Hello SDL!

I've recently joined SDL and as I intend to at least try to blog here regularly, I thought I ought to  start off with an introduction. So, hi! I'm Ian Truscott, I have recently joined the Web Content Management division as VP Products, North America. 

What does that mean? Well I am part of our product leadership team and my focus will be on our significant North American market. I'll be working with customers, partners and analysts to share our roadmap and gather requirements and trends to help inform our  product strategy. 

I come into this role having enjoyed a year as an analyst for the Gilbane Group (now part of Outsell Inc). I spent the previous decade in the WCM space, working for software vendors in product leadership positions in product marketing and product strategy. 

It's an exciting time to be coming on board, we have SDL Tridion 2011 fresh out of the box that has been well received by customers and analysts and a rolling roadmap of innovative products and enhancements this year. 

We are delivering practical products that help marketers get their arms around these challenging multi-channel engaging times. When it comes to our customers engaging their audience online, we have customer success, where plenty of folks are still talking about the theory. 

I admit, I talk a lot about engagement online (as you can read in my personal blog). I think we are entering a period in this industry where the promise of a pervasive, multi-channel, relevant web experience is now a business imperative and I believe we are in a great position to respond to these market needs. Needs that have clearly moved on from simply publishing pages and our marketing technology platforms need to reflect that. 

In addition, of course, once you publish content to the web it is global and the first step to making it relevant is to make it local. To translate it, to contextualize it for this local visitor and then manage and maintain the huge number of variants that can result from this process. 

So, hello to you, the SDL community. I hope you'll find my contribution here useful and I look forward to meeting lots of you in the coming months. If you'd like to connect, you can also find me on Twitter (@iantruscott).