Hello from Overe Engineering!
With 2024 in full swing now, we thought we'll check in from an Engineering perspective to recap where we were, where we are and where we're headed....
2023 was an amazingly exciting year on the Overe engineering front.
Back in February last year - we decided to spec out and deliver the Overe Freemium service - while continuing to validate our product strategy via (very) high-fidelity interactive mock-ups. While small, we have a very strong team with awesome folks and experience across many domains - from security, to operations, to development, Ux as well as Product Management - really, all ingredients to make it work and be successful.
Starting from scratch however is always a challenge. Setting out on the right foundations is paramount, especially for a startup: Source control, collaboration tools (Jira, Confluence etc.), development tools, frameworks and languages (.Net Core, Python, React), CI/CD (Git), integration environments, production environments, multi-region-deployments, Terraform, architecture, development methodologies, security, compliance - the list is long.
It was equally a challenge and a real joy for us to set up all these things from scratch and it was amazing to see how much there was to do and get to the point which so often is taken for granted.
A big callout to the Overe team for the patience and making it happen and to all the Ops/Engineering/Scrum teams out there which enable developers to work as frictionless as possible. With above in place, initial requirements scoped, it was off to the races!
3 months in, one additional team-member and a couple of new microservices later - v0.4 - the first alpha version of our platform - was released in June last year.
It was focused on offering free security posture assessment for individual businesses who wanted to know if they had the right SaaS security controls in place to help mitigate attacks.
Alongside with our website presence, things got real now - we were finally in the position to let our customers have a go!
It didn't take long for our first customer to sign up and the feedback was nothing short of fantastic and has been highly encouraging to all of us. The team quickly followed up with several bugfix and 2 major releases of the platform, with Notifications and identity breach detection support added in 0.5 (September) and MSP management support added in 0.6 (November).
The reception of the new features were great and we have now 50+ customers using our free or our 1.0 Beta version of the platform.
With that growth in mind, there were many other aspects which were just as important to take care of right from the beginning.
Data protection/legislation, compliance, security, reliability, internal reporting and visibility, integrations - to name a few - were treated as first class requirements and we were keen on building these into the Overe platform from the get-go.
And while doing all of that , the team was already chipping away on our 1.0 features on several fronts. A lot to juggle at the same time, but it's been tremendous fun! And here we are, almost a year later - what a journey!
We have had such fantastic support from so many folks and a massive thanks goes out to friends, family, ex-colleagues and our early adopters/customers.
We wouldn't have made it this far without you.
Last but not least - a big shout out to the Overe engineering team for being the rockstars that you are! We have high ambitions and grand plans and push ahead full-steam for our 1.0 release- 2024 will be nothing short of spectacular.
Stay tuned as we are readying the delivery of our next set of Overe features such as Anomaly detection, Alerts, Advanced visualizations and Policy Control. Onwards and upwards
Markus Hartwig
CTO - Overe