Thunder
13/01/2017

Joining forces for greater success

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Thunder started nine months ago, today eight Burda brands use Burda’s content management system, with 65 million visits per month in total between them. While the Thunder community grows continuously, the core team of Ingo Rübe, CTO of Burda Magazine Holding and initiator of Thunder, tirelessly contributes to its success, presenting Burda’s CMS at a wide range of conferences. The team has been talking to about 400 people from more than 200 companies in various countries since March of last year, adding up to around 200 potential clients, integrators and industrial partners. The positive response shows: Thunder is in demand.

“Joining forces”

Ingo Rübe brought together previous and potential industrial partners and integrators at a Partner Day in Munich at the start of the New Year. “You are all important for the community - without you it cannot grow”, Rübe said, welcoming the 36 participants from 15 companies. “Thunder started out successfully and is heading for commercial success on solid footing. Let us use the momentum to share our knowledge and join forces to make Thunder great”, he appealed to his audience. Participants showed great motivation to do so, following the day’s motto: „Let’s go out und spread the word!“

Challenges for 2017

Although Thunder is already successful, there are still plenty of things to do. These include making Thunder even more widely known and convincing other publishers, multipliers and users of the benefits of this perfect CMS for publishers. A major aim is to expand into Europe and extend the Drupal community in the (German-speaking) DACH region, which is still very small. While Thunder might be opened up for print and other industries, it will also be made simpler technologically and more accessible to beginners. There is strong competition both in the open source area with competitors such as Wordpress and in relation to proprietary systems.

New features and collaborations

Both the partners and the CTIs used the first session to show which modules they want to use to improve the Thunder product. Users of Thunder and Drupal can look forward to a new live blogging module, a user-friendly back-end and other new functions (see gallery). Another session focused on joint marketing activities to draw attention to Thunder. The participants presented their ideas and options for cooperating. Together the partners and CTIs will now develop concepts for workshops, road shops and joint PR measures in small mixed groups.

The bottom line

Thunder’s Partner Day was a success for all participants, marking the beginning of working together even more closely. “We started nine months ago and I am pleased to see what a great community has emerged. All of you have done a great deal for Thunder and Drupal by working on it incessantly developing new functions. I have not experienced anything like this in my entire career”, Rübe said, thanking all partners present and the CTIs.    

 

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Julia Pradel, Community Manager in the Thunder Core Team, led through the day
Daniel Bosen, Lead Developer for Thunder, presented the plans in 2017
Collin Müller from Thunder focused on joint marketing activities

 

Over the rooftops of Munich: The Thunder partner day took place in a cool location "Out of Office"
Time to network: The participants used the breaks to get to know each other to network
36 participants from 15 companies in six countries came together at the Thunder partner day
The Thunder community around one table
Wolfgang Ziegler (Drunomics) and Timo Welde (Galaniprojects) from worked together with Galaniprojects on a live blogging module for Thunder
Pascal Reutener from A&F presented a tool that can publish an article on different channels
Dennis Beste and Simone Reitze from nexx.tv presented their plans for 2017 and cooperation possibilities

 

Andreas Sahle (Wundergroup) and Andreas Krautzberger (Galaniprojects) showed the planned improvements for the Thunder Backend
Content is more than a simple article, said Miro Dietiker from MD Systems
Mike Hawkins of Riddle explained how to get more traffic to a website with quizzes and personality test
Ole Olsen from Digital Collections showed the Content Hub
Michel van Velde of OneShoe explained why Drupal needs marketing
Ulrich Heckenberger, Managing Director of Valiton ...
... and Caroline Götz, Director of Marketing PR Burda Direct Services offered co-operation for marketing activities
Sabrina Norman and Tamara Altendorf of Acquia brought ideas for marketing campaigns for Thunder
Martin Normann Lund von Ramsalt spoke about future marketing measures for Thunder
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