General Internal

VSHN Company Update 2022

23. Aug 2022

It’s about time to give all of you a short update on what we at VSHN are working on and where we want to lay our focus in the coming months.

Our open employee handbook grew quite a lot since we started it and we received very positive feedback. There are even companies and friends of VSHN using parts of it for themselves and also for people interested in joining VSHN, it’s a great help before your first interview and to get some insights on how we work as an organization.

At that point, we want to thank every VSHNeer for their contribution to our handbook.

VSHN Canada

After our initial VSHN goes to Canada video and quite a delay due to the pandemic, we are happy to announce that VSHN is finally present in Vancouver, Canada.

The idea behind this is a “follow the sun strategy” to make use of different timezones in order to reduce night shifts for our VSHNeers here in Switzerland.

Matthias Indermühle will lead VSHN Canada and together with Tobias Nehrlich and Sandro Kaspar, 3 experienced VSHNeers will be located in Vancouver in the next months to start operations and hiring there.

VSHN Canada became a reality – check out our Blog Post and our handbook section about it.

VSHN Management and Board

The VSHN board has appointed Marco Fretz as additional General Manager. The VSHN management now consists of 3 General Managers (“Geschäftsführer”), namely Marco Fretz (COO), Tobias Brunner (CTO) and Markus Speth (CEO), as well as Matthias Indermühle as Member of the Management of VSHN AG in Switzerland and CEO of VSHN Canada. Formerly, Tobias and Markus shared the CEO role as Co-CEOs, but Tobias wants to focus again more on technical aspects while Markus will focus on the exterior, if you want to know more details how the VSHN management is organized, visit this handbook page. We believe that with this setup, we have the force and experience needed to take VSHN to the next level.

The VSHN board has also appointed an additional board member with Till Bay, CEO of Comerge, an experienced entrepreneur and long time customer of VSHN to strengthen our outside view. The VSHN board now consists of Till Bay, Aarno Aukia, Patrick Mathers and Bruce Mathers as Chairman of the Board.

Kubernetes First Strategy and APPUiO Cloud

Our Kubernetes First Strategy is well on the way and lots of initiatives have been kickstarted recently. One of the already visible products is APPUiO Cloud.

APPUiO Cloud is our Namespace-as-a-Service offering based on Red Hat OpenShift 4, check out our behind the scenes blog post.

APPUiO Cloud has been possible thanks to the incredible experience of the VSHN team and to their investment in tooling.

In particular, Project Syn enabled the automation of many different tasks in APPUiO Cloud. And of course it is all 100% Open Source, as is the APPUiO Cloud Commodore Component.

We also improved our product docs and want to get even better in documenting for our customers and partners.

Outlook: VSHN AppOps and AppFlow

After agreeing on our Key Drivers and Key Deliverables, we figured out that we as VSHN want to focus even more on Cloud Native Software and want to become the trusted Service Provider for companies that need to run software and the best partner for Software Developers and System Engineers to help them in their daily tasks.

You can see a first outlook in our Product Portfolio, namely VSHN AppFlow and VSHN AppOps will be the new cornerstone of VSHN together with VSHN AppCat and the existing and already well-know APPUiO product suite.

All of this implies a certain change in our organization and team structure, which will follow in the coming months. With this move, we want to focus even more on running our customers’ applications and organize VSHN’s different business units to deliver value end-to-end most effectively. In doing so, our main goal will be to have as few dependencies as possible between our teams and to find the best way to further develop the required expertise in all areas of VSHN, both for our customers and for the continuous personal development of our VSHNeers.

VSHNtower offices in Zurich

In terms of home office vs. office, we have a strong new addition to actually go to the office. It’s called VSHNtower and it’s our newest office space in Neugasse 6 on the top floor.

It used to be Kuoni’s (the travel company) executive board room and we now use it as common room, for events, meetups or to just have a beautiful view over our home town, Zurich.

Check out yourself and join us for a coffee or beer there. 🙂

Markus Speth

Markus is VSHN's CEO and one of the General Managers.

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