Codestone delivers another record year: reflections on what’s driving our continued success.
As Codestone closes out another record-breaking year with circa £13M in revenues and a decade of strong double-digit growth, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on how we got here and the factors that are driving our success.
Codestone is an award-winning SAP and cloud services solution provider with a market-leading approach. We work with a wide diversity of UK businesses, across industries from SME through to mid-market and the enterprise.
The last decade has certainly been an interesting one from a UK business perspective. Uncertainty has become the new norm and our customers are navigating the challenges and competing effectively by finding opportunities to be ambitious, progressive – and smarter than their competition. Despite the uncertainty surrounding Brexit we have seen demand strengthen over the last twelve months as customers move to optimise and streamline to ensure they are best placed to move forward strongly.
Technology is Core to Strategy
We’ve seen how technology has firmly placed itself irrevocably as a strategic topic on boardroom agendas rather than being seen merely as a set of tools to be implemented. Organisations are continually pushing forward to see how they can drive greater efficiency, use analytics to inform real-time decision-making and innovating to seize new opportunities for growth. Our top level partnerships with key vendors such as SAP and Microsoft gives us the best technology on the market with which to build solutions.
Power to the User
What customers want now are systems that can truly transform their functions seamlessly from end to end. Of course, they want their business data to come from a single-source wherever possible. But customers also want insight from their analytics in real-time and sometimes for this to be integrated back into how the system operates. This is AI in action. They want to see their KPIs at a glance and to know how they can outperform their objectives. It’s unsurprising that we have seen a rise in demand for role-centric dashboards fully integrated with functional systems. Running alongside this is the expectation of full mobility with accessibility across sites, offices, home, and across devices from desktop, laptop and tablet to mobile.
New Ways of Working
The rise of social media, tablets and smartphones has driven new user behaviours and mindsets in the way people communicate, connect and share information. In short, we expect our applications to be intuitive, a pleasure to use and to get what we want in a few clicks or gestures. The problem has been that these new behaviours were not being catered for very well in the workplace. As organisations pivot their attention towards enhancing the employee experience as well as improving efficiency and increasing productivity they seek to mirror and tap in to these new behaviours. With Codestone’s market-leading cloud solutions, customers have the assurance that their work technology equips them for the new world of work – and that is a big driver of demand.
March to the Cloud Continues
Codestone has over a decade of experience in helping organisations implement and adopt cloud-based technologies. Many of our new customers are part-way there and looking to us to help them transition fully in order to reap the benefits and opportunities that the cloud has to offer. With this, we have observed an increase in awareness and demand for knowledge around data storage and security, and its implications for business risk. When organisations decide to invest they do it diligently and the level of detail they need to go into has increased. Ours is a well-formed strategy; we take a rigorous and diligent approach, challenging the thinking if necessary – we don’t just present our clients with a shopping list. Our systems are also accredited to ISO:9001 and ISO:27001 giving added peace of mind.
It’s in our delivery of these technology solutions that Codestone’s reputation has grown from strength to strength. Our portfolio spans our applications and infrastructure services all from under one roof and this means customers don’t have to seek out additional strategic partnerships to accomplish their goals and then have to manage these different relationships alongside each other.
We are continually evolving our portfolio and adding delivery resources across the business to serve clients better. The manufacturing sector is a good example of that. We enhanced functionality for this sector and it is proving a strong space where we have seen an impressive uplift in demand over the last 12 months.
What does the short-term future hold?
A record year doesn’t mean that we sit back on our laurels. We will be looking for more steady growth, targeting 15% year on year and expecting that to continue. Codestone has always ensured continuous investment in the business – we have to continue to invest in the business to drive that growth.
We are investing in the solution portfolio in a number of exciting areas in the coming year, which are yet to be announced. From a market perspective, we will continue to have complete focus on the UK market which is big enough for our short to mid-term ambitions. For international delivery we combine our own international experience very effectively with local expertise where necessary to serve our customers who have an international footprint – something we have done with great success over recent years.
Culture the Key
While the end product of what we do is a business and technological solution that meets the needs and ambitions of the customer, there is no doubt that it is our approach, the quality of our people and how we deliver our solutions that sets us apart. Codestone is, above all, a people-centric business. We have a tremendously strong and positive culture. That is what makes the difference and drives strong, positive results. And that in itself is cause for pride and celebration.