180° - looking back at Q3’16 in Sonalake

Welcome to our new quarterly bulletin. The goal is to offer a little colour around the business that’s keeping us busy. After all, 90 days can be a long time in software!

Jump

In Q3 we marked a few milestones with a record number of bookings and new software partnerships. We have grown the team, hiring an illustrious gang of new engineers with specialisations across the stack. Our telecom vertical was particularly strong and was complemented with exciting wins in fintech and e-commerce.

The satisfaction pulse across our software team augmentation customers has been very strong too. We received some great feedback over the quarter - nice words backed up by nice actions with several existing customers choosing to grow their Sonalake teams.

Analytics, Process Automation, Digital Engagement

We kicked off a number of new product development projects for existing and new customers. These applications vary from data analytics, to business process automation, to digital engagement. Reflecting reality, requirements and roadmap priorities change during development. We continue to hone our ability to collaborate with agility while keeping the commercials steady - no surprises!

Open-source research & delivery

A really important part of our work is to take a structured approach to monitor and evaluate emerging open-source software technologies. During Q3 we allocated increased budget towards our research into the enabling technologies we believe will drive future visual analytics. We love this space, have had good success in it over recent years and we want to continue to grow our expertise.

Visually democratising data

On that subject, we delivered a milestone project during the quarter, completing delivery of a framework to democratise data across a top mobile network operator. The solution delivers eye-catching real time dashboards across the company from the 24x7 network operations centre to the CTO and the sales director. Call it next gen BI, call it an organisational silo killer, but we just like to call it VisiMetrix and our customers tell us that it makes a big difference to their day-to-day operations.

Smart cities need monitoring

And at quarter end we landed a big extension to our role in a really cool smart city project. The original scope was about intelligent transport components such as traffic light controllers and interactive information boards. The extension covers rental bike stations, mobile devices for ticket and parking controls, and lots of other IT and network equipment. Our job is to build the software to ensure the effective monitoring of the connectivity and the applications.

All work and no play?

But it’s not all work around here - we did take time out of software over a long weekend in September to get the teams across Europe together for our Summer Challenge. Lots of fun was had with no injuries reported apart from a few sore heads at dawn!

Q4 has gotten off to a fast start after the summer, so check back in from time to time and let us know if you have an interesting software challenge that we can help you with.