India's First Umbraco Festival Picked Kochi, Not Bengaluru

Kochi hosts a lot of tech events that are really sales events. The Umbraco India Festival, which runs at Lulu IT Twin Towers in SmartCity Kochi on 28 and 29 August, is a different animal. It is the first dedicated Umbraco community event India has had, and it was assembled by the people who use the software rather than by a company trying to sell it to them.

Umbraco is an open source content management system built in Odense, Denmark, and it carries the kind of developer community that turns up to things. The Indian chapter of it, the Umbraco India User Group, has been running since 2023, and it has now brought Umbraco HQ in as co-organiser for a two-day festival on home ground. Of all the cities in India it could have chosen, it chose this one.

Why Kochi and not Bengaluru

The default answer for an Indian developer conference is Bengaluru, then Hyderabad, then Pune. Those cities have the headcount, the venues and the flight connections, and organisers reach for them without thinking too hard. Choosing Kochi instead is a decision somebody had to argue for.

It is also a reasonable one. The city has spent two decades building an IT base that started with Infopark on old paddy land in Kakkanad and now runs through SmartCity, and a large share of the people working in it are .NET developers at product companies and service shops rather than at the handful of giants that dominate the bigger hubs. That is close to the natural constituency for a CMS conference. Holding it inside SmartCity itself, at the Lulu IT Twin Towers, puts the event in the middle of the people it is for.

What the two days actually look like

Day one is the informal half. There is an evening hackathon with refreshments laid on, and a speakers' dinner running alongside it. Day two is the conference proper: a fun run to start, then keynotes and technical talks, with meals and networking breaks spaced through the day. It closes with a live music night, dinner and a DJ, which is a more Kochi way to end a developer conference than a closing panel would have been.

Nine speakers are confirmed so far. They include Emmanuel Tissera, who covers APAC for Umbraco HQ, Tony Meyn, Umbraco's head of operations, and Nikhil Prajapati, an Umbraco MVP. Having HQ staff fly in for a first edition matters, because it is the difference between a local user group meetup with a big name in the title and an event the parent organisation has actually committed people to. Ticket holders also get access to session recordings afterwards.

The ticket price tells you what kind of event this is

Early bird passes are 699 rupees, a 30 percent discount on the 999 rupee standard ticket, and both are capped. Students can apply for a free pass, though the spots are limited and each application is reviewed individually rather than granted on the click of a button.

Under a thousand rupees for two days, including meals, swag and the recordings, is community pricing, not commercial-conference pricing. Nobody is covering costs at that number and turning a profit on top of it. It is the price you set when the goal is to fill the room with working developers and students who would not expense a ticket, and it is the single clearest indicator of who this event is built for. If you are a freelancer weighing up whether to go, it costs roughly what a fortnight of desk time does at one of the city's coworking spaces.

What it means for the city

One CMS conference does not reposition a city. But the way these things compound is unglamorous and real: an international software community runs a first edition somewhere, a few dozen people fly in, the venue works, the food is good, the city is cheaper and easier than the alternatives, and the next organiser with a similar decision to make hears about it. Kochi has the airport, the hotel stock and now the venues to be on that list. What it has lacked is the reference.

For the developers already here, the more immediate value is simpler. Two days of talks and a hackathon within metro distance, at a price that does not need a manager's approval, is not something the city serves up often. Registration is open through the festival's own site, and more of what is moving in the local tech economy sits in our Tech and AI section, with the companies behind it listed in the Business Directory.