A Reekoh Progress Update

A LinkedIn connection of mine called me out on a fairly innocuous update I made about the really positive all-hands call the Reekoh team had this week, looking for a little more detail and "meat on the bones". Fair enough, and so rather than just post a quick comment back, I thought I'd write this up in a little more detail here to share with everyone how things are tracking with Reekoh.

Here are some of the highlights from the three main areas we focused on in the company update:

Market Positioning and Messaging

If you follow the IoT space at all, no doubt you'll be aware that the Platform segment is particularly crowded and confusing. Everyone has an IoT platform it seems. Some SaaS applications are being mis-labelled and sold as "platforms", and the range of capability, scale and commercial benefit swings wildly between offerings.

Reekoh has always been focused on integrating the various components of an enterprise IoT solution stack (devices, networks, security, services, applications, etc) as an Integration Platform, but we were put into the "IoT Platform" bucket by nature of our specialist capabilities in that area, plus our commercial model (which contained a billing component around the number of devices being managed). This hampered our ability to cut through the market noise, and to capture more of the type of customers where our capabilities were truly needed and valued (when we click with a customer, we REALLY click).

Moving forward, we're going to be more clear about our overall integration capabilities, and how this aligns with what the modern enterprise can achieve by working with IoT and other emerging technologies that we support (e.g. Machine Learning or AI) alongside their business applications and processes.

Consider the typical IoT scenario where an asset in the field is reporting an issue. A customer will have a field service management system in place for ticketing and job scheduling, and potentially other automated workflows that kick off within that system. The issue from the asset can be integrated into this existing business application and workflow via Reekoh, but we can also add device control to that workflow where the asset can be physically managed (e.g. shutdown, restarted, etc) as part of that business process. And this is achievable for the customer without adding in any new applications that the end-user (job dispatch or service manager) needs to interact with, saving time and money on training as well as all of the other operational and IT deployment benefits.

Reekoh is an integration platform for the modern enterprise – built from the ground up to natively speak new technologies such as IoT, AI and Machine Learning, alongside your existing enterprise business systems and processes.

Our platform is helping enterprises to rapidly take control of fragmented IoT and data ecosystems, build integrated business solutions quickly, and embed future-proofed foundations for digital transformation.

We’re confident that this positioning not only makes it clearer as to where we sit on the platform spectrum, but also which customers are in a position to benefit the most from our offering and services.

H1 2018 Results

We have grown in the past 6 months in terms of revenue, sales pipeline, headcount and product development.

Customers

Anchor customers in Australia such as WaterGroup and UTS are heading into secondary phases of engagement, now that Reekoh has been a part of their technology stacks for 12 months or more. They’re expanding their use of the platform as solutions mature and need to undertake more complex integrations, or need to integrate with new technologies and solutions that have recently been added to their requirements.

We’ve also added some significant logos such as Telstra and AT&T, and having gone through the approved supplier process are now working on early implementations and projects.

New partners such as AccessTel have started to develop their own plugins and are rolling out new offerings to their customers utilising Reekoh’s capabilities (watch out for a press release on these guys soon).

We’ve received inbound leads from nearly 20 different countries in the first half of 2018, and are seeing an increase in demand from the US and EU growth markets as well as in South East Asia where physical and digital infrastructure investment is skyrocketing.  

Our ISV partnership with Microsoft has resulted in our inclusion in a number of their internal sales enablement programs and channels, including being added to the Azure Marketplace and AppSource portals.  

Team

On the team front, we’ve reached a headcount of 20 across our Australian and Manila operations. It’s been pleasing to see a number of our longer-term engineers become team leads and really step up to bringing through the newer team members.

The ramping up of solution architecture and consulting capability in Australia is already reaping rewards for us and our customers, where we’ve been able to take a hands-on role with customer projects and implementation. I’m expecting our global headcount to grow significantly in the second half of the year (check out our Careers page).

Winning awards such as the CRN Impact Award (Emerging Innovator) and the IoT Australia Award (Best Platform or Product) certainly gave our team and market presence a boost!

Product

We’ve invested heavily this year in more under-the-hood engineering to our core platform, hardening and increasing fault-tolerance, and delivering a fantastic micro-services architecture to improve our API-first approach. A new release to the core platform is planned for this month.

This has meant though that we've been slower than we would have liked in delivering some of the new user-facing features we have in the roadmap. While that's been a little challenging for us, it's been important for us to do the work now to prepare us for the coming growth. In the meantime, we've made some incremental changes to our Plugin Framework (such as Gateways 2.0) that have brought some much needed capability to our existing customers.

We’ve just ticked over 130 pre-built plugins in our marketplace, and as mentioned before, are now seeing partner-developed plugins being deployed for the first time. The range of services for data enrichment that we’re enabling is particularly interesting, with plugins to open data sets beginning to become more prevalent. We expect this plugin count to rise substantially in the second half of 2018, mainly led by plugins that are needed in live customer projects.

Next Phase

Plans for the second half of 2018 include consolidation and growth of our APAC pipeline and on-boarding of new customers (currently in Utilities, Smart Cities, Asset Management and Retail), aggressive expansion into growth markets such as the US, and delivery of a large number of new modules and features off the back of our core platform improvements.

We’re tending to plan in 6 month blocks, review on a quarterly basis, but focus on executing monthly. Growing fast requires a fair amount of flexibility, particularly in a market that is continue to evolve and mature at different rates in different regions and technology segments.

Collectively as a team (engineers, sales, execs, investors, advisors) we’re passionately committed to accelerating the adoption of IoT and emerging technologies in the enterprise market, and more than ever are up for the challenge.

I’m very optimistic and up-beat about what we’re doing in this incredibly exciting and challenging market, and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else! Looking forward to updating the market again on our further progress in the near future.