Sitecore enters Global partnership with Avanade

On November 1st, the news about the Sitecore / Avanade partnership was finally official. I have been eagerly waiting to share the story since early summer, but in respect of our corporate marketing team, I have kept quiet until now.

Teaming up with a player like Avanade is an important step for us in Sitecore, as Avanade’s organization of 16.000+ employees, as well as their focus on Microsoft based technologies and digital solutions, will help Sitecore reach even further - and to even larger clients. This is also a stamp of approval, that everything Sitecore has worked hard to achieve (see the recent Gartner MQ report), now materializes and is backed up by such an important group.

As this partnership has been in effect for months and counting, with a few public statements along the way, the foundation is already quite solid. Without disclosing exact numbers, Avanade is by far the partner with most Sitecore certified developers on board (to list one key parameter). Avanade has definitely set the bar for other Sitecore Partners to follow.

 

My role in this is fairly simple, as I was early on appointed to help facilitate and connect Avanade peers to the proper Sitecore contacts to get things moving fast. This was mainly for assisting with their numerous training requests as well as presales related needs. As they are a big organization, it at times felt almost like “whack a mole” with new people in need of information popping up constantly. I have also had the pleasure of meeting some of the involved Avanade managers during this partnership start-up (check my LinkedIn if you are curious) throughout 2012, and must say I am impressed with their involvement and dedication.

I can only speak on behalf of Sitecore International and the combined efforts with Avanade throughout Europe, which so far has manifested in several co-sponsored events followed by interesting discussions with leading brands. But this appears as the beginning of something big, especially given the already closed deals deriving from this partnership, as well as the building pipeline. For the rest of Sitecore, it appears they have similar ongoing success – one example being Sonnenkraft and their Sitecore solution running on Azure.

 

Now we just have to keep up with Avanade’s ambitious plans, as well as their need for sales and presales support across the globe. Looking forward to support this ongoing, and now official, challenge…

Professional Sitecore Development book now available

Fresh of the press is this developer handbook written by Sitecore rockstar John West. The book is published by Wrox as announced here. News about the book have been circulating recently, but now you have the chance to get a copy for yourself and get the insight on how Sitecore employees address development on our CMS platform.

While I haven’t had time to read it yet myself, I am sure I could learn a thing a two. First however, I got to recover from a sudden stroke of nostalgia, as I remember my first purchase from Wrox being a book about “Active Server Pages” back in the nineties. Things certainly have changed since then…

Go check out the book on Wiley’s shop: Professional Sitecore Development

Is silence really golden?

My last post was in December 2010, about 18 months ago. I will be the first to admit the silence from my part is a bit embarrassing, as there has been plenty of things to announce during this time.

• I could for example have outlined the fantastic reviews by Gartner in their MQ reports released in 2010 as well as 2011 (just as I did in 2009).
  
• I could also have announced the various new Regional Directors joining in our many new locations within Sitecore International’s reach (as I did in 2010 and 2009).
  
• Or re-posted information about our Sitecore product releases (version 6.5 with DMS, Adaptive Print Studio and similar) as well as information about our constantly growing partner network and client base.

Obviously I haven’t done so, and I can only blame my busy schedule. The fact is that since I started this blog, my unit (Sitecore International) has doubled in number of staff more than 6 times over. A growth which has been very rapid during the past 18 months.  These are definitely interesting times for all involved…

But back to the headline question; has my blog silence been golden? Yes, It sure has in terms of won business and having had the opportunity to spread our vision and demonstrate the capabilities of our unique product suite offering to customers and partners alike, around the globe. My only regret is, that I was not able to share all those good stories here.

Let me make that up to you in the coming posts…

Some exciting news will appear officially very soon, underlining our strong global position. Something I am proud to be part of. Stay tuned.

Sitecore expanding in Poland

My blog has been silent for way to long, but let’s not waste time on excuses. Sitecore International has grown tremendously in 2010 doubling the number of employees and extending our reach and focus areas. Trying to keep up with this pace has of course been time consuming, but certainly also productive.

Very recently we hired Mr. Mariusz Krukowski to be a Regional Manager for Sitecore in Poland and the Czech Republic. Before joining Sitecore, Mariusz previously worked for competing CMS companies and thus is bringing a lot of experience from the WCM/CMS realm to Sitecore.

I previously hinted that I and Sitecore International were already focusing on this specific region, which now manifested itself with Mariusz joining us. Mariusz is already very busy getting partners on board and spreading the word about our Online Marketing Suite and Enterprise CMS solutions. Speaking of this, just last week I assisted Mariusz in Prague talking to some excisting and potential partners. Please join me in welcoming Mariusz to the team, and expect to meet us both if you are within the region, as I will be assisting Mariusz with getting up and running during 2011.

 

On another note, despite the long pause on this blog, I do expect to deliver more frequent updates in the future as a lot of interesting stuff is happening these days. Did you for example see the announcement of Sitecore 6.4 being finally released? The ‘Technical Preview’ release got great feedback from the developer community and certainly raised the bar for user-friendly interfaces.

 

Stay tuned for more updates and happy holidays!

Sitecore International keeps expanding

In the “good old days” back in 2008, Sitecore International had a head-count of 4-5 employees. Today the current number is 11 including our latest addition of key employees who left RedDot (now OpenText) in favor of Sitecore.

The growth of our unit is the result of hard work, a great and well recognized product, as well as the obvious strategy to expand our operations further.

Should you wish to join the great team of Sitecore International, now is the chance, as we just added some new listings on our job page on the Sitecore CMS website.

The following postings are up:

• Marketing Manager for DACH region
• Regional Sales Manager for Switzerland
• Solution Architect Belgium
• Regional Sales Manager Finland
• Regional Sales Manager Norway
• Regional Sales Manager Singapore
• Regional Sales Manager Hong Kong

As goes for myself, I know this blog has been left alone for a while. The reason is simple: we are extremely busy these days. On the very positive side, the quite optimistic budget for the current fiscal year (which ends June 30th) was met already in the previous quarter by the team (yes, we are that good). And I have also been spending time assisting a lot of my new colleagues who started working for Sitecore International within the past 6 months.

Apart from that, I am allocating whatever is left of my resources to establish a good foundation for Sitecore International in Poland and the Czech Republic. You can expect to hear more about this particular endeavour in coming blog posts…

Evidently, a blog

Last week Mark van Aalst released his much anticipated blog module “EviBlog” for Sitecore in a stable version. Mark has been working on the module for a while, and his work has definately payed off with a VERY impressive module.

The module is of course based on the latest Sitecore version (6.2) with support for Inline Editing as well as RSS, tag clouds, categories and so on. But that is not all, Mark have also added support for Microsoft Live Writer for those who enjoy writing content offline in a nice setting.

As the module was greatly expected, our Shared Source Coordinator Jimmie Overby has released 2 videos showcasing the module in action. These videos are available through Mark’s original blogpost.

The blog module is available for download on the Sitecore Shared Source Portal.

Great work Mark, keep it up!

Microsoft Germany Partner Conference coming up

During next week I will participate in the partner conference for Microsoft Germany in Dresden. Together with me on the set will be Søren Bak Jepsen, the Director of Sitecore International as well as of course our Regional Director DACH  Marc Schneider.

The show is a 2 day event (September 8+9) for Microsoft and their partners to network as well as experience the many keynote sessions and learn about the latest market trends. More information here and here.

Come visit us at booth #22 to learn more about Sitecore and our recent product release of the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite.

Bis dann...

Pleased to say I told you so.

The long awaited Gartner Magic Quadrant report has now been released by Gartner. As Sitecore holds reprint rights, this new report is available through this Sitecore link (requires registration).

As mentioned in my previous post I envisioned that this report "would blow your mind". This gut-feeling of mine is actually backed up better than I expected in the report. We are placed furthest out on the "completeness of vision" axis, among the top visionaries, as well placed centrally on the "ability to execute" axis.

This places us ahead of all the pure .Net based players, and can be seen as the result of our global business strategy, as well as Sitecore focusing solely on product development while our partners focus on building first-class customer implementations.

Needless to say, we at Sitecore are of course very pleased with this report. This kind of market approval from one of the leading analysts is bound to make a difference in the competitive CMS market.

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:

Overview of the difference between another analytics tool and OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview of the conversion impact of tracked campaigns in OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Sitecore blogs, now all neatly indexed

Mark Van Alst from Evident in The Netherlands have made a very nice site over the Christmas holidays which utilizes Google custom search to index over 30 Sitecore related blogs.

Check it out here: http://www.sitecoreblogsearch.com/

 

Original post by Mark: http://www.markvanaalst.com/2008/12/26/custom-search-for-sitecore-blogs/

Well done!

Happy New Year from Copenhagen

2008 is closing soon, and it's time for a small summary of the activities that happened during the year. Not in the google 'zeitgeist' manner, but more in terms of milestones and interesting Sitecore bulletpoints from my point of view.

After joining Sitecore (International) in January, it of course took a while to get acquainted with all the internal procedures and such. But I was already at my first tradeshow in February, showing off the wonders of Sitecore in Stockholm at the Internet Expo. 

More events followed, and during the summer came the big WPC in Houston. After that travelling in the name of Sitecore really took off, which is also why I try to update this blog as often as possible when there is something even mildly interesting to share from abroad.

Most of the events/tradeshows have been covered already on this blog.

On a more product oriented side, we had the release of version 6 in July which introduced many great features which really caters for the marketing units rather than the typical IT / developer audiance. We also released an updated version of the Intranet Portal and Sitecore Foundry. All in all some very interesting releases which will be improved even more once we release further marketing oriented modules. One thing to add is, that the release also introduced an improved structure for releasing updates in 3 levels, hotfixes, updates and service releases. This should ensure that we are on top of things, including fixing issues related to 3rd party vendor software like Adobe's release of Flash 10, and the issues it caused us and others like wordpress.

From the business side, we came out of our fiscal year with a growth in sales by over 100% from last year following our past trend. Included in that was a lot of nice sized deals and many great new references. Despite the whole world is currently still discussing how the financial crisis is going to impact business as we know it, I so far haven't met a prospect within my territories who postponed their investments. Hopefully this applies to all our markets also in 2009.

But rest assure, that despite any potential decrease in the market, Sitecore is well equipped and financially sound for going into 2009 head on.

 

As goes for the upcoming year there is already a lot of things planned. Aside from the various events we will be participating in, there is also plans for travelling to various destinations ranging from Dubai to Brussels, Oslo and Singapore. I will also be giving my first Sitecore Certified Developer training in 2009 in Stockholm in February.

So on that note, I wish you a happy new year!

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.

New Sitecore version revealed

I hereby interrupt the transmission of
on-the-road stories and module presentations with a special news bulletin:
It is now official, Sitecore will release the upcoming version 6.0 June 30th 2008.

This upcoming release is mainly focusing on simplicity and improved usability. Editors especially will have new tools available such as in-line editing, instant validation and simple layout control. Adding to that is a security enhancement based on the latest .Net security model allowing for roles-in-roles inheritance plus improving the already flexible Sitecore security layer. More information available in the officiel press release.

The current feedback from various sources point out some of these very interesting features:

CMS-Wire mentions the usability, the support for 64-bit systems and more.

Jukka-Pekka Keisala lists some of the overall changes from the previous version including the switcth from .Net 2.0 to 3.5.

Chris Wojciech goes into more technical detail listing many of the new options and features in the Sitecore framework and API.

Personally I really like the new version. It's even faster than the previous one and the UI is, in lack of better words, very sexy. But the biggest plus is definately the improved usability (with patents pending might I add) that will enable editors to create fully W3C (including accessibility) compliant content without even thinking about it.

I'm certain my upcoming posts from the road will contion reactions on these specific features, so stay tuned.

End of transmission.