Blogs

 As some of you may know, Liferay decided earlier this year to make a strategic investment in growing the European market. To that end, Joseph Shum, our former Alliance Manager for North America, and myself have been traveling frequently to our offices in Frankfurt over the last six months. 

Liferay's first Italy Symposium. The venue was an
old church converted into a university lecture hall.

It's been a whirlwind for us, signing up new partners, meeting new customers, and organizing events throughout the EU. 

Here's a round up of some of the highlights from Europe: 

• In April we moved to our new offices in Eschborn, next to the Deutsche Börse (German Stock Exchange), Deutsche Bank, Vodafone, British Telecom and others. And we're hiring!
• In October we held our third annual Liferay European Symposium in Frankfurt. We had nine partner sponsors, over 300 attendees, and a full two-day, two-track program with participation from the Liferay team worldwide.
• We held our first Liferay Italy Symposium Nov 12 near Venice, with over 150 sign ups and participation from several Liferay customers in Italy. Many universities in Italy are invested in Liferay as well as recognized brands like Benetton and Danone. 
• We held our first Liferay Workshop in London in July 2010. The half day session brought over 50 participants, including Marcin Kierdelowicz, our new Alliance Manager for the UK. We also hired Ruth Coca, also based in London, as a Consultant. 
• Our Hungarian and Spanish offices continue to grow. More office space, new furniture, and new engineers means better products for our eco-system and better support for our EE subscribers.  
• We are seeing enormous traction for Liferay in this market, including manufacturing, financial services, insurance, education, and public administration. 
• Liferay participated in the Open Source Conference in Amsterdam last week. Over 450 people in attendance learned about Liferay's commitment to open source and the advantages of being investor-free. 
• Liferay participated as a Gold Sponsor at the JAX Conference in Mainz, where I was able to share in my keynote about the history of Liferay as a company and some of the lessons we've learned buidling a commercial open source company. 

Of course during that same time we held several other conferences worldwide, including our East Coast Symposium in Reston near DC in June and our West Coast Symposium in Anaheim in September. We also had our first Tokyo Seminar in July. 

This year's European Symposium drew over 300 attendees!

Meanwhile, Paul Hinz, our CMO, and our marketing and sales teams have been hitting the road with our Liferay Road Show series, giving our community the opportunity to meet Liferay face to face throughout the US. We'll be holding these events throughout the year in 2011 and extending them to the EU as well. 

And if you just can't make it out to one of these events, you can always join Liferay for our Liferay LIVE events online!