Lars Fløe Nielsen

Uh, I know I promised to report from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2007, - also during process. But to be honest, I have not had the time to do so.

We’ve been clogged at the Sitecore gold sponsor booth with hundreds of visitors. Potential partners, potential customers, business analysts, Microsoft staffs, - and from all over the world. Here's a picture of the booth BEFORE it opened.

This year the majority of the Sitecore booth staff came from our US office, while we still had channel managers from both UK, Nederland, Denmark, International sales, and naturally from the corporation also, running up to a total of 14 staff members, plus two very charming greeters. At times all 14 members was fully occupied, and some even with more than one visitor. Here some of us are walking the streets of Denver in search of a restaurant.

Personally I have not had time to participate in any labs or sessions, even though there were a few I would love to have seen. In the other hand, I have been talking to so many interesting and clever people ranging from major corporations like Microsoft, to smaller specialized companies. They did have one thing in common though (despite their obvious great relationship to Microsoft); they all knew directly where to position themselves. For us, this means a more qualified visitor.

In the evenings, - all of them, I’ve been at various events; Danish partner event, global partner event, booth events etc. Here’s a picture from our Danish event, - the directors speaking from a stair to the crowd.

What's the Microsoft message? 

The message from Microsoft, - both Ballmer and everyone else this year was Software plus Services (for example, they launch a hosted edition of Dynamics CRM named Live CRM) and that partners should focus on selling the software that was released last year. Nothing new software though, except their Microsoft surface (http://www.microsoft.com/surface/) which looks so overly cool, and demos that well, but which I really have a hard time see fit elsewhere than Las Vegas casinos. For example, would you be using a travel planner with the size of a table instead of your mobile phone?

Anyways, - I hope to get home now and get a chance to absorb all the impressions. And, - hopefully blog more about it…

Sitecore will be attending at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference again this year. And just as last year, we will be sponsoring the event as a Gold sponsor together with Computer Associates, Citrix, Fujitsu, OnBase and Intel. It’s fun to see a company you have been part of forming suddenly appear on boards equally to these well-known companies.
Anyway, we’ll be around 10 people totally there whereas around half will be from our US offices.

Why am I there? I will participate as part of my job as the responsible of TP/ISV partnerships. I’m hoping to find potential technology partners which has software solutions that might directly plug in to our product (or vice versa). I also hope to talk to Microsoft employees who are working in within the “web sphere” and middleware, for example SaaS (or now Software and service), ISV Ecosystem, SharePoint, BizTalk etc.

Finally, as part of the evangelist team, I will support our exhibitor booth in case of technical questions.

You should come and visit us at booth 809. It should be hard to miss.