{% block footer_js %}

HOW WE FEELIN’?

We are satisfied. Most of our last year’s goals were reached, and we also have a good feeling about the year 2014.

GOALS

Let’s go through 2014 goals once more from
the blog post year ago:

• Starting a product business
• Turnover goal: 800 000 €
• Positive profit
• A raise for everyone
• 3 big parties in a year
• Monthly company-wide retros
• Azure-focus
• Projects for end customers
• Deeper participation in projects

We had more goals than the new Finnish government under Sipilä.

Happily most of these goals were something we just had to keep a hold of, instead of innovating new habits. But how did we do?

STARTING A PRODUCT BUSINESS

We started building our product in the beginning of the year on 15th of January, and the soft launch for our pilot customers was held on 1st of September. After Slush there were some articles about us on some related magazines and on Microsoft Finland’s press releases.

We are satisfied with the launch: by the end of the year 2014 we had ~70 client companies testing and giving feedback about our solution.

Surprisingly we weren’t spared the surprises. After congratulating ourselves for the succesful software product development project, we suddenly noticed that we’ve moved on to the next phase in the product lifecycle, meaning deployments to customers. Even though our product doesn’t require any installations and training to be used, a deployment of any new software to an organization has an effect on the existing processes and culture. This can naturally lead to anything – at the least to a meticulous walk-through, but sometimes to a requirement for new features and integrations as well.

These themes will certainly pop up in the next week’s blog post about the goals for year 2015.

TURNOVER GOAL

This goal was not reached. Our very ambitious goal of 800 000 € wasn’t reached by quite an amount. Our turnover for 2014 was appr. 624 000 €.

We reason that we did not reach the goal because of two reasons:

1. We mis-estimated the amount of work demanded by other than programming tasks: the development project itself went as planned, but other business tasks related to the product business were a bit of a surprise especially during the first half of 2014
2. At the same time during Q1 of 2014 there was a dry spell in the Azure market, which we were able to fix only after boosting our saleswork. Thus 2014 Q3 and Q4 were a very healthy period for our company.

POSITIVE PROFIT

With this goal we realized the requirements demanded by the product development, since we did not set any target figures 🙂

A RAISE FOR EVERYONE

This we accomplished. A 2014 Kompozurean got on average a raise of 270 € / mo.

3 BIG PARTIES A YEAR

This we did 😉 Chosen and validated (and possibly enriched) pictures will be posted on our office’s picture wall, if you feel like having a coffee and visiting us.

MONTHLY COMPANY-WIDE RETROS

Nothing improves a company as efficiently and generally as open discussion (shouting) between everyone. In addition to this benefit, nobody has to think about what’s happening, since these events are great for spreading information as well. These we did throughout the year 2014, and we’ll continue to hold these during the year 2015 as well.

AZURE-FOCUS

We are very happy with our know-how and history with Azure.

Our projects continued to be relatively large and strategically important to our customers. Our average project duration is 9 months, and after a project our co-operation with a customer normally continues. Actually we only have very few customer relationships that have ended at all.

Our normal projects still are custom business applications, like self-service portals, products, backoffice-solutions and partner services. In addition to this we’ve had the opportunity to help various software houses with Azure-related things.

In this way (or any other way; come and challenge us!) we believe that our expertise is the best in Finland.

PROJECTS FOR END CUSTOMERS

We still got to make most of our projects straight for the end customer.

However during the year we did receive one offer that we couldn’t say ‘no’ to, even when we didn’t have a straight up contractual relationship with the end customer. The implementation and project specifications were however done with the end customer, and in this way we fulfilled the spirit of our goal.

DEEPER PARTICIPATION IN PROJECTS

We are very happy with the constant improvement of our role. Even though our software house is deeply technical, and we see ourselves more as an implementation provider instead of strategy consultants, we still got to affect our customers’ development plans even more and earlier than before.

We believe that it is a serious mistake if someone still thinks that the chosen technologies have no effect on the outcome. It’s getting more common that our kind of software houses have the responsibility for bringing new enabling technologies and their opportunities to customers – and currently these are something that Microsoft Azure offers in abundance: Azure AD, Machine Learning, Azure Search, IoT, etc.

2014 FIGURES

Again we are happy with the figures, even when all of the goals were not reached. Even the profit was a bit on the positive side, even though every month we threw atleast a fifth of our resources to building our product.

Turnover and profit

Employees