Ilves’ Year 2019 – the Foundations for Growth
What an inspiring year 2019 we have had! We would like to thank all of our customers and partners for the confidence and interesting joint projects.
I remember thinking a year ago, that this is going to be an exciting and educational year – and I was right. I wish you an interesting 5 minute read about laying the foundations for our growth. I’m looking forward to our continued collaboration next year.
Continuous learning together with our clients
Delivering sophisticated search solutions as projects is the cornerstone of our operations. The project business and successful investment activities, as well as our strong balance sheet, enabled us to invest in finalizing the development of Ilves enterprise search service.
New business and growth cannot be built only on financial investment. Continuous, visionary customer feedback for developers of the new service is needed. The year 2019 got off to a great start. Right at the beginning of the year, we got exactly the kind of new dream clients that a company developing a new and innovative service needs.
On a mission to making organizational data valuable
Working together and learning from the very best experts in their fields pointed us in the right direction throughout the year. Dozens of meetings with our current and future clients confirmed that we were on the right track. Scattered information and knowledge is a real and acute problem in many organizations.
We are excited to be able to offer an easy-to-use solution to this challenge in the forms of our enterprise search software supplemented by our customized solutions and expertise. Read more (in Finnish) how to develop productivity by harnessing the value of your organizational unstructured and structured data and information.
We divided our goals for 2019 into two periods
During the first six months we focused on developing our search engine according to our long term strategy and on the basis of our customers’ demands. We also invested significantly in information security.
One of our key goals was to develop capabilities enabling scalable growth, such as installation management and data source integrations.
At the same time, we also renewed our company-wide corporate identity and designed comprehensive service descriptions for our clients at www.ilveshaku.fi.
Towards the end of the year, we gradually increased our investments in sales and marketing. We also developed the Search Cost Calculator service for our customers’ benefit. Read more below.
We invested in our visibility and finalized our online services. We also wrote the first articles for our new blog.
Ilves enterprise search ‘Ilveshaku’ in focus
Please find below a more detailed description of the last year’s development activities of our enterprise search service. We are happy to tell you more.
We developed service management and admin tools
Our new management tools allow us to provide remote monitoring and management (RMM), centralized updates, license management, a gathering of user feedback into one place, proactive problem prediction, improving services based on anonymous user information, and efficient use of our resources.
Your organization’s administrator is now able to track the use of the organization’s enterprise search engine and user feedback. Collecting feedback was automated by creating an integrated user feedback process. Support for more advanced tailored analytics based on our customers’ needs was also developed.
We decided to stand out with transparent feature descriptions
We described the Ilves Search features (33), plugins (14), and connectors (28) of Ilves Search to ilveshaku.fi pages in an open and informative user-friendly format.
We invested an extraordinary amount of time and design efforts on service description so that our customers can obtain a comprehensive view of the service in advance, and to ensure that the deployment of the service would be as easy as possible.
Connector development
We developed e.g. Planmill indexed data source, further improved the preview of Ilves M-files connector and developed the indexed Office 365 data source. We also speeded up and improved the preview of our Sharepoint connector.
Information security audit
An external security expert audited the Ilveshaku user interface in July 2019 against OWASP framework. No critical vulnerabilities were found.
We will continue to prioritize the maintaining and continuous improvement of the information security of our services.
Search Cost Calculator
Knowledge work is undergoing rapid change. Most organizations strive to increase productivity by increasing work efficiency. The goal normally is to free up employee time and organizational labor costs for customer value creation jobs, thereby saving labor costs and increasing productivity.
The Ilveshaku Search Cost Calculator allows you to estimate which tasks you need to improve to save staff time costs and to estimate the benefits of deploying Ilves enterprise search to your organization.
Ilves Search at Work
Access to information enables a better every day working experience. Here’s how Ilves Search helps you in the following familiar situations:
- “I don’t have time to look for information everywhere…
- “I know that the file is somewhere but where …
- “I want to find relevant information quickly…
Ilves Search enables dozens of information searching jobs and micro tasks to be done in a new way. See for example, our article on legal design. Next year, we will be presenting our clients with more examples on how organizations easily can become more productive by redesigning their daily activities and jobs.
Ilves brand
In addition to all the aforementioned Ilves Search refinements, we also carried out a comprehensive brand renewal to align our corporate identity with our mission, values, and strategy.
- Our overall image is now based on our mission – It’s our job to make data valuable by bringing the organizational information into one place.
- Our modern colors reflect our renewed values – Trust, Respect, Quality, Courage, Growth. Read more here.
- User-centered design and the clarity of our messages are an integral part of our current and future brand proposition.
The change was implemented at www.ilvessolutions.fi and www.ilveshaku.fi, to the user interface of the Ilves Search and on other company materials.
When you get inspired you succeed…
Our goal for the year 2019 was to build a strong foundation for growth as a company and in terms of our services. We focused on building the following competitive advantages regarding Ilveshaku enterprise search:
- The easiest to use interface
- The best search results
- The easiest implementation
I’m really proud of our top team’s achievements and super grateful to all of our partners who helped us in the process! Together we accomplished a huge number of important goals and, above all, we learned a lot together during the year.
Now, after four years of intensive product development phase, we have a solid platform as a firm on which it feels great to build the success of our customers’, partners’ and Ilves’. We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who has been involved in building the foundation for our growth!
Have a great year 2020!
Heikki Ilvessalo
CEO
