General

VSHN year in review 2020

4. Feb 2021

2020 – what a year. The Corona pandemic has overtaken every area of life, including ours, of course. For most of the year, VSHNeers saw each other in Zoom calls instead of meeting in person. Our office would probably be unrecognizable to many of us, some VSHNeers who started new at VSHN in 2020 only know our office from photos (see also: Hiring and Onboarding New Employees During Corona and if you still need home office tips, see here, but don’t forget to have fun while doing it :). ).

But it is what it is, we just have to make the best of the situation. And VSHN made the best of it: despite the difficult and unplannable situation, we reacted in the best way possible. The transition to home office went smoothly, as we were already practiced in working remotely; the only thing we still had to “digitize” was the landline. Of course, we in the IT world are also privileged – not every industry can switch to home office “just like that”, and we should always be aware and gratious of that.

Now we have been in this situation for almost a year and of course the first “signs of wear and tear” such as “Zoom fatigue” are appearing, but what the VSHNeers miss most is socializing. Simply doing something together, be it a joint lunch or beers after work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the “Zoom beerings” were fun, but today no one wants to hang out in yet another Zoom in the evening. 🙂

Despite all this, VSHN as a company has also developed positively in 2020 and we have now grown to over 40 VSHNeers. We are very happy about this, and also a little bit proud. Each and every VSHNeer deserves a big thank you at this point. A big thank you also goes to our partners and customers, thank you for staying loyal to us despite the difficult situation.

In 2020, we initiated important topics such as organizational development through the introduction of Sociocracy 3.0 practices, rebuilt the teams and divided them into solutions and product teams (related: people are not resources), launched VSHN Corporate Governance 2020 and 2021, which has led to the new management and executive board. We also produced an extremely large amount of content. Our start into the video / YouTube business should be mentioned here. 🙂 Or our first podcast.

Project Syn, our open source managed service framework, has been further developed (see intro video) and will continue to play a key role in our product portfolio in 2021.

In addition to the ISO 27001 certification, we are now also audited according to ISAE 3402 Type 1 (very recently also according to Type 2, more information on this soon on vshn.ch).

Transparency and openness are among our cornerstones, which is why we have further expanded our employee handbook and almost everything is open to the public.

We have organized a lot of events or participated as speakers, e.g. the WeAreDevelopers Live Week with Aarno & Adrian as speakers, participated in the Crossplane Community Day where Tobias held a lightning talk, went to the Red Hat forums in Austria and Germany, participated in the first Swiss Rancher Rodeo and organized the CNC meetups, APPUiO beerups, initiated the NGINX Meetup group Zurich and held a joint webinar with GitLab on Improving collaboration & software delivery using GitLab CI and Kubernetes.

We were awarded the “swiss hosting” quality label in 2020, published the DevOps in Switzerland Report 2020 (the DevOps Study 2021 is still running if you still want to participate), many new partnerships such as with SUSE Rancher, GitLab, Crossplane or our further extended Red Hat partnership. APPUiO has also evolved extremely, if you haven’t seen the new APPUiO explainer video, check it out.

We hope you enjoyed our year in review and we’d love to hear from you about how you felt about 2020.

To a great 2021!

Your VSHNeers

Past years in review

year in review 2019

year in review 2018

year in review 2017

Markus Speth

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

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