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.