Azione Unlimited’s annual spring conference took place last week on March 7-9 down in Scottsdale, AZ. The event, which was titled “Didactic Dovecote in the Desert,” garnered 281 attendees from the company’s 280 members including representatives from 31 new companies.
According to Azione Unlimited President Richard Glikes, the event’s unique name pays homage to the company’s commitment to learning and the plethora of youth in the organization.
Learning content has long been a core element of any Azione event, a principle in which Glikes takes an immense amount of pride. Thus, it comes as no surprise that when asked about what makes Azione Unlimited events unique, Glikes told a group of journalists: “We say they come for the programs, but stay for the meetings.”
At the Spring event, Azione unveiled that it has partnered with Nationwide Marketing Group to purchase the CEDIA Academy, an online educational program featuring a plethora of trainings designed specifically for the custom integration channel. For the company, this is a major step towards establishing the “Azione Academy,” which will add more assets from top vendors such as Savant, LG, Sony, and Samsung to the platform.
The goal in building out this online learning platform is to give members access to the educational recourses of Azione at any time and from anywhere.
The second major initiative announced at the event also comes in conjunction with the HTSN branch of Nationwide. The goal set forth by Azione Unlimited and Nationwide is to reach a combined 1,000 member companies within the next couple of years. Achieving this goal will require Azione to add roughly 20 new member organizations while HTSN is planning to reach nearly 600 companies from a starting point of 252.
