5 years on – how being acquired unlocked new horizons

For some, five years doesn’t seem that long – but the last five have been unique. Five years ago, there would still be three months before anyone had heard of COVID-19. That alone indicates how much can happen in five years! For us, that time has been significant. Five years ago this month, Communications Software (Airline Systems) Limited, now trading as OASES, was acquired by the Valsoft Corporation, based in Montreal, Canada.

In this article, we’ll look back over this time to celebrate our continued growth and success, and how we’ve invested heavily in our employees, products and customers.

A global pandemic

We embarked on our new journey as part of Valsoft and, in fewer than 6 months, the whole world changed. Among many challenges, lockdowns and travel restrictions affected millions around the world. Arguably two of the most heavily impacted sectors were hospitality and travel – two key components of the aviation industry. Airlines went from having a single aircraft out of service being a serious problem, to having whole fleets grounded.

At OASES though, we hardly slowed down at all. The unprecedented situation left our customers with a rare commodity in the aviation industry – time! So, many airlines across the world seized the opportunity to do all the things that are traditionally hard to fit into the flight schedule; carrying out maintenance, replacing parts earlier, and ultimately preparing their fleets for the day when they could fly again. For OASES, this time served as an opportunity to do some similar housekeeping and prepare our offering for the future.

Strengthening the team with new leadership

OASES had (and has) talent whose collective tenure in the industry is easier to measure in decades than years. But one of the great advantages of being part of a business like Valsoft is the resources they can bring to bear as a larger organisation. One example was our team. Our new affiliation with Valsoft enabled us to take our fantastic team and all their experience and add even more aviation and software expertise to the mix.

Starting strong with a new look

Tom Hedges, who joined the OASES team soon after its acquisition, was an integral part of another important step on the OASES journey. A comprehensive, bold new look.

Commsoft, and later OASES, has had several different brand identities. Now, it was time to really strengthen the brand in a new way. The OASES logo and branding helped define what the new OASES was going to be. This new look honoured its heritage in the aviation industry – employing symmetry, shape and repetition to reflect themes and imagery evocative of the sector. The logo might remind some of a jet engine, while others might see wings in the triangular geometry. This logo set the tone for the future, utilising a broader colour palette and standing alone as a logomark or alongside the “oases” text as a logotype.

Moving away from the literal images of aircraft, Tom and his team created this new design as a statement of intent – OASES is an aviation software company, with a focus on innovation and the latest in technology – and it was essential to state this, as some big technology changes were underway…

A new foundation on which to build

One of the first improvements we made to our technology revolved around hosting and servers. After much development, OASES started the process of moving their customer base to the cloud – a transition that is all but complete today.

For our customers, the move to the cloud enabled more streamlined support, less infrastructure to maintain and easier upgrades. For our more advanced innovations, the foundations of a cloud infrastructure were crucial, as they enabled functionality that simply wouldn’t have been possible before. The move to OASES Cloud fundamentally changed the software – improving it in basically every way – from the little things happening in the background, like improved security and support, to big things like API integrations and our business intelligence suite, launched in Release 11 in 2024.

Moving to the cloud also allowed for simpler, faster, more secure deployments, empowering our Implementation Team to get customers up and running more simply than ever, and with far less time, if any, required on-site. This would be a boon to our growth and expansion goals, as OASES continued to expand into new countries with new customers.

Enriching the Customer experience

We were working hard to improve our technology, but we also were enhancing the service we provide to customers; in many cases by taking advantage of the corporate systems that Valsoft make available to their subsidiaries. Since 2022, OASES has invested heavily in the customer experience in a variety of ways…

Customer Success

We established a strong team of Customer Success Managers, led by experienced leaders in the field. This team were (and are) dedicated to providing help, advice and support for their customers – with each Customer Success Manager serving as a dedicated contact point with whom to share feedback and consult on the best ways to make OASES support their business.

Project Management and Implementation

For many years we’ve had an Implementation team, with decades of experience with both the OASES software and the aviation industry. Many of them even have a background as aircraft engineers. One of the great additions to this team’s effectiveness were the new systems and processes made available to them since the acquisition. One significant example is our use of monday.com to manage and communicate progress with customers. This system is also an integral part of the processes established by our more recently formed Project Management Office. Our Project Managers ensure every process goes smoothly between OASES and their customers and are a vital part of our organisational structure.

Customer Support

Furthermore, our Customer Support Team, who had many years of experience with the OASES software, were given new tools with which to support our customers. These  tools, such as Jira, enabled better connection, communication and information-sharing between the engineers solving issues and the customers affected by them.

In-person events

The height of the global pandemic was beginning to pass and we had moved to a fully remote working model, enabling us to provide the highest levels of support for our customers, wherever they are in the world. However, some things just work better in person. As such, we began planning our first in-person customer event. We saw this as an opportunity to connect and network with our customers more closely, garnering first-hand, unfiltered feedback about the OASES aviation software and supportive services. Our 2022 event in Prague was the first time in years that we had seen some of our customers face to face and it was a valuable experience. Since then, we’ve held increasingly successful events to further strengthen our connection with our customers.

Most recently we held events in both the Middle East and Europe, where we showcased the latest innovations offered in OASES Release 11, including Insights, Integrations, a streamlined user interface, enhanced security and more. We were also happy to share details of new and ongoing partnerships with various other aviation software businesses.

OASES Academy

One of our biggest initiatives in the last few years has been our work on building community and providing educational resources for our customers. Our in-person events happen once or twice a year, so we wanted to find a way to strengthen the connection between OASES, their customers and the wider aviation community every day.

In early 2023, after investing in learning and development expertise, we launched a collection of comprehensive, self-guided multimedia courses, containing over 200 lessons, so users of OASES, old and new alike, could learn the software on their terms, alongside their daily workload. Again, this was not intended to replace the on-site and virtual bespoke training we offer our customers – it was simply an additional way for our customers to learn about OASES in the way that suited them.

Another big part of OASES Academy, is the community element. At the time of writing, OASES Academy has over 660 users from more than 75 aviation businesses, including airlines and maintenance organisations. This enables networking and knowledge-sharing at a whole new level. Customers can ask a question of the community and the OASES team will be on hand to help, but it’s also possible that another OASES user has the answer and can help too. This crowdsourcing of knowledge is the real magic of OASES Academy, and it only gets more effective as it continues to grow.

We are always looking for new ways for OASES Academy to support our customers, so we keep adding newer and better features:

• In 2023 we started running quarterly webinars for our customers.
• In 2024, we launched our AI chatbot, which can answer quick questions and suggest resources 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It can even answer in multiple languages, making the knowledge our users need, more accessible than ever.
• Most recently, we’ve been building a real-time Product Roadmap, lifting the curtain on what our Product Team are working on and when customers can expect the new features and innovations they care about most.

Our latest technology – built into our aviation software

Building on the strong foundation of our cloud infrastructure introduced in Release 10, we started work on what would become easily the biggest software upgrade in the history of the product.

Release 11 enhanced every part of the software. In some cases, these were small changes that made the product easier to navigate or improved stability and security. In other cases, we rebuilt whole sections with new and enhanced functionality. We even added entirely new features to the software, allowing customers to use OASES like never before. We have taken advantage of technology from Valsoft and integrated it into the OASES product.

Release 11 enabled many new features, including:

• A redesigned user interface (UI), with new colours, iconography and layouts, enabling simpler navigation and a cleaner design.
• Enhanced Access, which enables customers to access the full OASES software suite from any modern browser, and bolsters security with SSL/TLS support.
• OASES Insights, our advanced business intelligence tool, which empowers OASES users to understand their operations and make data-driven decisions.
• Maintenance Control, a completely new interface that enables faster, more intuitive scheduling of maintenance tasks against the flight schedule.
• OASES Workflow, which enables fast development and deployment of integrations, so customers have more flexibility over which systems they use alongside OASES.
• OASES Gateway, our new API framework, which enables third-party software vendors to integrate directly and securely with OASES.

Wider impact

With the added resources and opportunities available to us as part of Valsoft, we wanted to contribute something beyond the software and services that are part of our daily operations. So, we announced in January 2023, that we would be partnering with the Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre (DARTeC) at Cranfield University, sponsoring a student for their Aviation Digital Technology Management MSc. For us, it was a great opportunity to give back to the aviation community and support new talent entering the industry.

The decision to establish this partnership was also fuelled by the relevance of the course. As an aviation software solutions company, OASES strives to be at the cutting edge of the latest trends and technology in the industry, so it has been fascinating following the work happening at the DARTeC. It has also been a particularly fruitful relationship, as we’ve been able to work closely with Cranfield University, helping us focus our vision for the future. We’re looking forward to seeing what comes from this relationship, going forward.

Looking back

A significant driver of the growth and success of OASES over the last five years is the collaboration of many talented people and teams – from our product team building the latest innovations today, all the way back to the teams who worked diligently to make the original acquisition possible.

“OASES has been a cornerstone in aviation maintenance for over 40 years, consistently delivering value and reliability to its users. I am extremely proud to have helped introduce OASES into the Valsoft family, and look forward to supporting its continued innovation and growth as we grow within the sector.”

Costa Tagalakis, Investment Partner, Valsoft Corporation

With the backing of Valsoft, we’ve grown significantly as a business, with more than 40% Revenue growth and over 30 new customers, but we’ve also grown in many other ways, including:

• the maturity of the company and brand.
• the size, experience and expertise of our team.
• the channels for communication between OASES, their customers and the wider aviation community.
• the features and benefits of our aviation software.
• the relationships we’re building and the causes we’re supporting.

As we approach 2025, we’ll be sharing more about our next round of product innovations coming in Release 12.

We’re looking forward to seeing how our customers will benefit from them over the next five years and beyond.

Thanks for being on the journey with us.

If you like what you’ve read about the last five years and are excited about future innovations coming to OASES, why not get in touch to see if our software is a good fit for super-charging your operations?