A letter to our customers

At the end of each year we have time to look back and reflect on the year before and think about the year ahead. 2010 was once again a challenging year for Telerik as well as our customers. The economy continues to be stubborn in many parts of the world. Microsoft released new versions of .NET and Visual Studio that we had to be ready for. Silverlight 4 was released, then pronounced dead, then alive again, then Silverlight 5 previews were shown. Even Mother Nature in April gave us trouble; the eruption of Mt. Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland stranded over a dozen of our employees, including our CEO, on three continents. (Don’t feel too bad, some of them were stranded in Las Vegas!)

Looking back, 2010 was also a year of growth for Telerik. Our team grew very rapidly with lots of great new hires-we are already outgrowing our new office building in Sofia. We added two divisions (Testing and Team Productivity) and two offices (Austin, Texas and Winnipeg, Canada.) We added many new products including: Windows 7 Phone Toolkit, JustCode, JustMock, TeamPulse, and had major upgrades of some existing products such as our Web Testing Framework, OpenAccess’ LINQ implementation, and the SiteFinity 4.0 release candidate. In partnership with Microsoft, at the Silverlight Firestarter a few weeks ago, Scott Guthrie announced our release of a great reference application for Silverlight: f!acedeck. (We are proud of the work we did on f!acedeck, so give it a try!) 

We continue to push the envelope and drive innovation in our existing products. Our products won several awards in 2010, including the industry standard JOLT awards, Best of TechEd 2010 and “Best” by the Visual Studio Magazine Awards. Telerik was also selected as a Red Herring Global 100 company, the “Best Company to work for in Bulgaria”, and was a finalist in the prestigious European Business Awards.

In 2010, Telerik reached more customers at events this year. Our team traveled to all four corners of the globe to visit customers. For example we had speakers and booths at five TechEds in the USA, Europe, Australia, India, and Brazil. We sponsored major events in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, visiting customers in some familiar places (such as Las Vegas) and some new ones (Brazil and Hong Kong). Besides the big events, we also sponsored and spoke at several CodeCamps, user groups, and other events around the world, including DevReach in our own backyard. Our evangelists and marketing teams would even travel to Antarctica to visit customers!

Looking forward to 2011, we hope that the world economy and the general business climate improve. We have some great releases of our products planned, such as SiteFinity 4.0 in January and our Q1 2011 release in March. We have a brand new product that is currently top secret, but you’ll get a preview of it soon. We also plan to open some more offices worldwide as well as attend and sponsor even more events. We are hitting the ground running in 2011, we are putting on an event in Pune, India in January.

We hope to see you in person in 2011 since we do this all for you. I want to close by thanking all of you, our customers, for your dedication and support. Happy New Year!

Stephen Forte, CSO

Sofia, Bulgaria