Altoros

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the head of architecture and innovation for Tokentrust. We are aiming to facilitate the digitization and tokenization of commodities, enabling them to be traded in a simple and secure way, as well as provide accessibility to illiquid markets.

To achieve this target we based our platform on permissioned blockchain technology.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We were looking for specialists and experts to help us with deployment.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We are working with Altoros with a staffing model. They provide us with needed specialists on request and we integrate them into our team. They focus on infrastructure architecture and deployment.

At the moment, they are working on enterprise-grade platform deployment. They are responsible for ensuring that the deployment has all the necessary qualities from the perspective of regulators and auditors.

What is the team composition?

Currently, we have four engineers from the Altoros team.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

Altoros was recommended by one of our partner companies. Before that, we were in contact with many companies but none of them were able to provide us with adequate specialists in the area we were looking for, except for Altoros.

This made them very valuable to us. The price that they proposed was quite fair taking in account qualification of proposed specialists, so we decided to work with them.

How much have you invested in them?

We invested about $30,000 on average per month, and so far, it is about $200,000 total.

What is the status of this engagement?

In September 2020, we started active development with them on phase one, which was successfully completed three months ago. Now we are working with them on phase two. I assume our relationship with Altoros will go further after ending phase two.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Altoros seem to be very good at providing specialists who really meet our requirements. This is rather rare vendor's quality based on my experience. If you ask them for certain specialists, they understand what qualities the specialist needs to have. They don’t just try to find someone who fits from any perspective.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

We use an agile approach. 

In general, they react very quickly. As a startup, we have often some changes, and they are very flexible in this regard.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of their specialists and the price that we are paying for that quality is fair. Altoros is very client-oriented. There is nothing that I could complain about.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they continuously ask us for feedback. There is nothing that would cause me to complain.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Consider Altoros because they are qualified specialists, they are experts, and the price is fair especially in the context of their qualities.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a technology company. We're essentially a cleaning facilitator for delivery drivers. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We started the company from scratch, so we had all the challenges of a startup, which included visualization, pipelining, and technology.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I recognized that when delivery drivers needed to use the bathroom, they didn’t have many options, especially during COVID-19. I wanted to connect drivers with crowdsourced bathrooms during delivery trips. Altoros took that idea and built it into a product from scratch. They did all of the code — about 600 hours of code to create the proof of concept and MVP. Their team also created the API for drivers and then integrated it into their platform. Their work also involved cloud consulting.

What is the team composition?

Our main point of contact was on the business development side, but we also worked with software engineers. In total, we worked with 5-6 people, including frontend and backend developers, and QA analysts.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I searched Google and liked their reviews. I did a little more research and chose them based on their size and specializations.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent close to $30,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the project with Altoros in September 2020, and they completed what we needed in January 2021. However, we’ll likely use them again in the next phase.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We measured success based on the project's timeframe and the quality of their work. Our CFO said that Altoros created great technology and their code was excellent. The timing of the project was great too. To complete this project within four months was excellent.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

Overall, their team was great. We communicated via Zoom and had weekly meetings with their project manager in the beginning. Once everyone was on the same page, we cut back to meeting every two weeks. Although there was a hiccup with communication, it was quickly resolved. However, that happens when working on big projects.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Altoros’ communication was excellent. It was hard to illustrate my idea because it was complicated. Their team was able to create a physical product based on my idea, which was crucial. They also owned the project. Instead of blindly executing our requests, their team gave us suggestions to improve the product.   

Are there any areas they could improve?

This was a difficult project. Altoros hit it out of the park, so I don’t know how they could improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Stay on top of your communication with them. Don’t assume their team understands your idea because you do. That's just general advice.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a ratings and reviews SaaS company. We offer retail management software in the public marketplace.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

Our internal development team needed support in developing additional features and functionalities for our software product. We hired Altoros to increase our software development capacities.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Altoros provides staff augmentation services. This is a long-term engagement, as opposed to project-based.  We work with a developer who does front- and backend development. They also do API development. We work in Node.js, Angular, React, and MongoDB.

The assigned developer is part of our planning process and daily scrum projects. He is also involved in QA and code reviews. Although he is remote, he works like a fully-integrated member of our software development team. 

What is the team composition?

We work with one full-stack developer who does both front- and backend work. Last year, we had a part-time resource who worked on a specific redesign project for three months.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I researched different nearshore companies and looked at their portfolios of past clients and projects. We chose Altoros because they provided a better developer profile than others.

How much have you invested with them?

My company has spent more than $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2018, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We do continuous development of our product with Altoros. We can’t really speak to a project that had a clear beginning and end — rather, we’re continuously checking our software’s code, and that’s how we measure the success. Since we continue to work with the same developer, it’s obvious we’re happy with the deliverables.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

This engagement is very small. Although Altoros offered project management, we declined; we just have to manage a single developer. We have calls and check-ins to make sure everything is working out and to see if there are issues.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Altoros offers really impressive developer profiles to their clients. They’re very responsive to any type of questions, whether they’re related to the work or something administrative, such as invoicing. Any queries are usually answered within one working day, which shows a good level of service.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’re happy with the developer we have. In the past, we have needed DevOps resources, and they’re hard to find. If they had part-time DevOps resources we could draw upon to help with our servers and cloud management, that would be good. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The main effort is in the initial recruiting process. The return is always based on the quality of the developer, so the bidding and interview process should be very detailed and thorough. Make sure to check out the developers’ capabilities.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the President of a software company that provides mobile software solutions to wholesale distribution companies in the United States.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Altoros?

Altoros helped us take an existing suite of applications that were Windows based and get them on iOS using iPhones and iPads.

What were your goals for this project?

To be able to transition thousands of existing users from windows laptops and tablets to iPhones and iPads.

SOLUTION

How did you select Altoros?

We searched for companies that had core competencies in the following:

• Windows Servers
• MS SQL Server
• Amazon Web Services
• native iOS developers
• Android developers

Altoros was able to demonstrate to us, via white papers on various projects, that they were very strong in every one of these competencies.

Describe the project in detail.

We had worked for several months building a detailed mockup and provided many detailed drawing mockups. This allowed the team to come to a basic estimate for getting started, both sides acknowledging that the estimates would be knowingly exceeded, but that care would be taken to minimize scope creep. We were very successful in that.

The Altoros team members have always been extremely competent and careful.

What was the team composition?

Altoros provided a project manager, two developers, and had an art team, server backend, and AWS experts available as needed. Our team consisted of our lead designer and two PC developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We have successfully converted all of our customers to iOS devices.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

All communication, verbal and written, has been clear and precise.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

There is a lot of heart that shows through from all of the people and the processes that take place. It is a very pleasant company to work with. Life is short, work with the people you enjoy working with. For us at Inventiv, that includes Altoros.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None to speak of.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a small software company in the Atlanta area with about 10–12 active engineers working on our product. I’m the engineering team lead. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We had a new product idea but didn’t have the resources to devote to it. Because of COVID uncertainty, we wanted to experiment with outsourcing this work. We didn’t want to go through the recruitment and interviewing process to hire in-house resources either.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our product functions as a video portal, or learning library, for customers. Our main product is a massive, complicated software package. We found that we were spending a lot of time and resources training customers how to use our software. That tech support and onboarding was costing us. The global pandemic exacerbated the problem because we couldn’t travel or hold in-person meetings with our customers.

As a solution, we decided to create a series of instructional videos. That way, customers could help themselves whenever they needed through the portal rather than contacting someone on our staff. To start the project off with Altoros, our design department determined what we needed and provided them with a 120-page document detailing how the product should look and behave. That jumpstarted the collaboration between their team and ours to implement the design plan. Team members on our team and theirs worked on the project together using Angular. 

What is the team composition?

I’m the overall project manager for this effort, but they have a project manager who coordinates the work on their side. However, I speak directly with their three developers, their project manager, and two developers from my team. 

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I did a lot of research to find the right fit for this project, keeping a spreadsheet of companies that were ranked highly on top outsourced companies lists. We’d tried outsourcing to other companies but found issues with time zones as well and language and cultural barriers. To address each of those past issues, we decided to look for a partner in South America.

There would be less of a time zone difference and easier communication, especially because I speak Spanish. They were one of the few finalists in our search, and we chose to hire them after interviewing them and the other finalists.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $60,000–$70,000 so far. Our contract for the year amounts to $220,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since October 2020. This project is complete, but we’re now looking for more work to do with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our team expected this project to be complete several months later than it actually was. We’ve finished the work and are preparing to deploy the solution to customers. Each of their team members is very strong in their skills, which is why we were able to finish the project 2–3 months early.  

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

I meet with them every morning to discuss yesterday’s progress and today’s plans. We communicate if there are any questions or problems at that point as well. If issues come up throughout the day, we have open communication through Slack channels. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I chose to give this review based on how pleasantly surprised we’ve been with their work. The candidates they found and provided to our team were great. We appreciated being involved in the interviewing and onboarding process for those teammates. They gave us fantastic people to work with. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There were slight hiccups with setting up the initial billing, but those issues could’ve been on our side. I can’t think of anything for them to improve upon. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Try to plan out your project, breaking it up into stages. Once they get working, they power through tasks and tickets very quickly. They worked more quickly than I was expecting them to, which was a great problem to have.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a lead telematics mobile engineer for a financial services company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We hired them to develop our apps.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Altoros is responsible for developing the iOS and Android versions of five apps. In terms of the life cycle, they’re only responsible for the development. We give them designs and specifications through Jira tickets. They then address the tickets and perform a bit of testing before committing code and running our automated tests.

What is the team composition?

There is a project manager on their side who we don’t interact with too often. We mostly interact with two iOS and two Android developers through Jira tickets.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I’m fairly new to the project, so I wasn’t part of the process.

What is the status of this engagement?

The most recent project started around June 2020, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I thought that working with a team from another country would be difficult. However, it’s been great working with Altoros. They perform their work at a high standard but also maintain quick turnaround times. Their team is always happy to help and willing to work long hours.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

We chat on Skype and recently set up weekly meetings, which is essentially a sprint planning and feedback session. We interact with their project manager about once a month to handle invoices and feedback. Altoros is on the project but we’re responsible for implementing any feedback and communication mechanisms. Anything we suggest, they take to heart. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

We value the quality of their work and their willingness to comply with our standards.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There could be a bit more proactive feedback from their side. Had I not set up a weekly meeting to find out about any issues or problems that information could have taken a bit longer to come across.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have open lines of communication.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and director of a custom software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We needed help with the ongoing development and customization of our custom software.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Originally, we hired them to move our Microsoft infrastructure from a physical server to an Azure cloud-based environment. They managed the process and scaling of our software across those platforms.

In addition, they added in administrative improvements, in terms of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and ways our deployments could be improvements. We also hired a number of developers to help with a range of technologies we use in our stack. They were able to streamline and improve our performance as well as our architecture as a whole.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Svetlana (Developer), Roman (Solutions Architect), and Elena (Project Manager).

How did you come to work with Altoros?

We found them on the internet they were a fit in terms of flexibility, cost, and ability to meet our requirements.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around £350,000 (approximately $477,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2017, and our work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We have various performance metrics such as maintaining or improving site use and performance as traffic increases. We also use New Relic as an infrastructure to guide us on the improvements they’ve been making on the software. The specific team that we work with is a perfect fit for our needs.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

Our project manager, Elena, is invaluable to our work. She’s outstanding. We use Jira for project management. We also use Git to support our coding history and management. The team thinks through the goal or user experience we seek and Elena manages the team to suggest ways to achieve it.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re open to feedback and quick to discuss elements of the project as we see fit. They proactively and dynamically manage our relationship with us as best as they can.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be great if they had more support in place for companies like us. Our current staff is perfect but I’m not sure how effectively they’d be able to replace teammates if we lost both of them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The key is to discuss and be aware of all of your requirements. Have an exhaustive list of all the things you may need from them. It’s important to ask questions up from and how working together could change in the future.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder, largest shareholder, managing director, and responsible directly for strategy, sales and investor relations. Our CTO is directly responsible for platform and product, but I am very involved with these areas as well.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Altoros?

Ruby on Rails server-side development and maintenance

What were your goals for this project?

The Altoros team took over an existing application with hundreds of thousands of users, so job 1 was maintaining operation. The second priority was to improve the efficiency and performance of the platform. It crashed frequently, consumed way too much computing resource and provided terrible user performance all because of highly inefficient API calls, orphaned code from previous versions, and poor database design. The third priority was to add much needed functionality.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We researched vendors with strong portfolios of Ruby projects, provided requirements overview, requested quotes, and interviewed the engineers and project managers

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Each of the three listed priorities were met and we are now able to deploy new functionality, in fact, entirely new modules, with speed, confidence, and quality better than at any point in our company history.

What was the team composition?

Just one developer full time, but this developer is supported by the knowledge and resources of the Altoros organization.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Over the past 30 years, I have funded dozens of software development outsourcing projects in Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, India, and Sri Lanka. I have never had so positive an experience as I have had with Altoros on this project. Altoros engineers are consistently skilled, hard-working, productive and reliable.

They consistently look for better ways to achieve the end-result we seek rather than just sticking to the spec and design we provide. We feel our Altoros engineers are a vital part of our team and that Altoros as a company offers reasonable rates, entrepreneurial spirit and thinking combined with enterprise-class infrastructure and process integrity. Quite simply, I could not recommend them higher.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

This is an on-going development project. The project management aspects came in the beginning in terms of mapping out the deliverables, knowledge transfer, and checking/testing deliverables. For the past several months, there has not been much project management from the Altoros side as our CTO manages the development assignments.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I have worked with outsourced development providers before who either 1) produce demo-ware that shows the proper functionality but falls down in production or 2) meets the functional requirements without accomplishing the user experience or business goal. Altoros doesn't do that.

They think through the goal or user experience we seek and suggest ways to achieve it. They complete work within time and cost estimates. In short, I trust them. As the sales and strategy leader of the company, the last thing I want to spend my time on is worrying about or validating the development work being done. With Altoros, I don't have to.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I wish they had a development center in Asia for timezone purposes, but our CTO in Singapore seems to work well enough with the developers in Belarus.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a development team lead for a media company. We are a big publisher of local news and develop products for our readers and journalists.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

When we started out three years ago, we needed some assistance with frontend development. We were looking for a company that could take an active part in discussions about how to solve user problems.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Altoros has been helping us with the development of a tool for journalists. It is a web-based tool that journalists can use to write articles and drag and drop photos or videos. When the article is complete, they can save it, and the article will be published. 

Altoros built the frontend in React and the backend in JavaScript. We do the design and backend development in-house.

What is the team composition?

We work closely with two remote people from their team. We don’t have a middleman in between, and they work as though they are in-house with our team.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I’m not really sure how we found them, as it was before my time with the company.

How much have you invested in them?

We spend about $200,000 per year.

What is the status of this engagement?

I began working with them in January 2017, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We appreciate their work. We have been able to work as one team despite the distance between us. We don’t use a ticket system; we have a very close collaboration, which has been key. Altoros has an openness when it comes to development. We don't just place an order and get something back; they help us solve complex problems and take part in the discussions. Technically, they are very good as well. We are very pleased with what we have gotten from them.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

We primarily communicate through Slack, and we also use Skype. We use Jira for project management. Altoros is very integrated with our regular team, and they’re openminded. They listen to us and are part of the conversations that we have. They participate and give us their opinions. We are very pleased with the collaboration.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have good technical skills, and it is very good that they can communicate in English. They are open to having a close collaboration with us instead of seeing themselves as a company that only delivers things to their customers. They help solve user problems and are truly a part of the process of finding the user value, which is good. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not really. We have gone through that stage. We communicate on a daily basis. I wouldn’t say we expected more from them, as they are doing great.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Take the opportunity to work really closely with them and not just let them deliver a finished product.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company offers a cloud-based anti-fraud platform solution. We are historically known for our multi-factor authentication and electronic signature software. I'm a R&D director based in Montreal Canada.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Altoros?

We are working on agreement automation for account opening & automating financial agreement.

What were your goals for this project?

To transform customer account opening and financial agreement processes into seamless, secure, fully digital experiences that users will love to use.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had someone who knew Altoros and recommended us to use their services.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They help us in various areas of the development cycle, from early design to developments, testing and finally deployment and shipment.

What was the team composition?

Over the past 3 years, we have had the privilege to work with 10 different contractors. From junior to senior in the fields of development and quality assurances. All of them are great and exceed our expectations. In addition, we have always good communication with the resource manager who is a direct and permanent point on contact, always available to answer any of our questions or concerns.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Throughout the 3 years, the contractors brought their professionalism to help us deliver our solution to the market.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Altoros team members are part of our scrum teams. The project management function is handled internally through Scrum Masters.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I'm impressed with the quality of work they bring. They are skillful and up to date with the latest technologies. They were able to jump quickly on the project without spending so much time on onboarding.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The time difference is of course a challenge, as we are Montreal based we need to have most of our meetings with them in the morning. Anytime after 1PM eastern time is considered very late for them and almost none of them will be available to participate to our development.