The past 4 years have been filled with interesting projects and encounters with wonderful people. Thank you so much for your business and support. Without you, ANELEN wouldn’t have lasted until today.
As a small technology business owner, I ask myself every day why I am running an independent business instead of working for a bigger company. I admit there were times answering such a question was tough. The year 2020 threw a unique challenge as you all can imagine. It’s no secret that ANELEN lost some of its customers amid the rapid landscape change of the business due to COVID19 pandemic. We also lost the channels of building relationships in the remote environment.
A challenging situation sometimes leads to a new idea. I thought of a new way of connecting people through helping the people and sharing what we have. I started to clean up and organize the data engineering tools and published them as open-source projects. Those are the tools that help ANELEN do fast and reliable jobs for its clients. I also joined several online communities of data engineers and volunteered to answer questions and troubleshoot the problems posted by other data engineers.
Each open-source project by ANELEN acquired initial engineering users. No project was perfect from the beginning and the early adopters patiently tried my code and gave me valuable feedback. Through such interactions, I made a lot of friends from all over the world including Nepal and Brazil. Those are the people I would not have connected in the normal circumstances.
The experience opened my eyes and expanded the horizon. And today, I am happy to announce ANELEN’s yet another unique approach embracing Open Innovation. Over the past 4 years, ANELEN helped its client build data pipelines. It is a foundation work to transform a business to be data-driven. Businesses need to establish a highly automated flow of extracting the data to a central data warehouse for a reliable outcome.
ANELEN is now an expert in this area and knows how to build a reliable system that can be maintained with a small engineering team. Our knowledge is now transformed into a software tool called handoff and we decided to open-source handoff together with many other data engineering software projects. (For the entire list, please see our Open Source page.
In fact, I decided that ANELEN’s entire data service business should be built with the open model. Please take a look at this diagram:
The red circle is our client service. The data service is completely different from the traditional software development business. It is not about delivering the software to the specification and signing off. We need to ensure the reliable flow and transformation of the data from the source to the destination with active monitoring and maintenance. No one-time development is sufficient in the rapidly changing environment of the cloud service era. So, using our technology and proprietary software, we offer our clients a fully-managed experience.
Meanwhile, we will make our tool publicly available through open source licensing as indicated with the light blue area. It will connect ANELEN with the rest of the data engineering community and help innovate together. It benefits the international community in various economic situations. The feedback and collaboration with the users and engineers will make our product better.
The open innovation, in the end, comes back as continuous improvements and upgrades to the service subscribers. We can win together in the Open Innovation model.
I’m feeling great about this culture ANELEN started to advocate. It not only drives the service improvements but also gives a good reason why we innovate and integrate ANELEN with the rest of the world. This is another reason why I run an independent technology business. It is so exciting!
As always, please call me up for anything I can help with. I’ve invested so much in a geek project to make online collaboration more effective. Look here and here!
Daigo
