Bringing SimCorp’s Software Engineering Day to Life

This case study examines how GOTO helped design and deliver a unique and highly rated internal conference for investment management solutions provider SimCorp that brought new learnings, ideas and inspiration to their global engineering team.

When SimCorp had the ambition of bringing their entire engineering team together for a remote day of learning, discussions and meaningful interactions, they knew that an event of this size and scope would require expert know-how and experience. 

As longtime attendees of GOTO’s developer conferences, they approached the team to set up their first GOTO Exclusive package — a fully customized in-house conference experience organized and curated with the help of GOTO’s two decades of conference experience and their large network of industry experts. 

Within weeks, SimCorp and GOTO made “Software Engineering Day” — SimCorp’s first annual internal conference for 600 of their developers, testers and architects — a reality. 

“We wanted a day of in-depth learning from well-respected and well-known experts in the software community; we wanted a day of company-wide inspiration,” says Kenn Coops, SimCorp’s Enterprise Learning Architect. “And we wanted a day full of enjoyment.” 

SimCorp also wanted to deliver all the hallmarks of a face-to-face conference — networking, informal chats with speakers, engaging, hands-on sessions — entirely online.

Software Engineering Day in a Snapshot

GOTO worked with SimCorp to determine their objectives and create a vision for the event before joining up with SimCorp’s internal team to create a plan that covered every step from concept to delivery. 

“They started by asking the right questions, helping us nail down our areas of focus for the day and key learnings we wanted our engineering team to leave the event with,” says Kenn. “Every aspect of organizing this was thought out and executed through bi-weekly calls, open communication and daily updates on progress.”

Once SimCorp landed on the right themes for the day, GOTO helped them secure a lineup of industry pioneers, top practitioners and best-selling authors for keynotes and breakout talks. 

While the majority of sessions were led by external speakers, several were led by SimCorp leaders. This combination of content provided insights into what SimCorp teams in various parts of the organization were working on while contextualizing this work within themes explored in sessions throughout the day. 

SimCorp’s Conference Highlights

The lessons SimCorp engineers took away from the conference brought their technical training to a whole new level and gave colleagues the opportunity to connect and share ideas with team members around the world in sessions most relevant to them.

But the Software Engineering Day agenda did not only deliver a fantastic lineup of speakers and content, it also provided downtime and entertainment in the form of sessions like yoga, trivia quizzes and giveaways throughout the day to keep up the momentum.  

“We landed on the tagline of ‘lean in, learn and get inspired’ for the event,” shared Kenn. “And I think this was satisfied for all — we can see this event making positive waves in the organization today.”

Interested in hosting an internal conference for your engineering team? Contact us at info@gotocon.com