The Year in Review

Every year, we here at Commencis review the year that passed to see how we did and how we look to be prepared as we enter into the future.

This year, of course, presents a significantly different sort of review than other years as it was dominated by the global pandemic that changed the way the global economy works and affected so many people worldwide.

We’ll start our review of the year 2020 back in 2019, as the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season kicked off, killing over a billion animals and razing over 24 million hectares (59 million acres). At the outset of 2020, on January 26, Kobe Bryant’s Death shocked the world as it mourned him, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and 7 others as they crashed in a helicopter. The first time the world really came together to acknowledge Coronavirus as one was on March 11th, when The World Health Organization officially labeled it a global pandemic. Shortly thereafter and linked in terms of public reaction, on May 25th George Floyd protests rocked America and the rest of the world. On July 15th, a Global Twitter hack proved that even the global elites were in danger from issues of technological security, as many verified Twitter accounts were hijacked and tweeted out a bitcoin scam. And recently, news has started turning around, with the Pfizer and BioNTech Vaccine announced on November 9th. And while Diego Maradona’s passing on November 25th was tragic, the positive turn of the news of the world continued as on November 7th Joe Biden was declared the winner of US elections. On November 24th, Trump accepted formal transition of office. By December 8th, the first vaccines were injected as 90-year-old British grandmother Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world to be given the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination. And now we head into 2021 just hoping the year’s not QUITE as crazy as this past one, and ideally with a few more pieces of good news to boot!

Now, obviously some of these events came and went, but there’s one event that shaped the entire year of 2020 for every individual and every business: the Coronavirus, or COVID-19, global pandemic.

For businesses like ours, the major question was really: how prepared were we for the COVID-19 global pandemic?

As it turns out, pretty well prepared!

The coronavirus pandemic weighed on us on a personal level the same way it did the rest of the world. All of us know people who were touched by the pandemic, and who suffered tragic losses.

But as a business, our pre-pandemic focus on working remotely, on teamwork and communication between employees working from different locations, and our business focus on building and using digital platforms meant that we were uniquely placed in a position to succeed given the pandemic and the tools societies used to slow it down.

How We Worked Remotely

By the end of March, societies knew that poorly ventilated indoor office spaces were potential spreaders of disease and COVID-19. As a result, millions of businesses around the world had to adapt quickly to working remotely.

We were one of the first companies to see what was on the horizon, and closed our offices entirely by March 16th, one of the first companies in Turkey to do so that early.

On top of this, the fact that we’d been working remotely on international projects for so long means we’d long since adopted a system built to handle our needs for communicating with our employees. We believe in the importance of communication between our teams, and this allowed our teams to work together in harmony during this time of crisis. All of our teams and employees are trained and accustomed to adapting to a change in circumstance and keeping their workflow focused and as stable as can be. Working remotely was just business as usual for us, and we kept right on cooking.

For more tips and tools for exactly how we work, find them from here.

Engaging with the Pandemic

But of course, it wasn’t 100% business as usual, as the world around us was changing dramatically. As we quarantined at home and worked remotely, we saw it as part of our duty to engage with the pandemic directly and to help our customers, partners, and friends with the knowledge we’d gained over the years.

We produced online kits to help people build activities to deal with the pandemic.
We produced tips and tools to help people work remotely.
We came up with individual suggestions for how to deal with remote work and quarantine.
We produced a massive number of industry reports and research so our clients and stakeholders could keep abreast of what was changing in the world around them and react quickly and efficiently.

We launched our podcast Voice of Commencis to boost productivity and discuss the topics that shaped our business and how to handle the fast-changing developments.

Launch of Dataroid and Website

In fact, the pandemic coincided with us working on the brand identity and publishing the website of our big data analytics and customer engagement platform, Dataroid. Dataroid empowers leading enterprises to better understand every individual customer experience and take real-time actions. Harnessing the power of analytics and omnichannel engagement, Dataroid allows businesses to speak directly to individual customers and immeasurably improve their experience.

Events

We participated in a number of events this year, almost all remotely of course. And frankly, we got just as much out of them as we have in most other years. Once you really apply yourselves, you can get a lot out of remote meetings, just as in-person meetings can be a waste of time if you don’t apply yourself. This year we participated in 26 meetings in total.

Also, every year, like most companies, we’re used to hosting a number of important events in the industry every year. This year in-person events were a no-go, but given our wealth of experience meeting online, we invited students, developers, and anyone who wanted to learn from Commencis to online meetings. Even internal meetings were held online.

We also were able to continue our internship program for Future Commencers, teaching them our tools while maintaining social distancing and remote work principles.

And at the end of the year, from November 24th to December 24th, we held our annual CloudCamp 2020, a 5-week cloud training program that provides fundamental skills and hands-on experience to be a cloud professional, learning from industry-leading certified professionals.

Kept our Environmental Focus

We at Commencis have long felt an obligation to help save the environment and bring awareness to environmental issues. This year was no different, and we invested our time and research into raising awareness of climate change. This included many posts to that effect, as well as the donation of gardens and plants to help the Earth in its obvious time of need. This is a focus we truly believe in and believe that our commitment is something that can truly make a difference. We’ll continue to do and believe the same it no 2021 and beyond.