Global
The close of 2019 marks the anniversary of Ness’s 20th year in business, and I’ve been involved in the last 10 of them. As we start a new decade, it’s time to reflect on what made us who we are and why clients trust us to help drive growth in their businesses.
The company formed in 1999 in Israel to crack the nascent market for digital products. During those first 10 years, we honed our product engineering expertise, co-creating software with many independent software vendors (ISVs) that were – and still are – at the forefront of selling innovative software solutions in their markets. We became adept at helping clients define and execute revenue-enhancing software product roadmaps, co-develop intellectual property, and devise engineering automation practices to accelerate time to market. We practiced distributed Agile development with a DevOps philosophy – long before that mindset even had a name. We established teams of talented engineers in innovation hubs across the United States, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, Israel, and India, so we could offer clients the best combination of design, technology, and process expertise to advance the solutions for their end customers. These product engineering disciplines remain core to our skillset and ingrained in our DNA. Now headquartered in the U.S., Ness has continued to expand its global footprint with clients growing along with us year after year.
In our second decade, we saw that our software engineering skills were crucial for enabling new business models within the much wider universe of enterprises. Marc Andreessen wrote in a now well-known article for The Wall Street Journal in 2011 that “companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.” By then, Ness was already helping enterprises that agreed, and was one of the first in our industry to acquire a digital design agency (Imano) in 2012. We understood that exceptional experience design was imperative for developing exceptional software, particularly as enterprises wanted better options for engaging their customers and empowering their employees. At the same time, we debuted our Data & Analytics practice, helping Ness clients benefit from the insights we uncovered in their data and our recommendations on how to monetize them. We adopted the Ness Connected delivery framework across the business to harmonize design, data, and platform engineering into a cohesive, iterative process as we help enterprises envision, build, and evolve digital solutions that productively disrupt their markets. Ness-built software is frequently the enabler of that disruption.
Twenty years in, we are expert practitioners in Service Design, Cloud, and Big Data strategy and application. We’re also advancing new business models with innovative uses of the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, ServiceNow and Salesforce eco-systems to exploit emerging synergies with Ness’s customer-centric approach to digital solutions. Real-life examples include where Ness is helping global manufacturers add revenue streams by commercializing the value of their machine data with services that complement the products they sell. We’re enabling media and entertainment companies to transform the viewer experience with new personalization and digital media distribution models. We’re helping transport and logistics companies move people and goods faster using real-time 2D and 3D navigation, asset tracking, and insights from telematics data. And, we’re enabling healthcare organizations to improve diagnostics with Artificial Intelligence solutions that improve patient outcomes.
We are co-innovating digital propositions that are redefining a client’s whole company, and we are able to challenge their thinking because we have the experience of addressing common business themes across many domains. We also partner with innovative companies that already have their big idea and need help getting it to market fast, while scaling to satisfy demand.
Undoubtedly, the next 10 years will be much different than the last. We are now designing and building for constant change in the way we architect technology solutions. We will continue to invest to advance our expertise, but our ability to marshal and nurture the exceptional talent and creativity of our team members – towards co-innovating disruptive business models that generate valuable client outcomes – has remained a constant strength throughout the 20 years. These ongoing efforts inspire me to come to work every day.
We expect 2020 to be a year to remember with a number of exciting developments for our customers and for Ness. Our team will start to share some of these new ideas, perspectives, and predictions in January, kicking off our new decade with the latest evidence of how our forward-thinking imagination continues to drive significant change and progress.
