Delivering a new, alternative way of approaching electronics design through our unified solution provides an interesting scale of opportunity we can ultimately help every electronics designer wanting to create an intelligent device. However, it is not without its challenges. Asking a customers organization to approach the design process differently essentially asking them to retool their entire electronics engineering team requires us to know how to sell the benefits at all levels of an organization. The investment we have placed in building our Sales & Support organization to be skilled in strategic solution selling has already added thousands of new customers, including some very well-known brands that have standardized on our solution. However, we have a long way to go in further developing our organization and sales channels to really deliver on the potential for our business.

Thus recruitment and the development of our organization, particularly of our management team, continues to be the number one focus for us not only in our Sales & Support organization but in all areas of our business. As we will not compromise on our standards or on the smarts required to operate in this industry, and lead the change in the way electronics design can be approached, we have found it challenging to reliably predict the time and investment it takes to recruit.

Last year we were able to recruit 103 new employees into a number of core areas. We grew our senior management team as an essential element to help lead and develop our people and strategies, as well as increasing our hardware and software development resources to help develop our products, from which we derive our ability to provide a truly unified solution to our customers.

We have also introduced significant digital communication resources to allow us to communicate and interact with our customers in new ways. Major milestones, such as our online web based TRAININGcenter that now delivers over 100 videos of on-demand training modules, has made the decision to deploy Altium Designer throughout an organization an even easier one to make.

We continue to build our finance team to provide greater guidance, management and accountability in our organization, as well as develop our core business information systems. This last year we also saw the successful migration of our financial data into a new financial system which tightly integrates with our customer relationship system. This helps us reach our goal of ensuring that every employee, irrespective of where they are working (home, office, whilst travelling) can have real-time visibility to their customers accounts and contact histories. We continue to look to off-the-shelf solutions and readily available technology to help provide immediate information systems gains within our organization.

Our People & Performance team continues to focus on providing ways to ensure success in recruiting and retaining world class people through many initiatives, including our People Services team which is 100% dedicated to making life working at Altium easy, providing complimentary food and services to every employee.

Ensuring we have the right resources on the right opportunities requires strong discipline. However, it is our pursuit of excellence in knowing what we need to deliver and when we need to deliver it, that truly separates us from our competitors.

We are strongly committed to being the best in the world at harnessing contemporary electronics and software technologies to help engineers easily produce innovative intelligent devices.

We know that we can help our customers concentrate on delivering real innovation, allowing them to focus on creating functionality and product differentiation, rather then being weighed down by the traditional disparate design flow and pre-determined execution platforms of yesterdays electronics design paradigm.

We believe that the pursuit of this, and our continuous delivery of product innovation in our software and hardware development, will translate into industry leadership and commercial success.

Of course, none of this is possible without the collective dedication and tireless efforts that the Altium team provides each day to ensure our success. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the great people here at Altium and relay to all of them, that it is an absolute inspiration to work alongside such genius and passion.

Emma Lo Russo,
President & Chief Operating Office