The eLearning Expo was the perfect reason I needed to schedule a trip to Lyon and kill two birds with one stone: to meet Jean-Claude Michel and Michel Lollichon of Distrisoft, our new Partner in France, and to attend the eLearning expo taking place in the city of Lyon (eFront and TalentLMS were presented at the Distrisoft booth).
Lyon is a major centre for banking as well as for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotech industries. The city also has serious stuff happening in the software industry with a particular focus on video games, and in recent years has fostered a growing local start-up sector. Lyon is ranked 2nd in France as an economic and convention centre with a population of approximately 1,500,000 people.
The trip was too short as I stayed at Lyon for less than 20 hours but it was also condensed in terms of experience gained. It was really interesting not only to see our new partners and discuss their promotion plans for eFront and TalentLMS in the French market, but also to see more than 50-60 vendors that were exhibiting in this eLearning Expo.
Distrisoft, our partner in France, is also the exclusive distributor for Articulate in France and a distributor for Zyncro (www.zyncro.com) a social and collaboration platform developed in Spain. Distrisoft presented the Articulate and Zyncro product line at their booth along with eFront and TalentLMS. What is most interesting and of great importance from a sales and marketing perspective, is that as all these systems are complementary products to each other and the visitors that were visiting Distrisoft’s booth had the chance to have a quick tour to view all of those systems at once. As a result, booth visitors could get the full picture of what comprises a “total elearning solution” for their “etraining” requirements by just visiting Distrisoft’s booth.
Among many other vendors that were also exhibiting at this eLearning Expo were SABA, Cornerstone, TalentSoft HRMS and a few French vendors (unfortunately don’t recall their names!)) etc. I was also surprised to meet Jan Miskovsky and Julia Lampasova from GOPAS, a Czech company specializing in the development and marketing of Microsoft Office eLearning Courses at the exhibition! We had met the first time at Online Educa Berlin last December where we all exhibiting.
The closing event of this very long day took place at “Le Cintra” – a very nice Piano / Restaurant Bar complete with excellent French wine, delicious finger food and the sounds of piano and violin – the perfect end to a long day and cold night in Lyon!
The next early morning I had my return flight back but only after organizing a “rendez-vous” with Jean-Claude and Michel on February 12th-13th at the iLearning Forum in Paris!
A bientot! 🙂
