CINQ Technologies

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a company that’s developing a web-based POS application.

What challenge were you trying to address with CINQ Technologies?

The biggest challenge that we were trying to address was ramping up quickly in terms of development, QA, and development management. We were trying to scale up quickly in a short period of time, so we hired CINQ.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We work with CINQ in an agile methodology. As we've expanded the team we’ve created an organization where groups of developers work together with QA and product leadership to build certain features for a particular customer or roadmap item. We have multiple teams working in parallel on behalf of different product owners and we continue to build more features to enhance our core product.

We support bug fixes as well and CINQ is helping us with automation testing. The team provides us assistance with the full spectrum of our product suite, which includes customer portals that typically leverage React and other APIs. CINQ also helps us with backend services, such as MySQL, so they’re very much involved in development. 

We have multiple Scrum Masters, a squad leader, senior developers, interns, and QA analysts who are either doing manual testing or building test automation. We worked together in person for a week at their location to meet with the initial team, and that was probably three years ago. Since then, we’ve been on a remote arrangement. 

What is the team composition?

We have an account manager with who we meet on a pretty regular basis. There are other people involved whom we seldom engage with such as the founder, co-founder, and some other high-level executives.

There is a squad leader, under whom are three Scrum Masters. Under those Scrum Master are seven delivery teams that have anywhere from 3–5 developers and QA analysts.

We also work with other departments from CINQ. For special projects, we sometimes consult with their UX specialists and business development or growth team. 

How did you come to work with CINQ Technologies?

We were having a hard time expanding in the US due to a scarcity of developers, so I went to an event called Nearshore Americas to actively seek partnerships with companies. I met with a professional consultancy that helps companies like mine partner with nearshore, offshore, or global outsourced companies. They made recommendations for three companies, from which we ended up selecting CINQ.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve probably spent somewhere between $2 million–$5 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We were introduced to CINQ in 2017 and we kicked off the project at the beginning of 2018. Our partnership is ongoing.

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

We’ve probably done around 50 projects with CINQ and each one has its own success metrics. We try to define upfront a ballpark estimate of the time and costs and correlate back to that at the end of each project. We track every task, sprint, release, and deployment. 

A big success point is being able to deliver on time and communicate changes throughout so that we could manage our customers’ expectations. On that front, I would say we’ve been pretty successful.

How did CINQ Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

CINQ is excellent in terms of communication. Any time they're not able to see the deadline, they would let us know.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re not order-takers. In my book, working with order-takers is not the greatest experience because they just do what we tell them. If we provide them with requirements that are not great, we end up with a subpar product. 

However, whenever we give CINQ a task or project, they dive in, try to understand the requirements, and ask questions. The team makes suggestions if they want to challenge the design or have ideas about how to make something more efficient. These guys definitely go above and beyond, by being thoughtful and proactive in communicating about things like that.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I think turnover is the biggest thing that has bit us the most. There have been instances when developers’ skills and performance don’t align with their job titles. 

A possible area of improvement would be to have a better way to manage and assign the right job level to the right person. This way, they wouldn’t have a junior-level developer being perceived as mid-level, or a mid-level being perceived as a senior. We’ve called this out a few times and they’ve been willing to work with us on it, so it hasn't been a huge problem. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

To get the most out of it, build a team that can work autonomously. CINQ is not the kind of company where you can hire 1–2 people, so you have to think of the kind of company that you partner with. CINQ can provide several developers, QA people, and possibly even a product owner so you can have a self-sufficient team to whom you can delegate and entire projects.

It might be tempting to hire only a couple of developers, but they’ll be able to gain a lot more efficiency and autonomy if you hire Scrum Masters, squad leaders, or QA analysts as well. This way, you don’t become a bottleneck that holds them up from getting work done. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior VP of engineering for Apostrophe. We’re an administrator of self-funding healthcare benefit plans.

What challenge were you trying to address with CINQ Technologies?

We’re using CINQ Technologies as a software engineering provider.

What was the scope of their involvement?

CINQ has been developing our business software. They’ve been providing us with a stream of resources for the last year, and they offer a relatively full service in terms of product development capabilities.

What is the team composition?

Among CINQ’s resources are project managers, development managers, front and backend web developers, and quality assurance engineers for testing the automation. We also have a number of other resources on our site collaborating with them. My internal team is in charge of product management, and another group of resources complements them on more high-end and advanced software architecture.

How did you come to work with CINQ Technologies?

We found CINQ through another partner. This company has helped us find resource providers in other countries a few times.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend close to $40,000–$50,000 a month. It wasn’t that much at the beginning, but it ramped up. So far, we’ve spent around $500,000–$600,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together around May 2020, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

The quality of CINQ’s work has been good. We started interviewing them and quickly ramped them up. Over this time, they’ve matured and gelled together as a team — they’ve been as good as any team that can do that.

How did CINQ Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

CINQ uses the tools that we’ve created and put out. For project management, they use Jira.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I really like the team that CINQ put together. They have a really good culture within the company, and their management supports their team very well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There have been times when we’ve had to find skilled resources, and it takes a little bit longer than I’d like. That’s not necessarily CINQ’s fault, but it would be better if they could find them quicker.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be prepared to work with CINQ on getting the right team members in place. Don’t just accept whatever resources they give you; work with them and find the right ones for you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the lead developer at SITA, a major player in air transport communications. Our department is responsible for air messaging based on specific protocols defined by the International and Transport Association (IATA). These include Type B Messaging, Type X Messaging, and X.400. 

What challenge were you trying to address with CINQ Technologies?

We needed help with building out our air communications and messaging system as well as production support. Messaging is the crux of our company, so we wanted to ensure that our system functioned as intended.

What was the scope of their involvement?

CINQ Technologies plays a critical role in developing the major components of our air communications and messaging system, building our custom software in C++.

They faced an initial learning curve in the first few months because our system is extremely complex. We have more than a million lines of code, and the application is huge. Once they crossed that bridge, they were up and running. One of their major releases involved supporting our server migration from IBM AIX to Red Hat Linux. That was an amazing achievement for the team.

CINQ Technologies has also provided production support to maintain mission-critical applications. If these apps go down, flights won’t take off. They help us maintain 99.99% availability.

What is the team composition?

We started with eight people and grew to 12. During the pandemic, we cut down to seven. There’s an architect, five developers, and a tester.

How did you come to work with CINQ Technologies?

Other teams in our company had also hired them, so we considered them for the project. We ended up choosing them because we were comfortable with the time zone, and they had outstanding developers. These were smart people who provided great quality work. After interviewing all of the candidates, we shortlisted a few and picked our team members.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent $450,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2015, and the work is ongoing.

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

Our success metrics are based on open defects for development and production support — we judge them based on the number of calls they attend and if they can successfully solve problems. They’ve done a fantastic job to date.

A better gauge of their work is how they behave one-on-one with us. Nothing can replace human judgment in terms of how people work. I’m very happy with their performance and enjoy working with them. They have outstanding talent and a very high work ethic. Everyone is extremely professional with their interactions, too. 

How did CINQ Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

They follow whatever we define. We have a lot of liberty and a very open culture working with them. We use email, Microsoft Teams, and Azure.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m a big fan of theirs. They’re high-end developers who deliver impressive work quality.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only minor problem is people leaving because the market is quite fluid. That can be a problem when we have to keep training new resources on a system that’s so complex and huge.

CINQ Technologies has been doing a good job on this front. They’re highly resilient in putting procedures in place so that they can train newcomers. Even now, they’re working toward making that onboarding process better.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I highly recommend them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president of Verus Technology Solutions. We’re an IT services provider for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). We have two lines of business: we provide daily IT support and we also do custom business software development.

What challenge were you trying to address with CINQ Technologies?

In our second line of business, we were having challenges finding qualified US-based, more specifically California-based, developers who would meet our cost and quality expectations. We began working with CINQ Technologies when they were still under another name.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The primary relationship we have is for software development resources across different technologies. The primary platforms that we work with are the Microsoft .NET and related technologies, and that's where the bulk of the work with CINQ Technologies has been. 

We have our own project managers, who interface with the client and manage day-to-day aspects of the project, and then the developers that we get from CINQ Technologies are the ones who actually do the software development work. 

We've worked at all different phases of the development lifecycle with them, so their work can involve initial project conception where they define toolsets and the functionality, all the way through core development. They also do testing and deal with bugs and related issues, as well as post-deployment support of those platforms. 

What is the team composition?

It depends on the scope of the project we have going on at any one time. At the moment, we’re working with six engineers, but the team has been as large as 8–10 engineers at one time.

How did you come to work with CINQ Technologies?

I met them at an industry event for our managed services business line. CINQ Technologies was a vendor at the exhibition, so I had the opportunity to get to meet some of their leaders. 

Even though we primarily wanted US-based companies, we decided to give them a try on a small-scale project, and when that went well, the relationship grew.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent approximately $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them at the beginning of 2016, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

From a qualitative perspective, we’ve been very happy with our relationship with CINQ Technologies. They’ve integrated well with our core US team and have been flexible in terms of the expectations that we have from our different clients.

How did CINQ Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

We get some projects where the client wants to start in a rush, and the team is able to get us resources quickly. In other cases, the projects take more time to get approved, but they’ve been understanding and patient. We primarily use email, Slack, and Jira to communicate. They integrated seamlessly with our tools.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We really have a true partnership with CINQ Technologies. It’s not just a situation where they provide a service and we pay them for that service; we have a deep relationship with them. 

That flexibility I mentioned comes from having formed a strong relationship with them because we understand each other’s needs and the ups and downs of the project. We value our partnership.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The one issue we’ve had is different elements of communication, and we’ve worked with them to work through communication issues when we’ve had them. It comes down to the fact that there are cultural differences because CINQ Technologies is Brazil-based.

There hasn’t been anything that we weren’t able to get over, but there were times where lack of communication was an issue and put us in situations where we didn't have all the information we needed to be able to relate to our clients.

When those issues have come up, we’ve been open about them and have talked about them. That actually helped to strengthen our relationship. It’s much better than it was when we first started with them, but there’s still room for improvement.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you’re coming from the position I was in five years ago of not having worked with an outsourced, overseas development firm, just give it a try. There are preconceived negatives that are associated with outsourcing software development, but those haven’t ended up not being the case in our relationship with CINQ Technologies.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Corvalent is a Delaware Corporation that designs and manufactures Industrial Computing Solutions including hardware and software since 1993. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, we have branches in North East and Southwest of United States, as well as in Brazil, Israel and Taiwan. Our corporate mission is Empowering computing solutions to enable you with a peace of mind.

For what projects/services did your company hire CINQ Technologies?

Corvalent hired CINQ to assist on developing an industrial asset performance monitoring software solution that provides customers with better productivity, higher efficiency and maximize profitability.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals was to design a robust industrial application software platform to be able to service all twelve segments of our industrial industry, providing customers with a quick time to full application development delivering significant benefits where clients would see the benefit of improving revenues, saving significant costs and high levels of security.

How did you select this vendor?

We found CINQ doing a research for the best and most established software developers in Brazil. Some of our criteria was to make sure, the vendor was flexible, reliable, creative, well structured, experienced and able to communicate eloquently in English and Portuguese.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

CINQ provide augmented services of UI, UX, Front end and Back end development of our application platform

What was the team composition?

Off and on we hired about 6-7 professionals from CINQ, including project managers, SCRUM Masters, UI/UX designers as well as Senior Programmers.

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

We were able to maximize and optimize our development process, lower the costs as well as increase efficiency in the design process. We were also very impressed with CINQ development process.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project Management was done on both sides, here at Corvalent as well as internally at CINQ. Communication was customized to our needs and CINQ offered a high level of flexibility in adjusting to our requirements.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

What we found most impressive about CINQ was that the entire staff, including the principals of the organization were people with integrity, passion and extremely humbled. Their level of creativity and their commitment to accountability is something I have not seen before. That is extremely important to us and to our customers.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I know forecasting time to develop can be a huge challenge for any development organization. We would like to see a more conservative approach to lead time forecast and deliver the services ahead of time, below the estimated budget. This certainly creates a high level of partnership and trust, as well as very long term engagements with customers.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We deliver solutions to help modernize legacy systems and migrate to newer platforms. I was the CTO during the project.

For what projects/services did your company hire CINQ Technologies?

We needed to expand our software development organization in order to help us catch up on projects that were lagging behind or needed updates.

What were your goals for this project?

To migrate an antiquated Applet-based application and switch it to a modern web-based application.

How did you select this vendor?

I’d worked with them in the past, so I already knew the quality of their people and deliverables. Time was important in this project, and the quality of the deliverables couldn’t suffer, so CINQ was a perfect choice.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

We need to remove legacy integration using Java Applet technology and move it to a web-based application. Modern browsers don’t Java anymore, but we had a revenue stream that depended on the solution.

The project was a 9-month effort during which they had to familiarize themselves with an all-but-abandoned codebase.

What was the team composition?

One of our only remaining employees with knowledge about the application worked alongside the CINQ team in an agile manner. They provided a project manager, a tech lead, three developers, and a QA engineer.

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

We were up against the clock in terms of the cost of losing an annual revenue stream. Their ability to perform the work within the necessary timeframe helped to save that revenue stream from deteriorating.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We provided access to the tools, such as Jira and BitBucket. We interacted with them as an extension development arm, which was extremely effective.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their ability to get up to speed on the technology and understand the business was second to none. It has always impressed me how well and how quickly they're able to ramp up.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

There isn't much where I could say they need to improve. I will always reach out to CINQ as my first choice for development. The team is fantastic, they’re based in the same time zone as us, and their company culture is similar, all of which make for a remarkable relationship.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a software development manager for a company that offers a fare management system for large airlines.

For what projects/services did your company hire CINQ Technologies?

We hired CINQ Technologies to develop new features for our fare management system and provide maintenance.

How did you select this vendor?

Our VP of software development chose them because he had worked with them in the past and had a very positive experience.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

CINQ Technologies fixed all software defects reported by customers as well as the ones found by our internal QA staff. They also designed and developed new features and assisted in implementing new systems for new airline customers. We’ve upgraded the product with them once a year since 2013.

What was the team composition?

We have a flexible staff of 8–12 Java Developers and Oracle PL/SQL developers. CINQ Technologies also provides assistance with Level 3 support.

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

Since working with CINQ Technologies, we’ve gone through five successful upgrade cycles and have implemented the software to over 10 new customers, which gives us a much larger market share in the fare management space. Overall, we’ve been able to produce a higher quality product and provide a better service to our customers at a lower cost.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We were assigned a dedicated project manager from the start and have continued with that model.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

CINQ Technologies is always looking for ways to improve their business and their staff’s technical knowledge. They’re also very accommodating with our changing needs, scaling the team up or down as needed.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

It’s always a challenge to find excellent technical staff that also have experience in the airline industry. Improving their staff’s business knowledge is something they can work on.