Finally after a few years, there’s a in person version of the Kentico event of the year: Connection. And my first visit to Connection as a MVP is extra special because I had the opportunity to do not only a talk but also to moderate the panel discussion that closed day one of this two day event.
Kentico Connection is the annual event for Kentico partners, clients and digital marketing enthusiasts to enjoy an exiting line-up of speakers, get the latest insights on the future of Kentico and its products, and share ideas and thoughts through networking.
Dominik Bader did an excellent job as moderator for day 1 introducing the sessions and gluing the program together with his charismatic demeanor. His very first introduction was non other than Dominik Pinter, the CEO of Kentico to officially open Connection. He took the audience through the vision of Kentico and its latest SaaS solution Xperience by Kentico. Demonstrating the importance of the partner community and to provide a spoiler of the new licensing model. Dominik also introduced Bill Cunningham as the new CRO to further support Kentico’s ambition to claim the marketspace as the best hybrid headless solution vendor. Bill made in clear in no mistakable fashion that Kentico is doubling down on SaaS.
Kenote speaker Frans Riemersma took us on a eye opening ride into understanding true customer value based on knowing the answer to your clients happiness. Being able to understand what really makes your client happy will allow you to create better solutions, leverage the right technology and prevent you from going done the rabbit hole of endless bug fixing trying to satisfy your customer. The way he leverages data through experience and Martechmap.com is absolutely mind blowing.
Tim Walters treated us to a unique parallel between zombies, Top Gun and the things your business needs in order to build trust in your target market. Never knew that fighting the walking dead would provide such powerful insights to the daily practice of enterprise businesses. His almost analytical approach to define trust as a concept provided useful insights which many of us will reuse within their own organizations.
After the keynotes, it was time to focus more on the Kentico specific aspects of Connection. Lukas Bajer, Lead Training Specialist at Kentico took us on a demo of the new Kbank environment. Its clean UX and lightning fast performance is an absolute joy. During his short demo, Lukas was able to demonstrate the ease of use of personalization across all of the different channels. This hands on approach to one of the most powerful digital marketing features available is an absolute gamechanger.
Director of Product Debbie Tuček delivered her long anticipated talk about the vision of the new Xperience by Kentico product and its roadmap. This new SaaS solution was launched in an early stage to allow Kentico to stake their claim on the cloud market. The entire Kentico organization has worked extremely hard to deliver on their multisite and multilingual update days before Connection, which immediately took Xperience by Kentico to its next level. The challenge for Kentico with the introduction of the new product is the success and huge feature stack of the old flagship product Kentico Xperience 13. This created a sort of vertigo for partners in which they tended to postpone true adoption of the new product until a reached a more mature state. In her talk Debbie made the roadmap crystal clear, dividing the roadmap into dedicated features and possibilities that are being looked at as potential development candidates. The roadmap, available at roadmap.kentico.com, now demystifies future progress and capability allowing partners to plan their projects accordingly.
Looking at the roadmap, I especially appreciate the structured fashion in which Kentico has planned the growth of the product with loads of exciting capabilities to come.
And then it was my turn to tap into the possibilities for partners to align their business along with the Kentico roadmap. Whilst some partners still seem to be stuck on comparing Xperience by Kentico to Kentico Xperience 13, it was my goal to show how partners can actually benefit from the growth still to come within Xperience by Kentico. Diving into the world of better user experiences for your customers by leveraging its digital marketing features requires a shift in mindset and digital maturity growth from the partners side. Starting now would coincide nicely with the feature delivery in the upcoming 18 months. Using the DEMM Calculator (Digital Experience Maturity Model) is a great way to start structurizing your conversations on digital growth with your customers. Judging from the amount of questions after my talk this message seem to resonate with them.
To prove that switching to the new Xperience by Kentico platform is not just a farsight, Ondrej Noak presented us with some valuable key learnings from the first clients that are now on the new SaaS product. As Senior Customer Success Manager he is closely envolved, Kentico latest client FC Mainz being no exception. To see large football clubs choose Xperience by Kentico is a testament to its value and capabilities to deliver immersive user experiences.
This concluded the presentations for day 1. With the audience already anticipating the infamous end of day one party, the last session on the roster was the panel discussion on the future of websites and multichannel. It was my honor to moderate this discussion with a diverse group of professionals. The panel consisted of Jan Havel as founder of Actum Digital, Jenda Perla as VP Marketing at Kentico and Michal Rybář as Web Manager at Kommercni Bank. The mix having a client, a partner and a vendor provided insights from different angles. After touching on topics like AI to render all marketers useless, the amount of channels a business can have, maintain and monitor the panel discussion came to an end. With that, day one was a wrap.
The day one party took place at the Moravian Gallery in Brno where we all got the opportunity to take a selfiechino crafted by a coffee robot. As the party came to an end, it was time for the afterparty and for some even an after after party. It’s always great fun to have a drink with fellow Kentico-enthusiasts. VP of Sales Petr Klouda elevated the party to another level by introducing a hilarious Czech drinking challenge that required some skill. Some sweaters will never be the same…
The second day featured a strong mix of both business and technical tracks. It was a great opportunity for the technical MVP’s to share their knowledge and experience on Xperience by Kentico. First up was Dmitry Bastron, Solutions Architect at Byteminds, on the importance of advanced tracking within the platform now as well as in Xperience by Kentico.
Liam Goldfinch, Senior Systems Developer at Netconstruct had a great talk on the extensibility of Kentico and a hands on guide on how to create custom modules in Xperience by Kentico. His talk showed that with the new product Kentico has kept true to their flexibility philosophy.
Closing the day was up to MVP Jeroen Fürst, Software Architect at Truelime, with his talk on the Xperience by Kentico infrastructure and specifically how to tap into the strategic advantages that the new SaaS offering provides. He demonstrated how to seamlessly integrate release pipelines in both full SaaS as well as Self-managed.
Meanwhile, the business track day 2 was kicked off by Debbie Tuček with a deepdive into all of the details of the new SaaS-model. She provided a clear walkthrough of the different tiers, the user interface with all of its capabilities and the level of service Kentico provides with Xperience by Kentico.
Benjamin Franklin, VP Channel Growth at Kentico, followed straight after with a breakdown of the new licensing model for Xperience by Kentico based on channels. With the new philosophy of Xperience by Kentico creating multichannel experiences becomes a reality. Reusing content within a headless channel, an email channel, or in a mobile app is now available for Kentico clients using Xperience by Kentico. The new model will focus on the amount of channels you need, rather than copying other vendors that are on a consumption based model. This underlines Kentico’s desire to be both transparent and predictable when it comes to pricing. Surprisingly, e-commerce was not mentioned as a separate channel. Leading to the question that this may be seen as a feature when it comes available? Another detail that stood out was the introduction of microchannels of which a limited number will be included in each license tier. The exact definition of these microchannels remained unclear. Hopefully this will be announced on short notice.
With the new Content Hub a new approach to creating, storing and reusing content is needed. To use the Content Hub to its full potential, the art of content modeling has become more important than ever. Lukas Bajer showed all the valuable lessons learned whilst building the new Kbank demo site. Running through the most common pitfalls and providing important isights in how to optimally leverage global personalization through your content model implementation.
Mysterious Mr. Product delivered a lighthearted insight into some of the things Kentico will never commit to, offering a teasing preview of capabilities that may be available in Xperience by Kentico in the future. In turn, David Slavík, Ondrej Henek, Martin Králík, and Dave Komarek previewed on topics like AI, data protection, and future (never committed) capabilities. Curious about what these are? Keep an eye out for the recording, its worth it.
Last business track of the day belonged to Martin Doležal and Martin Jonas from Actum Digital on their running work on the Bolton Adhesives project. In the vertigo of switching flagship products, Actum created a way on Kentico Xperience 13 to get Bolton as close to the future Content Hub as possible. With its global scale, Bolton Adhesives is an interesting showcase of Kentico capabilities. I particularly liked to the design update Actum delivered. Fresh, recognizable and providing a better user experience for visually impaired visitors.
Looking back, this was an exceptionally well organized Connection event with a high number of attendees both from partners as from Kentico. A big thanks to everybody involved with making this event great. The timing was right too. I think that partners needed a clear understanding of the vision of Kentico, the roadmap, and how Xperience by Kentico fits within the DXP landscape.
I can’t wait to meet the Kentico community, the great people within the Kentico organization, and my fellow Kentico MVP’s again. Until next time!