Over 250 IT Pros from the Cincinnati IT Community funked up BlackFinn Restaurant & Saloon on Thursday, November 19th at IT Martini Hour 7: All The Fixin’s. Special guest Bootsy Collins set set the tone with his funkadelic style – which helped raise a cool $1000 for the Bootsy Collins Foundation!

But Bootsy wasn’t the only all-star – James McIntyre (Director of IT at Cincinnati Christian University) kicked off the event by moderating a ‘Building Better Software’ discussion with three of Cincinnati’s finest: Doug Ross (CTO of Western & Southern Financial Group), Jeff Crawford (Director of IT at Healthcare Waste Solutions) and Geoff Pearson (VP and Managing Partner of KiZAN Technologies). It was a great exchange of thoughts and ideas, captured on video thanks to Motiondrift films (coming soon).

Three Cincinnati start-up companies mixed it up over the dance floor: Blackbook EMG, which connects employees and organizations to their community; Technology Medical Partners, a company that improves performance for healthcare organizations; and Zakta, a search engine enabling people to customize their search or become a Zakta Guide and share their own expertise.

At the end of the night, YOUR votes were counted and Zakta took the IT Martini Community Choice Award presented by CincyTech and PSI Group. Congratulations Zakta!

To wrap things up, Bootsy and Patti Collins took a moment to share their thanks for everyone’s support of the Bootsy Collins Foundation – then presented a personally autographed guitar to one lucky raffle prize winner! But that was only the start: Bearcat football tickets (thanks Bootsy Collins Foundation), Guitar Hero for the Wii (thanks Peak 10), a Smart Pen (thanks Peak 10), and a Boomer Esiason autographed football (thanks CBTS) rounded out the charity raffle giveaway.

We owe a huge thanks to the Cincinnati IT Community for making IT Martini Hour 7 a success! It’s been an exciting, engaging, opportunity getting the IT Martini event series going in Cincinnati – and we look forward to future events in Cincinnati as 2010 gets rolling.

And finally, THANK YOU to Cincinnati’s Top Shelf Sponsors CincyTech and PSI Group! These two organizations are doing great things, by driving innovation in YOUR IT Community.