Focusing on Belgium

As I wrote in my last post, I have spent 3 days doing a  roadshow in Belgium last week. The topic of the trip was basically letting our partners know who their new points of contact would be from now on.

Since Sitecore has expanded and grown quite substantially lately, we needed to re-arrange our responsibilities.
Marc Schneider was the previous Channel Sales Manager for Germany and all of Benelux, but since we are opening an office in Holland in two weeks, Marc is now focusing on the German speaking countries exclusively. In fact, I am already booked for an onsite demo in Basel together with Marc on September 9th, but that is a different story.

So with Marc focusing on Germany, Switzerland and Austria - and Holland opening an office of their own, my colleague Sri Carlyle and myself are now focusing mainly on Belgium.

Personally I think that it is an exciting challenge. And since Marc has already done a tremendous job in Belgium and signed partners and customers, Our main task  is to pick up from that goundwork and continue the trend.

Some headlines from our trip included meeting up with a good portion of our excisting partners in Brussels and Gent. This time around we met up with
LBi Group, The Reference and One Agency. Lbi is based out of Brussels mainly, while we met up with The Reference and One Agency in Gent. I have to say the centre of Gent is a very nice place with beautiful old houses. One was actually for sale, but i doubt my salary will cover a penthouse in central Gent. We also had a meeting with a prospect on our way between meeting our partners. Of course I can't announce who this was, but I do envy their location with a private lake and beach for the employees.

Next time we go to Belgium we will hopefully be meeting with our other excisting partners De Schutter Neroc and Delaware.

We also met the local CMS expert Christian Daems (CMS Channel) for lunch one day. Christian is a very nice guy that I look forward to meet again on his December event in Brussels. We will actually sponsor that event, but more info about all that once we get closer to December.

 

One last thing to say. Yes, the chocolate is good. Very very good.

Post WPC 2008 and what lies ahead

This summer featured this years biggest Microsoft partner event as I have previously mentioned. Sitecore had a nice big stand, which I have to say looked really great and given our red color, was easy to spot from far away in the huge convention centre.

In short, we had a really good week in Houston. Many new partners were eager to sign with us, some even after just seeing a 2-minute demo.

 

Obviously WPC 2008 ended about a month ago, but since then I have been away on 2 weeks of holiday, and as a result, simply been so busy following up on WPC related stuff, that I had to down-prioritize writing here. A few issues however, justifies this late post.

 

First of all, I have to mention the new demo site (running on version 6.0 of course) that premiered on WPC 2008. The site in itself is actually quite cool (the best demo concept so far in Sitecore IMO) and most spectators find it easy to relate to.

The "Nicam" demo-site, as it is called, does a great job at showing off features which prove the many advantages in having a content-based CMS (as compared to page-based ditto).
More importantly people tend to like our open API very much, since this will help them save precious time as they can reuse existing controls or easily integrate with 3rd party systems.

 

Secondly, I'd like to make another thing clear. Whenever Sitecore International signs a new partner they (the partner) will at some point require a visit from a Sitecore representative. In other words, I might be going to visit new partners in such places as South Africa, Hong Kong, Cairo, France, Belgium, Israel and Mexico in the coming year, just to name a few of the leads we got from WPC 2008.

I can't wait to blog about experiences from such exotic locations, but until then, I plan on going into much more detail about our latest and greatest release and the new features.

 

So what else happened during WPC week? Well, I was right about the no-sleep-on-the-agenda thing. Everyday, after spending many hours at the booth, featured various networking events/dinners/parties which I attended a couple of.
I have to say the UK party was the most amusing, but then again, who ever doubted the Brits can go a bit nuts when their away from home?

I also have to mention my hotel. In particular my room. The dreadful American architecture somehow made it possible for my room to be placed exactly behind the only 2 elevators in the entire building. There was literally only a paper-thin wall between my bed, and the elevator shafts. Nice huh? 
Ironically my jetlag ensured that I actually managed to sleep anyway.

 

Next weeks schedule features a 3-day roadshow in Belgium, and the week after that has Helsingfors and Stockholm on the agenda. Till then please check out the many blogposts about Sitecore and the new .Net 3.5 Service Pack.