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Several of our customers and partners have asked us in recent days about our plans to ensure continuity of support and service levels for our products, particularly as they deploy Collabora Online to enable enhanced home working for their teams during this crisis.
From its inception, Collabora Productivity has been a decentralized company, hiring the best engineers to work from their homes. That means that all of our staff are highly experienced in collaborating via the internet, across timezones and via multiple channels.
This brings extraordinary benefits from a business continuity perspective with no two of our support and development staff working from the same location, being distributed across twenty countries, with the knowledge and skills for essential tasks in support and development being duplicated among various people.
Some of our staff live with other members of their family, and may find themselves unexpectedly sharing their homes with numbers of ‘fun-sized’ people during the working day. We ask our customers to bear with the occasional brief intrusion during live conversations – say of the enthusiastic presentation of a new picture to a parent – at least for the duration of widespread lockdowns. Offsetting this, other staff have found they have more time to focus on their work. Overall, there appears not to have been a significant effect on productivity to date.
To further increase robustness, we have gone further by expanding staff training and increasing overlapping in key areas of support and release engineering. In addition we share administrative function and offices with our parent Collabora. Collabora has also moved its office based staff to home working.
From a business perspective, we operate a conservatively geared business with no debt and significant cash reserves to safeguard us through business shocks such as this. This has allowed us to continue to hire people and execute our plans for further growth.
It also seems as though our widely appreciated secure, collaborative document editing products are seeing a significant increase in both interest and sales. Collabora Online in conjunction with a partner’s storage solution provides an ideal way for users to quickly deploy a secure, on-premise solution for collaborative editing with third parties of documents from the Enterprise to Education giving our customers the confidence that they can keeping control of their documents and their privacy.
In conclusion, Collabora Productivity is uniquely positioned to continue to offer support, services, sales and product development for our existing and new customers without interruption during this difficult time.
Thank you to all our customers for choosing us at this time as we continue our mission to driving the success of Open Source.
With best wishes to all for a speedy recovery in every respect.
