Interview with Luke Barton of eZ Systems

On February 9^th, 2011 I interviewed Luke Barton, Managing Director of eZ Systems Americas, about the 2011 eZ Winter Conference in Nice, France.

GH: What was the high point of the conference?

LB: There are many. I think one was the discussion from the partners: their input on how we should position our products. That showed a level of interest from both parties to make sure we're positioning eZ correctly and make sure what we offer is what is demanded by customers. On the developer side of things, there was a facilitated break-out group about the product road map. People could choose a group to join for 15-30 minutes and discuss with that engineer their hopes and dreams for the product in a certain category. A lot of energy came out of that. The overall theme for both was that you had a direct connection with eZ.

GH: How was the new CEO Gabriele Viebach received? What direction was she moving eZ in?

LB: Gabriele was framing her tenure as a new chapter in the history of eZ. Her approach is that the E in CEO is really “Execution”. So she is a strategist who rolls up her sleeves and gets tactical and gets things done. The board members, including Aleksander Farstad, when interviewed by the audience, made the joke over and over again in a very respectful way that Gabriele is demanding and they are very excited about having someone like that.

GH: Were there new announcements about eZ Systems?

LB: The marketplace is new. eZ Systems is creating a marketplace whereby partners and developers can resell their code through eZ and make money off their code. So their extensions are not only a community-type thing, but a for-profit endeavor. A provider licenses his code to be sold by eZ to premium customers, and the provider is responsible for supporting it and gets year-over-year revenue.

GH: What's in the pipeline for eZ Publish?

LB: From a product perspective, several new things in the roadmap bear mentioning. One will be a recommendations engine for personalized web content. We're going to integrate, as opposed to build our own, so the user experience driven by an eZ Publish installation will be enriched by a recommendation engine.

Second, there is a laser-sharp focus on the kernel, to properly abstract from it API's at a lower level so there are more hooks into the system with the overall mantra: “You don't need to know eZ to build applications based on eZ. You just need to know the API.” So what that means is the REST interface is going to be getting a lot of work done to it.

From the partner program side, we're also looking at value-added relationships in our program, to provide to those who buy into the program. That's yet to be defined in total, but a good example is Kapow [editor's note: Kapow makes software which facilitates the migration of content from one system to another]. We're looking for ways to make margins to make profitable relationships for Kapow, partners, and eZ to make Kapow-driven migrations, and to save the customer money all at the same time.