The Tenth WinDays Conference Opened

WinDays Technology, the jubilee tenth Microsoft technology conference and the leading Croatian technology conference, was opened on Monday in Rovinj. Over the course of four days, the conference will gather more than 1500 experts in the field of information and telecommunications technologies.

Conference attendees will be able to participate in more than 130 lectures held by numerous esteemed speakers from Croatia and abroad across 8 parallel tracks. Microsoft will also announce the public availability of many of its products in the coming days, allowing visitors to experience them firsthand, premiering in Croatia. The director of the Microsoft WinDays conference, Marko Makovac, presented the entire conference program during today’s opening ceremony, with a special emphasis on its technological aspect.

-Technology experts today face an additional challenge: they are no longer just responsible for the IT infrastructure in their organization, but they are also expected to actively contribute to the company’s goals. Moreover, it is entirely possible that technology experts can play a much more significant role within their companies today than ever before, and that certain solutions may actually originate from the IT department according to the company’s management – said Marko Makovac at the opening of the WinDays technology conference. He added that for most companies, the main goal during a recession is to make business cheaper and more efficient, but they must do so in a way that does not harm their business and that they emerge from the crisis as innovative, creative, and competitive companies. At this year’s WinDays conference, we want to show that these two desires – the desire for savings and cost optimization and the desire for growth and development – do not necessarily have to be in conflict. New information technologies, such as cloud services, virtualization, and innovations in server infrastructure, succeed in fulfilling these stated goals and enabling better use of existing infrastructure – explained Marko Makovac, clarifying why the new generation of IT solutions is particularly important at this moment. With the new conference concept, with a more clearly focused technological and business part, Microsoft aims to better tailor the content to specific types of visitors and provide them with a central place where they can meet and exchange opinions and impressions.

At today’s opening ceremony, awards were presented to speakers who have lectured at all ten WinDays conferences, which is a significant achievement given that the number of nominated lectures increases year by year, and ultimately only the best can be heard at the conference. Typically, these are also speakers who have been rated highest by the audience year after year, so today, awards for their successful teaching careers spanning a decade were received by Ozren Bajić, Tomislav Bronzin, Dragan Jelčić, Zvonimir Mavretić, Ratko Mutavdžić, Andrej Radinger, and Krešimir Radošević. Microsoft Croatia also took this opportunity to reward the best software solutions from its partners. The award for the most advanced technological solution was given to the company Ekobit; the solution with the highest business value was awarded to the company Acceleratio; the solution with the highest business value for small companies belongs to the company Citus; the most innovative solution was awarded to the company Croatives, and a special community award for contribution was given to Bernard Katić.