Check Out Our CEO’s Retrospective Perspective!
Team HotWax is feeling thankful for a productive 2014. It was a great year for us, primarily because we focused on two areas: 1. we took good care of our team members, and 2. our team members took good care of our customers. That’s the magic equation for internal and external success, and once again added up to great results.
Top 10 Milestones for 2014
1. Bug crush events
We organized a series of monthly bug crush events during 2014, and they went a long way toward improving Apache OFBiz, our common resource. Dozens of bugs were crushed, the OFBiz community was strengthened, and our internal participants flexed their philanthropy muscles while supporting their own learning and growth.
2. Other OFBiz contributions
We contributed hundreds of hours of work to the OFBiz project during 2014, and some of the best deliverables included a Lucene enterprise search integration, a Groovy-based domain specific language for OFBiz, and some performance testing / benchmarking that benefits the whole community of OFBiz users and developers. The list goes on and on and on, and I’m honored to be a part of this team and excited to continue our open source commitment.
3. New OFBiz committers
Next I want to congratulate Pranay Pandey and Mridul Pathak, our team’s two newest OFBiz committers. These guys have both been leading OFBiz projects here at HotWax for a long time now, and they are highly deserving of their new statuses. Mridul and Pranay know OFBiz as well as just about anyone, and far better than most! I’m thrilled for them and happy for the company to have them on our staff. Way to go guys!
4. HotWax U surpassed the 100 session mark
Our HotWax University program is one of the aspects of our company that I like the most. We use HotWax U to train new recruits and to provide ongoing professional development to our team, and in 2014 we hit and surpassed the 100 session mark. Keep Learning!
5. Magento connector
We built a Magento connector for our commerce platform, offering a great option for enhanced commerce operations running behind a Magento storefront. This is intended for smaller businesses (or anyone running a Magento storefront) who need a smooth path to more integrated and powerful back office capabilities around order management, warehouse, CRM, and so on. Look for good things from this connector in 2015.
6. BI reporting and analytics tool
We leveraged native capabilities in OFBiz combined with additional internal development to create a BI and analytics tool that runs in our commerce platform. Like Daniel Keys Moran said, “You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.”
7. Moqui Projects app
During 2014 we worked with the Moqui open source project to build our first Moqui app. The app provides task management capabilities similar to Jira, and it is quick, smooth, and easy. We have transitioned from Jira to our new projects app and are using it for for all internal projects. We are now migrating client accounts to our internal app as well. I see a great future for this application, and a lot more Moqui apps in our future.
8. Recruitment app
2014 was a year of reinvesting and growing the company, and anyone who has done any hiring knows that it is more art than science. To support our recruitment efforts, we built a software application that empowers us to administer proficiency tests to large groups of candidates onsite at various locations. This added a lot of efficiency to the process, letting us then focus our energy on a smaller and more qualified set of individuals, which helped both our recruiters and their candidates.
9. New facility
We needed somewhere to base all of these fantastic new hires, so we expanded our Indore, M.P. operation into a new, much larger building in the heart of the business / convention district. We are a block away from the city’s main convention center and across the street from Xerox.
10. Salt Lake City HQ
Last but not least, our headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah has experienced its share of excitement this year as well. Located on Main Street across from the Federal Courthouse, it’s great to be in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City. We appreciate the vibrant business and tech communities here in Salt Lake. We recently hired a talented Communications Director, and our newest Web Developer started this week. Onward and upward!
Stay tuned for exciting info about what’s ahead for HotWax in 2015! You are officially invited to participate in our upcoming 2015 OFBiz bug crush events. Contact HotWax today for more information.
