iENSO’s employer vision for 2021
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We caught up with iENSO’s President, Sebastien Dignard, to discuss how iENSO has overcome the challenges of 2020 and the company’s vision for 2021.
Q: Have your customers’ needs changed as a result of the pandemic?
A: As the pandemic hit, so did an important market shift, putting iENSO in a very unique position of servicing accelerated innovation in our industry.
Many of our customers took this time to do some inward looking and articulating their core value and future innovation path. Ultimately, the pandemic put a huge emphasis on the concept of digital innovation and connectivity. This, in turn, accelerated everything we were doing.
Before March 2020, we had a very clear path of what the next six, twelve, and twenty-four months were going to look like. When things started to change, our plans were accelerated, forcing us to condense our projects all while taking on new clients.
The pandemic did not change the intensity of the innovation we were already bringing to the market. But now, more companies wanted to accelerate or take on new ways to offer value to their customers, to inspire people, and to grow. The pandemic accentuated the need to future-proof equipment such as precision farming, and to improve people’s daily lives with smart technology embedded into our everyday devices. This is where our embedded vision systems combined with Edge AI came into play.
For iENSO, this was a net positive. Driving Edge AI and embedded vision for connected devices, the market shifts of the past year helped refine and solidify our vision for the future.
Q: How will iENSO’s culture shift in 2021?
A: Due to the rising market demands, we needed to hire more people and grow our team. We continue to invest even more into innovation along with our core customers and market segments.
In our markets, people are starting to realize that vision is really a segment of data and there’s no bigger source of data than vision in the world today. So, our customers are asking us to accelerate our innovation schedule. In 2021, we are definitely putting the pedal to the metal.
We’re going to be continuously increasing the size of our team. We will also be nurturing existing partnerships and developing new ones, working with industry-leading firms to add more to our product: security, data processing, and cloud integration.
All of that means that we as a company and the people who believe in us – our technology partners and our core customers – are investing into the culture of creation.
Q: What lessons did iENSO learn from the pandemic that can be implemented moving forward?
A: A lot more companies, who have historically worked directly with Asian based providers, are now looking for a trusted advisor locally to make sure that there is localized approached to technology innovation, integration, and support.
iENSO has learned that, so far, what has made us successful is our entrepreneurial spirit, our ingenuity, and our alignment with customers. These strengths need to be continuously leveraged to be a successful platform-based embedded solutions provider. We do this by empowering individual engineers and small teams working within an agile development framework to meet objectives by cross-pollinating with other groups.
The pandemic exposed that it is very difficult to build foolproof processes – issues will come up and you need people who can think on their feet. This has always been our strength and we will be looking to formalize it in our organizational structure. Moving forward, we will be focusing on creating proactive dynamic work groups that will work on solving fairly challenging technology and business issues.
The year 2020 also taught us that we must create an environment where, whether an employee is working remotely or in the office, they always feel connected and supported. We are looking forward to regrouping in a physical environment, but for now we’ve successfully pivoted into an organization that can work from basically anywhere in the world. We’ve always had a foot in Asia and a foot in North America, so remote working has never been foreign to us. Now we’ve applied it to the whole team.
Q: What are your goals for the new year? What can we expect to see from iENSO in 2021?
A: This is an important year for us! 2021 is the year that iENSO really grows into a dominant role in embedded vision, Edge AI, and cloud connectivity. We are creating and delivering a platform that will allow companies in multiple different markets to easily implement these vision innovations in their IoT products.
We also want to make sure that, as we grow and hire more employees, we are still able to create a team environment where people feel included even if they are working remotely. Making sure our employees understand where we’re going, how we’re going to get there and how they’re contributing individually is very important to us.
At iENSO, you’ll be challenged by new problems every single day. You’ll be inspired by a high performing team and, most of all, you’ll be learning something new every time you walk into the office.
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