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Friday, July 10, 2009

Naviatech won the Rising Star of the Year Award at eZ Conference

It was an honour to get on stage and pick up the Rising Star of the Year award on behalf of Naviatech at the eZ Conferenrence in lovely Paris two weeks ago. This award means a lot to me and I'm very proud of our whole staff. Last year was challenging. It was a big change for the organization after we made a huge decision to give up our own software development. You can read my comments and full press release from our website.
"This award is a great recognition for big decision, hard work and concentration on our new strategy."
Other than great Awards ceremony and ten year anniversary party of eZ Systems (check out video summary below), I found lots of good stuff during the international partner day and the eZ Conference. eZ Systems is changing its organization when becoming a professional global software company.

They are also changing their partner model (partly because of our co-operation) and I believe these are all good news. I think partners have to contribute also some money back (subscriptions) to eZ. That's the only way we, the whole ecosystem, can be competitive in the CMS (or WCM) market in the long run!

It was glad to hear Tony White, leading analyst of WCM from Gilbane Group, as he represented his study about different vendors and position of eZ:


I'm sure the discussion about new partner model (and position?) will continue, so feel free to drop me a line or give your comments through my blog, Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter. I was also very delighted (well, I'm a web analyst :) when Stephen Powers, senior analyst from Forrester, included testing, targeting and web analytics as a part of WCM 2.0.
"Interactive online customer experiences is be very important now and will be crucial in the future. And measuring as well."
Social features and user generated content for a website are good critierias of choosing a CMS. And so are integration possiblities to other systems, e.g. web analytics, testing & targeting. I was little bit surprised when Felippe Jaramillo showed Aplyca's contribution: eZ Google Website Optimizer extension.

With this extension A/B and multivariate testing is very easy to do. But I do have to agree with Felippe that technical implementation is not the issue, there are more or less problems with defining "the right" conversion and creating valuable hypothesis/scenarios.

There was also other interesting topics like CMIS (content management interoperability services). I actually saw a demo of eZ Alfresco extension and how they pulled a document from Alfresco and published it via eZ Publish. Isn't that great? If you're interested, you can download all eZ Conference presentations here.