Four Questions with Voyantic’s Juho Partanen

Finland has topped the annual survey of happiest countries in the world for the last four years in a row.

Any why not? Finland has a stable welfare society juxtaposed with a strong love for outdoor recreation of all kinds.

RAIN Alliance Board Member Juho Partanen takes full advantage of all Finland has to offer.

Partanen is the Co-founder and Director of Business Development for Voyantic Ltd., the Finland-based global provider of RFID test and encoding solutions. A skier and trail runner, we caught up with Partanen recently and asked him a few questions about RAIN and the industry. Here’s what he had to say…
Q.  What, in your opinion, is the single biggest challenge or opportunity faced by RAIN RFID companies today?

The opportunity that we face is to bring item level connectivity from tens of billions up to trillions of items per year. A strong eco-system of RAIN RFID suppliers is needed to build and sustain such scalability.

Q.  Tell us about Voyantic, Ltd.  As a co-founder, what are you most proud of?

Voyantic enables our customers to excel in their RAIN engineering challenges. We’ve helped the whole RAIN eco-system find a common language specifically when the performance and quality of RAIN tags and labels is discussed. We have devoted and talented people working for the company and solving our customer’s problems, some of them staying in the company for 10-15 years already. That’s something that really warms the heart of an entrepreneur.

Q.  Why did you join the RAIN Alliance? What has the RAIN Alliance meant to Voyantic?

Single companies can do only so much — even if they are large corporations. Bringing the resources, competences and stamina of a wider number of companies together enables eco-systems to form, mature and flourish. That is why Voyantic immediately joined the RAIN Alliance when it was originally announced in 2014. The RAIN Alliance has enabled us to drive causes forward that we feel strongly about. It’s also given us more business since we’re actively engaging and networking at the RAIN events. I genuinely believe that participation in the RAIN Alliance has made Voyantic a better supplier to our customers.

Q.  When you are not working, what do you do for fun?

I used to own a yellow summer house on the lakeside in Finland where my family spent many memorable holidays. More recently, I have swapped the lakeside for the seaside and the summer house for a patrol boat. Now I spend vacations navigating the shallow waters of the Gulf of Finland.

Q. What’s the first thing you are looking forward to doing once COVID restrictions ease a bit?

I will resume consuming culture with my friends. The Helsinki jazz scene has a strong undercurrent mojo to it, and while LP record shave supported me over the pandemic restrictions, I cannot wait to get back to live events.

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