Summary Of 2017 At Predica Summary Of 2017 At Predica

We would like to take a few minutes to recap our previous year, 2017, here at Predica. It has been a phenomenal time, with many achievements that a few years ago would have seemed impossible. None of them are an outcome of just 1 year’s, or a single person’s, effort. We see that 8.5 years of hard, consistent work of a great number of outstanding people are generating compounding results.

We are extremely grateful for the people with whom we can work towards such ambitious goals. Below, we list a few of our key achievements, and the people/companies who stood behind them.

This list is not complete by any means. Moreover, there has been a great deal of failures among the way, but as Albert Einstein said: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”! 🙂

Growth

2017 has been a year of significant expansion geographically, financially and in terms of employee numbers. We are excited to see where these accomplishments will take us!

Branching out internationally

We have set up a branch office with legal presence in Qatar. Despite the political turmoil in the country, we managed to meet our goals. We’ve achieved positive cashflow and financial results in the first year of operation!

This wouldn’t have been possible without Ra’ed Masri, who is driving forward the business with us, and Ewa Obrębska, who orchestrated the entire legal and financial aspect of establishing a legal Predica entity in the country.

Snapshots from our QA office

We are not stopping there with our work in the Middle East region. At the end of last year we managed to hire our first employees in Egypt, leading with Atef who will be coordinating our team’s effort “on the ground” from mid-February. We believe in the country with such a rich culture and long history to help us build a global delivery force in Microsoft Cloud solutions.

The neighborhood of our new office in Egypt!

Although our focus, constrained by distance, is EMEA, we’ve managed to win an exciting new project with our partner Ascent Solutions in the US, a market we already know, and where we have seen a huge potential for our services. This is a great start to a possible local office branch, but time will tell – stay tuned!

Strength in numbers

Looking at our data, this expansion has been outstanding. Predica grew from 54 at the end of 2016 to 94 employees (from 4 different countries and multiple cities) by the end of 2017. The financial year has also finished strong with revenue reaching 7mln USD, a 40% year-on-year growth, which has put us on the Deloitte FAST 500 EMEA list.

New business lines

Our growth in the last year was not only on a geographical scale, but also on the functional one. We’ve managed to successfully start 3 business lines in our core technology consulting division, as well as 2 in our R&D, startup business.

New partnerships

This year we have also started new partnerships, and we look forward to working together on the exciting projects ahead.

Omada

We have partnered with Omada, one of the leaders in Identity Access Governance and Administration space as listed by Gartner. Already we are working on a large project for a global financial company, and this would not have been possible without the support from Omada’s team (thanks Veronika, Mark, Santeri!).

We are proud to be recognized by Omada as one of their leading partners in EMEA. This is a great start to extending our competence and impact on the Identity and Access Management space, which is one of our key technology pillars.

WEBCON

We’ve also partnered with WEBCON – a Polish-based company delivering a no-code rapid development platform for business process management. With 2 projects already under our belts and 2 new ones just starting, as well as the internal process optimization at Predica, we are very optimistic about this partnership.

This would never have happened without Paweł and the WEBCON team supporting us. Thank you Łukasz, Jakub – we are always happy to support and work with ambitious Polish companies with a vision!

Extended offering

2017 has been a year of developing our business even further by expanding our services to include managed service and R&D.

Managed service

In terms of new business lines, we are seeing great traction with our managed service offering and signed a few long-term agreements, including such big names as A. P. Moller – Maersk, with whom we have overcome one of the biggest security incidents ever seen, just a few months after signing the contract.

The managed service business will only grow in 2018, and we are building a strong team focused solely on this division (Tomek – welcome on board!).

Electronics lab

But this is not all! In our R&D space, we have entered a totally new market of building electronics!!! We’re handling the whole process from building a prototype to coordinating production of the PCB and hardware.

We have partnered with Gerda (stay tuned to see what we’ll build!). This partnership has already resulted in additional projects, and our team of 5 new hires focused just on this area will grow by 100% this year. And all this is happening in our renovated garage, Silicon Valley-style!

Hmm, what are they building?

This initiative has been fully driven by Greg, with his passion, persistence and vision – the Steve Jobs of Predica! More details on the project will soon follow on our blog – stay tuned.

MS HoloLens

Another area of R&D we are investing in is augmented reality with Microsoft HoloLens. We have already managed to deliver 1 project with the EU and are soon starting another one. We believe that in the future, AR/VR will be one of the key technology pillars driving innovation in many areas of our lives.

Konrad demonstrating our HoloLens solution to Dawid, Łukasz and our CEO Paweł!

Customer and partner relationships

This year would never have happened without our customers and partners. Microsoft has from the very start of our company been very supportive to us in many of its subsidiaries, especially Poland, Denmark, Qatar, Dubai and Belgium. And we are excited to grow this global partnership in a new country, the UK, this year!

All our customers, both new ones in 2017 and existing, have been excellent to collaborate with. We thank you for your continued trust and hope to achieve more with you in 2018! We would like to take the time to extend special thanks to some of our most long-term, close customers:

A.P. Moller – Maersk

It has been an incredible journey working with you on running, improving and optimizing your Identity and Access Management solution for the last 6 years. Bharat, Will, Ian and Gavin – thank you for your continued trust!

Damco

It is exciting to build with such a committed team (Daniel) a new, innovative big data platform and help move Damco to the next level in the logistics and supply chain industry!

Euromaster

We’ve started working together just a year ago, and have already managed to move Euromaster a few steps forward to their vision of a data-driven, customer-centric organization of the future – all this wouldn’t be possible without Rickard and Jani.

Pepco

We have worked together for a couple of years, and the last one was very busy with new collaboration platforms and applications that help all employees to be more productive. Thank you Marcin for your open-minded approach and pushing us all to achieve the best results.

Polpharma

With your open approach and digital strategy it’s possible to reinvent your digital workplace. We have already made great progress with communication and collaboration applications. Magdalena, Krzysztof, Michał, thank you for trusting us.

Qatargas

With the Qatargas – RasGas merger there is even more work in IT that needs to be done. Fathi, Loay – you know we are here to help you make it happen 🙂

Wintra

Dalia, Simon – it’s a great partnership that we’ve managed to build together, can’t wait to see what we will build this year!

Staying lean in company operations

Growth is easier to maintain without looking hard at how you manage costs and optimize your operations. But this is not how we work. We focus on the bottom line just as much, and are obsessed with staying lean to keep delivering value to our customers at the best prices possible.

Team Leads

This requires to reorganize as we grow, and one of the key successful changes last year was to build a completely new role at Predica – Team Lead! We now have 11 new team leads, all promoted from within, most of them for the first time rising to management responsibilities.

Congratulations to all of you for the courage and hard work required to make this shift!

Our Team Lead dream team!

Marketing

We’ve also built a complete Marketing team with Piotr at the wheel. This team is ensuring our customers, employees, future employees and partners know what, why and how we are doing, and help us stay connected to the key people across the globe.

Last year we have achieved a great growth in our reach. With 52 expert articles published we’ve seen a 310% increase in average monthly website users, 440% increase in social media followers and 390% increase in social media reach year-on-year.

Our marketing team hard at work…

New HQ

In 2017 we’ve also moved to a new 850+ square meter office space in Warsaw. It allowed us to accommodate growth, but also our particular requirements. This includes an IoT/electronics lab, video room for content marketing, and social area for company meetings.

The space was totally refurbished to our needs, and this would not have been possible without the engagement of many employees who took ownership “the Predica way”!

Some glamour shots of our new office!

Into 2018

This short summary showed us just how much our relatively small team has managed to achieve in the last year. We are already 1/12th into 2018: we know it will be full of new, fun and exciting challenges. Stay in touch to keep up-to-date on the developments! And if you want to know more – just contact us!