An early 2024 field trip: 2 days at the Ibexa Global Partner conference

By Janus Boye

Good old Arnold was used in a fancy ad by one of the largest Ibexa customers

Can Arnold Schwarzenegger somehow help us make digital experiences better? This question was on my mind as I left the Ibexa Global Partner Conference 2024 held on the sunny Spanish island of Mallorca.

With over 200 participants joining, mostly from Europe, but also from further away, CEO Bertrand Maugain took the stage in his opening talk with an update on how the business keeps growing and how Ibexa now fits into the larger QNTM Group composable ecosystem.

Let’s zoom out: Ibexa is a well-established DXP vendor, who focuses on B2B e-commerce and has grown from their roots in Norway to now in particular having a stronghold in Germany and France.

Interestingly, the very first slide on the CEO opening was on the release of v4.6 LTS (Long Term Support). While the release came with many new features and improvements, it was clear from my conversation with partners that this was also a somewhat overdue release of a new stable version that they can offer to their customers.

CEO Bertrand Maugain on stage opening with the latest big release: v4.6 LTS

During the opening morning, we also saw how a larger German customer implemented a very large scale setup for a global retailer, which included a fancy ad with Schwarzenegger. Good to see how digital craftsmanship combined with some humour can help differentiate in a crowded market.

We also saw a demo of the AiAssistant - a prompt based on a large language model inside the editorial interface. A nifty beginning for LLM in Ibexa DXP. Time will tell where the customer use cases go

From an analyst perspective, I also came wanting to learn more about the new QNTM ecosystem. QNTM Group is a group of unique software and tech companies within MarTech and AdTech owned by Swedish private equity firm Altor. At the Ibexa Partner Conference this was presented as a composable opportunity for digital agencies and several partners told that the 2-days in Mallorca made the QNTM ecosystem feel like a real thing.

For a vendor like Ibexa that’s been around for 20+ years, having an owner with an investment window much longer than the traditional Silicon Valley-backed venture capitalists seems like a good fit. As a reminder - it’s now almost 4 years since eZ became Ibexa and started focusing on B2B ecommerce.

Think of the QNTM ecosystem as a smaller, more tightly-knit, more long-term and also roadmap-aligned private equity version of the much-hyped MACH Alliance. I sense that QNTM is also stepping up the marketing alongside some of the other partners in the ecosystem, in particular Actito, Raptor Services and Qualifio, who were also present at the conference. Perhaps the combined marketing muscle will help raise the profile of Ibexa in North America and the rest of Europe.

On the topic of raising the profile: While I did hear much chat in French and German in the hallways. I'm also sensing a solid presence and foundation for future growth in other countries. During the days, I also talked to several experienced partners from outside the current Ibexa stronghold in France and Germany, including Contextual Code (USA), Infinitum Digital (Spain), Netgen (Croatia & Switzerland) and Toumoro (Canada).

To quote Christian Paredes, CEO at Netgen in Switzerland:

"I’ve been to these before and the 2024 edition of the Ibexa Global Partner Conference was phenomenal. Impressive to see how the QNTM Group and Ibexa are advancing rapidly and creating a cohesive digital experience landscape. As an Ibexa partner, it's great to see Ibexa DXP improving towards a complete B2B solution, seamlessly integrating entire customer journeys."

At these types of events, it’s always interesting to observe the breath of the ecosystem. As in: Who’s also there? While this event was packed with the traditional digital agencies and system integrators, you also experienced quite a few participants from the other parts of the QNTM ecosystem. In addition, I also spoke to Gauthier Garnier from cloud vendor Platform.sh, who made this good point:

“Ibexa is in a very interesting position in the QNTM ecosystem, as they have strong integration capabilities with Ibexa connect (soon to become QNTM connect), and their unique go-to-market which is 100% through partners.”

From my opening on Day #2 of the Ibexa Global Partner Conference 2024

On the second day, I had the opportunity to share my quick takes in a 15 minute lightning talk. A few key points:

  • There's no I in AI yet (as Dutch Internet researcher Steven Pemberton said in his Aarhus 23 conference keynote)

  • Content failures can happen quickly and be devastating (paraphrasing Deane Barker and citing my work on content production)

  • Sustainable digital leadership is both a huge opportunity and a competitive advantage (via the Founder of the Sustainable UX Network Thorsten Jonas)

I also criticised vendors broadly for creating confusion in the marketplace. For that and more, refer to the slides (download as PDF).

The morning was packed with impressive lightning talks, which covered hot topics like CDP, personalisation, navigating post-GDPR and building high performance sites.

Overall, I appreciated the focus on "what happens when the rubber hits the road." It's all making projects that work and at the end of the day, it's all about people.

On that note, I'll close with the sense I got from everyone who was there - quoting the famous Austrian bodybuilder, American politician and now activist for the environment:

“I’ll be back”

Learn more about what’s going with CMS and DXP

The conversation naturally continues in our CMS Expert community in Europe and North America, where vendors, agencies, analysts and customers get together to learn, exchange experiences and drive the market forward. We also have regional peer groups focused on different roles, e.g. digital strategy. Ibexa is a member of our European CMS Expert Group.

If you are looking for conferences on this topic, then check out these upcoming events: