Just back from the eZ conference in London, I’d like to share some impressions about my journey through the open source world.
Keynote - Commitment to Open Source but Enterprise StyleeZ Systems CEO Gaby Viebach presented a quite ambitious vision to take the open source company and become a business empowerment platform. She presented several use cases that should take the company from their current publishing focus all the way towards enabling true digital business models. She continued by highlighting a clear commitment to the open source community and given the dialogues I had, everybody was very happy to hear that message. Since the company had a bumpy ride in the last years with leadership changes, this was an important message to deliver. What I liked the most was the real-life language used by her, which the audience also seemed to appreciate.Beautiful Social DialoguesI was asked to present on the business track and given the typical tech-audience on such an open source event, I was positively surprised to find a full room of business users with a fair share of executives present. See the slides below or watch the video from a presentation I gave at TEDx (although my presentation at the eZ Conference was more hands-on).All the Gurus It was an interesting experience to see some of the gurus in the industry. While I didn’t understand a single word presented by Rasmus Lerdorf and Derick Rethans, the former being the creator of PHP and both core members of the PHP team, I spoke to Nicolas, Director Community at eZ, who gave me his 2 cents and judging by the spark in his eyes, I could see he was happy. Don’t miss his perspective on the event.Highlight KeynoteMy personal highlight was Tony Wood, Founder and CEO, Vision with Technology, when he asked us to let all the tired people sleep and showed us a method he has invented to get into their subconsciousness. His keynote was also the most entertaining while he delivered great insights from his 9 years implementing eZ Publish.
We are the Community
While I am at the beginning to understand what eZ is all about, I have to give a huge applause to the crowd they keep. I spoke to executives, employees, partners, customers and all sorts of community members (they have 40,000+ community members). And the common pattern among the dialogues was the deep commitment to the cause and the great openness and friendliness among the community. They are really living up to their “we are open” claim highlighted by Gaby in her keynote. This was also reflected in Nicolas' session on Innovation and Open-source within the eZ Community.
When I spoke to Christof, Product Manager of eZ and our Markus, both pointed me to the keynote from Margaret Ann Dowling of Marquard Media Hungary with the quote: “Margaret impressed us by showing the potential benefits of content management technologies for multichannel publications to deliver in different formats to many target groups.” … what I found out too late, was that the Playboy was used as the example.
Much MoreI could only capture a fraction of the activities, therefore here a few links and comments. If you have more, let me know and I will add them over time.
As a little extra I got to enjoy London again after being here some weeks ago to visit a Eric Clapton concert. Looks like the city has some impact on me already.Full Discolsure: ifridge & Company has been asked to support eZ with strategic positioning and go-to-market. We are in the early stage of this project but you should know that there is a commercial relationship.
