The day started at Château des ducs de Bretagne with an opening keynote by Frédéric de Gombert, the Co-Founder and CEO of Akeneo. After his kick-off speech, the company’s roadmap was shared. It was very interesting to see what Akeneo has planned.

The Akeneo Serenity Cloud Edition was one of the biggest announcements. It gives customers the opportunity to enjoy a managed, cloud based enterprise edition with automatic updates and will be available in September 2017. Of course, the known free and licensed edition will still be available.

We were also very excited about the idea to launch Akeneo certifications, similar to the Magento cerfiticate system. At PHPro, we invest a lot of time and resources to allow our developers to become experts in their field. We have the most certified Magento developers in Belgium and the goal is to have the same level of Akeneo expertise on our team.

In the afternoon, there were various presentations of Akeneo technology partners. We also had the honour of meeting one of the most prominent Akeneo members, Ziggy. Since she is hard to handle, we had to go through https://ziggy.akeneo.com/ 1 before we could approach her. We talked about being the first Belgian partner and she immediately liked our way of working.

Having met Ziggy, we were really excited to meet her again at the Royal Party in the Akeneo headquarters. She told us she had always wanted to visit Belgium and travel home with us. We told her it was better for her health to stay at the Akeneo headquarters and went back to the hotel.

The second day was all about workshops. People could choose between functional, technical, sales or pre-sales workshops matching their profiles. Some of us followed the functional training about the preparation of e-merchandising and products with variations. Others joined the sales workshops about the Akeneo extensions and ecosystem, and the tips and tools for your pre-sales journey. Some exciting news about our own plans for building extensions will be announced in the coming months. The first introductory calls between PHPro and Akeneo will already take place this week.

In the afternoon, there was more than enough time for an interesting Q&A session. After these workshops, we definitely craved for more. That’s why we will invite people from the Akademy for a 3-day functional training at PHPro. During this training, they will teach us more about the Akeneo functionalities and we will be able to dig even deeper than before.

While boarding, we immediately noticed that our new friend Ziggy was joining us on our flight back to Brussels. We tried to persuade her to stay in Nantes, but she told us that the Partnership between PHPro and Akeneo was too strong and that she couldn’t resist visiting the country with the best beers in the world.2

Luckily, we had no problem adopting and raising this three-headed, multichannel animal. We showed her all around the country, fed her, gave her a job …

We can assure the people from Akeneo that she’s safe and sound. She has almost travelled through our entire (and really small) country and will return home soon.