On Thursday October 21st, we organized our first Technical University. In collaboration with our colleagues of i8c, Integration Team and Archers we filled a full day with knowledge sharing.
The main goal of this day was to share technical knowledge and practical experiences from recent projects.
What projects are we doing for our clients? What new technology is coming our way? What cool new tools are we using? In short, we shared everything interesting we’re working on.
Next to the interesting technical aspect of the event, this day was the perfect opportunity for our team to finally (re)connect after a time with very limited face to face contact. The Tech University was the first big event with all employees of the i8c cluster. We even dare to say that connecting with our colleagues was (for once 😉 ) more important than the technical content!
We started the day with a business update delivered by Kristof Lievens, managing partner at i8c. The entire team was pleased to hear and see that we are a healthy business with a steady growth, both in revenue and profit. Gradually we are taking over the integration landscape in Belgium and beyond… 😉
Next, each of our competence centers presented a brief vendor update. It was very interesting to see how each vendor tries to differentiate its position in the market. There is clearly a common ground between the vendors but they each choose different routes to approach the market. Hybrid cloud and HIP are predominantly present in the roadmap of each vendor. IBM/Red Hat (of course ;-)), Apigee, Tibco, Microsoft, Software AG, Axway, WS02 and AWS were all presented. Feel free to contact us if you want to get more understanding of our view on the current market.
To finish up the morning sessions, our colleagues from Archers presented their view on the current and future status of Hybrid Integration Platforms (HIP). It is clear, the world of software integration is undergoing a tremendous change driven by cloud and hybrid challenges.
After these intense sessions, we could all use a nice lunch to get our energy levels back up. A light sandwich lunch was served which gave us the perfect chance to catch up with our colleagues. It has been far too long since we met in real life.
The afternoon was divided into four parallel tracks. In total, we covered 16 sessions which covered customer cases, technology, architecture, demonstrations, best practices… It was not easy to decide what session to follow out of so many interesting topics. It was nice to see that so many colleagues took the opportunity to share their stories. Some were a bit nervous to present but everybody did a good job. A big applause to all colleagues who presented! The small box of chocolates they got after the end of their presentations was always well deserved. 🙂
After all the deep technical content we believed it was time for a completely different closing session. Nigel Williams, a stand-up comedian, took the stage. It is nice to see that the team has a good sense of humor and enjoys a good laugh. Perfect closing for a perfect day. Also, nice to see that Nigel enjoyed it as well:
“Thanks for the wonderful gig yesterday at your Seminar, really nice and welcoming people! (and thanks for the chocolates 🙂 )”.
To close off the day we had a nice reception and dinner. Time for more talking and socializing!!
It was a long day, but it was very rewarding. Quite sure that this will not be a one-off event. What a great way to connect with our amazingly skilled team !
We also like to thank the people of the Elewijt Center for supporting us with the event. A big thank you !
