Opening session

[This is live-blogged from IGeLU 2013 Conference in Berlin, please forgive typos etc.]

Welcome by Jiri Kende, chair

Updates on the Steering Committee's situation, with a special invitation for members to vote. Results will be announced at the closing session on Tuesday afternoon. Next year, the IGeLU conference will be held in Oxford, hosted by the Bodleian University.

Welcome by Matti Shem tov, President and CEO, Ex Libris Group

Unfortunately I can't join you in person as I broke my leg 3 weeks ago in a very unglorified way... [nice pic of Matti with cruches!]. What we've done since last year, we have 280 new institutioins and are now over 5,500, we employ 530 people, run 3 data centers (Chicago, Amsterdam, Singapour), revenue of 95m$ and have made Alma live. We have a new owner: golden Gate Capital, which is a San Francisco-based private equity firm with $12 billion in capital under management. ExLibris remains an independ business, with the same executive team, roadmap and operations.

We are working on the transition to SaaS, there are a few tedious issues but more and more applications are developed in SaaS. We develop our technology, as well as our business model and operational structure. It is a priority for us. We want our company to be in the Cloud although we will continue to support the local installations for the years to come. In 2008, we had only 11% customers in the Cloud and today, this has risen to 75%.

This past year has been very good for Primo. It now serves 1,916 institutions worldwide. We focus on particular aspects, especially personalised ranking and tighter integraiton with Aleph, Voyager and Alma. We moved to agile releases which present new functionality bi-monthly. We have introduced Big Data technologies (Cassandra and Hadoop) and use Oracle. We continue to enhance the product and have introduced large scale multi-tenancy.

It has also been a very good year for Alma, it is live at 33 institutions worldwide and there are an additional 52 institutions in implementation phase.

Our other products such as Aleph and Voyager still concerns more than 4000 customers and we are continuing developments. Rosetta is a very unique product for massive digital content. We have more and more customers using Rosetta around the world.

Singapore data center is relatively new and currently supports 4 customers, this is going to increase. We've achieved ISO 27001 as a security standard. We take a lot of community initiatives, and support various initiatives, such as open access. We have close collaborations with our customers via the community zone advisory group, voting process for enhancements or OPAC funcitonality in Primo. We collaborate with the product working groups, have teesting teams for new CRM system and work woth joint focus groups.

Koby Rosenthal, Corporate VP, General Manager Europe, Ex Libris

The partnership within the community is very rare because it is usually very competitive. We should be proud of this because it is really unique and I find it impressive. Updates for Europe since the last IGeLU, we have more and more institutions using Primo and adding more experienced people to our organisation. We try to bring more people from the headquarters to Europe. The UK early adopters programme is very successful. In many places Alma is now live, which doesn't mean there aren't still some issues to resolve but we can learn from what is done in various places. We have a very experienced team who speak the language of the countries with which they work.

We are moving forward with Alma and are working in close collaboration with institutions that have made it live as well as those who are showing an interest. We are transferring a lot of knowledge to our staff in Europe as well as to institutions. We are building a new team that will look at the local specificities and needs in various parts of Europe for specific tayloring for the different languages. We want to support the customers and future customers in Alma and are adding knowledge and experience to our organisation.

We have appointed an European strategy director and are planning enhanced cooperation by incresing the number of solution days. and establish regional directors meetings. There is an Alma early adopter program in German speaking countries, including the University of Mannheim, as a large German library, and this will kick off in October. We are in the process of implementing similar programs in other countries such as France, Italy etc.