Knock
There are those years when it seems like nothing works. OK, that may be putting it in black and white, but you’re hard at work and not much comes out of it. Nothing but dumb luck, lots of whining and hassle. For us, 2023 was such a year. Emotionally, that is. If you look at our figures objectively and without prior knowledge, you don’t see anything of all that trouble. Steady growth, nice results, costs under control. But it was a struggle.
Shake up
You often hear that the seventh year can be a time of taking stock, rehashing, a bit of chafing. Take a good look at yourself: am I still happy? Sometimes things have to change in order to enter the next phase of growth. This can also happen in the team.
That can also be a good thing. We have had some internal personnel changes which meant that everyone had to find their place and position again. Just like when the oldest son or daughter leaves the family to live on their own. Then the dynamics also suddenly change and things have to settle down again. In our case, this upheaval caused refreshment. Refreshment and new energy.
Wobbly market
What we have also seen in 2023 is the beginning of a “wobbly” market. Customers eager to move into the cloud with their database environments, but also customers who were actually moving back from the cloud.
We saw scarcity in the job market. At the same time, we sometimes had more than 40 applications from freelancers on one assignment. Success stories came along, of beautiful modern data platforms in hybrid cloud setup with kubernetes operators, ansible scripts and even built-in automated maintenance elements.
But also this year we helped many customers escape from the maze of “click, click, next, next, finish” – open source configurations. A lot of competition emerged, but many also disappeared just as quickly. It seems like decision processes are taking longer, and at the same time, people today want instant solutions.
Trusting your foundation
Above all, we experienced in 2023 that confidence in your foundation is essential. You can have a lot of bad luck in a year. Circumstances beyond your control that cause deals not to go through. Few inquiries from the market. Suddenly half as many visitors to your website.
Things like that. With a series of bad luck events, or when things keep failing, we tend to run even harder, try to do even more sales, put out even more lines. But by running harder, we lose our focus, take on too much and make mistakes.
As a result, even more goes wrong. If you have your vision, your mission, and your strategy clear, trust that. Don’t waver. Stick to your course and don’t get distracted by incidents. Believe in your own story. But do proactively move with the wind.
“You cannot change the wind, but you can change the position of your sails.”
Confucius
Opportunities
For 2024, we see a lot of need for our services. Especially in the areas of cloud migrations, cloud configuration and cloud cost control. In the second half of 2023, a movement has started. Many companies that had gone to the cloud before decided to go back to on-premises anyway – due to skyrocketing costs. Twitter (X), Linkedin, Percona are notable examples.
Rising costs, falling performance
There are still companies and organizations that expect with a cloud database (DBaaS, PaaS), such as Azure SQL DB or AWS Aurora and RDS, to no longer need a DBA. The cloud provider’s “fully managed” promise leads them to believe that maintenance is included.
These companies see their monthly bills keep rising due to scaling up resources, while performance goes down. We have seen cases of customers who wanted to move to the cloud with their current data model, where – compared to an on-premises configuration – the cloud storage would grow by 180TB in three years. Without intervention and rewriting of this by the database expert, this would become an impossible cost.
Trust
These two – opposite – movements give us confidence that we can continue to bring our added value in 2024 to help organizations make the best fit choice. To help companies achieve their ambitions. Whatever that ambition may be: moving to the cloud, outsourcing management, bringing cloud costs under control or, on the contrary, leaving the cloud (partly) again.
“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough”
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Exciting
When we hold up our ideas and plans for 2024, sometimes it feels quite exciting. What will the year bring us? Are things going to work out the way we imagined? We dare to think big(ish). We think that with our team and our foundation, we can carry these ambitions just fine.
We are ready. Refreshed, sharpened by the sanding, and with strengthened confidence in each other. Still, it’s nice to have a year in which not everything went smoothly. Setbacks turn out to have been blessings in disguise in the end.
When everything seems to be against us, remember that the plane takes off against the wind, not with the wind behind it.
Henry Ford
Curious?
Would you like to know more? Then get in contact with us. We will be happy to help you find a suitable solution to your problem.