Held at McCann's rather splendid offices at 135 Bishopsgate, this year's Business Partner Summit included presentations from the sales team - Mike Pedersen and new Sales VP Jonny Kristensen, technicans - Lotte Pitcher and Umbraco's CTO Filip Bech-Larsen, followed by some case studies from Umbraco partners True.

Mike and Jonny focused on the continued expansion of Umbraco - the leading Open Source .Net platform now used in over three quarters of a million sites globally - which is growing at over 25% year on year. The UK is a big adopter and accounts for around a third of all sites, not too surprisingly given that it's a Danish product, the Nordics are the next largest with 24%, the US is growing rapidly at 18%, followed by the Netherlands at 11% with the rest of the world making up the final 14%.

Umbraco is also being adopted by some of the world's leading brands, another sign that many enterprise level organisations are moving away from proprietary platforms to Open Source. In the last year this has seen the following make the switch:

Sports

  • Tottenham Hotspurs
  • Newcastle United
  • Wolves
  • QPR
  • Sport England

Retail

  • Tesco
  • AG Barr
  • Unilever
  • Reckitt
  • Kingfisher

Professional Services

  • KPMG
  • Baer Tilly
  • Gallagher
  • Slaugher and May

Membership

  • CBI
  • IET
  • BMA
  • Unite

Pharma

  • GSK
  • NHS
  • Priory
  • Sinclair

Public Sector

  • National Grid
  • NHS
  • LFB
  • Army

Finance

  • JP Morgan
  • Barclays
  • Lombard
  • Link

These are just a few of the 'blue chip' and major organisations that are using Umbraco because of its renowned flexibility and user friendly editor experience as born out in the latest research by G2 the world’s leading business software review platform. G2 leverages real business user reviews to drive better purchasing decisions. Technology buyers, investors, and analysts use G2 to compare and select the best software based on peer reviews and synthesized social data. Keeping their ratings unbiased is G2’s top priority. They require the use of a LinkedIn account or verified business email address to validate a G2 user’s identity and employer. Additionally, all reviews are manually checked.. Only the opinion of real users and data from public sources factor into G2 ratings.

Umbraco's CTO Filip Bech-Larsen then talked through the development roadmap, which is now formalised into regular releases aligned to Mircosoft's. New additions include ecommerce following the acquisition of Vendr, now branded as Ucommerce - we were already using Vendr so are familiar with the package which will no doubt benefit from increases in investment. This is added to by an ever growing market place of third party applications, such as Hubspot, Mircosoft Dynamcis CRM, Algolia and so on, which integrate with Umbraco. A key aspect of Umbraco is its flexibility which is highly amenable to composable architectures, which agency True illustrated with several case studies in which they'd implemented Umbraco as a CMS integrating it with other platforms as part of a composable approach.

Once the business stuff was over, as is standard practice with Umbraco, there was a few beers then we all headed over to The Glitch Bar in Shoreditch, a retro arcade with a huge radio controlled car race track which all got a bit competitive.