Letter from our CEO

We Built It!

For some, the journey began with a long flight from cities all over the world, including Yokohama, Chelyabinsk, Miass, Dordrecht, Dalian and Bengaluru. For others, it started in Silicon Valley, Irvine, Chicago, Austin and Denver. The destination? A week of innovation and creativity, of connection and collaboration, of challenges and celebration – what we call Rocket.Build – in Rocket global headquarters outside of Boston. This year’s event involved 200 Rocketeers, 44 projects, five days, four winning teams, and three bands.

We opened the doors of our innovation lab on Sunday, June 24^th at 10 in the morning, and we closed the week with an awards ceremony and musical celebration on Thursday, June 28^th. The five days of Rocket.Build 2018 can only be described as pure magic. Non-stop designing, coding, re-coding, re-designing, demoing, presenting, and building.

As a member of the Rocket Community, you will reap the benefits of our “hackathon” in the quarters and years to come. Our Rocketeers are creating new experiences designed specifically to help our customers and partners solve their most critical problems. Our Rocketeers are creating new platforms that allow you to extend the reach of your applications, your services, and your business. Our Rocketeers are creating the outcomes that will have maximum impact and deliver more value for you.

And here are some pictures of our winning teams and our (world famous) The Rocket Band performing at our closing ceremony at the Hard Rock Café in Boston.

And today we begin planning our Rocket.Build 2019 event, where we will be innovating even more in areas as diverse as data, applications, and security, and in platforms as varied as IBM mainframe, IBM Power, MultiValue database technology, EDI, B2B Collaboration, node/angular/full stack development, open source, machine learning, and more. Let me know if you have an interest in participating, sponsoring a team to create something specific to you, or just want to learn more about how events like this create, support, and drive a culture of innovation.

I wanted to share a few songs that The Rocket Band performed at our closing party. We assembled Rocketeers from all over the world into three bands to be part of this great show, and more than a dozen of us put on a 3+ hour concert.

Andrew J. Youniss
President and CEO, Rocket Software, Inc.