Time to Give Thanks

Hello. My name is Sandy, and Monarch saved my life.

Once upon a time, I worked for a great company. For almost ten years, I enjoyed my work. I held three completely different positions over those years. One day our division was sold to another company that didn’t need staff who weren’t sales people, which I wasn’t. So off I went.

I immediately joined a new, smaller company and for two years helped to grow a vibrant business, until one day a partnership squabble cost all of us our jobs. And off I went.

Seeking opportunities, I began working for a big multinational corporation in a nice little padded cubicle in a nice office with a bunch of nice people who didn’t seem to understand anything I did. But it was a nice job. And I was bored and miserable and I was trying to not let it show, which was the hardest part of the job because I needed the job.

Then one day I was introduced to Monarch, and everything changed.

I learned to how to reliably acquire critical data quickly and accurately. By myself, without help from the corporate IT department. I learned how to automate my work to do even more, and do it faster than anyone ever expected.

Given all of the data I was now mining, I had to come up with ways for the business’s management team to be able to easily use it in their decision making processes. So I set out to learn how to best present the data. While this seems to be an area for constant improvement, what I was doing got noticed by the right people.

My job improved. The work became more interesting. I began to have a better role. I wasn’t just the new guy in the cubicle anymore. I went from performing local office accounting duties to reporting first on a national basis, then internationally.

Along the way, I attended Datawatch’s user conferences in 2005 and 2007 (update: 2008 too!). In fact, I was privileged to have been selected by Datawatch to present to the group at each conference. I got to meet a lot of great people in many roles in many industries who had been using Monarch and other Datawatch products, not to mention the Datawatch staff and management who were (are) very kind, and just really great folks.

So here I am. I’ve just recently launched a Monarch based web site in the hopes that I can somehow make you just as excited about how using Monarch and Excel can change not just your job, or your company, but your life, as they have mine.

So today I say “Thanks!”, to the software publishers and to you, for taking the time to visit this site. We all have very busy schedules these days, and you choose to come here. I appreciate your attention.