BLOG CONTENT

Table of Contents:

• Overview of the goals for 2017
• Pictures 2017
• 2017 figures: personnel, turnover and profit
• Our offering 2017
• Azure-platform 2017
• Kompozure awareness 2017
• Contact us!

OVERVIEW OF THE GOALS FOR 2017

Overview from the blog post a year ago:

• Reached: Raising Kompozure awareness
• Reached: Strategic cloud consulting
• Reached: Raising the maturity of Azure PaaS-solutions
• Reached: Using new technologies
• Reached: Turnover goal was 2 500 000 €, which would mean ~35% growth
• Reached: Profit goal was to reach the same level as 2016, so 200 000€ after taxes

Result: 6/6, “great year”

P.S. We’ll naturally continue working further on these themes, but now and then it feels good to think that at least some milestone has been reached. There’s a long road ahead us especially with the awareness.

PICTURES 2017

In the first half of 2017 we celebrated our new office.

Everything’s well in Praha in August 2017.

It is hard to drum without the electric drums.

Slack’s Foosball bot’s ELO rating shows that Juval is the sovereign.

We diversified our apparel.

The basic drug needs must be met.

2017 FIGURES: PERSONNEL, TURNOVER AND PROFIT

Our turnover for 2017 was 2 684 000€, resulting in a growth of 46%. Turnover grew nicely, which of course relects to the growth of the market as well. Market growth was also illustrated by Microsoft’s own notice that their goal of $20B was reached earlier than anticipated.

We again took part in Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Finland -competition. This time we ended at the 20th position with the result of 271%. That denotes the growth between 2013 and 2016. Last year we were 9th. This year we might end up a couple of positions higher than last year. Kauppalehti also placed us in the 2017 Winners- and Growers-lists.

Our profit was 336 000€ after taxes, growing by 73% since last year. Profit was 15,9%, when last year it was 13,4%. Again this does not include the 20% of profit paid as bonus to company personnel. We’re happy with the result, since with this we can again invest into company culture and growth.

We had 11 experts join us in 2017:

• Lauri Lehman (Azure Data Scientist)
• Joona Puurunen (Creative Director)
• Jaakko Nikko (Azure Principal Consultant)
• Okko Oulasvirta (Azure Principal Consultant)
• Annika Ahonen (HR Coordinator)
• Santtu Keskinen (Azure Developer)
• Juhani Markkula (Azure Developer)
• Joonas Westlin (Azure Developer)
• Janne Pasanen (Azure Developer)
• Joni Virtanen (Azure Developer)
• Sebastian De Mel (Azure Developer)

Read about them on the people page.

Our company structure remained flat and burecracyless. 27 out of 29 personnel work with customers, while the rest (Annika and Markus) take care of the rest of us. We are happy with the flat nature of our company, and don’t see that changing much in the future.

TURNOVER AND PROFIT

COMPANY SIZE

FIGURES AS TABLE

OUR OFFERING 2017

ADVISORY

Karl, Okko and Jaakko run our cloud advisory, established 15 months ago. Our advisory business started stronger than anticipated, and it is clear that there’s demand for our capability at creating value out of Azure this way as well. Our consultants are fully employed and the business is profitable. The sales process functions well through well-defined service products.

The consultants are also responsible for our training offering.

DATA SCIENCE

We launched our Data Science-offering in 2017 H2, based on the visible needs at our customers. The expertise was strengthened when we brought in Lauri Lehman in November. Lauri has a PhD in quantum physics, and he is very interested in improving business and decision making through data.

UX DESIGN

Just before last summer our UX and visual design got a boost when Joona Puurunen, our new Creative Director, joined us. He has over 10 years of experience in visual and user experience design. We wanted Joona because his minimalist take on the user experience pleases us. He’s also done wonders with our brand already.

CSP-PARTNERSHIP

In 2017 we also started offering Microsoft Azure environments as a CSP-partner. We’re at the highest tier at Tier 1 on CSP. In Finland, there are only a couple of us at Tier 1. Juval manages our continuous services, containing both the traditional application as well as the new CSP maintenance processes.

PRODUCTIZATION

In 2017 we productized our business in a commendable manner – at this moment we have 18 fixed price service products from cloud governance and code audits to machine learning and improving DevOps-activities.

AZURE-PLATFORM 2017

As can be imagined from the global Azure growth mentioned earlier, the maturity of the Azure PaaS-development has risen to a new level again last year. All in all, Microsoft is not slowing down with their cloud focus…

DATA

The ongoing megatrend on the “data visibility” came to fore with us through different kind of integration/data platform projects. The issues with “data visibility” surprise nobody: the bigger the enterprise, the more there are invisible, siloed data. Gartner has been hyping about “Integration Platform-as-a-Service” lately in this space, and for us this has been one of the technical enablers.

In Azure, there are several products that can help in building the IPaaS capability. Especially Azure API Management and its peripherals of Azure Data Lake and Azure AD (Active Directory) were heavily used by us in 2017.

PAAS-DEVELOPMENT

Azure’s “traditional” PaaS building blocks of Azure App Service, Azure CosmosDB (DocumentDB), Azure Service Bus and Azure Search reached a highly stable and trustworthy level. Naturally Microsoft offers SLAs to all products with General Availability, but the older services have more development iterations under them.

The customer feedback together with the rapid cycle of releases have resulted in high quality products. The reliability has also risen organically since our kind of developers have gained more experience and are thus able to use Azure products more optimally.

IOT AND “SERVERLESS”

At the same time, a bit more rarely used Azure PaaS-products, like the IoT-stack (IoT Hub, Event Hubs, Stream Analytics) and the products related to “serverless” ideology (e.g. Azure Functions, Logic Apps), reached a new level of usability in 2017.

Serverless products are known for being costless if there’s nobody using the system. Of course the mentioned products were already in use in 2016 (with strong hype as well), but in 2017 many of the mentioned products received either the tooling required by professional software development or the features required by the common business use cases.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Last year (and this year again) Microsoft has put a strong emphasis on Artificial Intelligence. Azure’s Cognitive Services, referring to the easily provisionable artificial intelligence services, were extended, and some of them even gained the capability of being taught by the customer’s own data.

Azure Machine Learning, the product wherein the user is able to create and run their own training and predictive models, also received new development tooling and processes.

KOMPOZURE AWARENESS 2017

How should one track the growth of company brand awareness? There’s a dilemma.

I guess the main thing is that there’s enough both of work and of related experts to do that work. Still, can’t help but feel that we could have done better, especially when looking at our marketing costs. They were 2,3% of our turnover, which, according to the marketing and business theory, is “laughably low”.

How did we raise our brand awareness:

• We received 2 more Azure MVP awards to our company. In addition to yours truly, Karl Ots and Joonas Westlin are now Azure MVPs. This means that 3 out of 4 Azure MVPs in Finland work with us.
• We created our first brand video. We didn’t want to mess with the good feels by talking something, so if you watch this short video, you don’t have to worry about listening to company hype or clichés.
• We decided to focus in sponsoring specific events. At Techdays 2018 we were a bronze sponsor (picture below – wish I’d won that drone! :D). Pasi Taive, Karl Ots and yours truly also spoke at the seminar.
• We invested in recruitment throughout the year in different ways; we use three differet partners to help us with our recruiting.
• We deepened our partnership with Microsoft in many areas. We reinforced our training partnership and joined the CSP-partner program as well. Without doubt we joined some other partner programs during the year as well. Microsoft has so many partner programs that at first they are difficult to find, then after a while one cannot remember them all, and at the end it is impossible to measure the benefit from a specific program. However, the end result is that our multinational, gentle giant is beneficial to its partners, but getting the benefits requires work and effort from the partner as well.
  
• We took part in Great Place to Work -competition, in which we ended at the 5th place. The employee survey section went nearly perfectly (everyone answered, the average of answers was 97/100%, and “a good workplace” received 100% answer). The “culture audit”-document written by yours truly however requires more work if we want to get to a better position this year 🙂
• We continued as the main organizer for the Finland Azure User Group community. During the last year the community has doubled in size – we have over 900 members already, and there are over 10 events a year.
• In the 2017 Q1, we started to organize Iglooconf 2018, which was held in January. It is arguably the biggest Azure conference in the Nordics. At the event itself the atmosphere was energetic and the venue successful; the attendee feedback stated that Iglooconf “wins” when compared with Techdays. The event has been viewed through Youtube over 2000 times, totalling over 450 hours.
• Jouni Heikniemi’s and mine’s podcast Ikkunastudio is listened to over 25 000 times a year, and even while our ethos is that we won’t advertise our companies in the cast, it is possible that some brand awareness is still gained.

CONTACT US!

Thank you for reading our analysis of year 2017! Next week we will publish the goals for year 2018, so welcome to read those as well 🙂

Was there something else on your mind?

Call or visit, Sakari Nahi (+358 50 369 7782) [ Kompozure people and contact info]