Exadel

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

Our business is helping students find language courses abroad. We have the largest database of language schools in the world. We are like an online travel agency for language study programs abroad.

What are your role and responsibilities?

I’m one of the co-founders.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal in working with Codete Software House?

We were looking to improve both the quality and speed of our website development at an acceptable cost. We had worked before with an in-house team, and we wanted to see if working with Codete would be a better fit for us.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

Our website, plus a CRM [customer relationship management] system that our staff uses, and a content management system that the schools use, were all taken over by Codete. They do all of the development for these three systems. It’s a PHP MySQL setup using a framework called Symphony, and they have taken on the entire development.

What was your process for selecting Codete Software House with which to work?

They actually found us. They contacted us at just the right time, because our internal team was moving too slowly. We didn’t conduct any kind of comparison with other vendors; we just gave them a two-week test project. Their productivity per team member was about three times that of our internal team, so we decided to go with them.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Last year, we paid Codete around $200,000.

When did you start working with them, and is the relationship ongoing?

The relationship began in April 2013 and is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics, metrics, or general feedback from the project?

Their performance is excellent – really fantastic. We also started working with them to provide system administration help, but that didn’t work all that well because that’s not one of their core competencies. It’s been better recently since they hired a new system administrator but, for some time, it wasn’t that great.

We’ve done a lot of functional changes to the site, so a lot of functionality that wasn’t available before is now available because of Codete. We also worked to a certain degree on performance, where we cut down the load time on pages by 60 percent or so. We continue to do more with them in this area. Since we started working with them, our traffic has roughly doubled. We get a lot of unpaid search traffic, and that’s definitely something they’ve helped us with.

Is there anything unique about Codete Software House that really makes them stand out compared to other companies?

The quality of the people that they put on our project was really good, which leads to good communication, high productivity and high output. They’re very flexible in arranging the process so it works for us. We moved from a haphazard to a much more systematic process as a result of their work.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

The system administration area is not really their area of expertise, and we had some issues there. But, to be fair, they never sold us on that as being one of their core competencies. The cost is increasing in that area as well, but we still feel we’re getting good value for our money.

What advice would you give a future client of theirs?

I think it’s really ideal if you can do a test project with them, because then you can see if Codete will work for you or not. If you plan on working with them long term, it’s good to actually visit them and get to know their people. Also, work with them on continuously improving the development process.

BACKGROUND

I work for a high-tech company in Europe that produces customized e-commerce software solutions. I am the vice president here, and I manage the work with Codete.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

We have a development team here in Switzerland, but we wanted to augment our team with some offshore resources. We want to work on the core product continually to improve the UX/UI [user experience/user interface].

SOLUTION

We found Codete through a recommendation from one of our colleagues. We knew a member of their team. We decided to work with them a couple of years ago to provide offshore developers for the UX/UI on our core product.

They provide developers, but we manage the project. The project is ongoing, and we have spent more than $250,000 on their services the past three years. They have also worked on smaller projects in the past but, mainly, it's UX/UI work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Codete is not perfect, and we have had some issues with them. However, the good outweighs the bad, so we have stuck with them and are happy overall. They provide good development resources with very strong costs.

They are no perfect, of course. They make mistakes like everyone else, and we must focus on project management. That is probably their weakness because we must manage their resources more than our local team. We are very pleased with their cost and speed of delivery.

I would recommend this company to others, but make sure you plan out the project in advance very well. If you lose track of Codete's work, problems can arise. I would recommend this company though.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

We develop websites for art galleries, and [our product] is an online inventory management system.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m the IT [information technology] director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Codete Software House?

We’ve been with them for a few years, and they help us develop custom sites. They’ve helped us with a larger project, which is kind of a template system. [For] sites that are more generic and template based, we built systems to be able to spin those up quickly without really involving developers, which was a large project that they were responsible for. 

They’ve done a great job on developing that large and complex system, so much so that we’re now transitioning our other product to their team as well. They’re going to be responsible for the integration of rewriting that system and building it into our new collage platform.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

We leverage our own designers, and we do our own infrastructure work. So, primarily, what we use them for is back-end development, front-end development, and QA [quality assurance] testing.

What was your process for selecting Codete Software House with which to work?

I found them through an online job posting. I can’t recall which posting they responded to, but it may have been the one on Stack Overflow.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

It was between $10,000 and $50,000.

How long have you been working with them, and is the relationship ongoing?

The relationship started nearly three years ago, and it’s an ongoing, open-ended arrangement.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics, metrics, or general feedback from the project?

We’re very satisfied with their performance. They’re very responsive toward us. We have had some developers come and go, and they have a lot of young people and new hires, so it doesn’t always work out. We have a core group there who are dedicated to helping us with our problems. If someone doesn’t work out, they’re quick to fix it and find a replacement. They’ve done it very well, and we’ve been quite pleased to work with them.

On the custom website side, they probably developed about 25 custom websites. Our larger template system, which they helped us build, now hosts 75 sites.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

The responsiveness is good. I had the chance to meet them in person, and they’re just a nice group of people. The time difference can be a concern, but they manage it well. They seem to have shifted their hours to coincide with ours, and that’s a big help. Most importantly, when something pops up at any time, there is someone there to respond to us and help us get it resolved.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

Nothing really comes to mind. I think they do a good job, and we love working with them.

What advice would you give a future client of theirs?

Make sure your environment easily allows for remote development as many traditional networks aren’t set up to accommodate this easily. It could be an investment to get a system set up to allow remote development. That took some work on our end.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are HubSpot Diamond Partner in Poland. I'm CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Codete, and what were your goals?

We are looking for fast and reliable partners for HubSpot implementation.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Good marketing team feet and stron marketing competencies.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and marking tools used.

We run complete implementation of HubSpot Marketing Professional software.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with whole marketing team form management to copywriting.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Whole project done with less than 5 weeks.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Marketing team was very professional and goal oriented.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The team's level of marketing practice and knowledge was commendable.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No:)

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We develop IT solutions for a mobile and interconnected world on the basis of an in depth understanding of technologies and markets.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Codete?

Critical project for our most important customer. Schedule of this project was a main challenge.

What were your goals for this project?

Help our main customer to deliver a high quality solution on time. Success of this project may lead to next projects in the same area.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had a list of vendors, this vendor was selected as was able to provide strong candidates in a short period of time.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They designed, documented, developed and tested new backend solution for a leading car manufacturer. Two-week sprints were used.

What was the team composition?

More than 25 team members and team is growthing. We had 2 persons from the vendor. We used our customer processes, based on agile development.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

No, sorry. Confidential.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was provided by us, not by the vendor. We had a distributed team, using Webex, JIRA and Confluence as main tools.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Very open communication, the company was interested in our success, quick feedbacks.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not really.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Uhura is a marketing and technology agency that enables brand conversation through content strategies, platforms and story driven campaigns that reach and involve your audience. We combine the strategic excellence of consulting company with the agility of a digital agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Codete?

We hired Codete to enhance our development unit for a new project to cope with a much higher need in developers as expected. After this project we kept working with the developers from Codete on a long term basis.

What were your goals for this project?

The goals for the initial projects were to create a complex extranet with a high secure login process and database structure. After the initial project, the backlog had to be worked on as well.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Recommendation

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Codete gave us developers over a long period to cope with the amount of tasks our development unit could not handle alone.

What was the team composition?

We worked with up to 4 different front- and backend devlopers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The projects was well received by the client and the functionality and accessibility together with the high security measuremtns were overall great.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project Management was taken care of by us

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Very quick reaction time. Fast onboarding of developers. Friendly and experienced staff in general.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Project Management would be an addition that could be vital

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Co-Founder and CTO at Blinkist

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Codete?

Knowing codete for long we decided to fill our Data Engineering needs with 3 developers from codete integrated into our Scrum process

What were your goals for this project?

Build a new Data Integration site for our Biz Dev people.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Know the Codete forlks for a while already

Describe the project in detail.

Built a data integration site.

What was the team composition?

3 devs from Codete. 2 from us. Plus one of our Engineering Managers

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

A finished Data Integration product used by our business people

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Great

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They were accessible, honest, trustworthy, and high quality. No bullshit.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, there are none.