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FME International User Conference 2014 – Dale’s Take on a Week of Celebration, 5 Years in the Making

What a week!  Last November, when we wrote to invite you to our first FME International User Conference in 5 years, we promised it would “serve up a potent knowledge cocktail...

Celebrating the future at the FME International User Conference 2014What a week!  Last November, when we wrote to invite you to our first FME International User Conference in 5 years, we promised it would “serve up a potent knowledge cocktail that results from mixing FME veteran and newbie users together with those passionate Safe staff who create and support FME day in and day out.”

Mission accomplished.

In our opening keynote, Don and I promised a week of celebration.  Let’s review how we did:

Celebrating learning

Check.

Thank you to our 5 eye-opening keynotes from industry leaders who framed the trajectory of the data landscape that we and our customers live in every day. Thank you to the 70+ customer speakers, who showed us over and over again how their ingenuity pulling FME levers, in ways we never imagined, makes a massive impact in their organizations.

And thank you to the roughly 280 attendees who stuck around for the Friday training festival — the largest one day FME live training ever attempted, which went off without a hitch. (Thanks Amazon!)


I’m confident that no one left FME UC 2014 without having gorged on that knowledge cocktail that we’d promised.

Celebrating the Love of Data at the FME International User Conference 2014Celebrating the love of data

Check.

Not only did the FME World Cup of Data end with a dramatic finish (ICYMI, ArcGIS edged out AutoCAD in the final), but there was a bit more-than-expected love spread for at least one format

Celebrating our history

Check.

Anniversary celebration for Safe Software at the FME International User Conference 2014The week was also our slightly belated 20th birthday party, and we indulged ourselves with a bit of looking back. During the closing session, a pair of surprise birthday cakes were wheeled out after some extremely kind and deeply moving words shared by the Safe team and extended customer family, which gave Don and I time to regain our composure. We aren’t sure we can emotionally handle another milestone anniversary user conference.

Celebrating our team

Check.

Safe Software team, you amaze us.  Thank you for the incredible work you do day after day.  Don and I were so proud to be able to show you off all last week.

The entire Safe Software team on stage at the FME International User Conference 2014

Now what?

We at Safe also have had a lot of that potent cocktail, so it’s going to take us a while to have it work through our system. We’ll soon get all of the videos from all the sessions online so attendees can catch the ones they had to miss, and those of you unable to attend can partake in the learning at your own convenience. The five simultaneous tracks have left me with a lot of summer viewing to look forward to.

We’ve also got a huge number of fantastic product ideas to wade through, prioritize, and execute on.  Don and I can’t wait to see these come to life in FME 2015 and beyond.

And we’ve got to figure out when we can hold our next FME International UC.

5 years really is too long.

[For more, see recaps on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 of the FME UC, and Don’s post reflecting on the past 20 years.]

 

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