Unikie has the first full year of operation behind it. The company has secured its position at the top of the domestic software industry, all while the number of employees has grown to close to hundred software development industry experts. The aim is to continue the growth, and obtain future growth by expanding abroad. The goal is that in the future 70% of the company’s turnover will be generated outside of Finland.
Productized solutions are the only way in which a relatively small Finnish company can achieve trade outside of Finland. The aim of Unikie is to find solution concepts, that will open doors outside the Finnish borders. The Unikie Lidar and AI Vision software, is one example of an area of expertise for which there is a great demand, but few experts. We are constantly seeking similar areas of business where Finnish know-how will come into its own.
Lidar expertise in international demand
At the moment, we are focussing on two areas at Unikie: companies within the car industry in need of Lidar-expertise, as well as other industrial customers with similar needs. The second area includes customers with a lack of embedded graphics expertise for optimizing the graphics performance of any device.
Unikie’s lidar-expertise culminates in point cloud processing, analyzing and interpretation. Unikie sells a software solution that is suitable for a variety of Lidar devices. With the help of Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), for example people or vehicles moving around a car, can be identified more quickly and more accurately than for example by a video camera. Lidar works just like a radar, but instead of radar waves it uses laser beams.
In addition to the above, we will continue to search for a lot of full-stack know-how, front-end know-how and embedded know-how on the technology side. Within the field of special skills, the most important areas of expertise will include machine learning, big data analytics and security know-how.
The customer will benefit from a transparent and honest operation
For a company like Unikie, proactivity is the essential key. One has to understand the customer’s area of business and its challenges. In addition, one must see the customer’s challenges in order to develop solutions that customers want to invest in.
To begin with, Unikie must be able to recruit the best talent. Secondly, we need to work on providing our clients with ready-made solutions or pre-solutions, as well as answers to their problems and improving their competitiveness. A lot of background work is required in order understand the customers’ market domain and their customers, as well as agile technical development with the aim of finding solutions that can be offered to an increasing number of customers and across different market segments. We currently have ongoing Pointcloud projects for customers within different industrial fields, car, agriculture and forestry. At first glance, one would not imagine that these customers have anything in common. The best innovations are created by the combined expertise and solutions from a completely different line of business across to another, for a completely new type of use.
In addition to solid knowledge, our strengths include a transparent and honest operation. With us, the customer can always rely on getting exactly what has been agreed upon, on time and with high quality. Thus, we offer ready-made solutions, expertise, flexibility, cost-effectiveness and speed. This is what customers are looking for.
Creating an image with focus on competence
As development cycles become faster and faster, products and features must be developed at an increasingly rapid pace. No one has enough time to learn new things in this race. In order to respond to the development of the competitors, expertise is often sought from outside the company. This is an opportunity for Unikie.
A good example of this is a big project from one of our customers. They had a demand for top-notch graphics professionals, and a three-person team from us joined their own product development. Their own team in the field is more than a hundred times larger in size, and has a long history of R&D for their products. However, within the first two weeks, the three persons from our company already found two critical bugs in the graphics drivers of their existing products. They also repaired those instantly, thus extensively improving the reliability, performance, customer experience, as well as the power consumption of the end products. We were given a considerable amount of praise for this. This kind of know-how and reputation is exactly what we are looking for, and the type of added value we want to produce for our customers.
In this way, we create our reputation within our special areas of expertise – the Unikie brand – and we will be contacted if / when a customer wishes to finish a job promptly and to a high standard.
Seppo Kolari, Chairman of the Board, founder
