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Azure Functions, Serverless architecture in action

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One of the most popular Azure features is Azure App Services and the Platform as a Service (PaaS) architecture approach. It merely removes the overhead of setting up additional infrastructure, speeds up to get apps up and running and is an economical solution for hosting user faced web apps or API solutions for the web or mobile apps. For the last few years, App Services has played a significant role in the architecture and services I design for the customers.

As the need for background processes increased, Microsoft introduced Azure WebJobs as a part of Azure Web Apps, and it was the first step towards the functional serverless architecture. A WebJob is a workflow step which has a trigger based on time or, e.g. Azure storage features to undertake a specific logical task. WebJobs are a powerful tool to process data and create further actions based on business rules. The downside is that it has a poor modification, monitoring and laborious logging features from the UI compared to Azure Functions.

By publishing the Functions to Azure, it was a game changer in architectural plans and the way handling background processes in the Microsoft cloud. Azure Functions are hosted on-top of Azure Web Apps architecture and can trigger by HTTP requests, time schedules, events in Azure Storage, Service Bus or Azure Event Hub. The full introduction to Functions is available on Microsoft’s documentation.

Functions Apps can be created using developers prefered programming languages like C# or JavaScript either from the Azure Portal using the web editor or using Visual Studio. Cross-platform developers can use the Visual Studio Code for development using their non-windows environments.

Azure Functions have two runtime versions, and there are significant differences between versions one and two. Version 2.X is running in a sandbox, and it will limit access to some specific libraries in C# and .net core. As an example, if your function is manipulating images or videos, you don’t have access to the framework GUI libraries, and you will face exceptions. The version 1.X uses the .NET Framework 4.7 and is a powerful and alternative runtime for processes where full access to .NET Framework libraries are needed. The full list of supported languages and runtimes are available on the Microsft’s documentation.

Here is an example of the usage of Functions:
A client has financial data in different file formats and needs to process the information. The client receives most of the data in text-based PDF format. Using Functions is a perfect way to process textual context from PDF files to create data for search and Artificial intelligence. The following drawing illustrates the architecture.

  1. Azure blob storage to host files and PDF documents
  2. Azure Function which will be triggered as a new file is added to a container
  3. Azure Cosmosdb to save the content of the PDF file as JSON format
  4. Azure Cognitive Services to process textual context
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9 Important facts to consider when looking for a new job in London!

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It took me nine months to relax from my previous entrepreneurship era and start a new career as a Technology Advisor at Futurice Ltd in London. During the nine months period, I had enough time to explore new markets and think about what could be my next interesting and lucrative move. I’m going to write more about my explores later, but first I will share my thoughts about finding a job in London as it is in my fresh memory.

I started my professional career in Finland and worked there more than a decade in a limited, competitive and small but interesting, forward-going, time-ahead, and high-tech market. During this time I always had in my mind either expand my company to a larger market or move eventually to a metropolitan city. London was always my first choice as it is a metropolitan city in Europe and most large global companies have an ongoing operation in the UK. The mission of a new job search started at the beginning of August and I signed my contract at the beginning of September. Here are my learnings and considerations:

1. Don’t look for a job remotely

My family has a holiday residence in Southern-Spain and I was settled there during the summer. The new job operation kicked started from there by updating the CV and having my Spanish phone number in the contact information. After uploading the CV to various job-sites and having discussions with recruiters I found out that not being in the UK and not having a UK phone number was a show-stopper. That’s why I decided to travel to Londo, stay for a few weeks and buying a pre-paid phone number was my first action.

2. Don’t be passive and sell your self

If you are moving to the UK from another market/country it is obvious you are unknown professional. After having your CV uploaded to a job site do not wait for companies or recruiters to be in touch with you. List all interesting roles with contact details for your self and start to call them as much as you can. This stage reminded me of the start-up phase of Digital Illustrated where I had to call and introduce the company, but without a proper CRM system.

3. Don’t make compromises for your level of professionality

At the beginning of the search phase, I thought by reducing my expectations I will be faster to get a contract as I was not looking for a permanent position. It didn’t take me long to familiarize my self with the terminology of “Over-Qualified”. I guess this is a cultural matter as I did not come across this term in Finland. Basically, don’t Apply for a lower skilled position. For example, if your CV says you are an architect and you have done the job for certain years do not apply for a programmer position. Most companies will decline your application and will justify and explain the decision by the lack of motivation or “you will get bored and leave” message.

4. The market of recruiters

There are hundreds of recruiting agencies in the UK and they are all super active to hunt you down. The moment your CV gets indexed in the search results you will have calls from early morning until the afternoon. Remember to take a note of your discussions and make some background check. Some of these agencies are more professional than others

5. Do not sign any agreement during the search phase

Some recruitment agencies will try to send you terms and conditions during the search phase to be accepted. I noticed even a non-competition and NDA agreement. DO NOT SIGN any AGREEMENT with them during the search phase, even if they refuse to see you or insist to sign before having a face-to-face meeting.

6. Be careful with Job descriptions and roles

Don’t waste your time with generic job descriptions. For example the job description “.Net Developer” can be everything between Desktop Application development to Web Development. Be accurate with the job description and all bullet points. Even a small bullet point can be important to the employer and later will be a shop-stopper and waste of time!

7. Do not freeze your CV

My CV was made in Finland for enterprise level sales use. During my career, I had all kind of profession information available in my CV and that made my CV not longer than eight pages. Remember to have only essential information available in the CV, take feedback from each recruited you communicate with, and make sure the CV is two pages long with the most important information on the front page.

8. Avoid strange interviews

At some point, the recruiting company will ask you to have an interview with the client. I faced few strange interviews in where the client sent me an online task with limited time. The task I got had nothing to do with the role I applied for and it was a waste of time. I also had a phone interview in where the client decided to show their super skills and asking super detailed questions. Try to avoid none face-to-face interviews if there will be a task to accomplish.

9. Keep your options always open

Do not reject any role until you have a signed contract. There is always a tinny possibility to have complications on the road. After signing the desired contract remember to decline other offers politely and keep doors open for the future.

Here are some other hints you may find interesting:

  • Take your time to negotiate but be fast to make decisions
  • Remember always to do some background check about the client
  • Prefer direct discussions with companies rather than recruiting companies
  • Do some research about rates for certain positions, if you are looking for a contract position and year salary if you are keen to permanent positions
  • Money is not everything and not the most important driver. The role and the employer have more impact on your daily work, motivation, and work satisfaction.
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The sweet goodbye

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Recently I have seen some motivation videos about successful people like Jack Ma or Elon Musk on Facebook. The Video begins by telling how miserable was their life by failing over and over, dropping-off or leaving the university, nobody wanted to give them a job and then something happens. Their life changed by trying harder and they become successful, a Billionaire! I guess in most cases becoming a Millionaire/Billionaire part is what makes people watch those videos?

The only thing I could say about those videos is that working hard, finishing things you started with high quality, not spending your time with losers and not wasting time by doing fruitless thigs is the absolute key to success. As a teenager, I attended all classes and tried to get the best grade. I entered the university by studying hard and by getting the full points from the entrance exam. During my bachelor and master studies, I did all studies with the highest motivation and also by trying to be a model student. After the graduation, there has not been a day without studying or trying new things! As I have said before there is not a shortcut in life!

In my earliest blogs, I explained my experiments to work for a large global corporation and my road to becoming an entrepreneur. It was seven years ago during the Christmas holidays when I decided to leave the golden cage (if you can call it even a golden cage) and become a founder and join a Start-Up. Seven years later after hundreds of sales meetings and completed projects, hiring 50 amazing workmates we did the best year ever at Digital Illustrated. The growth of the company was over 50% compared to 2016 with a turnover of 6,2 million euro. We made over 24% earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization (EBITA) which is amazing in the ICT consulting business. The gains explain how efficient is the business and organization model and how self-managing organization can be fertile!

The following chart demonstrates the growth of Digital Illustrated from 2011 to 2017.

Beside the economical aspect past seven years has made me a new person. Continuous hanger for new information, competition with other companies during the bad economic situation and financial depression, office management, personal time management, sales and marketing, HR, building the corporate culture, recruiting, mentoring, entrepreneurship, board working, customer and partner relations, Selling the company and the process related to the EXIT and eventually not giving up in any situation are among the biggest learnings I embraced. For the past months, I have had some questions in my mind:

  • When is the time to let go and look for new opportunities?
  • How easily can you let things you created with your all your heart go and continue with something new in your life?
  • Is there a guarantee that the new adventure will bring you success and/or satisfaction?
  • Do you need a change in your life when you are successful and satisfied?

To find answers to my questions I have decided to leave my current position at Digital Illustrated. I’m going to have at least six months break from my day job. I have not resigned from the company and might get back to work but again once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur. At this point, I want to thank my family for the great support, my co-founders for the amazing teamwork and the rest of the staff (those who are and are not anymore working for DI) to make this amazing and successful voyage possible. I guess this is a sweet goodbye for now!

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An Excellent Idea for A START-UP! (PART 2)

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Recently, I attended a conference at Metropolia University of Applied Science as a co-speaker with my dear friend and workmate Jouko Nyholm. We attended to present about “Enterprise IT and Microsoft Solutions”. Attendees were a group of final year students from the Information Technology and Media engineering course. I spoke about entrepreneurship and during the questions and answer part, a student raised a funny question. The question was “So what is the next good idea to create a new start-up?”. My answer included giving the student advice to read the first part of “An Excellent Idea For a Start-Up (Part 1)” and wait for this blog post. If you haven’t read the first part of my blog post about the perfect idea, I recommend reading it first before continuing with this subsequent post.

Most successful Enterprises are mission oriented. It is extremely hard to gather a large group of people together and have their focus set to produce maximum productivity the company needs to perform an important and successful mission. It is almost impossible to succeed without a good founding idea. If the group does not feel the passion and love for what they are developing, they give up at a certain point in time. There is no way to keep the group together and execute the given mission, specially during the difficult times. Most young founders specially students think that the start-up phase will take a few years and maybe after that phase, the group would feel passionate about the idea. However  as I explained before the start-up will take 5-10 years to succeed.

One of the biggest mistakes is to copy an idea with small new insights. The act of copying does not excite people at all and it will not make the team work hard enough to be successful. The puzzle of creating a new idea is the problem that most founders face.

The fact is that the more you practice, the better you become and it is effectively worth trying to get more innovative and productive with the puzzle. The strange part of creating a greater idea is that, the best ideas look terrible at the beginning.

In my case, creating a company with small resources and no enterprise references sounded ridiculous. To be honest no Chief Information Officer (CIO) wanted a garage start-up as an enterprise service provider. The idea of creating a new cloud service provider sounded odd at the beginning because of the lack of trust and market size at that moment but it turned out to be a really good idea as the enterprise cloud transformation started to grow.

The idea to provide the same service as other competitors with the same project model and quality would have been insane and would have never took-off.  Entrepreneurs should look for a small market to gain a large part of it and expand the business fast. You should say to yourself; today only a small group of users or companies will use my products or services, but in the future, most of decision-makers will demands to use our services or products.

The entrepreneurs should keep in mind that if they come with a great idea it is possible that most people will keep it as a bad idea. You should not grieve but instead feel happy about it. This is the reason it is not dangerous always to tell others about the idea. Keep also in mind that the bad idea does not sound to be worth to be stolen. Basically, what is needed is an idea that many people are not working on it and it is more than okay that it doesn’t sound big at the beginning. The common mistake amongst young entrepreneurs is that they think the idea they have should sound or be big.

Here comes the secret of perfect idea: after figuring out a new idea, you should evaluate the market. What is needed is a market that is going to be big in 10 years. Most of the people are only interested in the market size existant today and they don’t think at all how the market is going to evolve. The mentioned mistake is not only amongst founders but also among the investors too. Some investors care about the current size of the start-up and not the size of the market in the near feature. In the small markets which expands fast, customers are looking desperately for a solution and have the will to pay for the cure you have for their needs. The important fact is that you cannot create a market which does not want to exist. You can change almost everything from the start-up but not the market. You should make sure and double check that the market you are looking for exists and will likely grow. The fast growing of the market is the most important thing!

Let’s wrap up the blog post:

  • Your mission is important to motivate people in the start-up and increase the productivity
  • A bad idea is always bad and will not change the way people think about it and will get worse during the difficult times
  • Copying an idea with no new insight is wasting time of the whole start-up
  • The more you practice developing ideas, the better you will get, so keep trying!
  • The idea doesn’t have to sound amazing and big at the beginning
  • Share your ideas with others and don’t be scared
  • The market is the most important thing with the new idea
  • Choose a market which exists, and will grow fast
  • You can change everything in your start-up but not the market
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Technical Challenges of Extranets and Customer Engagement

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Customer engagement

Over a decade of being a part of Microsoft ecosystem and solving customer’s needs, one of the most challenging tasks has been the engagement of customers and providing self-service systems to the end-users. In the old days and even currently some enterprises refer to the system as an “Extranet”. The cloud era and especially Microsoft’s Azure and the seamless integration between services has eventually changed the world.

Few years ago to have an environment where customers could authenticate, update their personal and professional information, interact with the enterprise and provide documents could cost hundreds of thousands euros. In most cases SharePoint was acting as the extranet platform, secondary Active Directory as the identity management system and Dynamics CRM as customer management system to hold customer information. Not to mention the integration platforms to solve the needs of communication between systems. For the risk, reliability, stability and usage load management all the platforms and systems had to be in a farm and at least duplicated for testing purposes. In most cases the capacity provided for the environments was frequently in the idle mode. The drawing below demonstrates a simple architecture of an on-premises server farm environment.

The minimal architecture

The costs mentioned above were only the hardware costs for the start.  The other costs for the project were the development and the maintenance fees which were much greater than budgets planned for the “Extranet” projects these days. The main reason for the bigger expenses was the custom made code created for platforms. Nowadays the need of custom coding is much smaller and most of the custom features are a part of the platforms.

Last fall Microsoft acquired a company called Adxstudio Inc. Since then I have been following the main cloud-based portal product of Adxstudio. The product is built on-top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM/XRM which is nowadays under the Dynamics 365 brand. User authentication is handled by the Azure Active Directory but user profiles are stored in the XRM as a contact record which can  interact with other entities in the CRM context. CRM entities and actions are extended to the web and information gathering is made amazingly easy. The product provides Content Management capabilities and search to create richer information management in the portal. As the technical perspective the UI is created by modern HTML 5 and CSS3 web technologies by using the Bootstrap framework to provide responsive mobile web pages.

But what concepts and features can be provided by the Dynamics 365 Portal to the end-users?
Here is a list of some concepts and ideas:

  • Customer service: help desk, account management and knowledge base
  • Communities and information sharing: discussion forums, idea management, polls and surveys
  • E-commerce: Transactions, invoice and order management, product and quotes management
  • Government: Services provided to citizens or emergency management
  • Marketing: Branding and design, conference and event management and lead generation forms

Each portal instance is hosted on Microsoft Azure and has some integration support for other Microsoft cloud based products like SharePoint. To keep integrations in mind, the product supports fully REST API and JavaScript can be used for the AJAX calls.

Currently the portal costs $500/year/instance but with each Dynamics 365 subscription the customer will get one instance of Dynamics Portals for free!
To refresh our memory each instance requires a Dynamics 365 CRM instance to which the portal will be attached during the installation/deployment phase. Corporate staff should have a CRM licence to be able use the portal but there can be unlimited amount of  external users for free!

In my next blog posts related to Dynamics 365 Portals I’ll go through the deployment process and features available in the product. My goal is to evaluate the product and give the business and technical staff better understanding of the product.

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An Excellent Idea For A Start-up! (Part 1)

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Excellent Idea

It has been a while since my last blog post, but in IT business a lot happens at beginning of the year which has kept me particularly busy. I would like to dedicate my next two posts to the subject of an “Idea” and the importance of the idea behind start-ups.

Whilst acting as an entrepreneur, I have engaged in constructive discussions with young entrepreneurs and some students who are planning their own start-ups. In most cases, I felt that young entrepreneurs do not focus on the idea or about the importance of the idea. This causes them to ignore the time they should spend to think and evaluate the value of the product or service they plan to deliver.

I found that these sorts of people tend to rush the start-up and gain success in a silver plate. Rushing to start-up may not be a bad idea, because things evolve and the world changes continuously, and in all honesty a good execution has extremely more value than a good idea. However, I believe it is clear that a bad idea is still a bad idea. Even the greatest execution will not get start-ups anywhere. Nonetheless, there are some minimal exceptions, but most successful companies have initially started up with a good “Idea”.

So, what can the Idea be described as and is it only reflective of the product or the service that one wishes to start-up?

In fact, most people seem to think that the idea is derived from being able to answer: “What do we want to provide to the customer”.  However, the definition of an idea is much wider than answering these sorts of questions. The definition of an idea includes the size and growth of the market, the growth strategy for the company and the defence strategy of the company against competitors.

During the idea evaluation, the founder should go through all facts and evaluate the quality of the chosen idea. As mentioned in my previous posts, it takes at least 10 years to shape a successful company. Therefore, it is really worth sitting back and taking enough time to think about the long term goals in order to add value to the business. This would then allow you to build on defending the business at depression. It is almost impossible to plan everything in advance and the start-up should be as agile as possible, and planning beforehand may become worthless at some point, but the practice of the planning has a grand value for the future. In most start-ups there is a lack of long term panning but if you have it, you will possess great advantages in the future.

The idea of my start-up currently known as Digital Illustrated was born during my last year as an employee. I was unsatisfied with the way the company was lead and the strategy in which the projects were managed. Repeated management errors occurred during my career and at the same time, the IT business was transforming.

Moreover, the term “cloud computing” was still unknown to most people and Microsoft lunched the first version of Office 365 (known as BPOS back then). Therefore the Idea I came up with was: Create an agile company in Microsoft’s ecosystem and go “Cloud”. The defence strategy was to generate and provide services with extremely high quality that makes end users and employees extremely satisfied. The idea was not the most unique one, but this was a new born market on its way and a gap to for us to fill. I intend to go into further detail about the relationship between the “market” and the “idea” in the second part of my blog post.

To wrap-up the first blog post about how to have a new idea for a start-up, here are some issues I advise you to keep in mind:

  • The idea always expands and you will become more ambitious as the journey of your start-up goes on,
  • You don’t need to plan everything from A-Z, but it is good to have a plan to start with,
  • The idea should always come first and then you should go for the start-up,
  • You should wait until you have the perfect “idea”. It is important as you should aim to choose between good and bad ideas;
  • If you have multiple good ideas and you want to choose the best one, take the one which you have mostly in mind during your free time (most of the founders regret the fact that they started the company without the idea they loved).
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To Be Or Not To Be A Startupper

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Back days during my university studies, I was always wondering what is the source  of multi-billion dollar/euro enterprises. How can you create such a company, and what do you need to be able to run the company. There are still many people, who are thinking about the same questions and trying to seek the answer.

Let me make the answer easy to understand. Any living object in this world has a start. Even our world had its own start during the big bang process. Companies are established for different reasons, but Start-up is a different and unique type of creation model. Most of the times I compare companies to humans, so I would compare a start-up to a just born baby. To evaluate yourself and to see if you are ready to create a start-up ask the following questions from yourself and compare your answers to mine. Then it is much easier to have a start.

Why you should not create a startup?

  • You have heard about a successful company, and you just want to have a try with the same idea to see maybe you will be successful. Don’t you even bother yourself! If the existing company is making a fortune with the idea, they have already used the opportunity and they will be always a step ahead!
  • The $/€ signs are in your eyes and you want to become rich really fast. That is the worst reason to become an entrepreneur and establish a start-up. There are so many other ways to become rich with less effort and responsibilities.
  • You are a control freak and you want to keep the power in your hands. A startup is a wrong choice for you, and maybe a bigger and more traditional company is the place you can show your power to the stuff.
  • If you are running from the responsibilities and trying to pass everything as fast and easy as you can, forget to becoming an entrepreneur.
  • Negativity and laziness does not fit in the life of an entrepreneur, and I guess you wouldn’t be reading this blog post if you were belonging to those group of people.
  • The idea of becoming an entrepreneur and creating a startup might cross your mind, because you are talented and experienced business person. BUT you have a golden cage around you (a good job, position & salary, with bonuses which generates consistent income). The golden cage makes you too  scared to lose everything, and not to achieve them again.  With the cage around, you will not dare to give a try and create the startup.

You should only establish a startup if you feel that there is a problem and the best way to solve the problem is to create a company. What you need for the establishment is the passion and the love for the thing you are creating. You should be absolutely ready to become the parent of the new born child which is the company.

Why did I do it?

  • As I have told in my previous blog posts, that I am from an entrepreneur family. As a child I saw how my dad created a company from 0 and built a successful enterprise.
  • I already created once a company which failed. I hate to fail and failing gives me new ideas and motivation. But the most important thing is that I’m not scared from failing and I try to learn from my mistakes.
  • I worked for the big and mid-size companies with the experience of different processes and failures in the companies. I noticed the reasons, why they were failing. Unfortunately most of the companies never learn from their mistakes nor try to solve their problems.
  • I was wondering why I’m doing this for them and not creating my own, with the better and agile way of doing the business.
  • There was a gap in Finnish ICT market and the gap needed to be filled with the startup I was going to create.
  • The market was not mature enough and the big size clients were too scared to buy from small companies. But I guess if the market was mature enough, there would not be a place for Digital Illustrated at that time.
  • I found out that few of my ex-colleagues became an entrepreneur. That gave me more courage to leave the golden cage and create the startup.
  • I love to be challenged and use my innovation to solve up-coming problems.
  • The last but not least is my love and passion for the IT/ICT business. The idea to create something new and unique makes me extremely happy!

Always remember the highlight:

Before becoming an entrepreneur and creating a startup, first evaluate yourself carefully. After the evaluation, think about the problem the start-up should solve. If you still have enough passion and love to do it, then you are ready to go and face the reality.

The road is long with lot of barriers, but the more you travel the more you will love it. Most of the entrepreneurs who I know, and who has created an startup have said “They couldn’t imagine at the beginning how hard creating a startup could be!”. One of the most important thing to keep in mind is that, if you go for it, be ready to spend 7 to 10 years of your life rising your “child”.

The rewards and the experience you will gain will be so great that you will never even thing to become an employee again and work for someone else!

 

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Follow, Believe and Take Over

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In my last two posts I had a review of the history of my entrepreneurship and the experience in a large corporation. In this blog post I will have a review of my transfer to a smaller company and the revoke of the belief to entrepreneurship. This will be my last blog post about the history and from the next post I will concentrate on entrepreneurship and the creation of startups.

Here is again a quote from Jack Ma (the founder of alibaba.com)

Before 30 years old go to small company. In a small company you will learn about the passion and dream. You will learn about many things what you can do at the same time. It’s not about which company you go, but which boss you follow (it’s very important).

During my Master studies the university offered a course about new digital ecosystems. The content of the course reviewed companies from the Silicon Valley and discussed about the creation and earning models of each company. At that time I still was working for the Tieto Corporation, with no intent to become an entrepreneur in the near feature. The course actually created an idea to have a change in my business life. I already had an experience from a large international company so it was a time to change to mid-size local company. After sending an application to few companies and few interviews I decided to join a company called Endero. The company was acquired by an Scandinavian company called Know IT few months after my entry.

I still remember the day, when I met one of my best friends and business partner, in my first interview at Endero. Petri Säkkinen was the team leader of the Digital business unit and became my boss at that time. He stretched out his business card and told me “We will meet in the next interview, if you get a mutual understanding with us”. Some times in your life you meet people by accident and you have no idea that the person can be become your best friend and you can build a success story which will change your lives. I guess Petri was the boss which I had to follow, but instead I shared my ideas with him and later we built a new company together.

I always knew that I have skills in sales. In my old life at Tieto I never got the opportunity to be part of the sales team and show my skills even in the pre-sales phase. Moving to the smaller company opened so many doors and new opportunities in my career. I was able to join the sales and improve my skills and learn about the sales  pipelines and marketing. As mentioned in my first blog post the technical line of the Finnish universities does not teach much about the sales and marketing. The real life business is the place you will learn about these subject if you have the passion and the interest. Actually if you become an entrepreneur you have no other choices!

After the acquisition of Endero, the buyer company made some changes to the enterprise. Few managers left the company and Petri decided to leave and create a startup in the Silicon Valley. That was a decisive point for me too, because I had no more links in the company which made me to stay. When I found out an ex co-worker created his own company I just had to do something about my passion and create my own startup. I will get to this story later in future posts. My career lasted at Endero/Know IT exactly one year and from 1.2.2011 my new employer was my own company.

Here are the highlights and some facts I learned from a smaller company:

  • You get more power and responsibilities
  • The responsibility makes you to think differently and outside of the box
  • You will learn much more from business and running a business
  • You have the voice to influence in the business
  • The personal communication skills will get improved
  • You are not a part of a big machine so you have to find your way more by your self
  • It is easier to leave a smaller company and creating your own comparing to a leave from a bigger company

 

 

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Begin A Part Of A Big Machine

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I was watching a video clip from the founder of Alibaba.com jack Ma who is the richest man in China these days. He said:

As young guy and before 30’s follow somebody. In a big company it is good to learn about processes and you are a part of big machine.

In this blog post I’ll go through how I ended up to Tieto Corporation and few words about the unit I was working for. The post will give good reasons why did I changed later to smaller and more agile company.

My professional career after the studies started in spring 2007 at TietoEnator corporation. The company changed the name to Tieto few years later and still working with the same brand. I started as a Software Engineer working with the .NET technologies and products built on Microsoft’s technology stack. Most of the large corporations and the public sector publishes news and corporate contents to employees using Content Management Systems (CMS). My experiences with CMS products started with SharePoint 2003 and Elevation. Elevation was a in-house built CMS product.

Few years before I joined Tieto, the company acquired a corporation named Visual Systems (VS) and the  unit I joined was a trail from this company. Visual Systems was founded by Pekka Viljakainen, who is a long line entrepreneur and business man. I was told that, the business idea of the company at the beginning was to create educational videos for schools and academic institutions. As the internet became more popular and companies started to provide services over the internet. At that point Visual System changed the business focus and started to create digital services for large corporations. For example the first Finnish internet bank service which was made for OP Bank was produced by Visual Systems.

If I should describe Tieto Corporation and find a synonym for it I would say a large whale. The corporation history and the way it was managed made it really hard to change the course and exploit talent inside the house. Everything is decided for you and there are so many hierarchical levels and bureaucracy, that new ideas does not fit in the daily business and the company makes a slow death.

Visual Systems managed to built a great corporate culture in where every one felt their value. All the employees were friends to each other and with the in-house events and brighten up and innovative projects the company managed to keep the growth and eventually owners sold the company (made the exit). The inherited culture was obviously different than other organization units at Tieto. One of the biggest mistakes Tieto did, was not to adopt the culture inherited form VS to other units and learn from the better one. Instead the management tried to bring the rigid and old-fashioned way of doing IT business to the young and innovative section of the corporation. This mistake eventually scattered the unit and almost all of the talented professionals left the house.

As I joined the organization as a junior professional everything was new to me. The business model, the earning models, the sales focuses, the organization model, employee roles, project models, the technology and so many other pieces, on which the IT and ICT business is built on. Curiosity plays a big role in my personality. From the moment I settled down in the company I started to research the business and asked question from high level managers. One of the most question I asked always was “How much they are paying?”. I guess this question comes from my background, because we Persians always love to know the price.

During the three and half years my main focus was on the technology, but during the period I tried to build as many direct customer relationships as i could. But in the most big IT & ICT companies you are just a resource in few projects. The managers reports only numbers to the higher levels and talents are not used as they should be used. In the big company your role is to create certain amount of income as it is planned for your role and most of the this are dictated and sold to with a beautiful story. Instead of re-evaluation of roles and talents, employees are kept in the same panel as long as it’s possible and the only way to improve and progress in your career is to change the company. There are many people who are contented with the dictation and in most of the time the only way they leave the company is to retire, get a better job offer from a similar company with a greater wage through a recruiter or last but not least to be fired (to get fired in Finland is extremely hard because of labor union power).

At the end of the day the experience I gained from the company was great. Here are some highlights from my experiences:

  • As a part of big company you will learn about processes
  • If you are new to the business, I bet a big company is a good place to start your career
  • More and less you are a resource and your only job is to make more income for the house
  • Big companies are really slow to change orientations
  • If your intention is not to retire soon, don’t stay too long in the big company
  • Make as much connection as you can even you are not at the highest rank in the organization chart
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In Entrepreneurship

The Big Bang of My Entrepreneurship

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They say history matters, and they are right. Here is the story of my wonderful failure and the first startup I created more than 14 years ago.

It was beginning of the millennium and the web/browser based games started to become more general. I was hooked with a game called Planetarion. The game was browser-based massively multiplayer online game and the idea was to build, develop create an army and destroy the enemy (Like all other strategy games). Planetarion story is based on space and SCIFI. I’m a big fan of Blizzard games and since 90’s I have been playing World Craft games. This gave me an idea to create a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) like Age Of Empires or Warcraft.

The passion to create the game and make the dream come true took all my attention. Beside of reading for the matriculation examinations and the entrance exams for universities I started to create the game. With no business plan, earning model nor capital, the only goal I had was to create the game. Later the game was named as Emperatur which means “The Emperor” in Persian.
Soon after I noticed that the game needs a good graphics to attract players. The background I had was from the technical side with no skills of drawing nor 3D modeling. Back then IRC was the communication and chat channel to get new friends and socialize in the internet. I started to look for 3Ds Max and Lightwave 3D artists. The funny and the strange part of the story is that I managed to find some few friends who started to make graphics for the game and for free.

As I started my engineering studies in the EVETK University of applied sciences, I asked some resources and hardware from the head of the department and she provided me a storage which I changed it to an office and some old computers which became the hosting server of the game. Soon after I was introduced to a professor with whom we started to think about the business model and marketing strategies. He also provided me some connections for example to Vesa-Matti Paananen (Vesku) who was an entrepreneur at that time and big name in the mobile world. Currently he is working for Microsoft as the Windows Consumer Product Marketing Manager.

One of the problems I met during my startup at the technical university was lack of business skills and knowledge. If I had the time machine to go back and change something I would definitely go to the business department of the university and started to find people with the entrepreneur spirit and also with business and marketing skills. Actually during my second startup I took advantage of my experiences from the first one and grouped up with my current business partners who completes me in skill which were missing from my skills set.
The game got to a stage that could had been a published to the web and I started to look for sponsors with my mentor (Vesku) using his connections. The only sales meeting we had was with the Finnish phone operator DNA, which got in to the pause mode because of the summer vacations and later lack of contact made that sales opportunity the only one and the game never got published to the web with a sponsor.

Currently games like Clash Of Clans of Super Cell is the complete version of what I was trying to do. The success of the game is the right timing for the game and the ecosystems provided by Apple and Google which makes the earning model in a class of its own. Back then the mobile devices were not in the current stage not to mention the internet connections in mobile devices.

Here are lesson learned from the startup #1:

  • Technical skills are not enough to create a startup
  • You need a good team to operate with, try to find people with good spirit to help you
  • It’s all about sales, marketing and connections
  • Write down your business plan, make a market research and build the earning model before doing anything else
  • Right timing of the service or product is one of the most important factors
  • Try to finish the product as soon as you can, so you can get experiences from the users and the market
  • During the studies and university life there are more time and good people around you. Try to take advantage of that!
  • If you fail it’s not end of the word, lift your head up and move forward
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