Kentico Connection 2015
This year’s Kentico Connection conference took place in the Reduta Theatre in the Czech Republic, where Mozart performed at the age of 11 in 1767.
Talk about history! How different life must have been for Mozart back then.
In 2015, all the talk was about digital – not a concern Mozart would have had at the top of his agenda in the 18th century.
Greg Williams, the Deputy Editor of Wired, opened proceedings with a bit of history himself. He showed a picture of the Apollo Guidance Computer that powered the first lunar landing in 1969 - a seventy-pound behemoth with a 0.043MHz processor, 64KB of memory and a cost of $150,000.
Contrast that with the ubiquitous smartphone we all carry around in our pockets now. The iPhone 6s weighs 143 grams, has a 1.4 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. That makes that thing in your pocket about 500,000 times more powerful than the computer that powered the first spacecraft to the moon. And it costs a mere $400 – that is staggering!
What is more staggering is the way digital is shaping and changing the world around us. As Petr Palas (CEO of Kentico) said in his opening address, it is no longer about ‘Using Digital’ as it was when Kentico started creating their content management platform 11 years ago. Now it is about ‘living digital’. There is no longer any separation between ‘bits’ and ‘atoms’. Digital is a part of everything we do in 2015.
This year’s Connection event was all about the pace of this change. We are living in a Digital Revolution. How does an organisation keep up with the rapid acceleration of technology? How does a business connect with their customers and deliver a service to them that the modern day customer has come to expect? How does a company harness the power of digital to ensure they are getting the most return on investment for their marketing budget?
One thing is sure, in an age where information is cheap and customer attention spans are short, organisations must be maximising on those fleeting interactions they have with customers, and to do that they need to ensure they are delivering the right message to those customers at the right time.
Kentico 9, which was launched at Connection, provides a toolkit to enable organisations to use digital channels effectively, and to intelligently build and deliver marketing campaigns to customers that will get better results.
A number of exciting new features are available in Kentico 9 that will help savvy organisations to deliver digital more intelligently. This includes an Integrated Campaign Management suite through which marketers will be able to build, understand and measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns.
For the geeks out there, the technical improvements include enhanced support for MVC, the ability to easily move content and data between different environments, improvements to modules – including the ability to deliver these via nuget and enhancements to web farm support enabling better scalability.
Connection 2015 provided an opportunity to hear the stories behind how organisations are using the product to help drive revenue and results, as well as a chance to meet the Kentico team and many of the people contributing to the growing Kentico community. They’re certainly a lively bunch, and it was a lot of fun!
And if you thought Elvis isn’t dead, you’re right. He’s alive and well, and apparently he’s been hiding in Brno in the Czech Republic. He came out for a rare appearance at the Kentico 9 launch party. Amazing!
