It’s a New Year and a good time to sit down and write down all that we accomplished as a company (If you were expecting New Year resolutions, sorry. I don’t make any!). 2019 has been an eventful year for all of us at Unvired. When I look back the one major theme that stands out is how customer-centric our development and technology use was. A big shout out goes to our customers who kept pushing us and helped us deliver some amazing solutions. Thanks to all our customers for not only did they help us pay our bills but pushed us beyond the boundaries that every technology company ends up imposing on their solutions.
But let’s start with a cool brand update. Unvired launched a fresh, new logo and branding during the year. We were doing a lot more than when we launched and felt the need to communicate a younger, fresher brand. We also relaunched our website and social media channels and have received some fabulous feedback from customers, partners, and well-wishers. Thanks to all of you.
On the product front, we launched a new Digital Forms solution. The Unvired Digital Forms solution is a Low Code platform to design forms with a drag and drop designer and configure simple workflows easily. The forms can be submitted online using any browser or using our offline mobile apps on iOS, Android, and Windows. The submitted forms can update any backend system, post to webhooks or email PDFs automatically via configuration.
We also added Tensor Flow backed NLP processing engine for Chyme (our Enterprise Chatbots platform). Training conversations got that much easier either using pre-existing training data or using the interactive trainer to create the training conversations. Want to start from scratch? We got you covered with a graphical conversation designer. Do check out the Chyme website for more details or better still, reach out to us to schedule a demo. We also officially signed up with Facebook as a Workplace partner to enable our chatbots on Workplace. Some of our customers are already creating Leave Requests and other HR submissions using their Chyme chatbot on Workplace.
A couple of examples of customer-driven improvements are good to list now. The Unvired Digital Enterprise Platform is a horizontally scaling platform. We can handle thousands of transactions any time. But our limits were challenged when we started public (consumer) facing Chatbots to improve fan engagement. Thousands of transactions and updates started flooding servers from Facebook and other messenger mediums. While horizontal scaling helped we also added conversation context and other business data caching, a fast processing inbound queue and smoother error recovery from broken conversations on the conversation front. We also had challenges on the Enterprise Digital Forms submissions. Some of our customers were using the solution in areas of no connectivity like Rigs etc for days together (sometimes close to a month) and used to submit hundreds of forms in a deluge when they reached a connectivity zone. This was unpredictable traffic in terms of volumes/load and did cause a few sleepless nights @Unvired before we figured out how to handle the unplanned/random traffic spikes. The Digital Forms comes with a built-in PDF engine that helps serve/email out PDFs on submissions. While this worked well, customers and their employees submitted so many requests (one reason was that it was simple to file away PDFs for audit trails and for printing) that PDF delivery times got longer. We built out a PDF microservice that can scale horizontally and handles jobs in a queue (asynchronous processing) and rolled it out to customers in double-quick time.
We have consistently scored high on customer satisfaction and that has helped us get overwhelming support from our customers with repeat business. This trend continued in 2019. We also added quite a few large new customers. 2019 was also unique in that we had a customer go live with an Unvired application almost every month of the year!
We also made developing apps with the Unvired Digital Platform easy with industry-standard SDKs. The SDKs were published to homes (repositories like NPM, Nuget, Maven, Cocoapod, etc) that developers are familiar with. Documentation and help guides were updated and published. We plan to be doing a lot more on this in 2020.
On the whole, it has been an eventful 2019 and I look forward to more customer-centric challenges in 2020. Cheers!
