Eight years ago, we have incorporated Nubelus with the main purpose to serve a single customer, and I was the only employee. This was a few years after I left daenet (the company I co-founded back in 1999), and after I was (for the first time in my life) working for someone else for a few years. We didn’t even have time to properly think about the name, Nubelus (Latin: clouds) was quickly chosen because we thought it would be obvious for everyone (hint: it wasn’t 🙂).
Soon after that, in 2017, we have decided to move the European Collaboration Summit to Germany, and we needed a new home for that conference, and Nubelus became that home. Those were the times when Nubelus got the second employee – Margit, who took over finances and attendee management, because there was no way that people who were involved in the conference could do that in their after-work hours and on weekends: it was just too much work for our pure community approach.
Nubelus continued working for the customers in Microsoft 365 space, but also closely working with some top product companies (to name only SysKit and skybow). We have landed on the suppliers’ lists of all major cloud platforms (Microsoft, AWS, Google), and all DAX-listed companies. The team was growing, that initial customer was still with us, and everything seemed to be just fine.
And then the pandemic massively hit us: while we have never considered the community-initiated European Collaboration Summit to be a profit-center, we have soon realized that it is very much a cost center, especially in the times when there can be no conference. Luckily, we were able to cover those costs from other income sources, but it became apparent for us that things do need to change.
In 2020, SW Teams Consulting GmbH (“Teams Consulting”) has been incorporated with the sole focus on delivering state of art Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform and WEBCON solutions, and it has taken over Nubelus’ consulting business. Soon after that, we have incorporated ecs.events OÜ, as an Estonian limited liability company with the headquarters in Tallinn, which took over the European Collaboration Summit and European Cloud Summit from Nubelus.
Besides those two areas of business, during the pandemic years we have started working on two separate software products: KORTO, a modern, AI-powered Records Management System (together with our partners from the Swiss financial software company INSA), and run.events, a cloud-based enterprise-grade platform for managing conferences and other events.
During this time, the team was constantly growing, and besides headquarters in Bingen am Rhein (Germany), the new offices in Tallinn (Estonia) and Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) were open. Twenty-one colleagues who are working with us today are coming from six different countries, making our work quite an enjoyable experience.
KORTO was also incorporated in 2021 as a separate Estonian limited liability company (a joint venture with INSA Group), and so Nubelus remained “only” the home of run.events product development. So, it was only fair to acknowledge that fact.
As of Friday, 22 July 2022, the new company name is officially run.events GmbH, and the headquarters have been moved to our new office space in Bingen am Rhein. With this change, we said farewell to the name Nubelus (it has served us good!), and the company is completely focused on bringing run.events platform to the market, which is envisioned for the Q4 this year. We are already using it for the European Cloud Summit, and some of our dear friends are using it for their conferences, but we still need to iron some rough edges before we hit the market.
And that first customer from eight years ago? They are still happily with us (with Teams Consulting), and we are just in process of delivering a state-of-art project for them, that – I am proud to say – not many other companies could do.
I personally will be devoting the most of my time to both products (where my passion really is) and to Teams Consulting customers. The other colleagues have already taken more prominent roles within both conferences (no worries, I am by no means leaving ECS, I am just making a step back 🙂). Here is to the future!