Meet the latest OMVPs - H2 2026 Cohort!

Some people don't just use Optimizely — they champion it. They stay late to answer a stranger's forum question, turn a hard-won project lesson into a blog post so the next team doesn't hit the same wall, and step on stage to share what they've learned. Every year, the Optimizely Most Valuable Professional (OMVP) program exists to celebrate exactly these people.

OMVPs are the practitioners who build brilliant things on the platform and give their knowledge away freely — mentoring peers, sparking discussions, and lifting the whole community as they grow. They come from every corner of the ecosystem: solution architects and developers, strategists and digital leaders, each with their own story and their own way of moving Optimizely forward. What they share is generosity: through blogs, talks, technical contributions, and real-world work, they make everyone around them better.

Today, we're proud to introduce the newest cohort — the 2026 H2 Optimizely MVPs. Every name here represents deep expertise, hard-earned experience, and a genuine commitment to sharing it.

So let's meet them. 👏

YiLun Miao

YiLun Miao has a rare talent: making emerging technology feel less like a leap and more like a natural next step. As Country Manager for Niteco ANZ, he's become one of the most recognizable champions of Optimizely and its AI capabilities across the ANZ and APJ markets, famous for explaining Opal through everyday moments like learning to ski or eating a Dutch herring sandwich, analogies now quoted on stage by Optimizely's own leadership.

Behind the storytelling is real momentum: enterprise POCs, region-defining workshops, and a knack for connecting customers, partners, and technology so digital transformation actually lands. Generous with what he knows, YiLun shares practical insight freely with the wider Optimizely community, and this cycle, he earned the program's highest contribution score.

Igor Sufonov

Igor Sufonov is a Solutions Architect at Niteco with more than 15 years of experience working with digital platforms and enterprise technology. He works across the Optimizely platform, with a particular focus on CMS, content operations, solution architecture, integrations, experimentation, and AI.

Igor enjoys sharing practical experience from real projects through articles, discussions, and community events. Recently, he has been particularly interested in Optimizely Opal and exploring how AI can be applied to real-world content, marketing, and solution delivery challenges.

Vipin Banka

Vipin Banka is a technology leader, architect, and mentor with a passion for digital experience platforms, composable architecture, integrations, and AI-enabled engineering. He enjoys helping organizations navigate complex technology decisions and designing scalable solutions that balance business needs with long-term sustainability.

As an active member of the Optimizely community, Vipin shares implementation learnings, architecture insights, and best practices through Optimizely World articles and community engagement. Beyond technology delivery, he is particularly interested in how AI and emerging technologies can enhance engineering productivity, solution design, and customer outcomes.

Piotr Nowak

Piotr Nowak is a Senior .NET Developer and Optimizely SME at ROCKWOOL Group, with nearly seven years on the platform spanning architecture, development, cloud migration, and DevOps automation across more than 40 global markets. He architects and builds on Optimizely CMS (PaaS and SaaS), Commerce, and Headless CMS with GraphQL.

Piotr plans and executes complex migrations — monolith to headless with Next.js, and Windows to Optimizely DXP cloud-native Linux — on Azure infrastructure built as Infrastructure as Code via Azure DevOps and the Optimizely Deployment API. He also runs internal workshops on DXP migration, headless architecture, and best practices, and earned all eight Optimizely certifications in October 2025.

Jill George

Jill George is a Strategy OMVP and Senior Sales and Client Director at Niteco, working upstream of delivery — shaping the commercial and technical narrative for CMS 13 upgrades, migrations, and Opal enablement across partner channels and RFPs.

She works closely with Niteco's four Platinum OMVPs to keep platform claims accurate and defensible, and positions the long-standing Optimizely partnership as the solution of choice. Jill moved from Opal sales accreditation to full administrator and development-level accreditation within six weeks, and has secured Optimizely One Sales accreditation.

Tom Denbigh

Tom Denbigh is a Commercial Director at Netcel. He has spent the last decade on a simple conviction: that the best digital strategies start with people, not platforms. He helps organisations keep users at the heart of every objective — and makes sure the technology follows, rather than leads.

With deep expertise across platform strategy, personalisation, and user experience, Tom guides companies in getting real, measurable value from their Optimizely and marketing-technology investments. But his contribution reaches well beyond client work: through Netcel's webinar programme, his Opticon panels, and the Future Ready Forum he founded for senior digital leaders, he's created spaces for the whole community to learn from one another.

Kiran Patil

Kiran Patil is a Group Technology Director at Horizontal, where he leads technical strategy and delivery across digital experience platform engagements. With 19 years in the industry building premium digital experiences for Fortune 100 clients, Kiran brings a full-lifecycle perspective to every project — spanning architecture, discovery, estimation, and go-live planning — working closely with tech leads and development teams to bring solutions to life.

He currently focuses on Optimizely SaaS CMS implementations and large-scale digital transformation initiatives, and holds both Optimizely SaaS CMS and Opal certifications. A long-time community contributor and knowledge sharer, Kiran is passionate about helping practitioners learn from real-world experience rather than just documentation, and is especially excited about what SaaS CMS, Opal, and Experimentation can unlock for marketing teams.

William Parr

With 18 years in web development, William Parr is a Lead Engineer and Optimizely Chapter Lead at iO, specialising in translating client requirements into scalable solutions and bridging business needs with technical implementation.

His expertise spans back-end development, enterprise content management, and DXP architectures, with a primary focus on Optimizely. An active community contributor, William holds certifications including Optimizely Certified CMS Developer, Optimizely One Technical Sales Accredited, and Opal Development Accredited.

Phil Heywood

Phil Heywood is Head of Experience at Netcel, working at the strategy and experience end of digital programmes rather than the build. He focuses on framing business outcomes clearly and building a Goal Tree so a programme stays anchored to them. Using Core Modelling, Phil identifies the "core pages" where a priority user task meets a priority business goal — insight that then feeds the CMS and DXP content model and Optimizely Graph's composable structure.

He sets experimentation and personalisation strategy across Web Experimentation and Feature Experimentation, helping clients move up the maturity curve, and owns Netcel's experience-optimisation practice. Phil also advises organizations on where Opal and agentic workflows can remove friction from everyday content and optimisation work.

Nicholas Sideras

Nicholas Sideras is a CMS Architect and Optimizely Platform Lead at Velir, a full-service digital agency and data studio, where he sets technical direction for CMS implementation projects. He started working in the CMS space twenty years ago, with over twelve years of experience on integration-heavy e-commerce projects connecting websites to back-office OMS, ERP, product information, and payment systems. While launching sites on the Optimizely platform over the past seven years, he has earned ten active certifications, including SaaS CMS, PaaS CMS, Opal, and Web Experimentation.

Nicholas has held both in-house and agency engineering roles, working with organizations ranging from local businesses to global brands. That experience — including client-side management of agencies — has taught him the weight digital projects place on sponsoring teams, a perspective he brings to his client work and to the technical writing and talks he shares with the community.

Muhammad Talha

Muhammad Talha brings a customer-centric mindset to digital transformation and digital experience programs, having led initiatives for renowned brands across professional services, consumer products, insurance, and asset management.

He works closely with business stakeholders to define digital strategies and roadmaps that maximize the value of the Optimizely platform, guiding customers on the effective adoption of Optimizely CMS, Commerce, and Digital Experience solutions while leading end-to-end delivery from ideation and solution design through to production release. Talha also supports customers on their AI transformation journey, enabling the adoption of Optimizely Opal and identifying opportunities for AI-driven capabilities to enhance content management, digital experiences, and operational efficiency.

Mark Ames

Mark Ames is a Technical Director at Netcel, has spent 15 years shaping how organisations build on Optimizely, from Episerver's earliest days to today's agentic, AI-accelerated platform. His work sits where technical direction meets architectural governance: guiding teams through digital transformations, complex integrations, and version migrations, and making the hard calls on where a platform should be pointed to deliver real value.

Lately, that focus has turned to AI. Mark has developed a structured, human-in-the-loop approach to AI-accelerated Optimizely delivery, championing what agentic tooling like Opal can genuinely do, while keeping a clear head about where human judgement has to stay in the loop. He led Netcel's Optimizely Opal hackathon effort, contributes thoughtfully to technical discussions across Optimizely World, and works quietly behind the scenes to mentor colleagues and widen his team's footprint in the community. Generous with hard-won lessons, Mark is exactly the kind of practitioner the OMVP program exists to recognise.

Wojciech Seweryn

Wojciech Seweryn is the kind of developer who turns hard-won project experience into something the whole community can use. As Lead Backend Developer at NoA Ignite, he's spent more than eight years deep in the Optimizely platform — currently leading backend work on The Royal Mint, where he owns everything from architecture to go-live across CMS, Commerce, ODP, Product Recommendations, and both Web and Feature Experimentation, including a heavily customized Commerce Bundles build.

But it's what he does beyond the code that stands out. On his blog at wseweryn.dev, Wojciech has published a steady run of practical, no-nonsense technical guides on ODP real-time audiences, CMS 13 upgrades, Graph migration, and Product Recommendations customization, the kind of writing that saves other developers hours of trial and error. He's just as active in the forums, where his answers have earned rare "accepted" marks from the people he's helped. Generous, precise, and consistently useful, Wojciech is a natural fit for the OMVP program.

Niklas Andersson

Niklas Andersson spent more than eight years inside Optimizely,  back when it was still called Episerver — building teams around Customer Success, Support, Partner Success, and Managed Services. Today he leads the Optimizely practice at Precio Fishbone in Stockholm, moving from asking partners to do great work to delivering it himself.

He is currently deep in Opal, GEO/AEO, and figuring out how AI fits into real enterprise DXP setups without breaking anything important. Outside of work, Niklas is usually on a boat, underwater, or being politely folded up on a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu mat.

Rikard Ljungman

Rikard Ljungman has been around Optimizely since the EPiServer days in 2007, and has seen the platform move through several eras — this one, he believes, being the biggest.

At Niteco, he focuses on helping clients make genuine sense of Opal and the AI shift: not just adopting new tools, but rethinking how teams work now that a lot of what used to require a developer no longer does. That is what he wants to bring to the OMVP program, helping people navigate what is genuinely new, informed by having watched what came before it.

Arnold Macauley

Arnold Macauley is a Partner at Nansen leading the AI and Opal practice, owning strategy and architecture for agent work on Optimizely: which agents get built, in what order, and how they connect to CMS, CMP, and Experimentation. He runs the "Prompts to Production" workshop method — moving from a blank page to around 60 use cases in under an hour — and handles commercial shape, account leadership, and change management through delivery.

Arnold built the Road Scholar Opal program, cutting an 81-hour sustainability review to five to seven minutes and reducing an activity-notes audit by 96% across 940 programs, with more than 40 everyday agents now live.

Karla Santi

Karla Santi is the CEO and founding partner of Blend Interactive, a digital agency that guides organizations through complex web and content challenges. Since 2008, when Blend became Optimizely's first North American partner, she has grown the agency into an Optimizely Platinum Partner backed by a team of experts across Optimizely's solutions.

Karla serves on Optimizely's Partner Advisory Board and is a frequent speaker and voice in the CMS community, bringing a strategic perspective on how organizations put technology to work for real results.

The Optimizely community thrives because of individuals who are willing to share their expertise, mentor others, and push the platform forward. This new cohort of OMVPs embodies exactly that spirit.

This announcement highlights just a portion of the talent and dedication that makes the Optimizely community so strong. Our OMVPs represent a wide range of roles, industries, and regions, but they all share a common passion: helping others succeed with the Optimizely platform.

We're excited to see how this new cohort will continue to contribute their expertise, share practical knowledge, and inspire the broader ecosystem in the months ahead.

👉 Know someone who should be an OMVP? Encourage them to apply or nominate them directly

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly. I’d genuinely love to hear from you, and I’m looking forward to working with and getting to know the OMVP community better!

📩 Reach out: raiyanbinta.abdullah@optimizely.com