Claus's Blog

What do these three topics have in common? Read on…

This story started for me 4 years ago when I found myself in Barcelona during the 2006 World Cup, where I had the opportunity to hang out in a cool local Spanish pub while Spain was playing France in the first game of the “Round of 16”. Spain lost. A few nights later, at a different bar, I watched Portugal lose to France in the semi-finals. It was great experiencing a major sporting event with a couple of raucous crowds although it would have been a lot more interesting had the home teams won.

This year I scored a double bonus. Firstly I was visiting Shoden Data Systems, our reseller in South Africa literally 2 weeks before the start of World Cup. I must say I was amazed at the progress the country has made since my last visit 10 years ago, and driving by “Soccer City” outside of Johannesburg was just plain neat. World Cup fever was everywhere, with “Joburg” festooned with banners and flags, and filled with excitement. I asked my hotel clerk how much my room would be three weeks hence and the response was “about 4-times as much”. I won’t give the actual numbers in case my CFO is reading (it was a bit pricey, even pre-World Cup), but needless to say, capitalism is alive and well in South Africa. Great country!!

Secondly, I found myself in Sao Paulo, Brazil last week for what we’ve been calling the “EBC on the Road” or the “Traveling EBC”, or what I like to call it: the “EBC- Mo-beel”. Check #ebcontheroad if you want to catch up and/or participate in some of the Twitter banter since it will be updated in the weeks and months to come. Some of the major topics were World Cup (we were in Brazil, for goodness sake!!), Caipirinha’s (we were in Brazil, for goodness sake!!), pizza (did I say we were in Sao Paulo, who believes their pizza is better than Milan’s?), and the demise of some of our favorite “home” teams (Italy (Roberto), England (Ros), Denmark (me, and, whoa, like they had a chance!), and of course USA (Sean and a bunch of others). Yikes, it was a rough week for loyalties. Roberto had the quote of the week when he said: “4 years ago France and Italy met in the finals of the World Cup. This year they met at the airport on the way home”. He properly attributed the quote to someone else, but I forgot who that was, so I’ll attribute it to Roberto (our Italian guy, BTW).

Friday afternoon the entire country of Brazil stopped running during the Brazil-Portugal match. We were all given awesome yellow and green soccer shirts, Brazilian flags, and these really corny yellow and gold oversized goofy plastic glasses. We took some foto’s, but I was told if even a single one was posted on this blog, my future would be at risk. Hint taken.

But getting back to the EBC, the concept is simple: rather than having our customers and prospective customers travel to one of our briefing centers, we simply pack up our briefing center, a few of our super-techie folks, a few executives and bring the briefing center to our customers, and it has been wildly successful. By the end of the week we’re generally collectively exhausted but feel we’ve put in a good productive week. Recent non-US venues have included (Real) Madrid, Stockholm in February (brrr), (Inter) Milan with Paris and Singapore coming up. Within the US we’ve pretty much covered the map with New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and of course the great US city of Toronto coming up. Like I said, follow us on #ebcontheroad for the fun. Join in.

So I promised a blog of World Cup, Storage, and our “EBC-Mo-Beel” and I’m not certain this all tied together in the end, but thank you for reading anyway…looking forward to the finals on July 11th…