The challenge for any company is to ensure that all employees have a clear picture of, and are true believers in, the company’s vision and purpose. When you match this with the best talent you have a recipe for business success. However, success that translates into strong financial performance comes when you focus on how to get the best out of this talent. I am pleased to be able to share with you Altium’s progress in this regard.
Some time ago, Altium set its benchmark at ‘world-class’ for everything it does: from the people we employ to the way that we work. Altium already had a world-standard for recruitment and you can see the results of this in the deep pool of talent across our organisation. This talent has been the major ingredient for consistently delivering innovative technology and the number of industry-firsts that Altium has achieved over the years.
We know that our people are our most important asset and this year we have invested strongly in our People & Performance team. A major focus has been the development of strategies to attract, motivate, develop and retain the world’s best and brightest people to ensure we continue to harness the passion and innovation of our team that sets us apart from others. Ensuring everyone is equipped with a solid understanding of how they can contribute, both individually and as part of the team, and how they are measured and rewarded, is key to our business success. We have already seen some pleasing results from the initiatives undertaken, and this continues to be a major priority for us in the year ahead.
In addition to our people development, in order to prepare and respond to our increased sales and expected future business growth, we have also worked very hard over the year to ensure we provide an environment where our people can deliver their best.
We have remodelled our sales organisation under a clear strategic selling model. The early success we are seeing is not only due to the model we are pursuing, and the leading technology we are selling, but in the quality and experience of the sales teams we have been developing. In March 2006, we introduced Salesforce.com, a world-leading, web-based customer relationship management (CRM) system, to ensure our people have the tools to improve the quality of our relationships with our customers, and our responsiveness to them. This system, renamed internally to AltiumForce, was further developed to provide greater global resources such as campaign management, procurement, reporting and project management capabilities, providing a powerful business infrastructure to ensure we operate as one, unified global organisation. We also introduced a wide range of new sales tools, such as downloadable videos, live and interactive web demonstrations and web-based training, so that our sales teams can fully exploit the power of the latest web technology.
This year we developed a new multilingual website which currently supports five languages. We also extended multi-language support across our software video demonstrations and enhanced the local-language support features within our software products. These initiatives help to ensure a consistent message and experience for our globally-diverse customer base. Utilizing the latest in web technologies and the electronic media continues to be a key focus for us. With it we can achieve greater reach and scalability, and deliver a wider range of support services across all regions of the world.
Altium Designer, our ground-breaking lead product, challenges current electronics design paradigms and opens up new possibilities for our customers to be more innovative and get their products to market faster. We have found the best way to prove our technology’s empowering capabilities and ease-of-use to customers is simply to demonstrate it. We have largely done this through our commitment to a ‘Seeing is Believing’ principle and it has proven to be a very powerful approach. We have successfully taken our technology to the marketplace by having our skilled software developers and application engineers directly engage with customers through active community forums, seminars, tradeshows, interactive web demonstrations and on-site visits.
The combination of the power of seeing first-hand our technology-at-work and the passionate commitment of our people in helping to make the electronics design process easier, makes our vision very real to our customers. When they buy our products we want them to know that we are 100% dedicated to helping them be successful in meeting their electronics design needs.
We’d also like to make this real for you, our shareholders, by sharing a few of our customers’ stories and how they are using our technology to create the electronics products of today, and tomorrow.
President & Chief Operating Officer
