
North Plains’ first EMEA customer conference was held on May 22 in London, UK and was a resounding success. With over 80 customers in attendance from across Europe, this was the first conference that brought together the customers across North Plains’ product portfolio – Xinet, Telescope and On Brand. It was an intimate gathering that allowed our customers to make some great connections – both with the North Plains staff as well as with each other. It also gave them the opportunity to learn about all the North Plains products.
James Christopher, CEO kicked off the event with an overview of North Plains’ strategy and provided an update on the developments of the company in the last 12 months. A lot of changes have happened and James made it clear that North Plains is dedicated to the future of all the products and ensuring that our customers will continue to be given the best solutions to manage their visual assets as the market continues to change.
James was followed by keynote speaker Geoff Ramm, who is known as the ‘Billy Connolly of marketing.’ Geoff was a dynamic presenter, engaging the audience with marketing stories and ideas that were both thought provoking and entertaining. It’s a changing marketing world and Geoff provided some thought-provoking stories about how to stand out in today’s fast-paced marketing world.
Much of the conference focused on product insights from our various customers. With three panel sessions that showcased how our customers are leveraging our products for creative production, control and distribution and brand asset management, our attendees got some great insights about how our products are being used in different organizations. Highlights included:
• Michelle Taylor from Xerox, Neil McCutcheon from Christie’s and Nick Gowler from Pearson Education joined Senior Product Manager, Andrew Salop on stage to discuss the need for a WIP-DAM like Xinet to support the fast-paced, heavy asset world of creative media production
• Simon Jenkinson from FutureBrand and Stephen McKillop from Diageo provided valuable insights into Brand Asset management and showed how they gained significant ROI from their installations of OnBrand and Unify respectively.
• Nikolas Stathopoulos from Hachette Book Group UK and David Bercovici from North Plains presented an in-depth look at the Telescope implementation at Hachette. The key takeaway from this session was the simple but immense benefit an enterprise like Hachette was able to gain from being able to better manage their assets. With an enterprise DAM, they now have a single source of truth for all of their publishing assets. Hachette has plans to move ahead with further phases of their DAM project to gain even more ROI for their business.


The day was rounded out with a product update that led into a lively Q&A panel with James, Andy Peters, General Manager of Europe & Middle East, and CTO Mohan Taylor. It was obvious to see that the content presented over the day had provoked a lot of interest based on the many questions that were posed and this session could have gone on for much longer.
But it wasn’t a conference with all work and no play. We ended the day with a little cocktail reception where all attendees gathered at the bar to enjoy well-deserved (and delicious!) cocktails while listening to a live band, and continuing the discussions from the day.
All in all, we couldn’t have asked for a better first EMEA user conference, but now the focus moves to our annual global conference coming in October. Stay Tuned. All we will say for now is Niagara Falls – be there or be square!





