Enjoying the show

Last week I was in Brussels attending an Emakina event. Emakina Group actually owns The Reference which is one of our big partners in Belgium.

The event was titled "CMS for International accounts" and evolved around the process of choosing a Content Management System (which is not a trivial task as you need to identify the right tool for the right job).  They had found a really cool location to host the event, a place nowadays called Flagey Centre. This used to be the studios of the Belgian National Radio Broadcast I was told. All the studios were still intact but now turned into conference and event facilities.

Sitecore sponsored the event, and I was glad to see how many interested people showed up to learn about CMS.

To make sure the whole event wasnt biased by us or other vendors, different cases were presented. Each running on a different platform ranging from open source system Drupal to SharePoint, Tridion, Emagic and of course Sitecore. The Sitecore case presented was Betafence, a very tight B2B and B2C website with a large product catalogue, all easy to filter through using the nice features on the site. Philip Achten from our partner The Reference ran the presentation and did an enthusiastic and very impressive job.

So what was I doing in all of this you might ask, and to be honest I was sitting in the back of the theatre enjoying the show. Philip presented the case much better, and much more believable than I ever could. This however wasn't the scoop of the day for me personally. That came during "one of the other presentations" where some of the participants asked some really cool questions about the competitor CMS. Questions which, to the presenters regret, revealed some important weaknesses of their systems. Basically my job was done, and I never even left my seat!

A few short breaks, as well as the lunch after the presentations, left me some time to mingle with the Emakina crowd, talk to excisting Sitecore customers in person as well as meet some prospects. Finally I also caught up to speed with the projects that The Reference have in the pipeline. You got to hand it to these guys, they are very professional, and one of the reasons for the success we have on the Belgian market.

After the event, I went with Steven Volders from Emakina to their premises. Although time was sparse we managed to have a short meeting about Sitecore and our partner program. Looks like The Reference's bigbrother want's a piece of the action as well, and they are most welcome.

Two shows in one week

Week 12 of 2009 (March 16 to March 20) was a bit hectic for my department.

Monday March 16 my colleague Sri Carlyle and I went to Belgium to attend meetings with new partners. These meetings would take place in 2 different cities near Brussels, so as a result we had rented a car in advance online. The car we booked came with a built-in GPS (BMW 1-series). When we arrived in Brussels airport. we quickly learned that you dont always get what you ask for. Instead the woman at the counter told us our VW was ready. Come again?

After a bit of struggle and complaints about this replacement, we went to pick up our car, which we now had to pay an extra 10 Euro for in order to get a GPS. Apparently it pays off to complain, so instead of getting the VW we got upgraded to a BMW 318. By the way, do I have to mention this model comes with a built-in GPS? Regardless, I wonder where my extra 10 Euro went exactly.

Anyways, after some valuable meetings, we headed back to the big city and returned the car before going out to experience Brussels on foot. Although I have been through this city numerous times already, I haven't actually had much time to check it out. But I ensure you, there is lots to see.

 

The next morning we attended the Content Management Forum event in Brussels to network as well as give a keynote. Lars Nielsen, who flew down to do this presentation, did a great job talking about how you can drive increased revenue from your website during the financial crisis based on the latest reports from Forrester, whereas the other CMS  vendors were talking about features and functions. This approach resulted in quite a few enquiries from potential partners and customers, not only for a copy of the slides, but also to get to now more about Sitecore. All in all very positive and productive for us. We also had a chance to introduce some existing customers to each-other which was a very pleasant experience. We really have to get moving and get a local user group initiated. There is lots to gain from that. A short interview with Lars about his presentation is available on youtube by the way.

After the event I arrived home Tuesday night, more or less ready for flying out 18 hours later.

Wednesday went by quickly with me attending class (I have an ongoing study next to my job), and later going to the airport to catch the evening flight to Oslo.

As the headline suggests, the reason for going to Oslo was another event: The WebForum 2009 conference which took place at the Royal SAS Radisson. Not a huge event in number of exhibitors, but nonetheless a very important one to be part of. WebForum 2009 was a 2-day event packed with interesting keynotes and sessions. These sessions started with 2 members from the Obama campaign office sharing their insights from the recent election. As you probably know the Obama campaign had an unprecedented use of social networking, personalized email campaigns and youtube videos. I actually got to ask one of these individuals from the campaign, Mr. Dan McSwain, a question during lunch regarding the tremendous social networking effort he was part of. If you believe in 6-degrees of seperation, I guess I have been pretty close to Obama himself. I better tell my mom.

During and in between the sessions I manned out booth together with my colleagues Morten and Sri. Quite a few other CMS vendors were also present at the conference, none mentioned, none forgotten ;-)

Although the breaks between sessions were very short, we did manage to talk to quite a few people who had an interest in learning more about our product in relations to their upcoming projects. It is quite a challenge to present the full scope of the product in a 2-10 minute demo, but I think we managed to get the message across.

The first day of the event also came with a banquet in the evening. This was basically "a dinner and a show" as the musician/writer Jo Næsby hosted the dinner as well as the award-show called "Farmand prisen".  I guess it is a pity that I am not 100% fluent in Norwegian as it seemed I missed the point of most of his jokes.  After this event, most people went to the penthouse level bar "Summit". With clear skies over Oslo, the view was simply impressive. So was the price of the beer by the way.

On the second day of the event, Sri and I had some meetings with prospect partners to attend, so we left Morten at the booth and jumped a cab. As one of the prospect partners are already involved with one of our customers, the meeting went well and the resulting action plan was indeed positive for all parties.

Other than these meetings, the rest of day 2 went by much like the first, with new interesting leads to bring home.

To summarize the week, airplane food haven't improved (will it ever?) but getting to drive a nice "Beemer" as well as having a great view over Oslo made up for that. And then it is also always very inspiring to meet the competition and others from the industry who are willing to share their insights and visions.