An Eventful 2018:
the OTRS Year-in-Review

Next week will be Christmas, and we ask ourselves again, “Where has the time gone?” From here on, time will pass quickly as we try to tackle last-minute year-end details, finalizing contracts and setting the agenda for next year. But despite these stressful activities, I would like to take the chance to reflect on the passing year. At OTRS, we have experienced many highlights that will shape our company and be decisive for our growth in the new year.

New Product Strategy

In April of this year, we announced our new product strategy: A topic that had occupied us for a long time and had been much discussed has now become a reality. Our focus since the announcement has been on our fully-managed cloud solution, which is called “OTRS.” The other changes this entails can be read about here. Even though there were isolated critical voices from competitors, the change in strategy was positively received by our community, our customers and partners, as well as our employees. And even though it has been in practice for such a short time, we can already say, “YES, it was the right decision.”

Opening of a New Subsidiary

Shortly after announcing the new strategy, another highlight followed in June: the sixth international OTRS location in the Hungarian capital of Budapest was founded. Up until then, there had been cooperation with a local sales partner which had proven to be so promising that the establishment of our own office was a logical step. The new team of three Hungarian employees is already making great progress. I was able to see this for myself in November when we hosted a customer event in Budapest: The event was very well attended and the customers were so interested in OTRS that one customer signed her contract during the event.

15 Years of OTRS

In August, our 100-person-strong team boarded the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and toasted the company’s 15th anniversary. Employees came from Brazil, Singapore, China, USA, Hungary and Mexico to celebrate the anniversary together. With exciting presentations, conversations about OTRS and discussions about our employee culture, we sailed across the Main River into the night.

OTRS 7 – A new Release

Another highlight was our new release, OTRS 7, which we launched at the end of November after much preparatory work and hours of testing. It is completely in line with modern digital transformation concepts and includes an innovative customer interface among many other new automation features.

Networking Events

We have also enjoyed the conversations and networking opportunities that we’ve had at large and small events throughout the world. Be it PINK 18 in Orlando, Fusion in St. Louis, IOT in Singapore, SITS in London, it-sa in Nuremberg, FUTURECOM in Brazil or SDI 18 in Mexico, each strengthened our position as an international service management solution provider.

Thank you

Between all the events, releases and figures, one thing that must not be forgotten: our employees. I continue to believe that employees are our most important asset. If we are successful as a company, then we have achieved the goal of taking care of our people and we have benefited from the contribution our employees are able to make through their personal development.

I would, therefore, like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to all our employees who came together to make 2018 a special year. Of course, my thanks also goes out to all users and customers who have remained loyal to us and have helped us develop OTRS 7 with such a high degree of quality.

This year at Christmas, we elected to embrace the ideas of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): instead of spending money on elaborate Christmas cards, we have invited around 35 children from the Arche in Grießheim, children who come from socially disadvantaged families, to a joint skating party in January. This was the Christmas wish of the children, and we are already curious to see what we can learn from them.

With this in mind, we wish you a happy and reflective holiday with your loved ones and a good start to the new year 2019.