What are the challenges facing software companies today? How does partnership with other tech companies help overcome limitations? How to build a win-win relationship with a business partner? Mirosław Bartnik, CTO of Enginiety, talks about the strength of cooperation in business.
What are the challenges that IT companies are facing these days? What are the changes in the last years?
The major challenge is to find the right people, who are not only skilled but also willing to learn as the market changes. This also brings us to another challenge – the fast-paced evolution of the market, with sudden disruptions and unforeseen revolutions. In fact, it makes the management of a mid-size company pretty tough.
That’s one of the reasons we started looking for a relationship with a much bigger player specialized in digital platforms development, which led to a strategic partnership at the beginning of this year. In January EPAM Systems acquired ENGINIETY and now we are part of the EPAM family.
Recent years have shown that focusing on the core of your business and delegating less relevant areas to trusted partners gives you an advantage, making the business less fragile to market volatility and more agile when facing its complexity and ambiguity. This is the approach we follow at ENGINIETY and it seems to pay off well.
How do you pursue this approach?
One of the examples of this line of action would be moving all critical systems to the cloud. When the pandemic hit two years ago it allowed us to easily switch to full remote work. With no struggling with the technology, we had the space to focus on better processes, and on taking care of our employees – so on the core of the business.
We try to follow the same strategy while working with our clients – we deliver highly specialized teams consisting of software engineers, quality assurance experts, or business analysts, but we never claim expertise in the areas of IT that are far from our business.
We focus on what we are experts at and we know when to reach out to trusted partners in order to provide a comprehensive solution to our clients.
How does the cooperation with Okta help you to face up the challenges?
One of such areas is infrastructure. More precisely, its full management, network, administration and support, especially when packaged within a cloud offering. ENGINIETY operates on the application layer, delivering the application itself and application support, however, the environment where it runs requires much different expertise and Oktawave provides it perfectly well.
Why have you decided on the partnership with Oktawave? What were the circumstances?
The very first time we had a chance to cooperate with Oktawave was in 2015. We worked together for TUI Poland. I’ve been personally involved in the project and I quickly realized that we share similar values, an engineering approach, oriented toward high quality and wrapped with a lean process adjusted to client’s needs. Our teams work together for TUI still today.
Has the cooperation evolved? If so, in which direction?
Knowing Oktawave’s way of working already, we could easily recommend their services to all the clients that would benefit from working with them. It happened many times, and I can say there is more than one project where we provide services to the same client, taking care of their solution just on different layers.
What kind of support do you leverage and at which stages of customer projects? What’s the scope of typical cooperation with Okta within your projects?
Whenever we see that a client lacks a proper cloud or private hosting solution, we try to open the discussion as early as possible. We know our job and we want to focus on it as much as possible. Fighting with unstable infrastructure, inefficient support or rigid processes slows down our teams as well. Oktawave works the way we appreciate.
What are the biggest benefits you see behind the partnership?
It is all about synergy. Our teams offer a complementary set of skills, covering different parts of enterprise applications that ENGINIETY delivers and maintains together with Oktawave for our clients. It also creates opportunities for our teams to learn from each other and it only increases the level of synergy.
What’s the biggest added value in our cooperation?
The comfort of work for ENGINIETY and better CX for our clients. Together we can offer a higher level of customer satisfaction. Oktawave offers the environments we need and the expertise in areas outside of our specialty. Having a trusted partner creates calm conditions and lets our teams focus on their job.
What were the tough moments?
Here we would need to go through dozens of moments that every delivery team is facing, especially before the first GoLive. Whenever you need to connect multiple elements of the system, react to changing requirements, and coordinate multiple teams, it’s just a matter of time when you face challenges.
What’s really important is to have highly motivated and committed teams that are working toward the same goal rather than looking for excuses or finger-pointing.
What’s important in cooperation with a true partner and what decides if it’s successful?
The most important is the way both parties perceive the meaning of a true partnership. One of my roles within ENGINIETY is to support sales activities and quite a few times we didn’t start a new project just because we could not align this understanding of a partnership with a potential client.
It is like with any meaningful relationship in your everyday life – trust and synergy are key to tackling the obstacles that come along the way.
What are the most relevant criteria when choosing the partner?
On the surface, the partnership makes sense when there’s at least some potential for a win-win relationship. Deep down, it’s all about trust and a shared value system.
Thank you.
Andrzej Paradowski
Oktawave Partner Success Manager
