Avenga

Please introduce your business and what you do there.

LocalEyes is a company offering localization services for a number of large tech and nontech organizations. We have a number of big customers, one of them being Apple, with which we've been working for the last 18 years. From a technology perspective, localization in the past used to be based on manual multimedia content. More recently, there has been an influx of automated, online localization. Our focus has been to shift the company toward more automation and integration with clients that require these services. I'm the chief technology officer of the company. 

What business challenge were you trying to address with Perfectial?

I have been working on a project that is currently in the research and development stage, consisting of a new platform for automated translations. I use Perfectial as a software development provider. 

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

During our current project, Perfectial has provided Ruby on Rails and native Mac OS and iOS development. We have a team of three people on the Ruby side, two people for Mac OS, and a project manager.

In the past, during our collaboration for a startup, Perfectial developed code on JavaScript, Node.js, Java, and .NET. Our focus was on small and medium businesses, offering invoice advance. The back-end of the platform was mainly developed in-house, but the whole of the front-end, including different processes that users went through, was developed by Perfectial. Their team consisted of six or seven people for this project, including project management and different levels of development and quality assurance.

When I started working with Perfectial, we gave them a critical project consisting of multifactor authentication. We had to implement this type of functionality as it became a requirement for a great number of financial institutions in the United States. Perfectial assigned us a four-person team initially, which grew in time. I have worked with Perfectial on a number of other projects.

How did you come to work with Perfectial?

I have used Perfectial as an outsourcer for several different companies, so this is the continuation of a strong and successful relationship, which has been built during the last five years.

I have worked with Perfectial for a startup in Milan called InstaPartners, which is a think-tank started around a year ago.

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

The total cost of Perfectial's services for our current project has been around $50,000 so far. The total budget for our three projects has been around $500,000 to 600,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started our current project three months ago [April 2016]. 

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I have had a number of experiences in the past with different software development providers, both nationally and internationally. Ultimately, I have ended up working with Perfectial more than with others because of their consistency and practical approach. I cannot remember any instances in which Perfectial promised something that they did not deliver or them managing expectations incorrectly. Unfortunately, I have found this to be a common issue with other organizations because of the remote nature of the work, or the type of relationship we had. Perfectial has a good, broad knowledge of different technologies as well as strong project management skills.

How did Perfectial perform from a project management standpoint?

Perfectial always delivered on time and on budget. We have worked through a mixture of project-based and time-and-materials engagements. We are currently working on a fixed-price project with Perfectial, but we are discussing other activities that will be time and materials because of the less-defined nature of the work. During our startup work, the engagement also leaned towards time and materials. We had a great scope, but it was not defined to a level that would allow Perfectial to maintain a fixed price.

We have used the Atlassian stack during our three engagements, namely JIRA and Confluence, for general collaboration. On a smaller project, Perfectial also used Pivotal Tracker.

What distinguishes Perfectial from other providers?

Perfectial's ability to work independently has been uncommon, relative to other outsourcers. Very often, in my experience, I had to give developers exact specifications. Perfectial can also work using this approach but, for our current project for example, there was no time for putting together a fully documented set of requirements. We went through a two-day brainstorming process around those requirements. Perfectial was able to start from there and deliver it.

Is there anything Perfectial could have improved or done differently?

Given my experience with Perfectial, an improvement would be in terms of even stronger project management. This depends on each project's requirements and they have been better than other providers even in this respect, but I would generally like for Perfectial to be more involved.

Could you briefly describe your organization?

I work for a company called Cove Financial. We’re a real estate company that buys homes for folks who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for a traditional mortgage.

What’s your position?

I’m the chief marketing officer.

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you began the relationship with Perfectial?

We had a number of challenges. Like a lot of companies these days, we do almost all of our marketing digitally, so we have a variety of websites and a lot of ad technology tasks. We approached Perfectial to help build out various Web properties as well as use them for the development of our APIs [application programming interfaces], integrating with other web partners, things of that nature. They’ve provided us with a lot of technical development.

Could you describe the scope of one of your larger, more complex projects?

We have a very specific scoring algorithm that we use for all of our leads. We drafted the algorithm in-house. They helped code it and deploy it into an API. Also, we tasked them with building out dynamic thank you pages on our website so that the thank you page a user might receive would be customized to them, as opposed to the generic thank you pages most users receive. This involved a lot of work around dynamic XML [Extensible Markup Language] pages being generated on the fly based on how the lead had scored just a page or two beforehand. It was a very important component for us and well done by them.

How did you select Perfectial as your solution partner?

One of our ad technology partners is DataXu. We use DataXu for a lot of our ad targeting initiatives. Their CTO recommended Perfectial to us as a quality development partner.

When was this project completed?

It’s an ongoing endeavor. We’re consistently updating and modifying our APIs and algorithms. They help us determine how and to what extent those changes are, and then deploy them.

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback you’ve received that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

A lot of their work is done behind the scenes. With APIs, they integrated a very large Web property, 5 million unique visitors a month, with us using our APIs. We’ve gotten great feedback from the end-users and stakeholders. The APIs worked extremely well. There were zero issues with performance or usability.

When working with Perfectial, is there anything you’d consider unique about their approach or development methodology that distinguishes them from other vendors?

They’re very agile. What I like about them is that they have rigor where they need it, but they’re also very flexible. If we need to jump in, interrupt a sprint and say that X or Y has just become an immediate priority, they’re on top of it almost immediately. I find in a lot of other firms, they say they’re agile or they say they can adjust but, in practice, they really don’t have the personnel to handle the incoming changes, whereas Perfectial does. All the guys there are willing and able to drop one project on a dime and start another if it’s absolutely critical. I love that about them.

They can hack it together when needed. If I tell them, “hey, to do this one quick and dirty and keep it cheap,” they can absolutely deliver. They also have some pretty good long-term, strategic vision. They’ve been able to offer some key insights into areas our own team hadn’t considered before, which is always a plus. I like having that balance with a technology partner because, at the end of the day, they’re more than just code monkeys. You don’t often find firms that can handle both small and large projects, especially without sacrificing efficiency or quality.

In retrospect, are there areas you think they could improve on as a service provider, or are there certain things you’d do differently before initiating a project with them?

I think they’ve gotten better over the months that we’ve worked with them. They’ve launched a lot of tools and dashboards for us to stay in the loop. Early on, that was one area that they were a little weak in terms of keeping us updated on their day-to-day progress, on individual projects. But, it’s gotten much, much better.  

Could you briefly describe your organization?

Contraqer is a cloud-based procurement management service.  In a nutshell, we help our clients purchase goods and services. We manage the entire procurement lifecycle: vendor selection, RFQ generation, quote comparison, PO generation, invoice tracking, packing list tracking, returns management, credit memo administration, etc.

What is your position?

I’m the CEO and founder.

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you began the relationship with Perfectial?

When we started working with Perfectial, we were a very young company – less than a year old.  While we were well funded, we had grand plans for what we wanted to offer our clients.  To accomplish our vision and scale as quickly as desired, we knew we needed to work with an offshore partner to get the greatest bang for our buck.  In previous roles, I had worked with offshore firms in India and Argentina so I knew what to expect and felt comfortable going offshore.

Could you describe the scope of this project in greater detail?

We started development in January of 2013. Initially I worked with an onshore team with which I had a lot of history to define the development methodology; select the tools; define the processes & configuration; and build mock objects and services. Once we had a good idea of where we were going and how we were going to get there, I hired Perfectial in February of 2013. I asked them to come in and start the actual coding based on my conceptual design. They did provide some strategic oversight but the majority of their initial work was custom development. Fast forward to the present – the onshore team is gone and Perfectial is handling both architecture and development.

In terms of UI/UX, I hired a separate onshore company to help me with the branding and UI design. I did this not because I thought Perfectial couldn’t handle the work but because I have an almost 20-year relationship with the other company. We know each other very well and they know exactly what I am looking for and how I want it delivered. Over the course of the last four months, I’ve been pushing more and more of the UI work to Perfectial, starting with small projects. Given the positive results, I’ve been given them more, larger, and more complex UI work.

How did you select Perfectial as your solution partner?

I went back to two of the previous vendors I had worked with -- one was an Indian company based in Bangalore and the other was an Argentinian company based in Buenos Aires. I was going to pick between those two but one of my close business associates suggested that I check out Perfectial. He had been working with Perfectial for about four years and was extremely satisfied with the results.

I had a standard questionnaire that I sent out to each company. The document covered the requirements and project goals. The proposals I received were definitely strong but the proposal submitted by Perfectial really stood out in terms of their experience, ability, and desire to work in my chosen environment, which was the Microsoft Azure cloud.

We began working together in February of 2013. I started with a very small team of three developers. That was it. I wanted to have a lot of hands-on experience with them and really get a feel for how capable they were. We started off with a three-month contract and I could have cut them off after that, but I was generally quite pleased with what they delivered. I had hired an architect on my end to perform code reviews and he was also impressed with the quality of their code. I’ve been slowly expanding that team over the last year to a point where I now have nine Perfectial techs working full-time on our project.

When was the most recent project completed?

It’s an ongoing effort. We’re cutting releases every two to four weeks.

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics or user feedback you’ve received that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

I don’t have any hard statistics that I use. SLoC is a terrible way to evaluate development teams.  And function points are really squishy. I track story points. There has been a steady climb to good number – about 1.1 story points per developer per day with minimal regression defects. It helps that our unit test coverage is about 60% and we have over 1,000 Selenium tests for the code base so the developers know quickly if they have broken something.

There is another very soft metric that I can point to. We’ve done well over 300 demos to prospective clients. We have been invited back to continue the discussion in over 98% of those cases. If the product looked terrible or did not work, that would not be the case.

When working with Perfectial, is there anything you’d consider unique about their approach or development methodology that distinguishes them from other vendors?

Many firms are wedded to their processes and tool kits. In contrast, Perfectial is extremely flexible in terms of adhering to my preferred toolkit and development process. They’re willing to bend over backwards to do what the client wants. The CTO, Ivan Kohut, actually came over to visit and spend some quality time with us to get to know us. And our team lead at Perfectial came over for three weeks to work shoulder-to-shoulder with us.

In retrospect, are there areas you think they could improve on as a service provider?

Everyone says the same things about external development partners -- they should work faster with higher quality and cost less.  I think that is more of an aspirational goal than a criticism.  In terms of actual critical feedback, I really don’t have anything significant.  There is one small thing.

When we were first starting to work together, I wanted to interview everyone before the project kicked off.  Initially they put too many developers in front of me whose English was not adequate to pair with someone in the United States who wasn’t able to speak Ukrainian or Russian.  It took us a little while to get to a point where they understood that language skills are not optional.  You may have someone who’s technically brilliant but if s/he can’t communicate, s/he can’t be on the team.  I will say with the last five or six hires, I haven’t been introduced to anyone who wasn’t proficient in English.

Please describe your company, your role and responsibilities.

My role is CTO. I’m responsible for all our technology stock and our products. Brandify is essentially a startup. Myself and a colleague founded the business four and a half years ago. We help businesses build and maintain a strong online brand or online presence. It is a very technology-driven approach. If you go to Brandify.com, we’ll tell you the current online brand of your businesses across Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and similar sites. We give you recommendations on how to improve it. It is a technology platform that allows businesses to discover their current online presence on social media.

What was your goal for working with Perfectial?

The goal was to have a partner that could help us build and maintain the technology platform.

Can you please describe their work in more detail?

It is primarily design architecture, design development, QA, and project management. Essentially, everything associated with our product lifecycle with the exception of product management, which is what we do here internally was included in the scope.

How did you select Perfectial to work with?

We actually found them originally through Elance. We talked to many people in various different locations. We basically selected them based on their previous expertise, their knowledge of the Microsoft technology stack and their approach in general. Price obviously was a factor as well.

Did you just consider offshore firms?

We looked at offshore, so the usual suspects: India, Eastern Europe, and the Philippines.

Can you provide a sense of the size of the initiative with a general cost range?

Right now, we have five full-time resources. Today, we have five full-time resources dedicated to us from Perfectial. They are working eight to 10 hours a day, five days a week for our projects.

When will the work be completed?

The work is completely ongoing. We have peaks and drops. We may add an additional two resources this month for three or four months. We may then take them back off and go back to a core group of four or five. Overall, this is ongoing. It is a live constantly evolving product.

Do you have any statistics or metrics you could share about the success of the work?

There is a couple of things. The biggest metric for us as a startup business is we were acquired at the end of the year of last year. For us, that was a success. The Perfectial team built and maintained that platform for us and made sure it performed as expected. They were also involved to some degree in that acquisition process because it was a due diligence period and obviously they wanted to know what the technology and architecture was.

That team still works with us and now does work for the acquired business as well. It is very high level. That is what we would consider success. Broadly how we benchmark Perfectial is that they deliver on time. We’ll ask them for estimates. We expect them to deliver based on those estimates. We expect them to deliver quality code. Most importantly, we expect them to be innovative. That is something we value with Perfectial that we did not find with other outsourcing companies.

I have a lot of colleagues that work with outsourcing companies in India and other places. The big difference we found with Perfectial is that they’ll use their initiative. I don’t have to provide a 500-page detailed spec. They know our platform well now. They know what works and what doesn’t work. They’ll suggest to us different ways of doing things. Essentially, they’re part of our team. They’re not just an outsourcing company that will basically only do what you put in a spec. That is a huge difference. That is what we value most about that team.

Is anything else unique or special about them that stands out as different from other IT firms?

I think their knowledge of the Microsoft technology stack is excellent. They are extremely good in Windows Azure, for example. They are probably one of the few organizations in Europe that technically understands that platform as well or better than anybody else. Obviously, we valued their initiative and the fact that we feel that they’re part of our team, not just another bunch of bodies sitting somewhere and coding. Their professionalism is unique. We met them. They are highly professional, very trustworthy. All those are important things when you’re working with an offshore company they possess.

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

There are a million things you might do differently in retrospect. Nothing really springs to mind. They have evolved with us. We started working with them three years ago. They were a smaller company, with fewer people. They weren’t as sophisticated when it came to project management and QA, which they are now. They seem to be very successful. We have other colleagues and other business that we’ve referred to them that now work with them. The company has grown quickly. They have evolved as they should have. Now, there is nothing of note really that I would change or do differently.

Please describe your company.

My company is an online advertising software company.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the founder and CEO.

What was your goal for working with Perfectial?

Our goal was to help scale out the software that we were working with for the company. Perfectial helped us increase scalability and reliability of the software.

Please describe the scope of their work.

Perfectial did software development, reporting development, Web development, API [application programming interface] development, release management, and a few other items. Their software development, Web development, and database work is core to their business. I haven’t worked on other projects with them outside that scope.

What was your process for selecting Perfectial to work with?

I worked with a few outsourcing firms and was trying a few firms with smaller projects. I came across Perfectial and liked their work, plus the attitude and culture of their company. I have used them for multiple projects outside of JasperLabs, and I’ve recommended them to other clients and companies. I really enjoy working with them.

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

It has ranged from tiny projects that take a week of work for one person up to a six-month-long project with three or four people on them. The scope and timeframe is fairly broad. I get the sense they are trying to move into a marketplace where they’re working with larger companies and corporations. Their sweet spot, where they are very effective, is in the small- to medium-sized enterprise where they potentially have direct access to the chief technology officer or the head of engineering. They would be able to work on some of the core systems of a company. I think they’re most effective in that capacity.

Is the work ongoing?

The work is ongoing, and we have no plans to stop the projects. All other clients I have recommended them to are still working with them. They have a good track record of starting projects and maintaining the client relationships for a long period of time.

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

I don’t have any specific statistics. The general feedback has been that they are extremely efficient at getting work completed and out the door. Their chief technology officer is one of the smartest people I’ve met. They are constantly looking at new technologies and are abreast of everything that’s going on in the technology space. It's nice to get their input when it comes to architecture and how we should introduce new features. I think of them more as a partner than a group of people that I give requirements to. It's more of a collaborative process, and I take their input seriously and want them to be part of the development process from the beginning. That helps form the shape of the project and the underlying system that they’re implementing. It's quite different from other firms that I’ve worked with.

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

I’ve worked with a fair number of firms in Eastern Europe and India. Generally, there is a real difference there. I don’t think every firm is the same, but Perfectial is more in line with how I work in California in terms of development practices.

They are very involved in collaboration, helping to figure out the back story of the business, and what the most appropriate solution should be for the problems, based on their business domain knowledge. That is very important in software development.

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

This is something that they have already started to improve upon. Before, it was a little less constrained with respect to project management, but during recent projects, they’ve been staffing a project manager on each project. As they’re getting larger, keeping up with the organizational aspects is very important for them. I believe they’re making investments in ensuring that each project is staffed appropriately with a technical project lead to help guide things and make sure that all projects are on time and moving along as expected.