It’s that time of the year again – everyone in the world of Magento are getting ready for the biggest event evolving around world’s favorite eCommerce platform – Imagine Commerce 2015.
What can we expect this year and what are some of the hidden gems of the Imagine experience?
The biggest Magento Imagine event ever, in one of the largest hotels in the world, with Magento 2 in almost full swing and the growing uncertainty around the future of Ebay Enterprise, this Imagine is poised to be the event where we can expect the unexpected 🙂
Some quick facts:
- Imagine 2015 will see 2400+ attendees from 40+ countries
- There is only one person on the General Session Speakers list with Magento next to his name (Head of Product Management Paul Boisvert)
- Magento 2 is featured heavily in the agenda with one full day of sessions
- People are still on the fence with what’s the proper hashtag for the event – #MagentoImagine (my favorite) or #ImagineCommerce
- Wynn is the 6th largest hotel in the world
Community at its strongest
You know how it usually gets, in face of uncertainty you grow stronger and pull together, and the community around Magento is no different – we’ll see many unofficial talks and get-togethers during the conference where we’ll try to find new ways of sharing best practices and, where possible, working together to better support our clients.
If you follow any of the official hashtags on Twitter, you can get insights into what’s cooking behind the scenes and how the community is prepping up for some unofficial talks and meetups which are, to me, an essential part of any Imagine conference.
PreImagine and MCSS Barcamp
These two unofficial events on the outskirts of Imagine are something that can set the tone (PreImagine on Sunday) for the entire conference and then nicely wrap it up (MCSS Barcamp on Wednesday). Both of these are very informal, and since we’re playing a part in both (Inchoo is sponsoring PreImagine and I’m speaking at MCSS Barcamp), it’s certainly worth mentioning them 🙂
PreImagine, organized by our dear friends from Interactiv4 is (un)fortunately sold out, and for MCSS Barcamp everyone’s invited, so make sure to drop by the Nucleus Community Room on Wednesday at 1:30PM.
NOTE: Unfortunately, the MCSS Barcamp got cancelled but we’ll all have plenty of time to catch up and discuss these topics during the conference.
New products in the Magento ecosystem – the return of SaaS, or not just quite?
Recently Magento announced its Small Business program which is essentially a list of companies that have bundled up Magento Community Edition with some additional services to create SaaS or SaaS-alike solutions – something that Magento Go was originally planned to become, but it never actually took off before it was officially shut down earlier this year – hey, even go.magento.com now redirects to smallbusiness.magento.com
This is a new way that community around Magento is evolving – we see many more closer relationships between solution, industry and hosting partners emerging, which is certainly a good thing. Whether this particular route will prove to be a good one for those involved, it remains to be seen.
At Imagine we will see these new solutions and partnerships taking the stage and there will certainly be some positive buzz around it – I look forward to learning more details about several of those in particular.
What I’m looking forward to most:
- Catching up with the #RealMagento folks – there’s so many people who I got a chance to meet in person only once or twice – and a smile, a handshake (and sometimes a hug) work wonders in actual human interaction, even when you are active on Twitter 🙂
- Breakout sessions – this time around there’s so many of them that it’s going to be difficult deciding between some very interesting topics
Team Inchoo
This year we have a party of two Inchooers attending – Tomas Novoselic, one of our team leaders and among our most experienced Magento backend developers, and myself so you’ll be able to talk both code and business with us 🙂
You’ll see us at #PreImagine (Inchoo is sponsoring the event), at Partner Summit and during the breakout sessions where we’ll cover mostly a healthy mix of business and technical topics.
If you want to catch up, the easiest way will probably be to approach us directly when you see us passing by or try tweet us up at @tomas_novoselic and @aronstanic.
See you soon in Vegas! Viva #RealMagento!
