I feel like I say this every year, but I can’t believe it's January and 2016 is already behind us. Last month, at our annual company holiday party, I once again had the privilege of delivering the ‘State of the Company’ speech to our team. In 2015, I focused on the amazing journey of building, learning, and growing the company. While that journey continues on, the theme of 2016’s address was a reflection on some amazing things we accomplished and an expression of gratitude for every single person on our team who helped us reach our goals.
Throughout the year, we welcomed many new clients onto our Boxtop cloud platform, and also added clients under our traditional managed services. Many of our existing clients continued to grow, meaning we needed to expand our project team to facilitate expansion and upgrade projects for them. And, with every new client, we continuously found ways to improve and streamline our onboarding processes, ensuring a smooth and disruption-free transition to our services.
ENHANCED SECURITY
In early 2016, we deployed several new layers to our security stack specifically to protect against ransomware (such as CryptoLocker), and those layers have proven to be 100% effective in protecting our clients. We continued to move more and more services to the cloud, both via Boxtop as well as some third party cloud services, where appropriate.
SERVICE & SUPPORT
Our R&D efforts continued to reduce the amount of support calls per end user, as well as the time to resolve issues, which is down 20% from 2015. Average response times to our clients’ mission critical emergencies remained under five minutes (still beating the FDNY’s ambulance average!). This means not only improved productivity for our clients, but also frees up our team to give more attention and patience to our clients as necessary.
BOXTOP
As more and more businesses see the benefit of getting rid of their desktops and servers, Boxtop grew by more than 180% last year! To keep up with this growth, we strengthened our cloud capacity with additional supercomputers and fiber connectivity. Several new features were added in 2016 including improved performance for graphic design and 3D applications, and hybrid file sharing for mixed environments.
Now in its second year since launch, demand for Boxtop continues to be steady and we are planning further improvements and expansion in 2017. We recently started another round of upgrades to the Boxtop platform, and look forward to helping even more small-to-midsize businesses utilize the cloud to help their companies grow. I’m also excited to share that Boxtop was named by TL NewsWire as a Top 25 Product of 2016!
EXPOSURE IN THE MARKETPLACE
Our marketing and communications department played a big role over the last year helping us educate new audiences about cloud computing, and introducing them to Boxtop. This included launching our new website, producing a series of videos, developing on-line and in-person seminars, organizing our presence at various events and tradeshows, and developing strategic partnerships. I’m looking forward to all we have in the works for even more momentum and exposure in the coming year.
GROWING OUR TEAM
We welcomed five new employees to Tabush Group during 2016, across our help desk, tech support, and client management teams. They all bring tremendous talent, experience, and passion to our team, and I’m so proud not only of how well each of them has performed thus far, but also of how warmly they were welcomed in and how well they’ve been trained and mentored by our more seasoned staff.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In 2016, we put an added emphasis on professional development, through a series of in-house skills workshops, outside training and certification courses, and team building events. And, as a result, many of our clients have remarked to me first-hand how impressed they’ve been with the increased level of knowledge and service from our team.
As we start off 2017, I’m reflecting back proudly on all that we accomplished in 2016 (check out this INFOGRAPHIC we put together with highlights!), and hope to raise the bar once again. I’m looking forward to continued development of our team and the services we deliver to our clients.
THANK YOU to our clients, for putting your confidence in us, and giving us the ability to prove ourselves day after day with very challenge that arises. And, of course, thank you to our outstanding team for consistently going above and beyond, making it all possible.
The challenge this year we most look forward to is competing with our former selves, and continuing to go above and beyond.
Wishing everyone a happy, prosperous, and healthy 2017!
