As the year draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the past year or so. 18 months ago I put together a management team of existing senior managers and new board members to form Accelerate Group Limited and on the 1st of August 2018 we acquired Webtrends Optimize from Webtrends Inc.
What’s happened since then? Well a hell of a lot actually! And all of it positive.
Initial Priorities
For starters, we had to transfer over the hugely experienced team from Webtrends Inc. to retain our core CRO expertise, ensure all our existing clients were up to speed with the changes, fully separate the IT infrastructure from Webtrends, build out the Product roadmap, move offices, fill new roles in the team and build a new website! All in a day’s work really…
These priorities were quickly put to bed to allow us to start building out our future. This was a huge amount of work and I am very proud of everyone in the business for what we achieved in such a short space of time – all of this was undertaken whilst simultaneously managing day to day ongoing workloads to keep the business moving forward. And of course, I’m grateful to our old friends at Webtrends Inc. for their fantastic support during the transition too.
Since then we have continued the transformation of Webtrends Optimize apace.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
As a product offering, Webtrends Optimize is unrecognisable 18 months in, as we’re constantly evolving our technology to support our rapidly growing SaaS business. Not just aesthetically, or in terms of UX, but the core product offering continues to grow as well. Our technology is not only increasingly stronger as we deliver more and more internally, but also by having strong partnerships and integrations in place to truly give you a best in class stack.
As our Product Director, Sandeep Shah, says “Our focus on UX and Visual Hierarchy makes the important bits to look at, intuitively clear. Our focus on clear and beautiful charting makes understanding your data and sharing it with others something you want to do. Things just make sense, and we continue to deploy tweaks by the dozen based on feedback from our team, clients and partners in the community.”
We’re now hosted in Azure, and so are not only well-managed, but also have easier abilities to scale and the opportunity to explore some of the advanced Machine Learning concepts that are now available – many of these have already started to make their way into our product as we make the platform more intuitive.
When you combine all of the above, along with new features like a Product/Content Recommendations Engine, Social Proof messaging, and a continual stream of great things still to come, it’s clear that we’re on a path to supersede every other testing platform on the market. Our 19 years of experience in the CRO space will ensure it!
Much like the taking the reins off our product development, I gave the Services team an immediate licence to increase their throughput and deliver even more. More tests, more data & analysis, more hands-on management, more focus on learning and furthering of the skillset within the team. This in turn has allowed us to deliver even smarter strategic hypotheses to our clients, unlock new capabilities within the team, and deliver growth like never before. Feedback is fantastic and just goes to show we’re doing the right things, consistently.
Roll on 2020
All in all, 18 months down the line, we are in fantastic shape, and exactly where I wanted to be heading into 2020. A vastly improved CRO product; an extremely efficient and modern infrastructure; and an even better services and support model than ever before.
I am immensely proud of the team that we have built – my management team, the best of Webtrends who moved across with me, and the impressive ‘new blood’ who have hit the ground running (and already feel like they have been with us forever). This is easily the most passionate and dedicated team I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.
I am more excited about the future of Webtrends Optimize than I have ever been working on this fantastic product. Everything is in place. To quote Henry Ford: “if everyone is moving forward together then success takes care of itself!”
If you want to understand how Webtrends Optimize can increase the ROI of your website, feel free to give us a call, or drop us a message here and we can have a chat or show you a no obligation demo.
