Review of the year at amatis Networks
2021 has been another challenging year for everyone. Just when we thought the pandemic was over, lockdown was a thing of the past and working from home was no longer necessary, another covid variant crops up. We have witnessed fuel shortages, rising energy prices, inflation and many other vacillations of fortune. Here at amatis we decided to review this challenging year and see what went well, how we coped, what lessons we learnt and where we need to improve.
Working from home
Living with the threat of the Coronavirus has changed the way we work for the foreseeable future. The days of video conferencing, long heralded, have now well and truly arrived and people both in business and private lives have come to accept and work with it. At amatis we rapidly adopted remote working during lockdown and in 2021 we ran a poll with our team to see how they felt about it. The overwhelming view was that hybrid working was the way forward, splitting time between office and home. The Sales team were a bit split on this as they felt face-to-face meetings really help to put across the message and discover what the customer really wanted. At amatis we continue to work from home and for some of our people this will be the way they choose to work going forward. The answer is that we trust our team to work out what is the best way for them to operate. One concern with working from home was that the level of service we offer could potentially drop – this is something we worked hard to avoid. The feedback from customers remains very positive: in our 2021 customer satisfaction survey 93% were happy with our service. For example, after a virtual demo of our new myamatis cloud platform one customer commented:
“I just wanted to feedback about the demo. I really enjoyed the hour or so going through the portal…. Michael was spot on and answered all my questions and directed me to where I could find settings associated with what I was looking for. I have a much better understanding of the product now”
Remaining resilient
One thing we are really proud of is the team’s resilience through these turbulent and trying times. We made a real effort to ensure their well-being was catered for offering on-line weekly online Yoga sessions and team ‘walk and talks’ on a Monday morning which were an opportunity to catch up and start the week in a positive frame of mind. A couple of high points were the outdoor team building events we organised to keep morale high and to keep the team connected – our Company BBQ in June and our Family Day in July in the field with an Aston DB5 and Bouncy castle for the kids.
Investing in the Future
Unfortunately, some of our customer businesses have suffered during the pandemic and lockdown. Those in the leisure and hospitality sectors had a particularly tough time. We have been understanding of their situations and have gladly taken our share of their pain. Whilst this has affected our P&L, amatis remains strong and has continued to invest in the future.
We hired two new members of the Sales and Marketing team to help communicate and promote our vision – Catherine Lake and Kirstie Mogilner. We developed and launched our exciting, new product myamatis cloud (mac) across our data centres in Reading and Slough. We have already successfully migrated a number of existing customers to our mac cloud solution. Thank you for making this move with us – 1-Fix and NB Medical to name a few. The feedback has been very positive, and we look forward to welcoming many more businesses to our secure, user-friendly, private cloud environment in 2022.
We also invested in increasing the capacity of our core amatis network replacing wavelength services with dark fibre and adding 100GE links for more scalability. We have established new points of presence in new exchanges in Gloucester, Oxford and London, increasing our reach to deliver APEX solutions further north and west. By investing in connecting our network directly to various exchanges, we remove the need to traverse the national network with its inherent risk and potential congestion. We developed an online pricing portal to give customers more visibility and control of their network.
Celebrating our successes
Although 2021 has been a very tough year for everyone – we have much to celebrate at amatis. We have been lucky enough to gain new customers and partners this year – welcome on board to you all – watch this space for new case studies next year.
Giving back
As the year draws to a close we, once again, decided to make a donation to our favourite charity https://www.naomihouse.org.uk/ instead of sending out Christmas cards. We are in awe of the amazing work they do providing expert hospice care to more than 600 life limited and life threatened children, young adults and families from central southern England. We are pushing the envelope this year and offering to match any donations our customers* make if they tag us in their donation and share it on LinkedIn.
Here at amatis in 2021 we have learnt to be flexible, resilient, stronger and, as always, customer-focused – roll on 2022 we are ready for you and whatever new challenges you may bring. If you have any questions about our added-value solutions myamatis cloud and APEX contact us here and we will get straight back to you.
*Up to and not exceeding an agreed limit
