Andy in the office

Andy Thompson named a Kentico MVP for 2020

Our CTO, Andy Thompson, has been named as a Kentico MVP for the sixth consecutive year.

Tami Iseli

By Tami Iseli, 20 January 20203 minute read

Luminary CTO Andy Thompson has done it again! For the sixth year in a row, he’s been named in Kentico’s prestigious MVP lineup. He’s one of just 13 MVPs for 2020, and the only one in the APAC region.

“It’s not easy to achieve and I’m in very impressive company. I know the other MVPs are all absolute experts in their fields..." —Andy Thompson

Andy was thrilled with the announcement, saying he was honoured and humbled to again take his place on the MVP honour roll. “It’s not easy to achieve and I’m in very impressive company,” he said. “I know the other MVPs are all absolute experts in their fields and go out of their way to help improve Kentico as a product and to help the broader community.”

The Kentico MVP Program is an annual recognition program designed to acknowledge outstanding developers for their contribution to the Kentico, CMS and .NET communities over the preceding 12 months. 

In announcing the 2020 lineup, Kentico Technical Evangelist Byran Soltis said “Each year we have hundreds of developers who participate in online forums, DevNet Q&As, user group presentations, and many other activities to assist the Kentico community. While we have a tremendous amount of involvement throughout the community, we have recognised a handful of developers who have gone above and beyond with their contributions. These individuals have excelled at assisting others with their knowledge and experience.”

What’s involved in being a Kentico MVP?

Being an MVP is not all about the glory – the role also bestows a certain level of responsibility. MVPs are asked to speak at conferences and contribute to online discussions and forums while steadily producing blogs and other content to assist the development community. 

MVPs take on the role as volunteers and are not provided with any financial incentive from Kentico. “We don’t work for Kentico,” explained Andy. “We still very much work for our respective companies, and we give Kentico very honest feedback.”

Part of the trade-off is that MVPs get to have direct access to key people within Kentico. “Being able to spend a lot of time with Kentico’s product owners, designers and developers, is definitely an advantage,” said Andy. 

Over the past year, Luminary has been heavily involved in providing feedback on the development of Kentico’s new headless CMS product, Kentico Cloud. “We’ve given them very objective feedback on the product,” added Andy. “It’s allowed us to provide a direct line of feedback on behalf of the whole partner community. And it’s always handy having a bit of inside knowledge into what’s in the pipeline.”

As well as being actively involved in evaluating product betas for Kentico in 2019, Andy presented at the Kentico Connection Conference, and was a regular contributor to the developer community through various online communities. He also joined the other MVPs working alongside Kentico staff in the Czech Republic for a week, as part of the annual MVP Summit.

“Being involved in the MVP program has really expanded my network and allowed me to work directly with some really impressive people,” reflected Andy. “It’s also helped me develop better relationships with other partners within the community that I might otherwise have just seen as competitors. Now I see them as like-minded people facing challenges that I can help with.

“The MVP program has also helped position Luminary in the market as CMS platform experts. The more knowledge we have about various CMS platforms, the more able we are to speak to potential customers about the pros and cons and help them choose the right platform.” 

Looking ahead

Andy is looking forward to another year of being an MVP. “I try to contribute as much as I can, and I hope to do that again this year,” he said. “I’d like to speak at some events and I’d like to continue talking about both Kentico EMS and Kentico Cloud. I’d also like to help other partners as they transition to MVC and come along on the ride with us as we transition to MVC.”

For the full list of 2020 Kentico MVPs, see Kentico’s blog post ‘Announcing the 2020 Kentico MVPs’.

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