Belatrix, a Globant division

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Mutare is a small software company in the Chicago suburbs. We write software for telephony and notifications. I’m the director of product development.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Belatrix Software?

We were looking to augment our team’s development capabilities by adding some outsourced development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We only needed the two .NET developers and QA person. That was for one project. I should say that for short term we needed two additional .NET developers for a separate project that was four or five months. So we extended the team and then it scaled back down to the two developers. We also have an ongoing relationship with Belatrix for mobile development for our mobile device that we use for one of our applications. They write the code in Android and iOS based on our specifications.

How did you come to work with Belatrix Software?

Another company in the area was using them and referred them to us. Our company’s owner also had some investment in another company that was working with Belatrix. They also recommended Belatrix and we tried them and liked them.

How much have you invested with Belatrix Software?

I don’t have that information.

What is the status of this engagement?

We used the .NET team starting April 2015 and they stayed on until October 2016. They worked on three projects throughout that time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

If we need to scale up quickly, we can use Belatrix to extend our internal team which is super efficient. If we are assigned the same teams, they already know how we work and what the expectations are. We know what their skillset is and we know they can help on our projects. What is nice is that with very little ramp-up time, we can extend our development team quickly especially when we have time restraints for certain projects.

How did Belatrix Software perform from a project management standpoint?

Typically we manage the project and, as a team, we decide on the sprints. They were very respectful of our requirements and continue to manage the projects appropriately.

What did you find most impressive about Belatrix Software?

When we first started talking about working with an offshore team, I was worried about the language barrier but that’s been a non-issue with Belatrix. They are all trained in English. Because they are located in South America, the time difference isn’t that much. They’re usually only about one or two time zones different than us. That’s extremely useful from the standpoint of meetings and we can also have daily video conferences.

Are there any areas Belatrix Software could improve?

Sometimes we’ve had internet issues so the communication has been difficult. Other than that, it was a great experience and I’d absolutely use them again.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

PinpointCare is a Software-as-a-service company that provides care coordination software for healthcare provider working on complex medical transitions.

What is your position?

I’m the CTO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Belatrix Software?

We needed .NET staff augmentation and frontend development. We couldn’t come up with an in-house team quickly and didn’t have the budget. We wanted to work with an offshore company directly instead of using a domestic company we had used in the past.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

When we decided how we were going to build the application, it was a second generation of a prototype that was originally built in PHP and MySQL. We wanted to cloud base it and build the backend using .NET and build the frontend using AngularJS. We’re a small company but wanted to build that quickly and didn’t have the staff in-house to build it.

They did 70% of all the frontend development on our app. They provided design services using HTML and CSS and the production for that design. They did some JavaScript and AngularJS coding as well. It’s a series of single-page applications that we provided the goals for and then worked with them to build templates. From time to time I had up to 4 frontend developers in-house and they added 3 to 7 more depending on where we were in the project.

They also contributed 5% - 10% of the backend development which was later in the project when we stopped working with a previous company who was providing backend work for us.

Health insurance plans are fee-for-service and have limits on how a customer can get paid. The goal is to have better quality service for less money. It’s important when you have a procedure where you have a lot of providers involved. As an elderly patient you may have Medicare and need to have a knee replacement which involves a lot of providers. That’s really complicated to manage but our software helps to manage and improve the coordination between those providers. We hope to reduce readmissions, reduce infection and control costs on both sides. Belatrix worked on the coordination that works with the providers. They worked on some of the early designs for the mobile apps as well.

How did you come to work with Belatrix Software?

I think I used Bing to find them. I was looking for offshore companies that would provide quality services. I had already chosen the technology I wanted to use so I was looking for someone who would specifically work with JavaScript, Angular and .NET. I looked for reviews and was impressed enough to reach out to them. I spent time working with their salesman and met the president of the company, Alex Robbio, in person. I was impressed with how he continually educated his team. That’s really important to me. Our relationship has worked out well.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We’ve spent more than $200,000 with Belatrix.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began the relationship in late 2014 and the project was completed in 2016.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

They worked very closely with us and were in constant communication with us. We had several teams working on the project in different locations. They participated well in that by doing daily video standups. We used Skype as a background channel. It felt like they were part of our team. They work relatively the same hours we do. The quality of the work was excellent to exceptionally good. I was surprised at their throughput. I think there were times we couldn’t keep them busy enough because they worked so quickly. They were so efficient that we got more done in a shorter period of time than I expected.

How did Belatrix Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They were great. They have a Scrum captain on their side so there’s one point person to contact with any issues. That person was excellent for us and we liked that model. It seemed like more overhead at first but I think it made them more efficient. That process helped so that there were no issues that didn’t get solved.

What distinguishes Belatrix Software from other providers?

We never felt like we were getting somebody who didn’t understand the technology that we were paying them to do. I haven’t felt that way consistently with other offshore providers.

Is there anything Belatrix Software could have improved or done differently?

They were some of the best outsource resources I’ve ever used. There was one employee that struggled with English as a second language more than the others but the point person really helped with that issue as well. If we could afford it we would still be using them today. It was purely a budgetary decision to stop the relationship.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

When I worked with Belatrix, I worked for Chatham Financial. Chatham focuses on financial risk management, specifically working with clients to help manage their risks with foreign currencies and interest rate commodity exposures.

What was your position?

I was the chief technology officer of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Belatrix Software?

We had a larger backlog of work that we couldn't get through with the in-house developers that we had. We were hiring as quickly as we could, but we were having a hard time finding the right people. We decided to bring in a development team.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We were building tools both to be used internally for productivity and externally by clients as an application. We were doing development everywhere from web front-end development through middle tier pricing models, database, all the back-end stuff as well.

Most of Belatrix's time was spent on the front-end development tasks. We had a specialist team that handled pricing models internally.

How did you come to work with Belatrix Software?

We took a look around. Domestic consulting rates were very high but, when we looked at fees, we found cheaper consulting rates. We then talked to many people about pros and cons of different locations, and narrowed it down to Latin America quickly so we could stay in the same time zone. That meant we had project management-type issues by being in the same time zone.

Once we'd narrowed that down, we did a review of the individual countries, the cultures there, the skill sets available, and so on. We narrowed it down to Argentina and took a trip there to meet the team and evaluate a few companies. We chose Belatrix as the best fit for our needs.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The project has cost more than $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

It's ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We successfully blended our teams with theirs for the duration. We don't have any particular metrics to share, but they definitely performed on par with our developers. We certainly considered it a successful project. There's plenty of work that would not have been done without them being involved. They were very flexible in terms of integrating into our controls and processes, in terms of participating in code reviews, so that we maintained the right level of quality. Many different activities we had around the project, they were well integrated into those.

How did Belatrix Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We didn't use much of their project management because they were integrated with our teams. Typically, these types of relationships, you will use the vendor's project management if you are taking a chunk of a project and handing it to them. What we were doing is we had their teams integrated with ours, so it was our own project management, and we just coordinated on the projects there. Everything worked very smoothly.

What distinguishes Belatrix Software from other providers?

We talked to several potential partners, and Belatrix stood out. They had the combination of a good business sense, a good sense of what was important, what needed to get done and good people. The things that distinguish them are their people, team culture, and hard work.

Is there anything Belatrix Software could have improved or done differently?

There are always small things along the way. I can't think of anything large in particular. As I used to say to my own team when we started working with them, any time you go out and add 10, 20, or 30 people to a project, then you're going to have to have a getting-to-know period and that just takes time. Once you get through that, then you start to work together more closely. I can't think of any one thing that was a big negative. They were just small everyday frictions along the way, which we worked out whenever they came up.