In 2019 Eziline went to Europe. The CEO and senior team took part in the Pakistan Tech Summit in Oslo in September and used the trip to visit Telenor's headquarters, Epicenter in Stockholm, the Pakistan embassy in Sweden, tech companies in Estonia and clients in Berlin, then a joint collaboration in Paris in October and a day in Doha on the way home. Every stop has a short post on this site.
Why Europe
The enquiries from Gitex and the UK company registration had turned into real European clients, and the trip was about meeting them in person and finding partners. The Paris collaboration and the Berlin client visits set up the sales presence that later became the London and Paris offices listed on our contact page.
At home: Startup Grind, LIFT and the universities
The year was also busy locally. Eziline attended the P@SHA ICT Awards in September, Startup Grind Pakistan's dinner gala and the LIFT Pakistan event in November, and a Startup Grind chapter event at Malakand University in December. UET Taxila invited the company to its project exhibition in July, Foundation University's open house and job fair came in April, and COMSATS senior faculty and final-year students visited the office in December. The CEO's interview with Rehan Allahwala and a meeting with Azad Chaiwala are from this year too.
The technology of 2019
Serverless went mainstream: functions that run on demand, scale to zero and need no server to patch. We used it first for the spiky parts of client systems, image processing, notifications, scheduled reports, and kept the core applications on containers. Flutter 1.0 (December 2018) made it our default for new cross-platform apps during 2019.
- Team tours to Swat and Kalam in April and the northern areas in July.
- Eleven years in business, celebrated in January.
- Serverless functions and Flutter as the cross-platform default.
Looking ahead
The 2020 calendar was full before the year started: the 12th anniversary in January, Developers Week and Startup Grind Global in California in February with visits to IBM and Google, and more university events through the spring. The product roadmap centred on taking the ERP, POS and LMS to true multi-tenant SaaS so that the European partners could sell them without a server install, and on extending the Flutter apps to cover every product with a mobile need. The European contacts from the Oslo trip were to be developed into formal partnerships. What nobody planned for, of course, was that by March the office would be closed and the entire company would be working from home. That the year still delivered its roadmap is the subject of the next post.
