What was the scope of their involvement?
I recruited Digiteum at the company I worked for previously. I’ve worked with them for maybe 4 or 5 years and they’ve been my sole development resource over the period. When I was at my previous agency, we hired them for tablet app development. They did some work for us for Corbis. We did 2 tablet apps and probably 3 or 4 website builds. That was iOS, PHP, WordPress, a backend powered website, and some customized Tumblr blogs, all for the same client.
Then we used them to help us develop a software as a service business, specifically an administrative backend CMS to build customized tablet apps. It was a system that would compile apps by drawing content from multiple social feeds for our clients. We sold that as a service to our clients. More recently, we designed and built a website for an Asian-funded bank in Africa. It included integrating foreign exchange systems, a federal exchange platform, and money exchange systems. That was a high-security project since we dealt with banking data and individual data as well. Plus, the site needed to be very responsive.
After that, we built an app for Instagram. Instagram sponsored the music awards here in England called the Brit Awards. We installed tablets in the back of the limousines that took all of the musicians and celebrities to the show. Using our app, they could take a photo while they were in the back of the car and it got posted on Instagram. We also built a mobile app for another startup client of ours. It was a photographic app called I Remember. They built an augmented reality app on iOS for a soccer team called Aston Villa.
Basically, everything I’ve done in the last 4 or 5 years has probably been built by Digiteum—probably 5 or 6 websites and 6 or 7 apps. Digiteum provides resources as we need them, then we do the sales, design, and strategy. They put project and development resources and bring it to market. We worked with a number of people over that period of time, developing relationships with some of the staff. Eugene and Tatiana are on project management, while QA has been a couple of different people. We’ve probably had 4 different iOS developers but we usually went to the same lead development team. There were probably 2 Android developers. For the backend, it’s probably 3 of 4. It tends to be very scalable, which was one of the reasons we chose Digiteum in the first place. We fire a problem at them and they come back shortly after with a solution.
How did you come to work with Digiteum?
They actually approached me through LinkedIn because they were impressed by the mobile development work we had done at the time. We looked at lots of different options from the UK, Brazil, and Poland. Then we met Mike and Julia from Digiteum. We narrowed it down to the guys in Brazil and Digiteum in Belarus. We went to visit, went through the project and came out of that convinced that they were the best people to do it. The time zone was an important factor, and the length of time on the plane to go and see them or for them to see us was really important. The price was probably third; relative to a UK-based developer, they’re very high value. Now they come to visit us more than we visit them. We found that Digiteum’s breadth of experience and focus on mobile development was a good fit for what we needed. They’re largely for app development but also have the ability to work on .NET, PHP, etc.
How much have you invested with Digiteum?
We’ve paid $500,000 to $1 million for their services.
What is the status of this engagement?
I started with them in January 2012.
To date, Digiteum has completed 50% of the work with the other half still to come. So far, feedback indicates that their designs are aesthetically advanced. All parties attend regular update calls and the team requires little oversight. Scheduling and communication are areas for improvement.