Kentico Connections Prague 2024

And that's a wrap for Kentico Connections 2024 in Prague. What a week it has been. It's such an amazing sight and feeling to have 70+ partners from all over Europe together to connect and get a first glimpse of Kentico's vision of the market and its future.

In this recap I will summarize my experience at this amazing event, but first I want to express my gratitude towards Kentico for the immaculate organization of the event. Rockstars like Eva Palbuchtova , Iveta Pari , and Veronika Matou?ková run this event like true bosses!

Day one kicked off with an opening talk by Dominik Pinter showcasing some of the biggest trends our market currently faces and how they affect our business. Consolidation, for example, can affect a business from several angles like having the need to downsize the number of tools an organization leverages to create uniform customer experiences across all channels. With these trends, Dominik made a strong case with Xperience by Kentico and how the product helps businesses to navigate these challenges.

Debbie Tucek then took the stage and shared how Xperience by Kentico supports businesses in leveraging personalized, automated, and AI-powered experiences. Using a real-life scenario in which most of us participated, Debbie showcased the power of Xperience by Kentico across different channels. All the spoilers heading up to the event suddenly made complete sense.

Luckily for us, Debbie brought her Dream Team with her. First up was Martin Králík with an exciting update on AIRA and how this AI-capability will support marketers in their day-to-day business. David Komárek really got my marketing blood flowing with his presentation on how to grow usage of digital marketing capabilities along with your business. In previous versions, digital marketing was separated into different apps. Today, you are prompted to create automation as you are working on a campaign or landing page. Lord David Slavík showed us how Xperience by Kentico leverages taxonomy and reusable field schemas to support content reusability.

After the lunch break it was my time to shine together with fellow MVP Jeroen Fürst . Our talk was based on the challenges of Kentico Xperience 13 in setting up a multichannel campaign and how this scenario is handled in Xperience by Kentico. We also showed how you could use a challenge like content modelling to bridge the gap between development and business and grow more mutual understanding working out a successful model together. I have great hope that next year, someone will continue the new tradition.

Liam Goldfinch took us on a quick tour of integrating Shopify into Xperience by Kentico for shops that do e-commerce as a side-business. It's so much fun to see a strong technical mind present at the business track. To end the day, Dmitry Bastron gave a nice talk about migration tools and the positive effect that it has on time to market. It's incredible to see the advantages the migration tool delivers not only for previous Kentico versions, but also for migrating from other vendors to Xperience by Kentico. Resources not spent on the migration can be leveraged to increase your customer experience.

The night ended with a nice tour by boat showing Prague by night. I really enjoyed the conversations I had on the boat with other partners. Who knew that being stuck on a boat could evoke such great networking.

Day two started with a licensing update by Ben Franklin and James Turner . The key takeaway is that Kentico has listened to the partner feedback on the licensing model and made some sensible changes to it. This simpler approach to license costs helps partners to better match their client needs in a model that makes more sense.

Leave it to Patrik Barto? to make a partner portal sexy again. The revamping of the portal is well on its way and is going to create a better experience for each type of professional. Another showcase of Kentico’s drive to do better every day and support their partners to succeed.

One of the topics that got the most exposure in the past months is the Sales certification. With all the attention that got on LinkedIn, you would imagine that every partner already had that in their pocket. For those that missed the certification completely, James and Lukas Bajer offered the opportunity to get certified on the spot.

And then it was Debbie’s turn again with the slide we were all waiting for: the roadmap. Instead of taking the usual route, Debbie took us on an amazing journey into the future of Xperience by Kentico. Without stealing her thunder, I can say that as a marketer I left absolutely thrilled with the glimpse into the future she gave us. Spot on!

After that journey into the near future, it was time to head towards the roundtables. I had the honor to present the roundtable: Customer journeys, personalization and insights; What actually matters to your clients and their business? Together with Vaclav Novak , Alessio Farina , Anton Permyakov , Igor Kytka , Jonathan Henault , Benjamin Biot , and Dave we discussed the maturity level of clients and the state of digital marketing usage amongst our clients. What stood out is that a business either is very digital savvy and leverages multiple features like automation and personalization or they have no clue and rely on us as partners to guide them in their digital maturity growth. There’s room within the partner landscape to improve in the effectiveness with which guide our clients to a next level of digital maturity. Moments like these make me proud to work for a partner that has had its focus on creating the best possible customer experience for a long time.

With the closing statements from Dominik and Debbie two days of Kentico Connections flew by. Can’t wait to start talking about the great stuff to come. However, we don’t want spoil the fun before the Connections event in Miami has taken place.

The only regret I have is that doing the business track made me miss loads on interesting technical presentations from Michael Eustace and Sean Wright for example. Aviva Solutions will publish a summary of the presentations including theirs soon.

Did you not get the chance to visit Kentico Connections? Reach out and I will happily share my impressions with you. For all that I did see and speak to: It was so much fun to be amongst friends to talk shop, have a beer, and share ideas. See you next year!