Apil 11, 2021 - The largest Croatian software company Infobip acquires Split Shift Conference, just after taking over US company OpenMarket.
In the next few years, Split will become the center of the world. At least in one thing. The first Croatian unicorn startup Infobip has completed its second acquisition, reports Novac.Jutanji.hr.
After a $300 million acquisition of a rival American company, OpenMarket, Infobip has decided to acquire a Croatian company. Namely, they have acquired the largest conference for computer programmers in Southeast Europe, Split Shift Conference.
The reason? The largest Croatian software company wants to create the largest developer conference in the world, in Croatia.
Developers are considered to be developers, but also all others who work on software development. The first step on that path will be the Infobip Shift Dev conference announced for September at the Spaladium Arena.
Izabel Jelenić, co-founder and technical director of Infobip, says that he will not announce the transaction's value.
"This is an important acquisition with which Infobip is making a strategic shift in business by focusing on developers, internal and external," says Jelenić.
He adds that the founder and director of Shift Conference, Ivan Burazin, became a member of the Infobip board for developer experience. Burazin will head the so-called Developer Experience department within the company.
Jelenić states that this department's goal is to create the largest global development conference and introduce and implement various initiatives to strengthen the development community.
Software companies compete globally for the market with classic sales and a presence in the developer community. Many build their own development communities, which know their software and thus make potential corporate customers more willing to acquire their own software products.
"We are all excited about this new collaboration. We have known Ivan Burazin for a long time, and we believe that we all have wonderful and great things ahead of us," says Jelenić.
Infobip itself, which has surpassed 3,000 employees in Europe, both the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia, internally has more than 800 developers.
Jelenić says that they are making huge progress in terms of the external development community.
"We realize them through numerous initiatives, such as our Dev Days conference, as well as by opening our products to end-users, in this case, developers," explains Jelenić.
It is less well known that Infobip has been organizing its own Dev Deyse development conferences since 2015. In Tuheljske Toplice, they would gather more than 500 programmers, mostly their own. At the last physical conference in 2019, Mate Rimac, Damir Sabol, and Ivan Burazin were guests at Dev Days.
Dev Days also attracted global program stars. They hosted Juergen Hoeller, co-founder and one of the key people of the Spring framework, a programming environment in which corporations worldwide develop more than half of their software.
But that conference never competed with Shift, which from the start was mostly geared towards the global community, so it remained smaller and focused on internal education at Infobip.
"We continue to organize the Dev Days conference, which we will now, with the acquisition of Shift, further improve and enrich with the experience and production brought by Shift. The level above this whole story is the third day of the conference, which is open to the public, and Infobip Shift will now take the stage," Jelinić emphasizes.
On the other hand, Shift has branched out in recent years, so it has started organizing conferences on fintech, artificial intelligence, and other topics. But his strongest product is still the Shift Dev conference for developers.
Before the pandemic, in 2019, Shift Dev gathered 1300 participants from all over the world in Split.
The conference, which has grown into the largest such event in Southeast Europe, is attended by top developers from Booking, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Shopify.
But also several programming stars such as PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf and CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie.
Ivan Burazin is convinced that with Infobip, they can scale Shift into the world's largest developer conference and emphasizes that he did not decide to sell because of the pandemic.
"Last year was certainly harder for us than the previous ones, but when it comes to finances, we concluded it better than 2019, which was the best year for Shift ever. This year we are planning a completely new, sensational level - a developer conference that would be even bigger than any edition of Shift so far," concludes Burazin.
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