Normally my new year doesn’t officially start until I attend the Workfront Annual Kick-Off meeting in Las Vegas in early January, but this year was a little different. This year Workfront decided to bring us all home to Utah to gather and gain momentum for working together in 2020. The event itself covered a lot of ground and included a Partner Kick-off, Workfront's Company Kick-off, the Sales Kick-off, and the CX Summit. As a Workfront Partner, it felt very special to be invited to SLC to spend a few days together learning, sharing and inspiring each other to do our best work and to Work Boldly, which is the new focus and mantra of Workfront.

Every year I have the opportunity to travel to Kehl, Germany, to join my fellow DALIM professional colleagues from across the world at DALIM’s World Wide Technical Meeting. WWTM is not only an excellent opportunity to share ideas and network with my fellow engineers but allow DALIM the chance to share near term software releases and future concepts for their products. DALIM spends the first two days presenting their vision of the future of ES and TWIST then provide us with two days of intensive training on existing and soon to be released products.

This article, by Andrea Müller Beilschmidt, Director of Field Marketing at censhare, an IOI technology partner, originally appeared on the censhare Blog and we think our readers will find it interesting. For many consumers, the customer experience is now just as important to them as the product itself. * The customer experience then, can be key to a brand’s success. It can be the decider, making the difference between whether a brand is remembered or forgotten, seen as a one-time provider or as a brand to return to again and again, informing the customer's lifestyle, supporting their community, or furthering their values.

I have recently spent much time researching information on Tesla's new Cybertruck (yes, yes, I pre-ordered one, I'm that kind of guy.) The initial reaction to Tesla's latest offering was mostly negative but became more positive over time, as Matt Ferrell pointed out in his Undecided blog. Matt’s points made me think of how many times when introducing new systems I’ve encountered opposition to solutions I felt should be a slam dunk sell to the end-users. As integrators, we are, quite literally, in the business of change, and resistance to the optimizations of both workflow and introduction of automation is a natural part of that business. For the horror genre fans in the crowd, H.P. Lovecraft famously stated that "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

This article by Ola Norman, International Head of Sales at BrandMaster, an IOI technology alliance partner, provides information we think our readers will find interesting. The automotive industry is changing and customer buying patterns are shifting with the power of digital and visual experiences revolutionising the way customers, research and purchase their vehicles. According to Guy Schueller, Automotive Industry Director at Google, the reality is that today’s consumers interact more with a brand online than they do in person with 95% of vehicle buyers using digital as a source of information and twice as many starting their research online versus at a dealer.

For the past decade, we have seen cloud and SaaS-based technologies gain wide acceptance as viable enterprise solutions. The solution offerings are far and wide and can touch every department in an organization. With the explosion in digital content happening in parallel, marketing and creative operations managers have certainly seen a host of these solutions that help organize the vast amount of data they have to manage. Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions have emerged as the most effective way to manage this information, and we have watched these solutions become a core technology utilized by organizations large and small. Like all other business applications, Digital Asset Management (DAM) technologies have evolved to provide both on-premise and SaaS-based offerings. Each solution has a place, and we are going to take a look at the Pros & Cons to help you determine which is right for your organization.