What’s in a Name? Welcome Calytera!
By Erin Mulligan Nelson
We’re thrilled to announce that today we officially rebranded our company and are now named Calytera. Our new name represents the company we have become over the last few years and the advanced technology that we build for governments, and better reflects our mission to deliver the world’s best govtech software, enabling our customers to create safe, prosperous, thriving, smart communities.
“Good enough” isn’t good enough.
There’s a popular phrase “it’s good enough for government work,” implying that government processes, employees or stakeholders deserve “good enough” — good enough software, good enough outcomes, good enough partnerships. We think this notion couldn’t be further from the truth. What we’ve found in our decades of working with governments is that our customers are some of the hardest-working and most committed there are, providing critical needs to tax-paying citizens so that their jurisdictions can function and flourish. They don’t deserve good; they deserve better than good. They — and their citizens — deserve great.
Inspiration from 500 BC
The Ancient Greeks are credited with creating the cradle of democracy, fostering a new way of city and community organization, governmental structure and processes and citizen engagement. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe.
Quite simply, the word Kalytera means “better” in Greek.
We chose to spell Calytera with a “C” to illustrate the importance of communities, citizens, connections and collaboration, which we believe are foundations for prosperous growth.
What is better?
In today’s ever-connected world, citizens expect interactions with government to be just as easy and seamless as those they have with retail, service, finance, and social organizations. That means they are comparing their experiences working with governments to those they have with companies like Amazon and Google. Government agencies will need the best technology and partners to keep managing and attracting growth, improving efficiency and transparency, and building their communities to be ready for the future with new technologies like Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence.
Calytera enables customers to provide better government services to citizens and communities and helps move governments into the future. Better government is smart government. Better government is efficient government. Better government is highly connected and collaborative. Better government should be able to turn to the best technology — which is precisely what Calytera creates for our customers.
Better starts on the inside
“Better” drives the way we think about everything. Are we delivering better? Are we innovating better? Are we providing value better?
Last week, we held our AmandaCon User Conference in Oakville, Ontario. While there, I reflected that my first AmandaCon, in 2017, was also my first day at the company. It’s inspiring to think that in those ensuing two years, we have made improvements in almost every part of the company. Just a few highlights:
· We have expanded our partner network so that more governments can take advantage of the Amanda platform to more efficiently provide citizen services.
· We adopted agile working methodologies to increase the velocity of new releases with improved quality. In fact, in the last 12 months, we have provided customers 28 releases containing more than 150 enhancements to the Amanda platform.
· We introduced an industry-leading Amanda Freedom of Information Solution to help governments manage and respond to an ever-increasing number of FOI inquiries while meeting compliance requirements and protecting the security and privacy of sensitive information.
Looking forward
I hope you are as pleased with the new company brand as we are — it has involved our entire team and we know it represents the company we have become and inspires us as we continue to grow.
Because in truth, we’re just getting started. We know that citizen demands will continue to increase, that growth and development challenges in communities everywhere will continue to rise, that government agencies will continue to advance their technologies to drive efficiency and safety, that the accelerating availability of data, machine learning and IoT will bring smart community strategies into the mainstream.
That’s all for the better.
Thank you for your support!
P.S. If you want to stay in the know about what’s happening at Calytera, in addition to checking out our new website, calytera.com — you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — I hope you will take the chance to follow our new channels and stay in touch.
