We are just some 24 hours from one of the most spectacular migrations on the planet. Thursday afternoon, Helsinki and other large cities begin to voluntarily evacuate themselves. Companies lock up, people pack their cars and join each other in traffic-jams all around the country. The endless convoys of cars creep forward and many of them don’t arrive to the secluded summer cottage destinations until late in the night, but still in broad daylight. Juhannus weekend (mid-summer fest) is the focal point for the Finnish summer period – it is where summer starts. But from a running-a-business-point-of-view, it is a period when almost nothing happens. It is thus a good moment to collect oneself and look back at how things went the past 6 or so months – and it is also an excellent time to plan ahead. Soon enough, the same migration will start (but less frantically) at the end of July and the last excuses of absence expire mid-August when schools start their autumn terms.
At Bilot, the first six months of 2012 have been a time of continued growth. Faster than the market we estimate. This is fuelled by strong performance by SAP and Microsoft, our beloved strategic partners. We scored some major breakthroughs in all of our key segments and in all of our solution areas. We managed to recruit the best talent in the market and also sign in a good number of new customers. We restructured our company to better accommodate our growth, but also to better accelerate solution development and innovation. This is not yet entirely complete, but showing some promising signs.
We designed and implemented some of the coolest mobile solutions, helped our customers identify how to adopt new innovation, advised them how to access better information and enabled them to improve their productivity. We also got our HANA up and running, dissected it to see its guts and with our certified experts we started some major work with in-memory.
We are gaining altitude and the higher we ascend, the more opportunities we see. The air does get thinner, but our vessel is built for this kind of travel. We have continued to discuss and even debate our long term strategy with our trusted customers and the feedback has been very promising. We are following our strategy with discipline and progressing steadily towards our goals – keeping our eye on the changing atmosphere. Surely and soon enough, you will see evidence of what we are up to. Some really exciting times coming up – again in all of our solution areas.
This is a good position to be in, especially on the eve of a ‘quiet period’. It is now time to recharge batteries, seek inspiration from extra-curricular activities, it is time to unwind and spend time with loved ones and it is time to ventilate the brain for a while.
I wish you all, customers, colleagues and friends and families an excellent summer break – looking forward to seeing you back in business after the holidays.
