The holidays are over and now is the time of the new year when I usually get ready to beat my chest a little bit bragging about the previous year’s results. This year is no different: 2019 was very kind to us (in virtually every aspect and statistic).
2019 at a glance:
● 2 out of the 3 most valuables companies in the world have now licensed netTerrain
● New offices in Buenos Aires and Madrid
● Record bookings, maintenance and highest quarter ever
Record bookings
We saw another year of growth in new customer acquisitions as well as bookings and revenues. As a software company that develops a commercial product for network, fiber and Data Center documentation, we utilize the generally accepted principle of measuring bookings (purchase orders closed, basically).
Just as in 2018, last year was again, a record year for Graphical Networks. We recorded the best year ever in bookings, including a record quarter. Q4 of 2019 was our best quarter ever (with close to a million dollars in bookings).
New investment and offices in Buenos Aires and Madrid
As a 100% employee-owned company, we are always careful about our balance sheet. We have zero debt, not even a dime in credit card debt. This is not the product of some kind of gimmick: we are profitable and debt-free in the truest sense (and this is important for us since we cannot go and ask some investor to open their checkbooks). This does not, however, mean that we hold back when it comes to investments. The last couple of years have provided enough growth to enable us to expand the team in important areas.
In 2019, we expanded our engineering team with a new office in Buenos Aires dedicated to the development of our new discovery engine, the Collector.
At the end of the year, we even released our first version of the Collector, with plenty of improvements in our discovery and connector engine. We also expanded the team in a new region: Madrid. We hired a designer who helped us in the latest release with a beautiful facelift of our main product as well as a QA engineer who has created hundreds of new test cases (as well as helping in a number of usability and UI areas).
Marquee customers and enhanced support
In 2019, we welcomed a host of new customers to the world of proper IT documentation and Data Center Infrastructure Management. However, our biggest win was a ‘top 3 most valuable company’ that started using netTerrain to document their fiber plant. With that addition, we’re now proud to say that two out of the three most valuable companies in the world have now purchased a license of netTerrain.
How about that?
In addition, we signed up dozens of new customers from 10 countries, and we now have presence in 32 countries and all continents (except cool Antarctica).
2019 also saw us pass the #200 customer mark. In turn, we upped our commitment to support by hiring a new support engineer that is helping speed the time to respond. Our number of open tickets at any point in time is actually lower now than a year ago (even though we now have more customers). We also enhanced our customer portal and assigned a new partner channel manager for Europe.
New versions, better software
In 2019, we wrote more lines of code than ever before, with the largest engineering team that the company has seen so far. 2019 was the year of version 8, which includes 4 minor versions, a host of new features for IT visualization, DCIM and outside plant fiber mapping and a modernized interface and design. The Collector, as mentioned above, was the newest addition to the software suite — with new capabilities in network discovery and network mapping as well as new connectors to third-party sources for more IT and network documentation automation.
In sum: 2019 was very kind to us, which ultimately resulted in more investments and an expansion of the company, and which will, ultimately, benefit our customers.
Happy documenting!