Characterized by the ‘phygital experience’, the 2020 edition of the annual Symposium event offered numerous ideas to face the new normal

“Realsolutions for your digital challenges”. This is the title of the2020 edition of the Liferay Symposium, held last week for the first time in digital form. Despite this, expectations about the traditional annual event have not been betrayed. As the numbers related to participation have shown, with over 600 registered professionals. Moreover, the company whose offer is mainly based on the open source platform Liferay DXP, whose extended name is Digital Experience Platform, which operates in such a way as to ensure uniform and continuous operation along all types of interaction channel between company and customer, creating digital experiences on the web, mobile and connected devices, is more than ever on the crest of the wave. And perhaps it could not be otherwise, given the scenario created by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has accentuated the importance of solutions that can digitally bring companies closer to their audience.

Phygital Experience

Andrea Diazzi, Business Development Manager for Italy and Greece at Liferay,summed it up well, talking about the”phygital experience”,that is the format that tried to merge the physical and digital aspects that characterized this year’s Symposium, with a way that favored interaction to the maximum.

Favored by the participation of 11 sponsors and a rich agenda, consisting of 18 technical and business sessions with 27 speakers, as well as networking moments and visits to virtual stands, the 2020 edition of Liferay Symposium illustrated to participants the main digital challenges of the moment, how to reduce customer service costs and unify different systems with solid integration capabilities.

Growing participation

The participants appreciated, given that the eleventh edition of Liferay Symposium saw as mentioned more than 600 registered professionals from the most diverse sectors, such as Public Administration, banking and insurance, telecommunications and retail, with an audience composed of CIOs and IT managers,business managers, Human Resources, CMOs and digital marketing managers, who interacted with”really high peaks of participation”. “, diazzi pointed out. A satisfaction shared by Carolina Moreno, Vice President Sales EMEA and GM for Southern Europe at Liferay,who highlighted how”the format of this year’s event has allowed us to get even closer to an increasingly large audience, emphasizing the goal of responding to the current needs of organizations with an offer of digital solutions to support competitiveness”.

The role of partners

Also noteworthy is thewide participation in the event of partners and system integrators,who constitute a “fundamental element of our success on the market, given that we have a 100 percent indirect model: today in the EMEA area we can count on more than 100 partners, 22 of whom have recently been added, further demonstrating the validity of our proposal”, continued Carolina Moreno, explaining that”the ecosystem of our partners has proven to be very resilient compared to the scenario created by Covid-19″.

The role of the Partners is also relevant for another aspect, as Diazzi highlights: “in addition to being the actual resellers of our solutions, they perform the essential task of building and developing customized projects on our platform, as is the case of the accelerators that are built to connect our platform and create an intranet in a very short time. Some examples of these achievements were presented yesterday during the virtual event.”

Success Stories

But an important role in the 2020 edition of the Symposium was also that of success stories:the protagonists told their projects, in a multi-sectoral perspective that allowed to know the specific characteristics of the various sectors of reference, with the testimonies of customers such as”Veneto Lavoro”,which offers online services to support employment; Fiera Milano,which have defined new digital projects for exhibitors, even in a period of stop; Senate of the Republic,with a new liferay-based intranet for senators and employees of the institution: it will be online in the coming weeks and has also seen a collaboration with IBM that has brought the element of Artificial Intelligence; finally, there are two utilities, theAmsa of Milan and the Veritas Group,active in the Veneto: the first has created an intranet to break down the internal silos, while the second has revolutionized the portal to the outside”, said Andrea Diazzi.

New products

Finally, the Liferay Symposium was once again the privileged stage to present the new products,among which the new version of the Liferay DXP 7.3 platformstood out, which incorporates important news and benefits for all sectors: B2B, B2C and B2E, responding to the needs of digitizing operations, quickly creating fluid digital experiences for customers, distributors, partners and employees. The platform now allows you to scale content creation and management, and is equipped with over and powerful new digital marketing features.