Introducing our Regional Manager for BeLux

As a natural development, the amount of business generated out of Belgium and Luxembourg the past year called for local representation. I am of course proud that the work I have been part of doing, together with our great and productive partners in the region, have made this possible.

So to keep our momentem in the region, Sitecore International very recently hired mr. Eddy Lalou as Regional Manager for BeLux to further strengthen our position and partnerships. Mr. Lalou, a man with many talents and much experience from the world of IT and management, started officially February 15th 2010.

Although this was already ‘leaked’ to our partners some while ago, I have just spent 2 days on the road in Belgium together with Eddy last week. The objective was to visit as many partners as possible to introduce Eddy properly.

We had a nice little roadtrip around the area of Gent, Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels during the 2 days, as the partners received Eddy extremely well.
Of course this addition to the growing numbers of Sitecore employees will also make things a lot easier and better for our local partners, so it is definately a win-win. We also took the opportunity to share our latest roadmap, which definately was greatly appreciated. Some of those inputs are still ‘eyes only' – but keep a close eye on the coming press releases to learn what is coming from one of the leading ASP.NET content management system providers…

Apart from the meet-and-greet, we had the chance to discuss other key things, such as the plan for the near future with all the stuff we need to do, as well as Eddy’s great vision for the region.

At this point I would like to make it clear, that I will of course still be focusing on Belgium and Luxembourg for the coming months. This is to ensure that Eddy gets the best start possible, and that the transition will be a smooth as can be.

Post DMF 2009

One week ago I attended the DMF aka Digital Marketing First expo in the centre of Brussels. The reason for attending this show as an exhibitor, was based on our experience there in 2008 as visitors. Back then my colleague and I were quite baffled at the extremly nice exhibitions. Clearly many top agencies in Belgium regarded this event as "the place to be".

So with that in mind we deciced we simply had to be part of DMF this time around. And I am sure glad we did. Apart from networking with our existing partners (Uniway, The Reference & LBi), we got a few nice partner leads to take home. We also met with existing customers who are really great advocats of Sitecore. Stephen Delvoye from Bekaert is particularly satisfied, and certainly does not mind telling people how great he think Sitecore is. Marvelous!

As mentioned in the previous post, we had Mark van der Wal from Pectora co-host our booth. This was a great combo for us, as Pectora have already delivered some nice Sitecore cases, and since the theme of the event was mainly marketing oriented. Pectora delivers a Sitecore/InDesign integration which can help companies control content and assets across print- and online material. Mark being the nice guy he is, added great value to the show.

On the downside I have to admit that our booth came a bit short of some of the others. The guys from Emakina built a whole giant black box (almost a house actually) where they invited people in for a talk. LBi had a huge bar very nicely set up as well, while a lot of other creative companies clearly had been spending big bucks on the event.

Of course the important part of going to an event such as DMF is both to be seen, but also to make new business. On the latter part, I will be busy for quite a while.

One thing is for sure, see you at DMF next year!

Sitecore attending DMF 2009.

On October 22nd Sitecore will be present at the annual Digital Marketing First (DMF) event in Brussels "Tour & Taxis" expo. As this event is more focused on Online Marketing and not 'just' CMS, Sitecore has teamed up with our partner Pectora for the show.

Pectora is the inventor of a very nice Adobe InDesign integration to Sitecore, which allows content owners to build catalogues with ease in InDesign while at the same time having full control of all their products and their properties.

One good example of the Pectora/Sitecore solution is BoConcept, a furtniture retailer with 1000's of products, who use the solution to easily tailor PDF catalogues for print on their different markets, they also use the solution to save time on creating price signs for their 200 stores. Too learn more about this case, and the other Sitecore/Pectora projects, please feel free to stop by our booth (D17).

 

 

From Sitecore Lila Carlyle and myself will be present, ready to showcase our Online Marketing Suite (OMS). A web-marketing tool which have already been praised by analysts such as Gartner. In short the OMS can bring your website and other marketing initiatives much closer together.

Attending DMF is free for visitors, please go here to pre-register.

See you on the 22nd of October!

Next stop WebScene 2009 in Brussels

In a few hours I will be travelling to Brussels to setup shop for the WebScene Expo 2009 event which starts tomorrow.

Hosted by Christian Daems and CMS-Channel, this June 9 event features many CMS vendors and partners and is definately the place to be for any serious player in the Benelux (and beyond) market.

 

From Sitecore 3 people are attending the show, my colleagues Torben Brams, Lila Carlyle and myself. By the way, we are of course sponsoring the event as you can also see on the website: www.websceneexpo.com.

We of course hope to meet a lot of people who are interested in knowing more about Sitecore and our upcoming release: Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS). So if you are in the neighbourhood, please stop by our booth to learn more.

More information about the OMS is available on the Sitecore website and through the press release.

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.

CM Innovation 2008, what a show!

On December 4th, the annual CM Innovation event took place at Brussels Airport in the Sky Hall. This event is hosted by CMS Channel, an association of Content Management professionals and analysts.

Sitecore International sponsored the event as Global Sponsors and as a result we had one of the largerst booths, just in front of the area where most of the sessions of the event took place. To top that off, we also had the opening keynote speaker session at our disposal. My colleague Sri Carlyle and myself went one day in advance in order to setup shop.

The keynote was done by Lars Fløe Nielsen, one of the founders of Sitecore. He did a very great job, talking not about features and hot-buttons, but about how to navigate the tech crunch. A topic which dealt with the current global financial situation, and why this is not the time to save money, but to spend money for easy gain of marketshare. The presentation covered a recent customer case, including their calculations of cost savings, and increase in revenue based on improved focus on their web platform. The keynote received some great feedback, and also resulted in an interview with a local IT magazine called Smart Business Strategies.

This really kicked off the event, and our booth was packed for the rest of the day with interested people and partner prospects. I'm glad we had some reinforcements from our Dutch office in the shape of Alex de Groot, otherwise we simply wouldn't have had time to talk to everybody.

To spice the show up a bit, we brought some nice prizes to win from our customer Royal Copenhagen (see case study). Something which made the 3 people who each won a gift quite happy by the looks of it. Thanks to Christian Daems from CMS Channel for helping us handing out the prizes.



After the tradeshow closed, it was time for the annual CMS Awards show. Sitecore had a few cases submitted to the awards, and we ended up winning the Silver Award in the category "Web 2.0" for the Thomas Cook solution done by our partner The Reference.
I'm the guy that is all smiles in the right hand side of the picture, next to Anja Capelle from The Reference.

The Award ceremony also came with a nice dinner arrangement, and a Belgian radio celebrity who controlled the turntables to get the party started. I left around 11 pm, after quite a bit of networking and dancing. All in all it was a very good event for us, with many interesting leads and positive feedback. We will definately be present at the upcoming WebScene event which will take place in the summer of 2009.

 

Till then, enjoy a few pictures from the CM Innovation event.

 

Sri Carlyle just after we had setup our booth and added the prizes from Royal Copenhagen.

 

 

 

 

 

Lars Fløe Nielsens keynote had quite a big audiance and gave us a lot of positive vibes throughout the day of the event. Thats me standing in the back checking out the setup.

 

 

 

Alex de Groot giving a demo at the Sitecore booth. In Dutch of course.

Innovation is coming in just 3 weeks...

CM Innovation that is. It shouldn't really come as a surprise to me, since we are a Global Sponsor of the event, but it did anyway just now, so I thought I might as well write a short post to remind myself.

3 weeks, thats pretty close. I guess I have been to busy traveling to realize it. But rest assure, Sitecore is coming well prepared. We have our keynote speaker lined up, the booth material is either done or in the works, and we have a great spot at the show!

If you are in the area of Brussels Airport around Thursday December 4th, be sure to come by and meet us. The event should be free for visitors, so there really is no excuse.

More info available here: www.cminnovation.eu

Some of our competitors will obviously also be present, but curiously enough, only one other looks to be a Global Sponsor as well.

Looking very much forward to the exhibition, and also to the annual CMS Awards show, which will take place during the evening on the 4th.

See you then.

MarketingFirst, business second in Belgium

Friday night of last week I came home after spending 2 days in Belgium. My colleague and I had attended a marketing event called MarketingFirst in Brussels as visitors. We didn't really know what to expect, except that we would meet a some of our partners who were exhibiting.

But since the event had free entrance for pre-registered visitors, we got alot more than we bargained for. With emphasis on A LOT. The event itself was quite small, with about 40 different companies on display. But the event was packed with people all looking to see and learn more about the latest marketing tools and trends. In between this crowd we met some existing customers, some newly signed customers and a few prospects. We of course also spent some time talking to our present partners. The Reference had a very nice stand where you could get a free massage, and LBi was handing out nice stuff and serving drinks.

Another important contact who had a booth was CMS-Channel. We managed to "kidnap" Christian Daems for a short meeting although he was quite busy. Sitecore International is going to be a Global Sponsor at the upcoming CM Innovation event (arranged by CMS Channel) in Brussels on December 4th.
Stay tuned for a lot more information about this...

So anyways, this was a recap of last Thursday which took us to the event in Brussels, and later by train to the city of Gent, which is a very nice city by the way. So all in all, we had a great day with lots of networking, for free!

 

Friday we then had a meeting with The Reference about previous and upcoming activities. We already have a lot going on in Belgium, but the future will bring even more, that is for sure. 
Besides that business aspect, it is always nice to talk to the developers at the partner, and hear them confess that for whatever project they are going to do, they always vote for Sitecore. They even had a few newly hired developers who passed the version 6 certification without prior knowledge about Sitecore, who already praised our API.

 

I'm travelling alot these days, but hopefully my upcoming posts will be more frequent than they have been lately.

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.