Cincom Smalltalk™ Director, Suzanne Fortman, to Speak at Smalltalks 2017
FAST (Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk) will be hosting its Smalltalks 2017 Conference on November 8-10 at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. This marks the 11th year that FAST has organized a conference that’s full of pertinent, interesting topics and dynamic speakers.
We’re happy to report that our very own Director of Smalltalk Global Operations, Suzanne Fortman, will be speaking at the conference on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 8th.
The topic of her talk will be the business side of Smalltalk and titled, “The Value of Commercial Smalltalk.” The talk will cover programs available to partners and students, the various ways Cincom works to build up and grow the Smalltalk Community and so much more…
Suzanne is a knowledgeable, passionate speaker who is bound to leave the audience with a sense of renewed energy and enthusiasm.
Suzanne Fortman’s Bio
Anyone who knows Suzanne Fortman would not be surprised to learn that her career with Smalltalk began on a flight from Atlanta, GA to Los Angeles, CA. During the flight, Suzanne in typical fashion had been chatting with the flight attendants as if they were old friends. Seeing this dialog go on for a while, her rowmate finally asked Suzanne if she was a flight attendant as well. This conversation was Suzanne’s introduction to Smalltalk.
She began explaining to her rowmate that she traveled a lot for work. After the man asked what she did, she described in detail that her job involved all aspects of marketing—a lot of sales, a lot of listening and sharing information … basically, whatever it took to get the word out about the great products she was representing. The man told Suzanne, “We need someone like you, we’ve got great products.” That man was George Bosworth, one of the founders of Digitalk and authors of Visual Smalltalk Enterprise. Four hours and a lot of small talk later, Suzanne realized this “Smalltalk thing” sounded pretty interesting and fun.
That was 20 some years ago. Since then, Suzanne has worked in many different roles within commercial Smalltalk and within the Smalltalk Community. Her career took her from Digitalk to ParcPlace-Digitalk and ObjectShare. The only time she wasn’t with Smalltalk was when she took a hiatus after Cincom acquired VisualWorks from ObjectShare. Even during her break from Smalltalk, she continued to work with partners, helping them to build their businesses. Along with Application Development, she also worked with high-availability software and security software providing marketing, partner relations, investor relations and other aspects of product promotion and partner management. Regardless of who she works with, she always works with great products, introducing them to enthusiastic partners and helping to grow partner and developer communities. The hiatus only lasted a few years, and before long, she was on the phone with Cincom Systems, Inc. who was asking her to come back to Smalltalk because, “We need someone like you, we’ve got great products.”
Suzanne always says that she’s an unlikely suspect in a highly technical market. She loves technology. She feeds off of the passion and energy she gets when listening to developers talk about what they’re working on. She loves bringing partners, products, and possibility together. Her list of roles could go on and on, but in the end, Suzanne does whatever it takes to bring great products to the market and help developers and decision-makers find their ways to each other.
Of course, her current focus is on Cincom® ObjectStudio® and Cincom® VisualWorks®.
We hope to see you at Smalltalks 2017. And, please make sure to catch Suzanne’s talk … you’ll be glad that you did!