One of my very favorite events is when Bjarne Hansen—president of Sitecore North America—spends a few traditional moments at the annual sales kickoff and company celebration. He is the single best person in the world to relay the company’s history, and he takes these moments to ask people to stand in recognition of their achievements in the order they joined Sitecore. (Note: he is able to do this in the context of how many company celebrations you’ve attended with significant others, an amazing thing in and of itself). “If you were at the very first company celebration…..” Literally a handful of the great North American founders stand. Huge applause. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th celebration attendees stand in turn. More applause as bigger chunks of the room stand. “If you joined this last year….”. The remainder of the room--more than half of its total attendees--stand to applause as the already standing welcome the new crew, excited about how they will help continue to grow the well-oiled machine in place.
I’m on a plane from Boston to Las Vegas and thinking about those events that I’ve had the privilege to attend, trying to get through some chapters of a MongoDB text recently purchased, and looking forward to a fantastic week at Sitecore Symposium 2014. The tradition that Bjarne keeps is always an incredibly tangible, live-person-bar-graph way of seeing the phenomenal growth at Sitecore. Symposium is another such event—this one having the added benefit of our incredible partners and customers joining in the fun. And while Bjarne’s exercise drives home the growth of the fantastic people working for Sitecore the company, this event rounds out the story by adding the growth highlights within the product, partner channel and customer base that makes this amazing ecosystem that is Sitecore. Bjarne is always clear about this achieved goal—we have the best people, the best partners, the best product and the best customers in this industry. Period. It would be silly to say this goal is easy and foolish to say it’s ever fully realized, but the consistency of this message drives this ecosystem to fantastic new heights every year, heights that will be very tangible in Las Vegas.
Symposium 2014 will be yet another reminder to me of how far we’ve come. I left the original Dreamcore with a great feeling (“wow, we’ve arrived”), and looking through the session agenda this year makes it incredibly clear how much further this platform and its people have evolved. It is truly amazing to see the breadth of what is to be covered this week and it makes me look forward to the side conversations between and after sessions that will fill gaps left by presentations I couldn’t attend. When at Dreamcore we were certainly talking Web Content Management (which itself filled an impressive session agenda). Now, with that WCMS engine still incredibly important, foundational and fundamental, we’re able to have the discussion about the set of layers that leverage that Rocks-solid foundation. From mobile development, publish once / use everywhere, content-as-a-service, content marketing, testing, analytics, insights-driven personalization, EXPERIENCE….the list goes on and on. An incredible new analytics architecture drives the next phase while holding true to time-tested features and methodologies.
The customer and partner sessions reinforce that feeling of pride I had way back at Dreamcore—there is truly an army of Sitecore-powered professionals that do amazing things with this platform. There is no one Sitecore solution, there is only the right Sitecore solution for you or your customer. The collection of challenges and solutions described in these sessions really brings that point home for me, and reminds me that software projects are never perfect, but they are made more perfect by the skill of this ecosystem and the breadth and flexibility of this platform.
With the sneak-peak of Sitecore 8 (look at all of those tiles and applications in this platform!), I’m continually blown away at how much this system can do. Sitecore 8 really drives the point home of how powerful it is to have all this under one hood, one set of user interfaces, one incredibly consistent underlying structure and model. Oh, and to top it off, Sitecore Experience Platform and Commerce—a bond with obvious and far reaching potential—is now being realized. The scalability of Sitecore search and content/product modeling with the ability to test and optimize and present in the right place, at the right time, coupled with the amazingly granular insights that drive this continuous optimization. Wow.
In my own job, I get to support the best presales engineering team in the biz. We challenge ourselves with keeping ahead of this growth, keeping on top of an ever-evolving product and technological landscape. Check out Chris Castle’s and Brandon Royal’s session as they discuss their own experiences moving Launch Sitecore to Sitecore 7.5/8 and a cloud-powered architecture. We are excited by the challenging level of expertise that you expect and deserve from us and are looking forward to the heights our combined expertise and the Sitecore Experience Platform will take us this year. We look forward to working closely with all of you as together we unlock the potential of this platform and stand up together in celebration of all the successful Sitecore solutions ahead.
As Bjarne reminds us, more than anything, it’s the people. It’s the ecosystem at this event (and those at home still ferociously working the project) that makes me incredibly proud to represent this platform and this company. Software projects are people projects that succeed and fail with the level of skill, resourcefulness, drive and teamwork of the people that undertake them. I am truly honored to be among those of you that will be in this impressive Symposium audience, and those of you that work to drive successful Sitecore projects every day. Please seek out as many of your Sitecore employee hosts as you can at this great event (there are lots that have just joined this year, but we’re all easy to find in our purple shirts). Say hello and let’s talk about how we can continue on this great journey together.
