Dreamonkey: 2024 results and 2025 company goals

Dreamonkey’s 2024 has been a year of outward opening and restart. In this article, we look back at the milestones of the past year and the prospects for 2025.

2023 had been a year of change and investment (you can read our review on 2023 results and 2024 company objectives). After two years of growth, turnover had remained stable. Fortunately, 2024 brings with it signs that our company is ready to get going, removing the ‘weights’ that held back the previous year. So here is our fifth company report outlining the past year’s highlights and goals for the future. Get comfy and pour yourself a drink, the 2024 report is the most substantial written to date: there is so much to tell!

New clients and projects

In 2024 we acquired 14 new customers, more than double the numbers in 2023. The average size of these customers’ projects has obviously decreased and, as will be seen at the end of the article, has not corresponded to a steep rise in turnover. As far as overseas companies are concerned, the collaboration with our historical customers continues. One exception: the project with an American company linked to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with whom we have collaborated for years, came to an end. Unfortunately and to our and the customer’s regret.

In order to contribute to the commercial expansion plan structured in 2023, we undertook two initiatives. First of all, we introduced a multi-firm agent in the company to get in contact with new Italian companies. Last but not least, we finally freed our shareholder and CTO Paolo Caleffi from the server room to push him into the Reggio Emilia business environment. Passing on some of his operational duties to other team members allowed him to participate in many initiatives, gathering contacts and building a new network of people. Our network grew, reaching companies in Mantua, Turin, Vicenza and Arco di Trento.

Among the 2024 projects, we would like to mention two in particular, unrelated to big business but relevant to Reggio Emilia’s young people community. First of all, we put online the new Mercatino del Libro portal in Reggio Emilia (also active in Modena), a second-hand school book marketplace. In addition, we took care of the new Kraken comics shop brand identity with a logo, gadgets, and some graphic application for the physical shop.

Events

It was an events-full year and we participated in many initiatives (more than twenty-two!), so we wanted to keep track of them. Instead of presenting a long list, we have mentioned them according to the topics they refer to. You will find most of them scattered throughout the report, but let’s summarize a few here directly.

As already mentioned, Paolo has been very busy. For example, he took part in all of Unindustria’s aperitivi digitali (digital happy hours), sometimes followed by our developer Alessandro Vandelli. And we mean it, ALL of them!

He attended the Convegno Nazionale Giovani Imprenditori di Unindustria (Unindustria Young Entrepreneurs National Convention), held in Rapallo from 30 May to 1 June.

He organised several Unindustria ClubD meetings. Among others, the one on cases of Artificial Intelligence applied to Industry (13th June) and the one on HPC (high performance computing) and Quantum computing (7th November) stood out in particular.

Together with our art director and UX/UI designer Niccolò Menozzi, he attended Moku Srl’s meetings for their Branch format, a software house’s dedicated community. Branch promotes and coordinates short thematic online meetings. A speaker presents a topic and then discusses it with the participants. On 24 October, Niccolò was the third meeting speaker and talked about Dreamonkey time management.

Partnerships, development and UX/UI

We attended general-public-oriented events and others more technical-oriented. The latter allowed us to keep updated on industry news. In 2024 in particular, these events have also been opportunities to get closer to the Italian developers’ community, opening a dialogue with the Reggio Emilia and Modena tech scene.

On 7 June, our art director and UX/UI designer Niccolò Menozzi and Alessandro went to Faenza to attend the UXDay organised by Grusp. In 2022 we had attended the conference remotely, but this time we preferred to experience it live.

In September, In September, we contributed in our own modest way to the DevFest Modena, an amazing event dedicated to developers, held at the Laboratorio Aperto di Modena, on 12 October. Like every DevFest, it was sponsored by Google, while Davide Muzzarelli of WebForce Srl organised this Modena appointment. We helped set up the event website following some of Google’s official guidelines. Obviously, we did not miss the appointment on the day of the event.

Our shareholder Kevin Borghi attended the Modena FullStack events on 29 May and 30 July. Davide founded the FullStack community for all developers who wish to meet live to discuss technology-related topics and promote networking. We wanted to extend the reach of this beautiful initiative and, at the end of July, we got together with Davide to found the Reggio Emilia FullStack community. On 29 October, we launched the cycle of events with the first evening at the Catomes Tôt social club in Reggio. Together with Davide, we also designed the twin communities’ new logo.

In December, Paolo and Niccolò were guests of the podcast Nessun Segnale, run by the DotEnv Srl team in Ferrara. Nessun Segnale deals with topics, case histories, and news related to the world of technology. We talked about the relationship between UX/UI designers and developers and the episode is scheduled to be published in February this year (don’t miss it!).

Last but not least, 2024 collaborations include a very important piece of news for our company’s growth. We came into contact with Datasmart Italia Srl of Reggio Emilia, a management control services company, and we have laid the foundations for a collaboration. This is a business partnership that will hopefully consolidate over the next few years in order to achieve two objectives: increasing turnover and enhancing DataSmart Italia’s software products. We would also like to strengthen Koioty’s sales network, but more about that in the next section.

Koioty, Industry 5.0 and ESG

The commercial engagement with Koioty is moving forward. Since January, we have been approaching a consulting partner willing to work together to bring its know-how to companies, integrating Koioty and other control and management tools. As a result of this collaboration, we acquired a new customer at the end of the year, and in 2025 we will undoubtedly cooperate to create further opportunities to sell our software. A second customer came through the cooperation with DataSmart Italy. A technical supplier was also added to the team. This is a company from Lombardy with whom we would like to establish a solid and lasting relationship of trust for the supply of hardware devices for industrial machines data collection.

In 2024, many companies became interested in Industry 5.0 (formally Transition 5.0) because of the new Italian laws on this subject. This interest has also fuelled curiosity in the ESG principles (Environment, Social, Governance). We networked in order to create new opportunities, getting in touch with consultants and other companies active on the industrial efficiency services scene.
On 16 April, Paolo attended the conference Sostenibilità e metriche ESG lungo la Value Chain (Sustainability and ESG metrics along the Value Chain) organised by RTZ Advisory, at the Unindustria headquarters in Reggio Emilia. On 12 June, our director Federico Schianchi and Niccolò attended a second RTZ conference, in collaboration with BPER: Le PMI verso il successo sostenibile – La centralità delle metriche ESG e gli standard europei (ESRS) (SMEs towards sustainable success - The centrality of ESG metrics and European standards), at the BPER Forum in Modena. From 2 to 5 October, Paolo took part in a master course on ESG, held in Cambridge, with Unindustria Gruppo Giovani Imprenditori (Young Entrepreneurs Group).

In the meantime, at the beginning of May, we published the Koioty website. At the same time, after the publication of the decree on industrial innovation in the Italian Gazzetta Ufficiale (Official Gazette), we made a small contribution for the Italian readers on our blog, on how to obtain Industry 5.0 bonuses and, as a corollary, explaining what are ESG certifications. The knowledge gained during the meetings and the expertise of the consultants who helped us were useful to write these articles.

On the business side, alongside the conferences, we also attended trade fairs. We went to A&T - Automation & Testing, a major trade fair dedicated to the manufacturing and industrial automation sector. The event includes several appointments. Paolo, followed by Kevin, went to Turin, on 14 February, while he attended the Vicenza event alone, on 6 November. Paolo also attended two other events. On 5 June, at SOLIDS, the trade fair dedicated to the field of granular materials, powders and bulk solids technologies, in Parma. On 4 September, at Farete, dedicated to manufacturing, processing, subcontracting and services for the production system, in Bologna.

There was also technical news. The code quality and UI have been improved. The mobile version was extended and made more user-friendly. Charts were migrated from ApexCharts to Apache ECharts and new features were implemented. The integration of a new type of Dashboard widget and a more complex company asset tree structure has begun. This was followed by many other backend structure related improvements.

We developed a Python package for low-level interconnection for the main machine protocols (Modbus/TCP, OPC UA, MQTT, S7, FINS). We tested machine data reading, in real-time and in polling, and put them into production.

Thanks to these connectors and collectors, Koioty is a ‘star-shaped’ interconnection hub, able to act as a gateway between machines, databases and third-party software.

Finally, we made contact with Artificial Intelligence experts and experimented internally to identify possible Koioty integrations and for other software we work on.

Quasar Sponsorship and open source

This is the fifth collaboration year with the Quasar open source framework team. While in past years we have tried to support the project on several levels (branding, marketing, etc.), our 2024 effort has focused on code-side open source contributions.

In addition to the important activities of triaging, debugging and community support, this year we focused on updating and stabilising the Quasar codebase. Among the many contributions, most of them by our developer Yusuf Kandemir, our energies were mainly focused on:

• migration of the package manager used in the Quasar monorepo, from yarn to pnpm;
• the creation of new TypeScript templates, where previously only the use of JavaScript was possible;
• significantly improve TypeScript support, especially with regard to flexibility and type accuracy;
• improve Quasar’s automated test system, thus making it even more stable;
• the study and application of optimisation in accessibility;
• the development of an integration with PlayWright, a new automated testing framework, which we will complete in early 2025.

After his experience in Cambridge, Paolo flew to Bonn to join the VueConf DE held from 8 to 9 October. We couldn’t miss it: our friend Luke Diebold (Quasar scene senior developer and content creator) arrived from Australia to give a talk. On this occasion, for the first time, some of the Quasar Core Team members met live. Paolo had the chance to shake hands with people we have been working with for years: first of all Luke, followed by creator Razvan Stoenescu, and media manager Scott Molinari. Other friends from the Vue and Nuxt frameworks team were also there.

Technology

Quasar is not the only project on which we have spent energy. There are other internal activities that help us improve our company assets and streamline our workflows.

Yusuf managed the updates of our internal template (known in the office as Coralloy) that we use to set up some of our customers’ projects. Usually these continuous additions are based on functionalities developed for specific projects, which are generalised and extracted. The resulting code, which is agnostic, is reusable and merges into the template, enriching it.

Yusuf also took care of other interesting tasks. He improved and automated the installation of our standard development environment. Finally, in December, he presented to the entire team his research and study work carried out during the year, related to the accessibility of digital environments and best practices for implementing them in the code. We also wrote an article related to this topic: What to do to comply with the Accessibility Act.

Training, trips and other news

As the long list of events already mentioned shows, in 2024 we focused on our Italian network. First of all, the company holidays came to a temporary halt. After last years’ holidays in Copenhagen, Trentino, and Budapest, we took a break. This did not prevent us from spending a few days together.

In April, we enjoyed a team building day playing Airsoft with customers and employees. Some would say: what better way to settle personal squabbles than by shooting each other? 😛 Well, that’s not our policy, but it was a fun exception to the company rules.

In June, we organised our first company barbecue, open to friends and employees and served by the pit master Gabriele Mammi of Il Barbecue Unisce.

On 29 November, we organised a Pizza&Game night at the office, strictly overtime-free 😛.

Employees and shareholders who wished to pursue this personal improvement, continue weekly English classes to improve their speaking proficiency.

We made company T-shirts to wear at summer events (maybe we will make branded jumpers for winter time…).

Finally, as every year, in line with our corporate values of continuous improvement, we welcomed three young interns into the office in collaboration with high schools in Reggio Emilia. The students, from high schools in Reggio Emilia and Sassuolo, were supervised by Paolo and Alessandro.
Paolo also attended four Unindustria meetings related to schools. Two meetings were organised by Unindustria Education, one for high school and one for middle school, respectively on 22 February in Reggio and 4 November in Albinea. The other two were Davvero Connessi? and Connettiamoci. These were collaborative workshops aimed at universities and held on 6 June and 10 December in Reggio, respectively, in collaboration between Club Digitale and Unimore.

New hires

No official recruitment in 2024. Since the beginning of August, we have opened a new position for a PLC and SCADA developer. We would like to strengthen our industrial development offer by supporting Kevin with a colleague to help him with programming activities for industrial machinery.

After a period of occasional projects, we welcomed Andrea Cerlini, our former intern in 2021, to the team. Given his promising programming skills, we wanted to bring Andrea on board as soon as possible. In 2023, we put him to the test on a few on-call projects and in 2024 we intensified our collaboration, hopefully hiring him in the future as we grow.

Turnover

Dreamonkey’s turnover increased by 4.5% over 2023. The increase in turnover marks an improvement on the previous year’s results. However, these numbers also highlight the tail end of the strategic indirect investments embraced since the beginning of 2023.

In 2023, turnover was stable compared to 2022. As explained in our previous report, the company’s growth halt reasons were mainly dictated by the investments made in Koioty. In a nutshell: software development shifted the team from other billable projects. Similarly, the 2024 commercial efforts required a lot of energy, but aiming at a broader horizon, with new revenue prospects for 2025. 2024, therefore, closes with modest results, but with good prospects for the year just started.

Although a higher turnover remains a goal to aim for, Dreamonkey Srl closed positively for the fifth year in a row, confirming itself as a 100% financially sound company.

2024 goals and the 2025 ones

Last year we set 6 main goals (you can read them at the bottom of this report). Four of these objectives were achieved, the other two only partially.

1. Company turnover increased;
2. our sales network has expanded and we have gathered many new contacts and collaboration opportunities;
3. there have been no new technical hires, despite our attempts since August. Consolidating Andrea’s presence as an external developer can still be considered a partial achievement;
4. we acquired new technical skills in IIoT;
5. we did not exceed the number of technical articles written in 2023 for the corporate blog, but the number was equalled, between published and draft articles;
6. we have definitely strengthened our presence in Unindustria, participating in more initiatives and projects;

In 2025 we will conduct activities with these objectives in mind.

1. Increase company turnover;
2. officially activate a stronger partnership with DatasmartItalia Srl;
3. expand our team dedicated to industrial development;
4. increase the number of Koioty installations;
5. invest time in R&D in AI, focusing on Koioty implementations;
6. invest time in R&D dedicated to industrial programming (PLC, machine protocols, etc.) aimed at improving Koioty;

As always, if you want to work with us contact us and let’s talk about it.