March Madness and Episerver: Ascend Recap

 Another successful Episerver Ascend is in the books. The annual user conference comprised of more than 600 digital marketers and commerce leaders from the North American Episerver community concluded last week.

 Ascend featured nearly 100 sessions across six separate and comprehensive persona-based tracks, including hands-on labs, customer led presentations, and product and industry expert discussions. Among the attendees were customers, partners, industry analysts, Episerver executives, and potential clients, who all converged upon Las Vegas February 26-March 1 and were treated to a 'what's next' for digital commerce and digital marketing.

 The Episerver Digital Experience Cloud? combines content, commerce, multi-channel marketing and predictive analytics in a single platform to work full-circle for businesses online – from intelligent optimization and lead-generation through to conversion and repeat business – with unprecedented ease-of-use. These elements were key themes throughout the conference.

 Some of my personal highlights included:

•  Rightpoint being named Episerver’s Premium Partner of the Year, a true recognition of our commitment to our partnership and accelerated growth over the past 12 months
• Seeing the rise of Big Data and how Episerver is supporting it – Episerver’s new Perform product makes great use of all the data it can get its hands on to deliver personalized experiences and forthcoming products like Episerver Advance and Episerver Insight are sure to take that to the next level.
• One of the most packed sessions all week was a joint Rightpoint and Episerver presentation that highlighted our new Power BI integration – the room was so full people were sitting on the floor!
• Among other topics was the non-surprise that Episerver has no plans to discontinue the Ektron CMS, and customers can rely on Episerver to support Ektron.
• The parties, obviously, the parties – you could feel the excitement that the whole community has around the platform and its market momentum – did you know that Episerver is now the only Microsoft-based CMS that is rated as a Leader by both Gartner and Forrester? That’s impressive.

 While spending more than 2-3 days in Vegas can really wear you down, continuing to build new relationships, learning about advances in the platform, and spending quality time with your peers makes Episerver Ascend a must-attend event each year. I’m already looking forward to Ascend 2018, how about you? Hat tip to my friend and partner Jon Kee for contributing to this recap.