On Sept. 28, we were pleased to announce our partnership with Akeneo, an open source PIM solution. If you don't know what a PIM is, read more.
To celebrate the partnership, Akeneo invited us to their 2016 Partner Summit in Nantes. Two weeks ago, a small delegation from PHPro gladly accepted the invitation and followed an interesting 2-day program.
Day 1 - The castle
The day began at Château des ducs de Bretagne with an opening address by Frédéric de Gombert, the co-founder and CEO of Akeneo. After his kick-off speech, the company's roadmap was shared. It was very interesting to see what Akeneo has planned.
The Akeneo Serenity Cloud Edition was one of the biggest announcements. It allows customers to enjoy a managed, cloud-based enterprise edition with automatic updates and will be available in September 2017. Of course, the familiar free and licensed edition will still be available.
We were also very excited about the idea of launching Akeneo certifications, similar to the Magento cerfiticate system. At PHPro, we invest a lot of time and resources to enable our developers to become experts in their field. We have the most certified Magento developers in Belgium and the goal is to have the same level of Akeneo expertise on our team.
In the afternoon, there were several presentations from Akeneo technology partners. We also had the honor of meeting one of the most prominent Akeneo members, Ziggy. Since she is difficult to handle, we had to go through https://ziggy.akeneo.com/ 1 before we could approach her. We talked about being the first Belgian partner and she immediately liked our way of working.
After meeting Ziggy, we were very excited to meet her again at the Royal Party at Akeneo headquarters. She told us that she always wanted to come to Belgium and travel home with us. We told her it was better for her health to stay at Akeneo headquarters and went back to the hotel.
Day 2 - The Akeneo headquarters
The second day was devoted to workshops. People could choose between functional, technical, sales or pre-sales workshops that suited their profile. Some of us attended the functional training on preparing e-merchandising and products with variations. Others participated in the sales workshops on the Akeneo extensions and ecosystem, and the tips and tools for your pre-sales journey. In the coming months, we will announce some exciting news about our own plans for building extensions. The first introductory calls between PHPro and Akeneo will take place as early as this week.
In the afternoon there was more than enough time for an interesting Q&A session. After these workshops, there was definitely a need for more. Therefore, we are inviting people from the Akademy to a 3-day functional training at PHPro. During this training they will teach us more about the Akeneo functionalities and we can dig even deeper than before.
Day 3 - Going home
While boarding, we immediately noticed our new friend Ziggy accompanying us on our flight back to Brussels. We tried to persuade her to stay in Nantes, but she told us that the partnership between PHPro and Akeneo was too strong and that she could not resist visiting the country with the best beers in the world.
Fortunately, we had no problem adopting and raising this three-headed, multi-channel animal. We showed her around the country, fed her, gave her a job ....
We can assure the people of Akeneo that she is safe and healthy. She has traveled almost all over our (and really small) country and will be returning home soon.