How are Empires created and big corporations done ? Can it succeed ?
Espotel was a medium sized company in Finland, about 300+ people, in about 7 locations around Finland, and an office in Poland Wroclaw of roughly 50 people. Espotel has a good reputation in Electronics and Software design fields, we've done projects for most of the major brand owners in Finland having something to do with embedded products. There's a huge list of products that we've been proudly a part of in making them to happen.
A year ago Espotel was owned by an investment company, the founders had already moved out of the company's daily life, and it was known that there will one day come a change in the company's structure. Still, the news that Espotel was acquired by Etteplan came as a surprise. And, not immediately as a nice surprise - at least to me. You know, we've been competitors for a long time, so the immediate reaction to being bought by the competitor is not necessarily a feeling of a major victory...
So, the "enemy" broke through the lines a year ago and started making it's intentions known. It's one thing to make a conquest, and another to make something permanently good out of it. Etteplan has grown by acquisitions for a long time, so this was not a new operation for them. Turned out, that Etteplan wasn't really so much buying a competitor than making a big strategic move into making itself a substantially more relevant player in the field of Embedded Systems design and Internet of Things field. Espotel, especially combined with Soikea that came into Etteplan with the same door opening, was actually much stronger in the software design and project deliveries than the bigger competitor and current owner (for Embedded products).
In the end that meant that the result of this integrations wasn't so much Espotel integrating into Etteplan than Etteplan's Embedded Design parts integrating into Espotel, forming a new Service Area within Etteplan. One that starts looking way stronger now than Espotel or Etteplan combined previously (for the embedded systems parts). Why's that ? Something has actually gone right and well this time, even if not everything... So, what has actually happened this last year in big picture ? Let's see :
First of all, a new Service Area within Etteplan was formed around previous Espotel, and it's management. Soikea and the related parts from Etteplan's Vantaa and Hyvinkää organizations were combined into it, giving the whole operation both more volume and muscle, but also two new stronger competence areas, namely Test Automation design and Mobile/Backend Software development. So, Etteplan Embedded Systems and IoT Service Area now has a full stack of services for any IoT project, were normally there is embedded device developed, some way to arrange connectivity to Cloud and Backend and Mobile SW, including Test Automation. It is a strong asset also, that Etteplan can offer much more mechanics designers for projects when needed as well.
On a more personal level, it's been really nice to get collegues from Etteplan, and being able to exapand my personal connections within Etteplan. Towards Customers it's really good to be able to provide a wider range of services. There's little that our 2600 designers cannot do.
Of course there are downsides also. A big company has it's practices (hour reporting and invoicing system : I'm talking bout You!), there are differencies in corporate cultures, benefits and whatknot. And that won't change or converge over night. But, and this is a big but : In daily life the focus is still in making the project deliveries succeed, and for this the new integrated Etteplan Empire is much stronger than Espotel, Soikea or Etteplan were previously on their own. Nothing has really made any of us perform worse than before.
So : drummers, beat the rhytm, we have this area secured and can start marching to new conquests !
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