Friday, July 10, 2009

Sitecore International at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009

Next week WPC is taking place in New Orleans. Although I myself am not going to be participating this year, my 2 colleagues Morten Ljungberg and Søren Bak Jepsen will be present.

Please be gentle with them as it is their first WPC experience. I remember from my trip last year that it is a lot of hard work, followed up by lots of networking and very little sleep. I also remember the Microsoft UK party - but that is a different story.

As one could expect, this years conference will be all about Sitecore's new release: Online Marketing Suite. If you have even the slightest interest in seeing this ground-breaking integrated marketing tool in action, do not hesitate to visit our booth. Sitecore is a Gold Sponsor, so it should not be hard to locate us.

Feedback on the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite

It has been some hectic weeks lately in Sitecore, mainly because we closed our fiscal year on June 30th - but also because we at the same time released our new version (Sitecore 6.1 including the OMS).

Doing both of these major events at the same time might seem as overkill and downright crazy, but we have actually managed quite well. At this point we cannot reveal any figures of the closed fiscal year, but just wait till the numbers have been chrunched and made public. It will blow your mind.

Part of the reason for releasing the product now, before the summer holidays really kick in, was also to have the product out prior to the upcoming Gartner report. A report which will probably also blow your mind.

I realize I am painting a really fantastic picture here, but I have to admit that this version (OMS) is also a huge test to our communication skills. There is alot of information to give out in terms of describing how the OMS can really make a difference for any website, even without getting into all the nitty gritty stuff.

I know for a fact that it is difficult because I have been in this situation a couple of times already. Even for trained senior Sitecore staff, the inner workings of OMS are a challenge to describe without confusing the receiver. Mainly because what might seem obvious to us, can look diffecult for the viewer. I think part of this is related to us technical people usually talking to other technical people. With OMS we will more often talk directly to marketing and sales people. Im not mocking non-technical people, but it can be challenging to learn and use their lingo, and talk "business value" instead of cool ground-breaking features.

Anyways, as I often seem to get side-tracked in my blog-posts, I will get back to the subject: Feedback on the OMS:

On Tuesday 7th we held a webinar for our partners to see OMS in action. We brought the big guns in shape of Lars F. Nielsen to host and run the presentation. The 30-or-so partner representatives who signed in was taken through a 2 hour live demonstration, as well as explanation of how to solve various analytics related issues. I was also signed in to surveil the session, in case my partners would have questions. During this, before the presentation was over, I recieved 2 mails from 2 different partners with headlines such as "Great product!" and "Excellent presentation, keep up the good work".

That made it pretty clear for me, that the product is certainly on the right track, and that our partners will be well equipped to meet their customers demands of marketing and analytics related features in the future.

 

A few screenshots from the slides used in the presentation:

OMS-presentation-analytics

Overview of the difference between another analytics tool and OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

OMS-presentation-campaign-conversion

Overview of the conversion impact of tracked campaigns in OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

OMS-presentation-multivariate

Overview of a typical setup of multi-variate (A/B) testing and the tracking of progress

 

 

 

 

 

For the partners who were unable to attend (+ the lucky ones already enjoying their holidays), we of course offer a video from the presentation. If you for some reason did not receive the follow-up email, and want to get your hands on the video + slides, throw me a mail.