The end of the year is often a time of finishing up projects, closing those last few deals and planning for the year ahead; the beginning of the year is often the time to start with new initiatives and evaluate the past year. While I’m sitting here in our office, and things around me are getting packed and organized for the move to our new office, one of many great new things for our new year, it’s time to collect my thoughts about 2018 and look ahead for 2019.
2018 was a year for us to mature, moving from that rebellious teenager to a young responsible adult. No doubt we’ve always had an awesome product, and we used 2016 and 2017 to grow the WEM platform to be a feasible platform for both simple and complex enterprise level applications and carefully entering into the global market. In 2018 that focus changed, we used the year to mature. We completed the development of version 4 of the WEM modeler, a fully HTML5 native application with advanced features including context aware drag-n-drop and undo/redo functionality.
At the start of the year, we set a target to become more boring; have a prepared answer to any question a customer might ask. We’ve applied this thinking to all aspects of our business from pre-sales to post-sales and from engineering to brand. We updated all WEM documentation, many of our tutorials, provided many standard documents on security, privacy, private hosting, and many other subjects that we share in the myWEM partner portal and updated support processes and the WEM forum. Shortly, we’ll be publishing all new training modules including e-Learning capabilities to go with the WEM certifications we launched over the summer. A new version of the WEM Appstore was published just as the year was wrapping up and has seen good uptake in the short few weeks that it’s been available.
Using our wildly successful channel model, we’ve been able to move into many new geographic markets from Asia to South America, with first projects in production in many locations. For us to effectively support such a large and diverse customer base, we’ve evolved our business processes to a level that allows us to grow well beyond our current estimates without requiring major rework in the future.
The WEM team has grown, both in number of people as well as in reach, our partners everywhere are recruiting and training WEM consultants constantly and I’m happy to inform that the WEM team in Amsterdam is stable and working well together. To help with this stability and support our continued growth, we updated all our employment agreements to include better parent-leave, unlimited paid-time-of and many other benefits. And while making all these changes and improvements, we were able to meet our service level guarantees for availability and performance of the WEM platform with only very few disruptions of service.
We’ve also found some challenges, like the evolving no-code vs. low-code debate. WEM is a platform that enables true no-code development of enterprise class applications. The market however seems to start to see no-code as a solution for simple applications, with low-code having viability for somewhat more complex applications and real enterprise stuff requiring actual coding. Throughout 2018, we’ve successfully showcased the endless possibilities of our no-code application platform to market analysts. Hence, challenge accepted: at WEM we’re keen to set the benchmark for enterprises to enhance business value with no-code development.
For 2019, we’ve got many exciting things planned, from an office move to start the year to major product milestones including general availability of version 4 of the WEM platform and native mobile apps. Our new office will give us three times the space we have now, allowing us to grow for the foreseeable future and serve you even better. We expect to grow the number of cloud sites globally in the next few months and service even more customers with even more applications. The road we are on seems to be a good one, I think we’ll stay on it for a while longer.
Hopefully your year in review was as exciting as ours and your plans for the next 12 months make you happy to be back at work after the holiday season.