2018 was a great year for VANTIQ: We tripled the number of employees. We established successful operations around the world (China, Japan, LATAM, Israel and Europe). We created a Professional Services organization dedicated to assisting our partners and customers. We signed on many new customers and dozens of partners. We moved into a very functional and beautiful new headquarters in Walnut Creek. And — most importantly — we started celebrating as more proof-of-concept projects began moving to live real-time, event-driven applications.
Product
We dramatically enhanced our original product, Modelo, and introduced a brand-new product, Pronto – the world’s first dynamic advanced event broker. Major innovative breakthroughs, such as an event catalog and an application modeler, were introduced. We expanded our installations to include managed private clouds – a major competitive advantage, as more and more companies are requiring this. There is still no real competition for us in the real-time, low-code, event-driven platform market. We are setting the technical agenda because of our unmatched depth of experience and our top talent. The opportunity here is huge: tens of billions of dollars.
Where We Fit
VANTIQ enables the real-time operations of complex operational systems. By real-time, we mean how thing are changing in time and space as they are happening. VANTIQ applications receive event data from sensors, humans, and other software systems. As data is received, VANTIQ analyzes, informs, and takes action. Very importantly, VANTIQ is a truly agile development platform. Applications are built in weeks and easily modified thus enabling experimentation and rapid evolution. If you keep these strengths in mind, it will make sense why we have been chosen for many innovative applications in the past year:
- IoV (Internet of vehicles). VANTIQ applications monitor the location and actions taken by advanced vehicles during testing and normal operations. This requires logic running in the vehicle and in the cloud to enable real-time analysis and changes.
- Ports. Ports are very complex environments with containers, vehicles, ships, and personnel constantly moving in and out, often with very fluid schedules. This requires accurate and dynamic inventory management, human activity scheduling, and location tracking. VANTIQ is the only platform to support such a dynamic environment.
- Field Service. VANTIQ has been chosen for numerous modern field service applications. These applications require real-time situational awareness to understand what the problem is, get the right person to the job as fast as possible, and monitor the entire service process.
- Environmental Monitoring. A VANTIQ application was created in Belgium to monitor flooding via sensors and to interact with people who might be in harm’s way. Using the application, people are routed to the nearest shelter or provided emergency assistance, if requested. AI is used for multiple language interactions.
- Safety. Numerous safety and monitoring applications have been built in VANTIQ using image recognition and collaboration, generating emergency responses when needed. For example, Capital Airport in Beijing will use image recognition to identify emergencies via AI and assign security personnel in real-time.
All of these real-time applications monitor assets, people, and/or environmental conditions and how they change in time and space. This is our market. No other single product enables this like we do.
Market
The world needs our products. All businesses realize they must innovate with technology or risk becoming obsolete. CEOs are concerned. They know they must deploy innovative new technologies. But the means and strategies are elusive. As we have repeatedly heard, failure rates for building the types of real-time applications mentioned above are astoundingly high and are continuing to worsen. So far, our success rate is unmatched in the market.
Industry analysts are catching wind of VANTIQ and the feedback is extremely positive. VANTIQ won the SIIA CODiE Award for best Platform-as-a-Service as well as the Gartner Cool Vendor accolade in 2018.
We are uniquely positioned to lead this next generation of enterprise platforms.
Our Go-to-Market Strategy
Our strategy is to work with partners (System Integrators and Independent Software Vendors) who can use and distribute our product. We now have dozens of partners worldwide, many of whom have numerous employees dedicated to building VANTIQ applications. A single Chinese SI has 26 employees working on 10 VANTIQ projects. A large Japanese SI is building multiple projects and has signed 3 customers so far. This is a winning strategy that benefits both VANTIQ and our partners. Most importantly, this strategy will enable VANTIQ and our partners to achieve unprecedented growth and success.
2018 Major Events
During the year we have given numerous keynote presentations worldwide. Three notable events were:
- Our first Global Partner Summit. Nearly 70 people attended, representing 20 partners. Many partner presentations were given with rave reviews of the product. For example, a key partner in Brazil said they were 40x as productive by using VANTIQ.
- We created the Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Consortium in Japan. This Consortium’s goal is to educate the industry on EDA and offer roadmaps for success. The first event had nearly 200 attendees with many of our partners present, as well as numerous C-level executives. There were about a dozen presentations, most of which promoted VANTIQ. A similar event is being scheduled in China in 2019.
- Another example of a significant conference we attended was the recent keynote presentation I gave in Israel at an annual major IT event that had about 400 attendees including numerous CIOs and System Integrators. Our product strategy received an excellent response.
2019
I wish a Happy New Year to everyone. I am immensely proud of the team we have built together, and I look forward to the exciting journey 2019 will bring.