Infobip Acquires Shift Conference, Goes All In On Developers More acquisitions across unlikely verticals signal the importance of growth for the unicorn
By Navjyot Gurudatta •
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Infobip, a global cloud communications unicorn, has signaled a strategic shift to put developers front and center of their company strategy with the acquisition of Shift Conference. Shift is a tech conference franchise with over a decade of experience in creating and producing technology conferences in multiple industry verticals such as software development, finech and artificial intelligence. Shift Developer, Shift's flagship conference, is the largest developer event in south-eastern Europe, attracting attendees from over a 100 different countries and speakers from all the major global tech companies including Microsoft, Netflix, AWS and Spotify, many others.
Incorporating leadership and experience with the acquisition
Infobip, besides acquiring Shift as one of the leaders in this space, also appointed its founder and CEO Ivan Burazin to the board as chief developer experience officer. With a decade of experience in producing developer, fintech and AI conferences, Burazin has positioned Shift as a leading European and regional tech conference producer.
"The vision was always to become one of the largest developer conferences in the world, hence with the backing of a unicorn and the freedom to keep working on independently – the vision seems to have finally become possible," said Ivan Burazin, Shift Founder and CEO, and the new CDXO at Infobip.
The acquisition is set to provide both companies with new expertise and business opportunities in this space that will not only boost Infobip's own conference offering but will also form the basis of their all-new Developer Experience department. Along with creating global developer conferences, the new department will be addressing the B2C market by conducting outreach to developers through teams of developer advocates and all-new startup outreach programs.
Growing a new vertical on the shoulders of a successful brand
By bringing Shift inhouse, Infobip can build on the flagship Shift Developer conference to take it to new heights, particularly with regards to setting new production standards, reducing complexity and increasing overall quality of the experience in the event space.
Additionally, it will provide the resources for Shift to expand globally, first to the US and then in the coming years to Latin America and South East Asia, transforming a successful regional player into a global one.
"The last year been the most challenging year for the event industry in its history and powering through it and being able to adapt showed us we are ready to expand and grow, perhaps faster than expected. With the backing of Infobip we add another order of magnitude to the growth potential," said Burazin.
Thinking beyond the traditional verticals is a must to maintain prominence
Infobip, with over a decade of industry experience, after being founded in Croatia has expanded to include over 60 offices on six continents offering natively built technology with the capacity to reach over seven billion mobile devices and 'things' in 190+ countries connected to over 800 telecom networks. The company serves and partners with leading mobile operators, messaging apps, banks, social networks, tech companies, and aggregators. Reaching out actively to the developer community is perhaps obvious but still a turning point for such a company.
"Infobip is on a growth trajectory to expand rapidly into the B2C vertical, or more specifically Business-to-Developer (B2D) space. Having Ivan on board with his experience as the founder of Codeanywhere, a B2D SaaS company, and creator of Shift , the largest developer conference in the region, will be an asset to us going forward," said the unicorn's CEO Silvio Kutic.
Outside of its external impact, the newly formed developer experience department will offer various initiatives to empower internal Infobip developers, such as content creation seminars, open source time and opportunities for developers that want to embrace a more public-facing role. Infobip has its eye set on the overall shift, pun fully intended, the developer community will represent in the world and they want to be at the forefront of it.
