This fall, we had the pleasure of welcoming a special guest to our premises. Not only does he carry our company name: he is known for his world class technique, sportsmanship and a true European champion.
This is: “Vanenburg meets Vanenburg: Revisited!”
Gerald Vanenburg is an iconic former Dutch footballer and was part of the national team that won the European Championship in 1988. We had the pleasure of finally meeting him in person – after many somewhat frustrational talks, because of the fact that his name actually appears first in Google search results, while looking for our company name 
Our Chief Revenue Officer, Willem van Enter, asked Gerald Vanenburg to share his extraordinary career with us, resulting in him winning multiple awards, both with football clubs Ajax (3 national titles) and PSV (5 national titles and Champions League), as well as the Dutch national team (European Championship).
Whether it is luck, working hard, or talent to come to this success? “A bit of all three”, he answered decisively. Being born with specific skills means you have to nurture them time and time again, being the first to arrive on training and the last person to leave. “It’s all about ball contact: where a regular player has around 50 ball contacts per training, I made sure that, by staying longer, I touched the ball no less than 100 times per training”, he said.
And yes, a little luck also played a role in his career. “You can train yourself up to doing everything right, so that your shot will be as close as possible to the target you are aiming for 99% of the time. But to actually hit the target on the moment supreme, there’s that 1% of luck needed.” Examplorary of this was the video he shared, where talent, practice, and a little luck came together in a fine moment.
Many anecdotes were shared from a lively professional career – for example, why on earth did Vanenburg leave Ajax for joining rival PSV and what had this to do with Johan Cruijff, his coach at that time? The answer remains exclusive to the people joining our event…
Gerald Vanenburg was known for his fabulous technique – yes, of course we see similarities with Vanenburg as an IT company, we humbly admit 😉. This is why Vanenburg CEO Ardjan Baan freely took the stage and shared his thoughts on how state of the art technology can let you aim higher, enabling our customers to outperform their competition.
In times where development of business-critical applications can be expensive due to high licensing costs and vendor lock-in, meet Vanenburg’s newest star-player: Rappit Developer, an app development accelerator that speeds up the development process of business-critical IT apps, saving organizations time and money.
As no (football) star can shine without great teamwork, we were delighted to welcome Google Cloud’s Rokesh Jankie on stage, who shared the latest and greatest on everything Generative AI, sharing examples of how Google Cloud’s technology enables companies, from generating text and images to intelligently using data that allows companies to perform even better.
Before the guests were invited to the barbecue, Gerald Vanenburg was kind enough to sign our Vanenburg football table. And the barbecue, organized by Kasteel De Vanenburg (what’s in a name?) , was excellent as always.
Many thanks to the customers who joined the event, as well as our rock-star partner Google Cloud for attending and for our great teamwork in enabling our customers. Let’s aim higher!
To close it off: during this event, Vanenburg was officially congratulated by Petra Stojanovic (Partner Sales Manager) for reaching the Google Cloud Premier Partner status.
