Reflections From Our CEO: 2017 & The Year Ahead

It’s a new year and, as everyone does, it’s time to reflect on the year that was. For me, the year started when I joined atmail in April 2017 – and we’ve achieved a lot in the last 7 months. We’ve had a revolutionary mindset change in our business, going from a company which was trying to service ‘anyone and everyone’ who might need an email system, to where we are today, which is focussed completely on solving email problems for service providers. We want to be the “go-to” solution for service provider email systems, by leveraging what we are really good at.

 

We articulated what we are good at

• We’re innovative, we’ve always led the industry in our user interfaces;
• Our solutions work great for large scale service providers;
• We empower our customer’s brand, not our own. We are white label heroes – and support multi-tenanted domains;
• We have customer support that our customers rave about; and
• Our employees are hungry for success – we love our company, working with our colleagues and serving our customers – which is a very rare trifecta!

 

We refined our vision and priorities for 2018

So, who does atmail want to be? Only the #1 hosted email platform for service providers on the planet!

Simple to say, hard to do.

So, how are we going to prioritise, to set this ball in motion?

1. Stability

We must prioritise platform stability. This means mature operational governance and change processes, not to mention the implied monitoring and recovery processes (both pre-emptive and reactive recovery).

2. Security

Security matters: Everything we every do (policies, code, platforms and more) has to be secure. It comes back to one of our core values: Think Customer. Would we like to be our own customer? Would we like our data treated this way?

3. Scale

From this point forward, every decision is made through the filter of, “Will this work with a million users accessing the system at the same time?” This type of filter certainly changes your perspective!

4. Revenue and Savings

It’s not enough to run a stable, secure and scalable system for service providers, we need to bring dollar savings to the table. We want to talk to service providers not only how we can save them valuable money from their capital and operational budgets, but also how we can drive new revenue streams. Now that’s an interesting discussion if you’re a service provider, yes?

 

We held our first all-staff conference

In December, we had our inaugural atmail company conference (after 20 years), where all of our employees from around the globe came for a week to our headquarters in Peregian Beach in Queensland, Australia. The goals of the week were quite simple: for everyone to connect; to get on the same page; and to plan the next quarter’s activities.

The week was set up as: “What can you do to make our 2018 vision (to be the #1 hosted email platform for service providers on the planet) a reality?”

Thankfully, my colleagues did not disappoint. Each of our teams (Innovation, Sales and Marketing, Engineering and Service Delivery) created three team-level goals for the quarter, then within each team, each individual created their three individual goals – all of which support their team, which in turns supports the company. To do so, required a lot of communication (both within teams and across teams) and the results were outstanding.

To reward everyone, we ventured out for a team building exercise in the spirit of Survivor, with the Great Rafting Race of 2017, followed by a Christmas party of pizza and beers at a local establishment in Noosa Heads. It was a truly memorable, inaugural conference and I thank my fellow atmailers for making it such a success.

 

 

 

The year ahead

The email world is full of opportunities, especially now in the light of changes we are seeing in the general environment (such as GDPR, data retention laws, lawful intercept requirements), plus consumer-driven changes at Facebook, Twitter, Google and more. As such, we don’t see email going anywhere anytime soon. We’re excited for our future!

So, if you’re a service provider wanting to offload your email headache to experts (who get excited about it!), let us know. We’d love to understand your big problems for 2018 and brainstorm how we might be able to help. We’re keen to either meet in person at Mobile World Congress Barcelona next month, or chat via email, phone or conference call, anytime.

Talk to you soon?