Thank you for 2018

Last week panagendians from all over the world came together in Obertauern, Austria for our annual company meeting (find out more in our video message at the end of the post). Here we not only plan ahead, making sure we’re all on the same page. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on the past. In this case, we had 18 months and 11 million licenses to reflect on since our last gathering in June 2017. We want to share some of the 2018 highlights with you here.

It was around this time last year when Katrin Pascher and Felix Vogler initiated a campaign that we are particularly proud of, #panagenda4good. Quite possibly inspired by the season to be jolly, we decided as a company that a charitable component needs to be present throughout the year. We first supported Alma Mater Education (AME), a charitable organization building schools in Ghana to provide an ICT suite at Wioso Senior High School. Since then we’ve looked to our own surroundings, funding a cultural excursion for students of the Hans Radl School, which was established to cater to students with special requirements. Read about the overwhelming impact the musical “Dance of the Vampires” had on these students according to their teacher Katrin Hermann. Most recently we were made aware of the dire need for mobility for residents of Haus Rosa, a home for female asylum seekers. The dedicated staff explains how they try to assist the women during the asylum procedure. You will notice that this funding was already some months ago and we are currently looking for another organization that we can support either financially or by dedicating our time to them. We invite you to share suggestions in the comments below.

These are of course not the only co-operations we have the honor of being a part of. As mentioned on our blog looking at the first half of 2017, IBM announced panagenda ApplicationInsights as IBM’s standard solution for application modernization and analytics! In April this year, this entitlement offer for IBM Domino customers was again extended.

In our new partnership with HCL we now jointly provide an easier, faster and cheaper way for Notes and Domino customers to upgrade Notes clients, together with exciting additional benefits: Available as of today(!), MarvelClient Essentials is built directly into Notes and Domino 10.0.1. Customers on Notes 9.x can also download and install it from here free of charge. The development of this product and the partnership is based on our extensive client management expertise and the many learnings from numerous Client updates & upgrades, the most important of which are described in this blog entry by CEO Florian Vogler. As such it was also necessary to make our collaboration solutions IBM Domino 10 verified.

This increasing exposure also means an increase in responsibility to our stakeholders. Geographic presence and availability are of utmost importance. For this reason, panagenda and multi-award winning Australian IBM Platinum Business Partner ISW (well known for their Kudos product family) have joined forces to cater to the ever-increasing demand in the APAC region. “This is not just a partnership on paper,” says panagenda CEO, Florian Vogler, further explaining that Vanessa Hutchinson is now located at the ISW office in Melbourne. In line with our fantastic partnership, a new release of MarvelClient in Japanese is just around the corner, as well as ApplicationInsights in Japanese and Chinese.

It’s thrilling to have won the trust of so many more business partners and customers in the past 18 months. A lot of this has developed through meetings at conferences around the world. Each is an amazing opportunity to present ourselves and how our products have developed since we last met. Deciding to sponsor many of these events is also our way of giving back to the community that is so dedicated to their areas of expertise. If you’re interested to see all the places we’ve been, this overview page lists all 2018 conferences that panagenda has been a part of, including the recording of our respective sessions at each.

In addition to MarvelClient Essentials, we have had the pleasure to introduce two new solutions in the past 12 months: Starting with DataMiner, which allows you to access the data warehouse of panagenda AnalyticsSolutions with your own queries. Integrated within ConnectionsExpert, ApplicationInsights, and OfficeExpert, we have recorded a DataMiner webinar series, showing you how your chosen panagenda solutions are now even more powerful with this add-on solution.

The newest addition to the panagenda product portfolio, however, is the aforementioned OfficeExpert. A tool that offers Quality of Service monitoring for Office 365. Since its release in February, Product Manager, Stefan Fried has been working hard with his team of developers to introduce new features important to design partners and potential customers that we met at the European Collaboration Summit and the European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference 2018. It won’t be long now until some of these are released in a new version. In the meantime, you can make yourself more familiar with OfficeExpert by browsing through related blogs including “On-premises, Hybrid, Cloud: Does your monitoring cover it all?”, “Introducing the SharePoint Quality of Service (QoS) and Monitoring Sensor” and “End User Experience Measurement – The Client API makes the difference.” If this could be relevant to you, then it only takes a few seconds for you to access a demo of OfficeExpert free of charge for 30 days.

Similarly, IBM Connections adoption specialists, community managers, and administrators have voiced their desire for new features that we have recently implemented. ConnectionsExpert 2.1 enables the analysis and visualization of participation with Excel or business analytics tools, such as Tableau or Power BI. Additional built in widgets as well as customizable alerts and notifications such as file library size maintenance and trend updates on user activity, continue the success story that panagenda ConnectionsExpert has written with our customers.

Since the v1.6 release, panagenda ApplicationInsights is also enabled for analysis and visualization in BI tools. Database design complexity categories are now defined based on the design complexity of specific reference templates, and it is now possible to modify the factors upon which computational complexity is based. And returning to global accessibility, ApplicationInsights is now available in five languages, including Chinese, Dutch and Japanese.

These rapid developments have been made possible due to constant internal training. Most recently, our front-end software development department joined the ranks of Certified Professionals for Usability and User Experience. Lead Developer – Frontend, Miraldo Fifić says, “Being taken out of our developer bubble, allowed us to see the bigger picture and acknowledge that, with which our Product Managers are confronted on a regular basis.” This holistic view has taken a lot of pressure off the Product Managers and improved internal communication immeasurably.

The journey taken in 2018 would not be complete without also looking at how panagenda Consulting has developed. Our consultants are incredible at assisting customers of panagenda solutions with their business needs. We have noticed though, that they have so much more to offer. Consulting CEO, Henning Kunz has made the decision to expand the consulting branch of the business to also cater for topics such as Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery. As such, we’ve already assisted customers in building their private cloud infrastructure, automating infrastructure processes, automating software development, transforming existing applications to microservices and implementing a DevOps culture.

panagenda is constantly looking for new challenges and continuously seeking companions that will join us on this fascinating journey. We would love to hear about your panagenda highlights in 2018 and what you are looking forward to most in 2019. If you want to be among the first to find out about exciting new developments such as our upcoming webshop, subscribe to our blog, register for our newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

Finally, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all our customers and business partners for working with us with our below season greeting compilation. We wish you and your families a joyful 2018 holiday season and are very much looking forward to 2019 with you!