Now that 2018 is done and dusted, and we are facing our new 2019 year with excitement, I thought I’d take a moment and reflect on the last 12 months at reinteractive.
2018 for reinteractive was an eventful year - some would even say “interesting”.
In summary, 2018 saw us;
- Complete many incredible projects for our clients
- Achieve new certifications for both Amazon Web Services and Salesforce
- Grow our team to an even larger number of amazing staff around the world
- Establish our Quality Division with a full time team member
- Establish our new Expansion Division with another full time team member
- Create a new Salesforce Implementation Division with multiple staff able to service our new Salesforce customers
- Became known as the company in Australia for Salesforce / Heroku / Heroku Connect integration services
- Grow our OpsCare and CodeCare subscription services to new highs
- Launch our new storeConnect ™ software product
- Launch our new reinteractive.academy training platform.
- Introduce our 2,000th person through our reinteractive Installfest community service
- Redesign and publish our reinteractive website
All while continuing to grow in both staff numbers and revenue on the previous years - higher than any previous year.
So, it’s been quite busy!
I thought I’d break down some of the above, starting with our amazing clients.
reinteractive exists to help our clients achieve their goals. 2018 was no different. While a lot of our work is done under non-disclosure, I can say that we worked on several exciting start-ups and existing projects over the year. Our developers are constantly commended by our clients as being some of the best they’ve worked with and our high levels of consistent communication with clients continues to get projects across the line. Our clients are the lifeblood of reinteractive and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them all.
Next were our new certifications. I’m quite proud of these. reinteractive is now one of a very few software development companies in the world to hold an Amazon Advanced Consulting Partner certification, and one of the fewer still to also hold a Salesforce Partner certification. Combined with the skill of our developers, these certifications allow us to offer solutions across Salesforce and Amazon Web Services that many other companies simply can’t match.
In terms of our team, we continued to expand by bringing on more amazing team members. Even though the vast majority of our team hail from Australia and New Zealand, we now have team members in Portugal, the Phillippines, the USA and Latin America. We have been able to choose talented developers, ensuring our clients get the very best solutions for their business.
Part of this expansion saw us gain a full time Qualifications Division Manager for 2018, Daniel Draper. Daniel has been at the forefront of establishing training and review processes for our team to keep them at the top of their game. Daniel’s role includes reviewing any quality situation in the company and recommending solutions, procedures and training to fix any issues. It also covers overseeing certification of our team. Along with our our Community Manager, Rachelle, Daniel has been busy preparing for the launch the first level of our reinteractive.academy to do our part to help solve the massive skills shortage in the software development industry by training developers. We have much more to come on this in the first half of this new year!
We also put a full time Expansion Manager on post, Virginia Gordon. Virginia’s role is threefold, including managing our partnerships with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Salesforce, as well as working with those companies that earn commission by bringing new clients to us and finally promoting our successes and good news to the world at large. Her taking on this role helped us achieve our certifications with AWS and Salesforce in record time.
Our Salesforce certification went hand in hand with establishing our Salesforce implementation team, lead by our head Salesforce Consultant Daniel Cockerill. We’ve already achieved a lot of success with this new division and it is a natural complement to our Salesforce integration services, providing some of the best service in the Asia Pacific region. As one happy partner said to a prospective client of ours;
“I know two good software development firms, and reinteractive is by far the best of them.”
storeConnect is an exciting product we launched in 2018. It provides a much needed, cost effective solution in the Salesforce e-commerce space. Providing a full two-way synchronisation between Salesforce environments and a full customisable online store, it provides significant gains in efficiency and customer satisfaction. I’m very excited about this new software application and am looking forward to even more exciting expansion in 2019 of our storeConnect product.
2018 also saw us put our 2,000th person through our reinteractive Ruby on Rails Installfest. We started the Ruby on Rails Installfest 5 years ago as a free service to introduce people to the world of programming with the amazing Ruby on Rails framework. We’ve had budding programmers from all walks of life come along and learn how to program. We have partnered with the University of South Australia, Queensland University of Technology and Deakin University to run Installfests for their students with rave results and feedback from the highly practical experience it gave the students.
I’m excited and proud of the Installfest. Significant funds and energy has been invested in delivering this and the results have been worth every cent with literally thousands of people learning that programming web applications is an achievable thing to do and encouraging them to take it on as an option for their future.
Finally, as 2018 became 2019, we launched the new version of our reinteractive website. The old site was functional, but our company had grown over the previous years and it needed a new site to encompass all the things we do for our clients and community. I really like the design and feel of the new site and think it represents us much more effectively than the previous site. But let me know your thoughts.
So there you go, 2018 was an interesting year! But the more exciting thing is that it has set us up to have a really spectacular 2019.
Thank you to all of my team for making this happen. Thank you to all our customers for coming on this journey with us. And thank you to all the students and attendees of our Installfest and community events for being part of our amazing year!
