Her & His-tory HDI, itSMF and ITSM
Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 8:09AM 
While watching the yammer stream at my office today, I saw an amazing dialog between Brenda Iniguez and Rich Petti about the early days of our industry here in the USA. I thought I would shamelessly cut and paste. Enjoy!
Rich Petti:
HDI folklore & factoids for fun. Ron Muns moved Bendata and HDI from TX to Colorado Springs, where I first met him and Gary Case in June 1990 after leaving DEC's NorthAmerica Call Ctr. Bendata created a help desk app called Heat, which eventually became part of Goldmine and now is Front Range Solutions. Both FRS and HDI are still based in COSP. My first project for Ron was to chair HDI's first Call Mgmnt conf in Dec'90 in Orlando, FL. Eventually that became a track in HDI's Intl Conferences chaired by George Spalding. In the halls of HDI I met Ron's friend Malcom Fry, who had a young sidekick with him by the name of David Ratcliffe. All of us ended up at HDI's conference in San Diego where I believe Fatima Cabral spoke. Joan Embry brought in a lion from the San Diego zoo. I taught HDI's first classes in the UK when Ron was thinking about starting up an office there by having a conference. I also hooked up with someone who had another cust svc association there at the time called HelpDesk User Grp [HUG]. My wife became Director of Sales at HDI when I was Director of Training. While working as a consultant or E'ee almost eight years with them, I was on the HDI Intl Certification committee. All in the family? Those were the days!!!
Brenda Iniguez:
Cool Rich - kinda fun remembering the old days- with the HDI history ... so here are some added players that will bring back some memories: When Ron started HDI in 1989 and then sold Bendata to FrontRange, both their HD tool HEAT and their CRM tool GoldMine (both still FRS anchor products today ... and forerunners of FrontRange's current Service Mgmt tool: ITSM) he based both companies HDI and FrontRange out of Colorado Springs. The annual HDI Conference came into being "Support Services Conference & Expo" was born in those years: the first HDI Conf was held in Sept 1989 at Moscone Ctr in SF; that was the start of many longterm colleague friendships: Ron & Malcolm, David & Malcolm, David & Fatima, George Spalding, Char LaBounty, Patrick Bultema, Ivy Meadors, Gary Case, Rich Petti, John Custy, Ed Hawthorne, myself, Phil Verghis, Bill Auvil, Pete McGarahan, Sophie Klossner ... Then in 1992 Ron sold HDI to Ziff Davis and ZD moved HDI HQ to SF. This is where HDI's former events mgr Fiona Henderson joined HDI (from ZD). But the HDI unrest in Ziff Davis soon grew and it wasn't long before there were competing HD Conferences: ZD Support/Service Expo, SDI-Key 3 Media, and the HDI membership was in severe disarray. Having lost 1000s of HDI members under ZD) Ivy Meadors at EOY 1998 decided to "save" the HD membership and industry and launched HPDA Help Desk Professionals association, which I sat on the founding Board for ... and we also started a HD Conf and Govt HD Conf under DCI (Ivy still runs these Conferences today). Then at the height of all the membership commotion, Ron stepped back in and bought HDI back from Ziff Davis in 1999 and moved the company back to Colorado Springs, CO. Another familiar name: Patrick Bultema, who had been General Mgr and Chairman of HDI was also Chairman of DCI Customer Services Conf ( Ivy), was appointed CEO of FrontRange in 2001 - also keeping FrontRange HQ in Colorado Springs. Then in 2003 Michael McCloskey was named FrontRange CEO and moved the company to Pleasanton, CA (though there are still substantial HEAT operations based in COS). Back to HDI, they started the HDI Strategic Advisory Board in April 2002, first chaired by Char LaBounty, then succeeded by Phil Verghis (Akamai) and several of us all sat on that Strategic Advisory Board: David Ratcliffe (Pink), Kris Brittain (Gartner), Ron Muns (HDI) Patrick Bultema, Gary Lemke (RealMarket), Greg Oxton (KCS Consortium Dir) , Me-Brenda (Bof A then Providian Financial), Malcolm Fry, Paula Howel (E&Y), Richard Hanke (Lockheed) ... any of those names ring a bell? Blast from the past HDI pillars. the HDI Strategic Advisory Board and Member Advisory Board - of which I am Chairman Emeritus still are active functioning Boards today. ... So back to HDI: Ron Muns, in JAN 2008 sold HDI - all 3 components: HDI membership, HDI Conf and HDI Cert Trng (which were all part of Think Service) to UBM - United Business Media for $24.5millon. Today HDI is part of UBM (a company of over 5000 FTE and in 30 countries) and has in the last year been moved into the TechWeb Division, which also publishes Information Week and Dr. Dobbsand runs many Tech Conferences including InterOp, Black Hat, Network Computing. HDI currently has 68 Local Chapters and @ 8000 members and is still based in Colo Springs, under the COO Direction of Craig Baxter. The newest HDI news is the announcement Fall 2010 to partner with itSMF and merge the annual Fall itSMF Srvc Mgmt Conference with the HDI Service Mgmt Conf (not the HDI Help Desk Conf in the Spring) into 1 event in 2011 (the last 2 years both events have averaged @ 400-500 each); the first merged event will be this Fall in Sept ... the industry is a bit skeptical as those are very different audiences ... but we'll all wait and see.
Reader Comments (1)
Brenda - how on earth can anyone remember all that stuff????
You must have kept a secret diary.