Blueriq 12 is out for half a year now. The first months after the release it has been quiet, as we expected. Teams were experimenting with the new software and planning the migration. With the Blueriq 12 release, you also have to do a Java upgrade, as Java 8 has reached the end of public updates in January 2019. So, a few customers made a plan, arranged the correct platform support and then started migrating to the new version.
Why a race?
Around the summer we heard from two customers they planned the migration. There was good contact between the customer and support. During the first steps to 12 a few bugs were found. One of the customers made a step from Blueriq 9 to Blueriq 12. In the 4 years between those versions, a lot of functionality was added and some behaviour has been changed. This was an extra challenge for this particular customer. In October it was a neck and neck race which customer was going to be the first to get in production with Blueriq 12. And then came the third. When hearing about two customers racing to be the first with 12, the third customer decided to sprint and get to 12 first. Congratulations.
We now have one customer live with 12.5, one with 12.6 and our own academy just migrated to 12.7. From support perspective I had a lot of fun working with our customers to facilitate their migration to Blueriq 12. We learned a lot from each other and also celebrated successes together.
Reflecting on this period, we thought it would be fun to give more insight in the race to 12. We created a physical board, with a logo for every customer and added columns for Blueriq versions. Each time a customer successfully migrates to a higher version, we move their card to the correct column. This gives us, and our customer success managers more insight into which versions are in use.
As we want to encourage our customers to migrate to the latest versions, we want to give a price to the winners of this race. In December, Blueriq 12.9 will be released. All customers that are at least on Blueriq 12.9 at 31 March 2020 will be selected, and from the selected customer we randomly pick one to win a price. What the price is will be kept a secret for now, the only thing I can say is that Support and our PO’s will join this event.
Enjoy the race, and keep the pace up.