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Today is our last working day before the Snobal ‘office’ closes for 2020 and our team take a well deserved break to recharge and refresh over the holiday season. 2020. What a year it has been for us all. Before we head off we wanted to take this opportunity to pause, reflect and share a little about how Snobal has travelled this year and what our plans are for the year ahead.
2020
As we all know COVID19 hit in earnest for many of us in March and over the coming months we saw key themes emerge on the technology front from our conversations with customers and partners spanning the US, Europe, Australia and Singapore. We’ve shared this in depth in an earlier post but elements were:
Innovation using digital technologies became critical in a remote working world and XR moved from ‘nice to’ to a ‘need to’ to keep work moving forward. Only today an article appeared in McKinsey & Co outlining how ‘the virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place’. This shift it still playing out and the repercussions will impact how technogies such as XR are leveraged.
Our themes for 2020
Going into 2020 Snobal’s key themes were growth and expansion but like many companies when COVID19 hit in March we paused and re-focussed our themes to preparing for the now through resilence and business continuity planning and preparing for the future.
Preparing for the now
Our focus on ‘preparing for the now’ looked to how best to make Snobal resilent to weather the COVID19 storm.
In terms of protecting our team, partners and customers we made the call for all team members across our offices in Melbourne and Singapore to go remote in one day in mid March. Since that time the whole team has been working remotely and plan to continue doing so for 2021.
Preparing for the now also involved keeping even closer to our team, customers and partners and listening to where they were at in their professional – and personal – resilence journeys during this time.
Preparing for the future
As we quickly started to notice a surge of interest from companies in applying XR to business in particular to workplace learning and assessment, customer engagement and education we sought to look at how best we could help our customers respond to pain pts they were experiencing.
Key pain pts were either how to best scale XR solutions across a remote working workforce and how to continue business as usual such as essential workplace training (technical and soft skills not to mention education) when classroom instruction was out or at least restricted and workers were scattered in geographically dispersed locations.
Solving the problem of scale in XR for business
Our platform, Snobal Cloud was built from the ground to be enterprise friendly and we knew it solved the problem for organisations of how to best scale, manage and analyse XR solutions remotely. As such we accelerated ‘decoupling’ of our platform, Snobal Cloud from our XR solutions enabling Snobal Cloud to be made available to organisations and third party VR/AR enterprise content creators. Reach out if you’d like to know more.
And to better enable and support the XR for business ecosystem we signed a partnership with the worlds second largest enterprise focussed VR hardware manufacturer, Pico Interactive.
Helping solve organisations mission critical problems and knowledge gaps using XR
We always knew XR could be harnessed for organisations mission critical work. 2020 only illustrated this. For example:
In collaboration with our partner, registered training organisation, JB Hunter Technology we launched an innovative Virtual CPR course providing a direct solution to organisations needing workers and contractors to keep up to date with their CPR training despite working remotely. The training combines virtual learning, followed by a practical assessment session in the virtual environment and can be undertaken from a workers or contractors home or remote location. It’s currently been used by some of Australia’s largest telcommunication provider.
In collaboration with JB Hunter Technology we also brought to market virtual training and assessment modules developed for the telecommunications and safety related industry.
In September, Snobal and JB Hunter Technology took out the LearnX Live! Virtual Summit & Awards Show Platinium Award for “Best Virtual Reality (VR) Hard Skills Training Project” and a Gold Award for “Best use of Technology in Learning” for our work on development of innovative virtual reality training.
- https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Ync3jcLeK7k?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0
Our themes for 2021
Our key themes for 2021 will be sustainable growth across our business and platform development, along with staying close to our customers and partners and doing all this an eye to agility and adapatability.
In terms of team growth in Q1 2021 alone we will be increasing the team by nearly 30% with new team members onboarding in January.
As we said team Snobal are downing tools today to take a well earned break. We will be back on board mid Jan. In the meantime thank you for your continued support and encouragement this year. From our team to yours we wish you and yours a safe, happy and healthy festive season. Until 2021.
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