Today I spoke with Derek Scruggs, SurveyGizmo’s VP of Sales and Business Development, about attending Connections ‘09, The ExactTarget User Conference. Held this year on October 13-15th, Connections is a conference for worldwide partners of ExactTarget, attracting a cosmopolitan crowd to the Indianapolis area, which charms natives and foreigners alike with its midwestern appeal. According to Derek, it was a very well organized, well-run event, and he even got to see some of our Indy customers at an informal SurveyGizmo meetup!

For Derek and for SurveyGizmo, Connections reaffirmed the value of product integration. Many of the conversations that went on at the conference mirrored those that have been taking place in the industry for awhile, like customer engagement, and customer retention, with a major addition to the discourse: the importance of APIs and product integration.

ExactTarget was SurveyGizmo’s first product integration partner, and today we continue to move towards embracing similar partnerships and integrations, with services like iModerate, The Sample Network, StreamSend, and our most recent partnership with MailChimp. Since I believe users will eventually expect all of their favorite web applications and technologies to work together seamlessly, SurveyGizmo is doing its part to contribute to the brighter future of total integration with these, and other future partnerships.

Some of the people Derek enjoyed getting in touch with were Tom Needy of Leisure Trends Groups, and the cool guys over at FanMail. We hope to see you next year at Connections 2010!