Roundtable discussions is an important part of our format. Here’s Joel Varty from Agility CMS spotted in conversation

CMS Kickoff 2025

A vendor-neutral international conference focused on CMS

Thanks to everyone who joined the 3rd annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to the global CMS community.

Here’s a few blog posts and useful summaries from the conference:

Happening on January 14 - 15 in St. Pete, Florida, this event brought together top-notch speakers, our renowned learning format, and engaging social events.

Join us next at CMS Summit 25 in May in Frankfurt, CMS Connect 25 in August in Montreal or at the Boye Aarhus 25 conference in November. The conversation also continues in the CMS Experts community.

World-class speakers at CMS Kickoff 25

Carrie Hane (US)
Digital content strategy leader

Makram Mansour (US)
Product Manager - Customer Experience Management at Intuit

Nicole France (US)
Chief Evangelist at Contentful

What is the CMS Kickoff?

We started with CMS Kickoff 23, which was quite well received. We made it bigger and importantly better at CMS Kickoff 24. Now we’re building on it and working on making it even better with input and participation from our global CMS Expert community.

Open source was also well represented at Kickoff 25 with participation from the WordPress, Drupal and TYPO3 community. Karim Marucchi, who leads Crowd Favorite, shared an update on what’s happening in the WordPress community

Conferences come in many shapes and sizes. This one had 90 participants.

The sessions are without the usual sales and marketing pitches. There’s also plenty of time for conversations, so that you can bring actionable insights back to your desk and your projects.

Who joined us?

It was an international conference with participants from Australia, Europe and North America. A friendly mix of vendors, agencies, analysts and customers who get together to learn, network and talk about what really matters in CMS right now and for the rest of the year.

Thanks to all who made the commitment to learning and networking.

Among the vendors and open source projects at CMS Kickoff 25 were Agility CMS, ai12z, BL.INK, Brightspot, Contentful, CoreMedia, dotCMS, Directus, Kajoo, Kentico, Kinsta, Kontent.ai, Magnolia, Modern Campus, Pantheon, SearchStax, Solodev, Squiz, StreamX, TYPO3 and Umbraco. As you can see, it’s not just the usual CMS vendors, but also from the larger ecosystem.

On the agency and consulting side, we were joined by experienced implementation folks from fine companies like 9thCO, ACTUM Digital, Americaneagle.com, BizStream, Blend Interactive, Crescendo Collective, Crowd Favorite, Distinction, Evolving Web, First Line Software, iMedia, Kingsway Digital, Lone Rock Point, MMT Digital and SilverTech. Tom “The AEM Guy” Cranstoun will also be there. Talk to them about what happens “when the rubber hits the road” and they’ll help you towards 2025 project success.

Among the analysts joining us were Dan Drapeau from DXP Catalyst Consulting, Mark Demeny from MACH Alliance, Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic and our host Janus Boye from Boye & Co in Denmark.

A key point is also digital leaders from the customer-side. You could meet with ICANN, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, TELUS, WebMD Ignite and several others.

One last thing - the participants are quite mixed in roles. We had tech folks joining us, but we also had marketers, content strategists and really digital leaders with a diverse set of backgrounds.

Conference partners

Venue

It was our first time at the The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art in downtown St. Pete and what an ideal setting for a conference like ours with its spectacular modern and historic works of art that evoke the spirit of a wide-open frontier and the beauty of life in the American West.

The conference program included time to tour the museum.

For accommodation, St. Pete has many hotels in all budget ranges within walking distance.

And how to get there: Tampa International Airport is about 30 minutes drive away.