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We had a phenomenal turn out for this year's Liferay West Coast Symposium, our annual community and customer conference. Our North America marketing and events team, led by Cecilia Lam, put together a fantastic event filled with valuable business and technical insights, including performance tuning information, business case studies, customization training, and opportunities to meet and talk with the Liferay team. 

Amazing turnout for the Liferay West Coast Symposium 2009

Some significant milestones for this event: 

• We enjoyed our first West Coast event away from headquarters, at the Marriott Suites in Anaheim
• We had nearly 150 people in attendance at our first paid-for event in a tight economy
• We presented five amazing customer solution stories (case studies), including presentations from Intuit Corporation, Sesame Workshop, Monster Energy Drinks, NBA Stock Exchange, and Product Partners

It's incredible to witness the rapid growth of Liferay as we enter our sixth year of business and our tenth year of product development. Over 2.5 million product downloads, a conservative estimate of 250,000 Liferay production deployments, 25,000 community members measured by website registration alone, and hundreds of enterprise customers makes Liferay the independent leader in open source portals, content, and collaboration software. 

Attendees had many opportunities to connect with the Liferay team.

We had a strong mix of longstanding Liferay users and new entrants to the Liferay eco-system, and I had a chance to meet several customers, partners, and community members, including: 

• An entrepreneur forming a new startup using Liferay to create a solution for the health care industry
• A community member that works in the research division of a leading auto manufacturer that gave up on Websphere Portal after struggling with it for a year and went to production on Liferay instead
• A new Liferay implementation partner whose staff includes a committer to the Spring framework

What I proposed through my keynote address was confirmed in speaking with these community members: that Liferay is the best platform you can use to combine enterprise app integration, user management, UI & presentation, and content, collaboration, and social networking capabilities to build business solutions. There are so many different ways people are using Liferay, and more importantly, they're using Liferay to drive new revenue, reduce costs, and accelerate business processes. 

Nate Cavanaugh presenting the amazing new AlloyUI meta-framework.

Feedback from the Symposium was overwhelmingly positive: 

• "All of us from [customer] enjoyed the opportunity to network with Liferay staff and learn how other companies use your product and what's on the horizon.  It was especially good for me to be able to finally put a face with a name of so many of you who I've interacted with over the past few years via phone and email." Liferay Retail customer
  
  
• "Everyone was so helpful at the symposium.  We received helpful suggestions for a few showstoppers we encountered, and we are working on trying them out.  The face-to-face experience is a real time-saver.  You have a great team!" Liferay academic sector community member
  
  
• "Thanks for a wonderful conference!  It was great to meet your team to such a great extent, great to see your thoughts, and upcoming system enhancements, and to see some of your users, and what they have done with Liferay.  We all had a fantastic time, and I myself learned a ton." Liferay higher education customer
  
  
• "I didn’t get a chance to meet you and thank you for the great Liferay Symposium this past week in Anaheim.  The sessions were awesome and I’m especially interested to see how the marketplace plays out.  Thank you and the LR team!" Liferay higher education community member
  
  
• "At #liferay WCS, a larger-than-expected turnout, a bunch of solid sessions on making best use of the portal." Ray Valdes, Gartner analyst, via Twitter
  
  
• "Liferay Symposium 09—ridiculous value—tuning and approach. Demos were invaluable—5.3 features OFF THE CHARTS—run Oracle run" Chris Stavros, LEVEL Studios consultant and community member, via Twitter

There's a real, tangible excitement and passion that the Liferay community brings to these events. People love what Liferay can do to help them run their organizations more efficiently, connect people with each other, and unleash the latent value in their communities.

Thank you again to everyone who attended and worked together to make the West Coast Symposium an overwhelming success!