The past year has been very good for Anders. We have accomplished 67% business growth, and we have grown our headcount even more! With that growth, we expanded our Turku office to the second floor and moved our Helsinki office to Mannerheimintie, right in the heart of downtown.

Our biggest business growth area this year has been in the public sector, and we are currently involved in several projects for the City of Helsinki. We also work as partners for the cities of Turku and Tampere. It is gratifying to see how open source combines the common needs of cities and the cost-effective duplication of services.

During the fall, we have done a lot of internal training and strategy updates for the next decade. We have particularly invested in enterprise search technologies and the accessibility of online services. We were among the first to receive the Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) certificate!

We also started a machine learning business – for example, in Helsinki City Parkkihub project, which will forecast the availability of parking spaces in the Helsinki area using machine learning models. We foresee that the machine learning will become even more popular in the next decade. In addition, we streamlined our own DevOps operating model and achieved significant growth in our DevOps services.

For next year we will clear our service offering, and with our partners, we will be more comprehensive in digitalizing our customers’ businesses. We are particularly committed to sustainable digital development.

Unfortunately, website administrators can do very little for these kinds of zero-day attacks. For this reason the people who first discovered the vulnerability have been criticized for making their findings public before software vendors were given sufficient time to upgrade their products.

On the other hand, if the news about the discovered vulnerability had not been made public quickly, many parties would have probably not upgraded their OpenSSL. It remains on open question whether some malicious attackers have already known about the vulnerability and used it before the information become public.

The best way to prepare for zero-day attacks is still fairly traditional: regularly updating operating systems and other software.

Although this vulnerability is very serious, there may be silver lining to this dark cloud. A vulnerability so clear and serious will hopefully encourage service providers worldwide to act, and perhaps also to re-evaluate their current security standards.

In recent years, we have heavily invested in the well-being of our staff, and 2019 was no exception. We were ranked third in Finland’s top jobs this year, and we ranked 18th in the Great Place to Work European list. We added the full sports and culture benefit to our employees to enjoy. We also travelled again to Gdansk with all the Andersians and had a great long weekend.

We try to avoid keeping our people at the customer premises. Flexible remote opportunities continued, and a few employees even worked from abroad for a week or two. Next spring, we will offer our employees the opportunity to work remotely under the Spanish sun.

We are happy for our talented employees, and we welcome new ones to the Anders family! Recruitment will continue into the coming year.

– Mikko Kivistö & Anders