Last Wednesday, 26^th Oct, the inaugural Meet Magento UK conference was held in the salubrious surroundings of the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in the heart of London’s Westminster (have a look at the video with all the highlights in the bottom of this blog post!!).

I arrived early with our client Alex Barbier from Watco, as we were due to present a case study and needed to be taken through the running order for the day. The venue was just coming to life at that time and the main presentation hall was empty, looking vast and intimidating….. gulp.

The agenda kicked off with an introduction from Bob Schwartz the senior VP at Magento who’s infectious enthusiasm for all things Magento can’t help but sweep you along. This was swiftly followed by the keynote speech (and highlight of the day) from Roy Rubin – CEO and founder of Magento.

The first thing that struck me about Roy was how young he is considering the enormous success he’s achieved with Magento. He related how Magento had its genesis with Varien, a software development company he founded from his garage as a student (what is it about tech entrepreneurs and garages in the US?!!) and how Magento as the company focussed increasingly on eCommerce.

Roy highlighted some staggering statistics that really put into perspective how dominant a force Magento is becoming - $25 billion dollars transacted on Magento sites per year, 110k merchants using Magento and $1 billion a year taken by solutions partners like us (a greater share of that revenue please!!).

The next big highlight was John Lunn’s spin through x.commerce and………………….THE FABRIC. So what does it all mean? Well in short, the fabric appears to be Ebay’s attempt to leverage the open-source developer community as Magento has to such great effect. This is achieved by use of “THE FABRIC” via which developers will be able to innovate new eCommerce experiences by integrating with it new software “capabilities”. Existing Ebay commerce assets are already plugged in as capabilities but anyone with an idea (and a will to make money) can do so, even if that puts their solutions in direct competition with Ebay’s. Exciting times await us....

The rest of the day was filled with a ton of interesting and informative presentations and it is well worth checking out full presentations at the Meet Magento website if you missed them. For my part, it seemed that our multi-country case study generated a lot of interest and we spent much time in the breaks answering questions from interested parties.

So in summary, all in all it was a great day and one that demonstrated how vibrant the Magento community is. Oh, and the after party wasn’t half bad either, at least if my sore head was anything to go by the next day!!

Also Have a look at the video with all the highights!