2022 has been a year where we came out of the pandemic (for the most part) and life returned to normalcy (new normal). We are thankful for our learnings this year. We are thankful for the challenges. It provided a great opportunity for us as we continue to strive to become better as a team and company.
Towards the end of 2021, we announced that we are taking a fully distributed approach with people working from home or anywhere. For that reason, we decided not to re-open our offices. Thanks to our team and culture, we were able to adapt well to the changing times of distributed work.
We also announced that we will be taking the second Friday of the month off, providing a long weekend every month. The initiative of Second Friday’s Off has been great. One thing we noticed is that we tend to be more productive during the week where we have the second Friday off every month. We will continue this initiative in 2023 as well.
It is a privilege to work with people who speak different languages, and those who come from different cultures and backgrounds. We are able to truly blend and work well together. We are also glad that we met two times in 2022 for DCKAP Homecoming. (One in March 2022 and the other in November 2022). Our team flew in from different locations to Chennai, and we are thankful we were able to do this. In 2023, we plan to explore locations outside of Chennai to host our DCKAP Homecoming.
This year, one of the initiatives we are proud of is the DCKAP Palli பள்ளி (School) Initiative. As we decided that we are not re-opening our offices, we were not sure what we were going to do with our office spaces. At that point, we were not quite sure and thought we would figure out something along the way. Then, early-mid this year, we decided to start DCKAP பள்ளி (School).
In this program, we recruit smart students who finished 12th grade or their diploma but are not able to pursue a college education due to a lack of resources. We decided to offer them coursework which can be better than what is taught in college while paying them a stipend every month so they don’t have to work odd jobs. We started our first batch in September of this year, and we are excited! We plan to double down in 2023.
What was planned as a Homecoming for our domestic team in the States, ended up being an experiment with DCKAP’s Round Up event – A smaller event where we invited our customers, prospects & distributors. We are glad that our domestic team was able to join us. We held the event in Austin, Texas in May 2022.
Later in the year, in October 2022, we hosted a larger format event, the DCKAP Summit in Los Angeles, California. This was our fifth annual gathering, and an event that caters specifically to distributors, offering them an opportunity to gain important insights on how to overcome challenges, find opportunities, and learn how to best navigate the future. A big thanks to each and every one of you who participated and made it to the event and to those who watched the content online.
re:Brand: We completed our re:Brand exercise for our products and kept it simple. – We simplify commerce for Distributors with DCKAP’s Integrator, PIM and so on. We are also glad that this re:Brand has been received well by our customers and they have provided us great feedback.
DCKAP’s Integrator is our primary offering. Our ERP integration platform integrates distributors ERP with ecommerce, CRM, Accounting or integrates any system to the distributor’s ERP System. We are proud that our DCKAP Integrator is now used by over 100 distributors.
DCKAP’s Test Management Platform, QA Touch, continues to grow and is used by customers spread over 100+ countries. We also celebrated Global Testers Day (September 9 2022) as a month-long event with great community participation. We also started receiving product contributions for test automation from the community.
Also, while at our 2022 DCKAP Summit in Los Angeles, California, we launched a new product offering Zircly, which is an employee experience platform. Culture plays a key role in bridging gaps across the organization. Employee experience is more important than ever before as the pandemic has created new norms in working with In Person, Hybrid or Fully remote teams. How do we ensure each of the employees, no matter where they work from, have a great experience? Zircly solves this problem and bridges the gap.
As a company, we also provide services for non DCKAP products (Magento/Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, and more). This offering has contributed significantly to our growth. To ensure we continue to serve our customers well, we plan to separate this offering from DCKAP and launch a new services brand which will offer services for non-DCKAP products.
We want to continue to focus on building the DCKAP Community and an Ecosystem which will benefit the distribution community by simplifying commerce for distributors. We will continue to run new experiments in 2023 and focus on scaling the business. We are excited about 2023 and beyond.
A Big “Thank You” to our customers, distributors, our team, partner community, and each and everyone of you. Wishing you and your families a happy and prosperous 2023. Happy New Year!
