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Joomla! at HostingCon Global 2017

Joomla! at HostingCon Global 2017

Joomla! returned to HostingCon Global for our second appearance with high expectations. Last year we made our debut at HostingCon Global and HostingCon Europe and discovered how important it is for Joomla to attend these type of events.

The focus of the event for the project was to create new partnerships and gain sponsors, as well as outreach, to increase our overall presence in the web and hosting community. Jason spent the first two days networking and attending sessions and workshops, while Robert took many ones on one meetings.

Tuesday kicked off with a press release about Joomla’s 80 Million Downloads Milestone and the future of Joomla that was picked up by over 210 media channels, including Yahoo, MarketWatch, and Seeking Alpha, among many others.

 

HostingCon 2017 Expo hall in action

HostingCon 2017 Expo hall in action

 

The Expo Hall opened on Wednesday with a steady amount of traffic at the Joomla booth. It is important to note Joomla was the only CMS to have an Expo booth this year. Jason fielded questions and set up partnership opportunity meetings for Robert. We spoke with a good number Hosting, Security, and Services providers about the latest news and the future of Joomla. Attendees were excited to hear about the upcoming new features as well as the ongoing security and user experience updates.

From a geography perspective, it was the best place to be at HostingCon, our booth position faced our friends at Sucuri.net and was next to other friends and partners, as well as the lecture hall. Our standout position allowed great networking with Google, GoDaddy, and ClearDB, among many others. The insights and questions from booth visitors were thoughtful and congratulatory. Joomla delivered on a professional presence at a top tier event, a great reflection of the new board.

 



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Just like our past HostingCon Global experiences, we met happy users of Joomla which sang the praises of Joomla and were jubilant to see us. We also encountered a good number of Joomla users who haven’t followed the community or updates since Joomla 2.5 or even 1.5! This brings up one major issue we need to address: Joomla is still a relative unknown in North America. How do we get past users of Joomla to come back and take another look at Joomla as well as introduce ourselves to a continent? Most of the attendees that had used Joomla and moved on to another platform did agree that it had been years since they used Joomla (version 1.5 or even 1.0) and they should check in and see what's new with Joomla 3 and the upcoming Joomla 4 release. We were happy to share the latest news and hope they will give Joomla another look.

Thursday was a bit slower in the Expo Hall, but this gave ample time for Jason to give one on one demos of Joomla and for Robert to follow up with our long list of potential partners. The co-conference, Data World, focused on hardware and vendors for data centres, so we were a little surprised when they made their way to the booth but were happily pleased to find that quite a few Data World attendees had chosen Joomla for their website.

 

“I researched both Joomla and WordPress and found Joomla to have more features and the perfect solution for my company”
- MP Divakar of Item Media 

Overall, we had a busy and productive event with Robert taking over 30+ one on one meetings and Jason making sure we had an active and friendly presence on the expo floor. Though the event was a bit slower this year, we had more time to engage attendees with meaningful discussions. We were very sorry to learn that this would be the last HostingCon after a fantastic 13 year run.

 

HostingCon Global Press Release:

HostingCon Global Press Release: "As you may have recently heard, Penton Information Services, including the HostingCon brand, was recently acquired by Informa. Operating at the heart of the Knowledge & Information Economy, Informa is a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, education, and events business. The combination of the two businesses adds balance and breadth to our portfolio, further expanding upon valuable insights for the hosting space and provides increased opportunity to learn, network and grow via a robust lineup of technology events. Due to this change and substantial shifts in the market we have made the strategic decision that HostingCon Global 2017 will be our last HostingCon Event. "

We would like to thank the staff of HostingCon for their contributions and making Joomla a part of the event.

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