We just got back from our ninth annual Global Partner Conference in Boca Raton – what a great way to kick off the New Year! Especially in the warm 80 degrees weather as opposed to the stormy/wintery/snowy weather that has been happening every week here in Bedford!
Our Application Partners are very important to us, and this conference is our way of highlighting their great applications and ongoing participation in the Progress partner community. Their work extends the reach of our products even deeper into verticals that are near and dear to us. Our overall goal is to have our partners thrive and maintain success and we wanted them to connect and learn from each other at this week’s event.
At this year’s conference, we talked to many partners, including B&L Information Systems, Bluebird Auto Rental Systems, Franchise Technologies and others about their growth strategies for 2011 and how they have been able to focus on growth with the help of Progress tools. We love hearing success stories like these and will be bringing you some video content from various partners in the very near future.
We were also very excited to hear from QAD, Skyward, and VanMeijel about how OpenEdge BPM is helping them develop and deliver business process-enabled applications. These applications will give end users the capability to adjust and modify their business processes based on rapidly changing business and administrative needs.
Other key themes from the conference were integration and, once again, the Cloud. We heard from several speakers, including ZDNet’s Brian Sommer, Forrester’s John Rymer and others on some key integration best practices, how the industry is changing and speeding up overall, what it truly means to integrate your applications in the cloud, and how to communicate with new types of customers regarding their specific needs and solutions.
Finally, the conference would not have been complete without our annual awards ceremony, recognizing over 30 partners that were nominated based on their performance in the past year. Awards were given out in eight categories: Partner of the Year, Reseller of the Year, SaaS Excellence Award, Business Focus Award, Partner Collaboration Award, Fastest Growing Partner Award, Rising Star Award, and Innovator Award. Partner of the Year went to Epicor, an Elite Progress partner focused on the global Enterprise Software market.
We’ll be filling you in on more detail from specific sessions soon. Thanks again to all of our partners who attended the conference. We look forward to a great 2011!
Colleen Smith
Colleen Smith is Vice President, Customer Advocacy at Progress. In this role, she is responsible for ensuring customer focus and accountability for improving the company’s relationship with its customers and partners, as it relates to the use of Progress core products. Smith joined the company in 2005 with 20 years of enterprise software marketing, sales and product strategy experience, and has helped transform software companies into industry leaders, built strategic partnerships, designed acquisition strategies and moved companies through aggressive growth stages.