2022: The Year in Which Innovation and Workplace Wellness Were Rewarded

The year that is ending has left Plain Concepts with several awards and recognitions while allowing the return of face-to-face meetings and combining our constant search for innovation with that of a diverse and inclusive company.

In this post, we tell you about some milestones that have marked these twelve months at Plain Concepts, and that makes us proud of our team.

One of the 100 Best Companies to Work for in Spain

The newspaper El Mundo has highlighted Plain Concepts’ 35-hour, flexible and remote work week pilot test and the fact that we provide financial compensation for telecommuting expenses or equipment for telecommuting.

If you would like to work with us and take advantage of other benefits we offer to our employees (health and dental insurance, discounts on sports activities…), you can check our job offers on LinkedIn.

Successful Introduction of the 35-hour Working Day

At the end of 2021, we launched the 35-hour working week pilot project. As we have said before, these are flexible and remote. Moreover, without cutting salaries.

The project has been developed throughout 2022, and we can say that it has been very well received by the nearly 500 employees that the company has, as well as by our customers.

Tech Holders: Our Innovation Podcast

Plain Concepts colleagues and external specialists (managers and employees of Google, Santander Universities, AENOR, or Prosegur, to give a few examples) have spoken into the microphones of the Tech Holders podcast to talk about the impact of new technologies on companies.

You can listen to Tech Holders on platforms such as Spotify or iVoox or watch it on our YouTube channel.

Spot, from León to the Netherlands

Spot, the quadruped robot from Boston Dynamics, has demonstrated this year its versatility in projects that have served to preserve our heritage or improve business tasks.

In León (Spain), Spot was used to film the city’s century-old Gothic cathedral. Converted into a virtual reproduction that can be visited down to the smallest corner (including ceilings and stained glass windows), it will serve to check its current state if it is ever necessary to rebuild a part of it and for anyone to get to know this monument without having to travel to the city. The image is based on a cloud of millions of high-resolution points.

Spot also visited the offices of the energy company Alliander in the Netherlands. It did so through workshops so that employees could learn how this industrial robot could help them. In its case, Spot can be useful for hazardous work in high-voltage substations.

These workshops were used to learn from more theoretical aspects of the robot to more practical ones: software modules, sensors, and cameras… After each class, the students handled Spot.

Our Talent, Recognized at the Partner of the Year Awards 2022

At Plain Concepts, we are very happy about the recognition we have received in the Partner of the Year 2022 by Microsoft.

We were finalists in the overall Artificial Intelligence Partner of the Year category. In addition, at the Microsoft Inspire 2022 Spain, we received awards in the categories of Security, Social Impact, and Partner Pledge Diversity and Inclusion. Thanks to these awards, we have been the most awarded partner this year.

The projects for which we received these awards were, among others:

• Artificial Intelligence: a sports broadcast production tool with cognitive services, Custom Vision and Computer Vision, which allows recognition and labeling of different types of content; a consumer behavior profiling platform with Azure IoT, Deep Learning, and Cognitive Services, which works by analyzing emotions in retail establishments; and software to improve the recruitment process in companies, through machine learning, bots and also Cognitive Services.
• Security: technical security guides and their scripts for the deployment of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure at the National Cryptologic Center (CCN-CERT), a body attached to the National Intelligence Center (CNI).
• Diversity and Inclusion: we had joined the Microsoft Partner Pledge, which promotes diversity, sustainability, or responsible and ethical AI, among other activities. In addition, we have also promoted the activities of our Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which we will talk about later.
• Social Impact: we have highlighted Madrid te acompaña, the app that brings together volunteers and senior citizens, who are also the protagonists of Todoporvenir, a CSR project with Leasba Computing to bring them and young people closer to technologies that only large companies have access to.

These awards have received 3900 entries from more than 100 countries. This level of participation gives even more importance to the awards obtained; thank you very much!

Joining forces with technology partners

Microsoft has been one of the partners we have allied with during 2022, but there have been others who have recognized our work and with whom we have established synergies:

• Google. We have received the Google Advanced Partner, a certification demonstrating our expertise to companies that want to use the services of the Mountain View company to grow digitally.
• Amazon Web Services. We achieved Partner Select Status, an essential step for our multi-cloud strategy.
• GitHub. We are the only Spanish partner recognized as a GitHub Services Partner. This title is added to the 11 GitHub certifications we already have. In addition, in recent months, we have given 15 training sessions to customers, and we have migrated to GitHub the website of Sunweb Group, a leading European company in the tourism sector that was previously using different platforms and repositories.
• Intel. In the Service Partner category, we obtained Intel Gold Partner Status. Our collaboration with Intel is more profound: the company collaborated in the sponsorship of dotNET 2022 and the first Plain Concepts Live!, our new networking events; in addition, the Research team has started working with them in the areas of Computer Vision and metaverse.

Our Diversity and Inclusion Committee Continues to Conduct Initiatives

At the end of 2021, we told you about creating this committee to develop diverse teams and promote internal training and events that promote female technical talent.

Well, this 2022, we are very happy because we have carried out initiatives such as:

• Equality training for employees.
• Lovelace scholarships, with which we have encouraged the hiring of female technicians. Several female colleagues started as interns in areas such as web development, data, and artificial intelligence, and today they enjoy a permanent contracts.
• Meetups with Out in Tech, a non-profit organization that brings together LGBTIQ+ workers in the technology sector and whose members create websites for activists in countries where the group is most at risk.

We also continued to work with the Business Network for Diversity and Inclusion (REDI). Its deputy director, María Ortuño, gave training on why it is important to work on diversity in the workplace.

Commitment To Sustainability

In addition to diversity, in 2022, we have also worked to become more sustainable. To this end, we have calculated the carbon footprint we generate: as we have implemented full-time telecommuting, we reduce many carbon dioxide emissions from commuting. And if we have to commute to the office, we promote the use of public transport. We also encourage our commitment to sustainability among our customers, as you can see in the projects and publications we have about it.

Precisely in our offices, we encourage recycling by distributing garbage cans for each type of waste. In addition, we have replaced plastic with more environmentally friendly materials, which we also use in our events.

And speaking of events…

On-site Events Are Back

Meetups such as Out in Tech were on-site. Along with them, we had two of our big events:

• DotNET 2022. On June 28th, we celebrated this massive event in Madrid where specialists and fans of .Net technologies, Front, AI, Extended Reality, and collaboration tools met. You can watch all the talks on our YouTube channel.

• Plain Camp. Nearly 300 company employees met in León for a weekend. Between meals and activities in the city and in nature, they met again after two years of the pandemic, and the new colleagues got to know each other in a relaxed atmosphere.

Our New CEO: Quique Martínez Alén

Quique has been, until now, the Director of Operations at Plain Concepts. With ten years of company experience, his objectives are to continue with international expansion: we already have a presence in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Romania. The intention is to continue in these countries and, in the long term, to add clients in Asia-Pacific. In the newspaper Expansión, Quique himself talked about these and other plans.

These news items and more are also part of our corporate report. And 2023 promises to be a year of many other novelties. If you want to be part of one of the 100 best companies in Spain to work for, learn about our on-site and online events, or work with disruptive technologies, we look forward to seeing you!