Connect Amsterdam 2018: Full Schedule

8:15am CET

Doors Open: Coffee & Registration

Doors open at 8:15am to grab your badge, a coffee and take a seat in the arena!

Thursday November 15, 2018 8:15am - 9:00am CET
Expo Floor

9:00am CET

Keynote: Raj de Datta, BloomReach CEO

Join BloomReach CEO Raj de Datta for the opening keynote of Connect Amsterdam!

Speakers

Raj de Datta

CEO, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 9:00am - 9:30am CET
Amsterdam stage

Keynotes

9:30am CET

Gartner Analyst Mick MacComascaigh: Digital Experience Orchestration

Digital Experience Orchestration: The promise of “human interactions performed digitally” and the need for a DXP to get you there.

''Digital Experience'' is currently one of the most hyped terms in the context of engaging target audiences effectively. And yet, for many, there continues to be a chasm between the associated promise and the often grim reality. A digital experience platform will help you bridge this gap. In this talk, Gartner analyst Mick MacComascaigh describes what constitutes a DXP, what trends you need to consider AND what best practices you should observe on the path to realizing the promise of an effective digital presence for your organization.

Speakers

Mick MacComascaigh

Research VP and Lead Analyst for Web Content Management, Gartner

Thursday November 15, 2018 9:30am - 10:00am CET
Amsterdam stage

Keynotes

10:00am CET

Customers the Day After Tomorrow: Winning Customers in a World of AI, Bots and Automation

Steven is a thoughtleader on the transformation of customer relationships and the future of marketing, which is evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first business. He is an expert in inspiring companies to become true customer-centric organizations in this high-speed digital world. He is a popular speaker at home and abroad, having given keynotes in over 30 countries around the world. In his keynote, Steven takes his audience on a journey to the world of modern customer relationships and how to win customers in a world of AI, bots and automation, in a clever, enthusiastic and inspiring way.

Speakers

Steven van Belleghem

Keynote speaker, Keynote speaker

Thursday November 15, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am CET
Amsterdam stage

Keynotes

10:30am CET

Coffee Break sponsored by SKAVA

Join us for a break and some refreshments.

Thursday November 15, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am CET
Expo Floor

Networking

11:00am CET

FC Bayern Munich: Fan Engagement & Innovation

FC Bayern Munich has one of the largest fanbases in the world, and you don't change club so it should be easy, right? But with increasing availability of digital content like Netflix, find out what makes the experience so great for those fans, what Bayern Munich have learned and where are they heading in the future.

Speakers

Benjamin Stoll

Head of Digital Strategy, Platforms & Innovation, Bayern Munich

Benjamin is the Head of digital strategy, platforms & innovation at FC Bayern Munich. He is also the founder of the consulting firms ‘Digithalamus’ and ‘the missing piece’, who specialize in strategies, solutions and creating value for a digital world. Previously, Benjamin... Read More →

Thursday November 15, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am CET
Amsterdam stage

Innovation Track

11:00am CET

Tech Track Kick-off & 2018 MVP Awards

This year we are kicking off the main tech track with a celebration of the Most Valuable Participant of the BloomReach community during the MVP awards. We are looking for exceptional opinion leaders devoted to helping the community to understand and use BloomReach products and technologies.
Find out more and nominate yourself - or someone else - for the MVP Award before Nov 9th.

The kick-off is also the place to learn what's new for developers and which of the other sessions in the tech tracks will go more into them more in-depth. A session you don't want to miss!

Thursday November 15, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am CET
Wenen Stage

Tech Track

11:00am CET

Starplayers of the Community - Medley of Awesome Innovations - for MVP's & others

Limited Capacity filling up

Are you a community contributor or want to know what it takes to become the next developer MVP? Join this talk in the Ajax Locker Room, for Star players only, to celebrates the best developments in the Community. For example: learn how to integrate the CMS with Google Assistant, use AWS image APIs and dockerize a CMS projects including Hotswap. Did I mention that setting up the CMS in a Kubernetes cluster is easy?

LIMITED: Access to this session is only available via sign-up through Sched (this program tool) and for 2017 and 2018 MVP's. Seats are limited.

INSTRUCTIONS: We gather at the BloomReach booth on the Connect zone at 11:30am after which we will walk down to the Locker room. The whole experience takes about 45 -60 minutes.

Speakers

Luis Lemos

Software Engineer / Trainer, BloomReach

Kenan Salic

Solution Architect, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 11:00am - 11:45am CET
Locker Room

Interactive Track

11:30am CET

Customer Experience: Not as Hard as You Think

In this session, Ivo Bronsveld will act as your coach in a press conference setting, sharing the common pitfalls to should avoid when using or starting to use content in your commerce environment to improve your customer experience. Next to that, he will showcase what a successful customer experience looks like using the recently launched BloomReach DXP for Commerce solution.

Speakers

Nate Barad

Head of Product Marketing, BloomReach

Ivo Bronsveld

Director of Product Innovation, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm CET
Amsterdam stage

Innovation Track

11:30am CET

Content & Commerce: The CIO Challenge

As a CIO or technical decision maker in commerce, you will ultimately be facing the challenge of bringing content and commerce together. Why is this such a difficult challenge? Because in theory, the solution seems easy…

Join Mark Blockhuys (CTO & Director Consulting of Osudio) and Steven Fockema (Commercetools) to learn from a successful collaboration in building an agile commerce platform.

Speakers

Mark Blockhuys

CTO & Director Consulting, Osudio

Menno Pijpers

Business Development Manager, Commercetools

Thursday November 15, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm CET
Belgrado Stage

Tech Track

11:30am CET

Scale Up Your Dev Teams with BloomReach Experience Manager 13.0

Do you have separate dev teams that want to build and deploy sites independently? BloomReach Experience Manager 13.0 can support this! Come learn when to do it, how it works, and how it affects the daily code-test-deploy workflow. Safely reuse code and config between teams, without conflicts! Redeploy specific channels without retesting the world! And more!

Speakers

Peter Centgraf

Platform Teamlead of BloomReach Experience, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm CET
Wenen Stage

Tech Track

12:00pm CET

Customize the CMS with Open UI

Customization of the UI is among others tricky because it makes upgrading your project a pain. Open UI provides a standardized framework to extend the CMS with e.g. pixel tracking, SEO, typo detection and other 3rd party tools.

Speakers

Matthijs den Burger

Product Software Engineer, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm CET
Belgrado Stage

Developer Track

12:00pm CET

GrandVision: Using Digital to Enable Customer Experience Innovation

How GrandVision is using digital to enable customer experience innovation for over 30 brands and 44 countries.

GrandVision, is a global leader in optical & eyecare retailing, with 30 different retail brands in 44 countries including Pearle, Eyewish, Vision Express, GrandOptical, Apollo Optik etc. Grandvision has an innovative approach and ambitious strategic vision to delight its customers. Join their Chief Digital Officer to get insight into how this multi-country multi-brand retail organization is driving digital & omni-channel transformation at scale, while keeping a sharp focus on customer experience.

Speakers

Kunal Chakraborty

Chief Digital Officer, GrandVision

Thursday November 15, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm CET
Amsterdam stage

Innovation Track

12:00pm CET

NHS Digitals Journey with BloomReach Experience – a Technical Perspective

See how NHS Digital uses BloomReach Experience as the CMS and BloomReach onDemand v1 as the choice of hosting platform. Graham Dodsworth, Solution Expert at NHS Digital, shares all the technical aspects of their journey such as the software development life cycle, CI, security, testing and monitoring of performance.

Speakers

Graham Dodsworth

Solution Expert, NHS Digital

Thursday November 15, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm CET
Wenen Stage

Tech Track

12:30pm CET

Lunch

Please join us for lunch and fun activities on the expo floor or head outside for a picture on the Ajax field!

Thursday November 15, 2018 12:30pm - 1:30pm CET
Expo Floor

Networking

1:30pm CET

Integrating Spring Boot Applications Headless with BloomReach Experience Manager

Recently, BloomReach released the SPA++ support. You can use the same feature to also integrate with other application frameworks such as Spring Boot. Together with a powerful and experimental proxy service it will make the integration with the channel manager easier and it will support all the Experience features such as drag-and-drop components, editing component parameters and even relevance without any specific code in your Spring Boot application. Using this feature, you can implement your projects using all the advantages of a microservices architecture, but still manage it from the BloomReach Experience Platform.

Speakers

Kenan Salic

Software Engineer, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm CET
Belgrado Stage

Developer Track

1:30pm CET

Fireside Chat with Moritz Zimmerman

Get warm by the fire with SAP Customer Experience CTO Moritz Zimmerman and BloomReach CTO of brX Arjé Cahn for a personal chat on navigating through the technology space as founders of technology companies, the trend of monolithic platforms versus microservices and what innovations from customers they're excited about and you should absolutely pay attention to!

Speakers

Arjé Cahn

CTO of BloomReach Experience and co-founder of Hippo, BloomReach

Arjé is the brains behind BloomReach Experience. He has a record of building groundbreaking software in his role as co-founder and CTO of Hippo CMS, which is regularly recognized by top analyst firms for its technological excellence. He has earned his stripes in the open-source world... Read More →

Moritz Zimmerman

CTO SAP Customer Experience, SAP Hybris

Moritz is a technology enthusiast. Disruptive tech has been the cornerstone of his life. He is one of the co-founders of hybris Software, which they brought to life right out of university in 1997. The company was acquired by SAP in 2013, and Moritz has contributed to SAP Hybris becoming... Read More →

Thursday November 15, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm CET
Amsterdam stage

Innovation Track

1:30pm CET

Bringing ML to Content - Search Intelligence

Whether for internal or external use cases, search is a fundamental capability of a content-centric technology. Join this tech talk to learn all about how BloomReach is applying machine learning to it's content search.

Speakers

Gijs Hendrix

Product Manager, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm CET
Wenen Stage

Tech Track

2:00pm CET

N Hidden Gems in Apache Jackrabbit and BloomReach Forge

Sure, you've been using Hippo CMS for a long time, but I'll bet you don't know all its secrets. In this talk you'll learn some of the hidden, overlooked (or not-well-documented) features of Hippo Forge and Open Source Software commons, and ways that you can reduce your effort in managing your CMS platform by leveraging some of these features. More specifically, this session will introduce some useful Hippo Forge module features such as Hippo Forge Utilities, Content-EXIM REST APIs, View Templating Support module, Page Flow module, and more.

Speakers

Woonsan Ko

Principal Solution Architect, BloomReach

A Principal Solution Architect at BloomReach with long experience in software development. He develops BloomReach Experience Delivery tier Framework, CRISP API, SPA++ and contributes to many other projects. He also writes documentations including those available online. He helps people... Read More →

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm CET
Wenen Stage

Developer Track

2:00pm CET

What's New for Users: Learn About the Latest Tools Available for You

How to get the absolute most out of the tools you have, or a preview into the possibilities that AI-driven site search, merchandising and content management can bring your business. Learn why new and improved work-flow brings the best experience available to your most valuable customers, and why merchandising is widely successful when real people control your power-pages and AI takes care of the rest.

Speakers

Clint Burgess

Product Marketing, BloomReach

John Field

Dir. of Product Marketing, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm CET
Amsterdam stage

Innovation Track

2:00pm CET

Roundtable Discussion: Next Generation Digital Experience Platform

The Next Generation Digital Experience Platform is all about Microservices: Small, but mighty.

What's the big deal about services so small? Join a panel of experts from technology providers SKAVA, Elastic Path and implementation agency Authentic, as we discuss the promise of microservices and why teams are just beginning to apply them to significant projects. Bring questions you would like the group to discuss.

Moderators

Nate Barad

Head of Product Marketing, BloomReach

Speakers

Ritesh Jaiswal

VP, Europe, SKAVA

Peter Lukomskyj

SVP, Products, Elastic Path

David Roe

CEO, authentic.

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm CET
Belgrado Stage

Tech Track

2:00pm CET

Create Your Own Essentials Plugin Workshop

Limited Capacity seats available

In this hands-on workshop, we will walk through the basic steps of creating an Essentials Plugin for installing some functionality into your Experience or Hippo project. Essentials Plugins come in handy if you want to reuse functionality in multiple projects, or in order to quickly scaffold new projects, e.g. for testing or demo purposes. This workshop is intended for Hippo developers with at least the knowledge taught in the Developer Fundamentals training.

Make sure to bring your development laptop.

Speakers

Tobias Jegers

Director of Engineering, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:00pm - 3:00pm CET
Madrid Stage

Developer Track

2:30pm CET

Fast Single Page Application implementation with Next.js and the Experience React SDK

Front-end development is evolving constantly and it's a challenge to integrate new libraries and frameworks in your existing application. In this talk, Timo Westland (Incentro) and Nuno Mendes (BloomReach) highlight a super fast SPA++ implementation, using server-side rendering with Next.js, the Experience React SDK and reverse proxy with the URL Rewriter across 40+ channels with a common library for the core components. A great case on how to get started with popular JS front-end frameworks such as Angular or React with the Experience SDK's.

Speakers

Nuno Mendes

Pre-sale Solutions Architect, Bloomreach

Timo Westland

Front-end Developer, Incentro

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm CET
Belgrado Stage

Developer Track

2:30pm CET

Peer Sharing: Three Practical Merchandiser Success Stories

Limited Capacity seats available

Get up close and personal with three merchandiser panelists and your peer. Our panelist will share their greatest achievement from the last 12 months, from unique product launches to valuable customer insights. Discover what challenges other merchandisers are facing at other companies, how they got “unstuck”, and how they measured success.

LIMITED: This session has limited availability for 50 people and will take place in a unique space: the Ajax press room. Please sign-up through Sched if you'd like to attend and make sure to bring your questions!

INSTRUCTIONS: We gather at the BloomReach booth on the Connect zone at 2pm after which we will walk down to the Press room. The whole experience takes about 45 -60 minutes.

Speakers

Lindsay Calderwood

Online Multi-Category Manager, Harrods

Jessica Lock

Global E-Commerce Manager, All Saints

Nick Stragnell

Head of Online Trade, Boden

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm CET
Press Room

Interactive Track

2:30pm CET

CMS Platform - Architectural plans for BloomReach Experience Manager

Ate will present and explain important upcoming architectural changes for the next major release(s) for BloomReach Experience Manager. These changes will enable more agile development, and more power to build and standardize integration solutions on top of BRX, while reducing the need for customizations. And thereby also make future upgrades easier and quicker.

Speakers

Ate Douma

Principal Product Architect BloomReach Experience, BloomReach

Ate is our Principal Product Architect at Bloomreach Experience (Amsterdam), working for the company for more than 12 years now. He's passionate about Open Source, Open Solutions, Java, dynamic languages, and overall architecture in general, in no particular order. He is also heavily... Read More →

Thursday November 15, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm CET
Wenen Stage

Tech Track

3:00pm CET

Coffee Break

Please join us for the last coffee break of the day on the expo floor, before the closing sessions and... the party!

Thursday November 15, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm CET
Expo Floor

Networking

3:30pm CET

5 Supers in the Experience Era - the BRoadmap

A sneak preview of our latest product developments. Learn how we have innovated on the BloomReach platform with "the 5 Supers", giving you the tools you need to become Superheroes.

Oh yes. Superheroes.

Speakers

Arjé Cahn

CTO of BloomReach Experience and co-founder of Hippo, BloomReach

Will Uppington

CTO of BloomReach Search and Merchandising, BloomReach

Thursday November 15, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm CET
Amsterdam stage

Keynotes

4:00pm CET

brAwards: The BloomReach Connect Awards

We are thrilled to announce and award remarkable BloomReach customers at Connect during the brAwards! The brAwards are designed to recognize and reward outstanding brands that excel in creating top-notch digital experiences, digital merchandising or development with BloomReach technology.

The winner categories:
- Outstanding Implementation Award
- SPA Superiority Award
- Search-n-Merch Award
- Top Experience Award
- Influencer Award

Speakers

David Hurwitz

CMO, BloomReach

David leads BloomReach’s marketing and sales development initiatives and organization. His Silicon Valley career began as a software engineer. Later, he created the concepts of IT Governance solutions as CMO of publicly-traded Niku Software and Lean IT as a marketing executive at... Read More →

Thursday November 15, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm CET
Amsterdam stage

Keynotes

4:30pm CET

brBash: The Afterparty!

Limited Capacity seats available

Every attendee at Connect is a VIP for a day and where does a VIP need to be? Yes, at the Royal Lodge. Make sure you cancel your plans for the night to enjoy an amazing afterparty, aka the BloomReach Bash, aka brBash, in the Royal Lodge on the top floor of the Johan Cruijff Arena overlooking the field. There will be music, drinks, bites to eat and great company.

Thursday November 15, 2018 4:30pm - 8:30pm CET
Royal Lodge, top floor

Networking