Solutions Linux 2005

So, 9267 visitors showed up.

The Zope Village booth was across from Bull and Mandrakesoft. It looked good, and drew attention.

Five companies participated in Zope Village: Pilot Systems, Adesium, BlueDynamics, atReal, and Infrae. Logos were very visible.

David Sapiro and crew did a great job with organization. Beamer, projection screen, A5 factsheets about Zope Village, furniture, brochure holders, contact forms, extra pens, etc.

The booth was well staffed, and nearly every visitor who paused got a “Bonjour!”. (Of course, if they started talking to me they got a “Parlez vous anglais?” :-)

A lot of contacts were made. Of course, it’s a trade show, so it remains to be seen what small percentage actually becomes business. But for companies in the French market, the visibility was good. Often the result happens a year or more later: “Oh yes, I remember your booth.”

David has all the contact sheets, and will make them available to participants.

People were impressed by the collaboration between companies. This also helped to dispel the ‘no support for Zope’ notion.

The Zope Europe Association was also visible, and helped with the story about international presence. I can easily see ZEA doing something similar in the future, as such activity fits into the ‘economy of scale’ idea.

Nuxeo did not have a booth, although they showed up and cruised around. Stefane said they skipped it for two years, but the audience is obviously changing. Two years ago it was mostly geeks. This year many decision makers were present.

BTW, Ingenieweb also had a booth. I didn’t talk to them (didn’t know any of the suits manning the booth).

Zope Village was not in suits, in fact David and I both sported a one week beard (I’m the boss ;)

On the projection screen we had various sites preloaded in tabs. The Objectis.org site is really impressive. Thousands and thousands of (mostly Plone) sites in multiple languages.

CPS is on Objectis now (92 sites so far), together with Plone 1/2. Silva will be available shortly.

For Infrae, there was some interest in Silva and Railroad. Having Silva onboard helped with the Zope versioning and XML story.

To my surprise, a lot of people spoke english, at least a bit. One guy, whose english was pretty good, said, “You don’t speak french? What are you doing here?” :-) Often I passed a visitor on to a french speaking person.

The trip didn’t cost much, as I stayed in Hotel Sapiro. I think it was worth it, and will probably do the same next year.

If Infrae ever does anything in the French market, we’ll collaborate with Pilot Systems as integrator. I can see command of the language is essential.

Damien of Pilot Systems said he will translate Silva into french.