Based in Auckland, New Zealand, but now with offices in Australia, and the UK, Unleashed started life 11 years ago as a SaaS company specialising in inventory management software. There are currently around 120 staff, the majority of whom are in Auckland, with about 20 in Bristol in the UK and four in Melbourne. The company aims to give its customers total control of their products and comprehensive and immediate clarity regarding their suppliers, production, inventory and customers.
Chris Liu has been Head of Engineering, leading the Engineering competencies at the company, for the last three years, and he joined Unleashed as Development Team Lead a further three years before that. It’s been something of a linear progression for Liu, who studied computer science at the University of Auckland, then had various developer roles and technical leadership roles before landing in his current position.
When he joined Unleashed in 2014, he says, it was much smaller, with fewer developers and testers, with operations hosted in Auckland by a local service provider.
As the company began to grow, however, its horizons expanded and its market became a global one. But to develop the product with a growing customer base at the global scale, there were issues that needed resolution.
Being in a private cloud meant limited scalability as a local provider was unable to support the additional demands of a global expansion.
After evaluating options, Unleashed made the decision to migrate to AWS and formed an early partnership with AC3 to assist. At the beginning, AWS was being used as infrastructure rather than a platform. That came later. Shifting the company mindset away from being 100 percent Microsoft opened the possibilities. “There were so many things we could explore,” says Liu. “Especially around the managed services.”
Though its primary focus was unchanged. “Inventory is still the core of Unleashed,” says Liu, “but now the product covers more than just customers managing their stock.” Now its offering includes giving customers greater insight into their own businesses, helping them to understand how to improve their ability to make, manage and move more products.
The major step was turning Unleashed from a system of record to one of results, he explains. “A BI (business intelligence) module became a must-have component of what Unleashed needed to offer.”
The mission
The goal was to be able to turn customers’ transactional data into meaningful information. This entailed exploring new territory for the company – designing and building a pipeline to extract data from customers’ databases and transforming and loading this into a database that is reporting and analytics friendly.
“The entire BI solution needed to perform at a high level to satisfy our existing customers, and also scale to accommodate our future growth,” says Liu. It was also very important to Liu that genuine customer needs were at the heart of any development. “What we want to achieve is something that’s valuable to people, not just solving a computer science problem,” he says. “When problems occur in our customers’ business space, how are we going to use the latest technology to solve them in a better way?”
Migrating to AWS was only the beginning of this journey. “While we had explored so many awesome options offered by AWS to build ETL (extract, transform, load) and the reporting database, we needed an expert to help us design the solution with the best options to suit our needs.”
Enter AC3, which evaluated Unleashed’s requirements, designed the solution architecture and implemented a working prototype.
Importantly, the AC3 team also worked to upskill the Unleashed team, enabling them to fully understand the new technologies and be in a position to troubleshoot any issues encountered during the implementation.
A true partnership
Unleashed’s working relationship with AC3 has been some years in the making and is now built on a solid foundation of trust and mutual respect. “We see our partnership with AC3 as a valuable investment,” says Liu. “It provides a trustworthy opinion and working prototypes to kick-start our product initiative. Its expertise in AWS also helped us to build and mature our AWS cloud competencies,” he says.
Cloud in the time of Covid
Just like organisations and individuals the world over, Unleashed has felt the impacts of 2020’s global pandemic. But that has not all been negative, says Liu. “To provide immediate value and assist our customers over COVID-19, rather than charging for the BI module on release, we provided three months of free access to the premium BI Vision functionality.”
Liu also points to Unleashed’s BI offering as a strong factor in the company’s COVID performance, as it helps customers at a time when the insights it provides are more important than ever. “They want a deeper understanding of their business,” he says. “Many of them – the manufacturers, the distributors, the wholesalers – they’re not experts in technology. So offering them BI has definitely given them some very valuable insights. They can look at their top selling products and their top customers, identify the risks and opportunities, and also optimise their operations too.”
On a more personal level, Liu says COVID-19 has demonstrated just how strong the team culture is at Unleashed. “It’s a unique time,” he says. “I truly feel that Unleashed actually glues people together. We’re not just saying we are one family, we actually do treat each other as family members. And it’s not just me saying that. We did a staff survey and this popped up there as well. It’s a real life example of teamwork.
“Being part of a leadership team and navigating through a pandemic situation, I think, is a good experience. It is a difficult and challenging time, but we all learned and reflected from it.”
It’s taught him resiliency and that he has the capability to handle difficult situations, he says, while concluding ruefully, “But I do want this COVID to end…”