MERLION’s “Club of Creative Companies”: three days at Seliger

The sixth stage of “Club of Creative Companies” took place from July 8 to 10 at the lake Seliger having united representatives of IT-companies of Northern, Central and Moscow regions under the flag of MERLION. During the first day of the event, the participants overcame a long distance to Seliger for which they were immediately awarded with a sail sing on a motor vessel on wide spaces of the famous lake. National cuisine, the guide’s story about history of the lake and visit of Nilo-Stolbensk monastery on the island favoured the participants with a pleasant evening in a nice company.

The next day was completely dedicated to the conference in the course of which representatives of MERLION, BenQ, Crucial, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Transcend have taken floor. Partners meeting was opened by Yulia Pechnikova, head of the business development department of MERLION. Then representatives of vendors that made their speeches in front of the participants:

• Alexandr Morozov, Head of Distinguished Partners Department of Dell, appeared with the presentation “Dell: easy to be different”.
• Petr Shilyaev, Specialist in Printing Equipment Promotion of Samsung, continued the meeting with the report “Samsung partners program for printing equipment” from which the partners of MERLION learnt about main clauses of the vendor’s partners program.
• Alexey Mylnikov, Head of Representative Office of Crucial, appeared with the report “Crucial’s partners program for DRAM and SSD lineups”.
• Alexander Kudryashov, HP Networking Solution Architect, presented a review “HP Networking Solutions”, and his colleague, Anton Morkovnikov, HP partners manager, told about the latest partners programs of the manufacturer in the report “HP Partners Programs”.
• Vladimir Mukhin, Partners Work Manager in Central Federal District, Lenovo, appeared with the report “New Products of Lenovo”. Denis Belyaev, key account manager in the area Idea, read the presentation “Novelties in products of Lenovo”.
• Vadim Khomyakov, Partners Work Manager of BenQ, presented the report “BenQ LC-displays and projectors. Novelties and technologies of 2011”.
• Sergey Savkin, Business Development Manager of MERLION, concluded the working part of the meeting with the report “TRANSCEND solutions for the Russian market”.

The official part gradually turned into an intellectual game “Club of Creative Companies” for which all the participants were divided into 4 teams: “Kreativnoe myshlenie (Krem)”, “Nulevoy kilometr”, “TIM”, “Team named after Putin”. Representatives of MERLION and vendors acted as an expert board and settled controversial situations. During the game, the participants had to show different talents: to invent advertising slogans, to appear with remake of songs about companies-vendors, to apply their knowledge for answering matters of the intellectual quiz. One of questions of the fascinating quiz was put by MERLION Centre of Competence: “Why should one learn, learn and once again learn?” The most creative and funny answer was given by the team “Kreativnoe myshlenie (Krem)”: “Learning is light, and ignorance is rising with early twilight and hurry back to work!” Winners got 100 MERLs (“merl” is an internal monetary unit) per each company. The winners will be able to spend these MERLs for training in the MERLION Centre of Competence. Besides the winners, all the participants of “Club of Creative Companies” also got 500 welcoming MERLs each from the Centre of Competence and were admitted to its HR-club.

In the final stage of the game, according to the results of all rounds, an unconditional winner was revealed – it happened to be the team “Kreativnoe myshlenie (Krem)” having received an invitation card to the Moscow final stage, and all the participants of the team were awarded with souvenirs.

The day ended with barbecue in an open-air café on the lakeside of Seliger. In the morning everybody set out to return trip and without any doubt carried away a lot of impressions.