A Turkish Delight

Director of Partners Geoff Hook shares tales from Lanner’s recent channel conference in Istanbul, Turkey

The Lanner team recently returned from Istanbul in Turkey where our latest channel conference took place. We have a number of customers in Turkey, the largest economy in Central and Eastern Europe, which is seeing significant growth. Turkey is now one of the world’s leading producers of textiles, transport, construction materials, consumer electronics and appliances and is firmly cementing its position on the global stage.

With sunshine included as standard, it seemed a perfect location from which to host this year’s event which was focused on the theme of international collaboration.

A host of delegates descended on Istanbul from Europe and Asia-Pac to join their counterparts from the likes of Australia, Singapore, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic. Ideas for improving customer experiences were shared during the discussions which took place over two days. Workshops also covered the sharing of best practice and new ways to add customer value, helping to raise awareness of WITNESS as the leading simulation tool for improving decision-making, planning and business growth across the world.

A key part of the conference was dedicated to the new virtual reality capabilities within WITNESS 14 which enable users to see the impact of new decisions or business process change in the kind of 3D environment typically associated with high-end engineering applications or gaming. As Lanner CEO David Jones explained at the session, through allowing users to visualise the impact of using simulation, it enables business users, or those who don’t have knowledge of simulation, to experiment with different scenarios and drive change with confidence. This then opens the door to much wider adoption of the solution which in turn, can accelerate the business benefits.

Our theme of international collaboration was designed to prompt discussion on how communications channels across the Lanner partner network could be enhanced to drive even greater coordination across our global accounts, and facilitate a platform to share best practices and ideas.

As well as regular webinars on both technical and commercial issues, we explored ideas for a new reseller portal, based on similar principles to our new customer portal. We also agreed that a tool such as WhatsApp would be a great way to issue more immediate and informal queries, share success stories and garner support from other resellers.

Everyone in attendance gave us immensely positive feedback about the various workshops which had run throughout the two days, as well as many discussions which had run into the evening dinner. All of those who had taken part jetted off to their respective countries at the end of the conference buzzing with fresh ideas and inspiration to apply to outreach and campaigns in their individual marketplaces.