OVERVIEW OF SET GOALS

Let’s revisit the goals set year ago:

• Turnover 1 600 000 € (about 55 % growth)
• Profit over 65 000 € (profit of 2015)
• 6 more developers
• Raised salaries and better compensation for everyone
• Start offering strategic level cloud consulting
• Start marketing Leanvisio in the USA

Result: 5/6 accomplished, “good”

DETAILS

Our turnover for 2016 is 1 844 000, growth being 80 %. We received some recognition from Deloitte for growth from 2012 to 2015; 9th place on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50. We’ll probably be on the list this year as well, just not in top 10.

We made 194 000 € profit after taxes, growth being 195 %. We’ve deducted personnel’s 20 % bonus from that figure. We also raised everyone’s salaries appr. 10 times this year.

We found 9 experts:

• Sandra Matilainen (Azure Developer)
• Jukka Arola (Azure Developer / Architect)
• Ilpo Toni (Azure Developer / Architect)
• Iiro Airaksinen (Azure Developer / Architect)
• Olli Alopaeus (Azure Developer / Architect)
• Toni Könnilä (Azure Developer)
• Ville Toni (Azure Developer / Architect)
• Janne Välimaa (Azure Developer)
• Karl Ots (Managing Consultant @@ Kompozure Consulting Business)

Karl Ots joined us in order to grow our cloud consulting unit. He came from Microsoft, where he’s been working on Azure since 2011 and with a similar role. He is one of those rare people who can consult on cloud’s impact on both business and technical level. Karl is responsible for the following products:

• Cloud Strategy
• Cloud Governance (IaaS + PaaS)
• Cloud Security
• App Portfolio Modernisation
• Training

Even though we’ve delivered consulting services before, we’ve done them in an ‘ad hoc’ manner. With the birth of the cloud consulting unit we’ve defined the consulting products as part of our offering’s lifecycle. In practice our consulting products transform very naturally into development and continuous services, of which we already have over 5 years of experience on Azure.

LEANVISIO

And then some hard lessons concerning Leanvisio.

We evaluated company direction many times during the year, especially when recruiting. During the year we kept recruiting developers, because that supported our project business growth. However, at the same time we realized that Leanvisio’s success was not about developers anymore, rather it was about marketing, sales and customer onramping functions.

This brutal dilemma kept repeating, and we came to the realization that our kind of growing software house is not able to focus on two different businesses so that both of those would grow at the rate required. Only through hindsight did we see how much we’d need help in launching a product meant for company-wide resource planning.

Following this realization we decided to focus on growing our project business, and have for now quit driving Leanvisio forward. Especially since Finland’s market is too small, and we’d need to launch the product in USA, and that’s an impossible dream without substantial effort.

The silver lining here is that we were quite painlessly able to transfer Leanvisio’s intuitive hour tracking feature to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services. Once that service matures just a little bit more, it might even make sense to offer it through Microsoft store.

If we’re lucky, this story helps someone else besides us as well.

WHAT ELSE?

We moved from Forum to Kamppi (Olavinkatu 1 B), next to Teerenpeli, due to the old site getting too crowded. We’re doing “interior design”, but for now we’ve only received our new flipper, screens and some VR/AR stuff in the form of HoloLenses and HTC Vives. Welcome for a cup of joe anytime!

We’ve been visible in the Microsoft community:

• Finland Azure User Group is a living, active community, where we’d like to see all of you
• During the year we started to organize our first more international event, called Iglooconf, that was held as a free event between 19th and 20th of January 2017. It had over 1000 livestream followers from 30 countries.
• We also again organized the Global Azure Bootcamp
• Ikkunastudio-podcast [Finnish] is listened to 20 000 times a year, so we’d say that also has a small, defined role

With the main man Microsoft we’ve enhanced our co-operation through several new long-term relationships. Most visible of these are the Cloud Development Programme, containing only 16 companies in Scandinavia, and Partner Seller- and Certified Trainer-programs, through which we’re receiving valuable visibility and business capabilities.

On Augmented Reality we’re pretty excited that our first Hololens project started.

2016 FIGURES

We’re satisfied with the figures; the profit grew, even though we hired 9 new experts (appr. +40 % personnel). It could be stated that we’re over the well-known hump in a young company’s journey, where a single recruitment is a disproportionately large risk due to the effect on the cash reserves.

Turnover and profit

Employees

CONTACT US

Interested in something else about our year 2016? Call me: Sakari Nahi (050 369 7782) [Kompozure crew and contact details]