leaders of the Seattle Area SOLIDWORKS Power User Group (SASPUG) to attend their 20th anniversary meeting last month. This allowed us to learn from SOLIDWORKS end users to better understand their needs as well as educate IT decision makers on picking the right hardware for this software. We were largely able to educate in this setting thanks to the extensive testing we performed on the software and the results we accumulated during the process of creating our recommended systems.

The more we immerse ourselves, as a company and as individuals, in these communities the better we can provide solutions that will be tailored to your real world use case. How many times have you bought a product and ended up thinking to yourself, “have these guys ever actually used their own product?” Heck, it wasn't until we started carrying our new mobile workstation around with us from show to show that we realized.. we really need a more substantial carrying case for it. That’s exactly what we hope to avoid for our customers by learning from and engaging with various communities in these fields that actually use systems for these applications.

All of that to say, we are working hard to grow our community and we welcome you to become a part of it. Whether it be lending a helping hand down at the local LAN event or working with mechanical engineers to optimize their workflow at a user group meeting, if there is an opportunity for us to be a part of your community, let us know! We are always looking for opportunities to help out, educate and learn.

Here is what we have on deck for the second half of the year: