HOOLOOVOO

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of development for The Kindred Group, an online gambling company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Hooloovoo?

We needed help with payment integration.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve been partnering with them on quite a number of projects. We continuously collaborate on both projects and through an exchange of strategic guidance. They've assisted with payment integrations and tooling surrounding customer communications using Java. Our software backends are built on Java. While they're primarily Java developers, they also have React back- and frontend developers.

In some of our collaborations, we give them specific guidance on how to build a product. Other times, they play a critical part of the conceptualization journey. They've handled every aspect of development from requirements through maintenance as well.

What is the team composition?

There are around 30 developers.

What is the status of this engagement?

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

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

We’ve grown with them, and their work is a vital part of our company. They're integrated into everything we do. Their quality of work is really high. Since I started working with them, we’ve grown the team from four people to around 30.

We get high-quality deliverables from them. They take ownership of and pride in their work, allowing us to put our full trust in them. They also do 24/7 support for everything they build. We’re extremely happy with the collaboration.

How did Hooloovoo perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management works really well. They follow our development model with self-containing teams with agile leads and product owners. We have precisely the same process with them that we do internally.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their involvement and interest in improving the business is impressive. We have a positive and constructive dialogue, which ensures we get the best value of what we’re trying to build.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We have such a tight relationship. There isn’t anything major that I can say they need to improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Work as a partnership and benefit from their technical skills. It’s quite different from working with a traditional outsourcing partner. It’s nice having a partnership with a mutual agreement on what success looks like.

This review was updated by the Head of Data on September 29, 2020. The original star ratings were: Overall - 5, Quality - 4.5, Schedule - 5, Cost - 4, NPS - 5. New content is below:

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Kindred Group forming one of the largest online gambling companies in the world. We offer 25 million customers a great form of digital entertainment, fine-tuned to present a great experience in a safe and fair environment every day.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Hooloovoo was engaged to support us with development and maintenance of applications (real-time and batch) both in Hadoop tech stack and in AWS. This includes applications related to personalisation, automation in both real-time and batch.

SOLUTION

How did you select Hooloovoo and what were the deciding factors?

Hooloovoo is a partner with Kindred supporting our Tech teams offshore, it was an expansion to also support and staff up the Big Data team.

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

Development and maintenance of applications in both Hadoop tech stack as well as AWS. Mainly using Java, Scala in these tech stacks.

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

Three people, all Big Data developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

General feedback is that the deliverables are of high technical quality.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

The developers are easy to work with, are engadged and have good communication and collaboration skills.

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

They are easy to work with and have a proactive approach.

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

Nothing in particular.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and current director of Relax Gaming Ltd, a game development company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Hooloovoo?

We needed technical resources to augment our internal team.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Hooloovoo took care of the recruitment and screening of the developers that would be added to our team. We worked with the resources on several games, including fantasy sports and casino games, both front- and backend. For the backend, we worked with Java, and the frontend was also various types of JavaScript and React technologies.

The backend of the casino game is very logically demanding. It takes a mathematical specification of how a casino slot game works and implements that logic into algorithms in Java, which produces the results for the game. On the frontend, there was the implementation of the frontend using our own proprietary framework. It was quite a holistic task.

How did you come to work with Hooloovoo?

I’ve worked with Predrag (CEO) for several years in previous roles. I’d had great experiences, so when we needed resources, I knew to reach out to him.

How much have you invested with them?

On a yearly basis, we spent between €75,000–€100,000 (approximately $84,000–$112,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

The collaboration took place between May 2016–January 2019. 

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

We haven’t formally evaluated their success, but we’ve been happy with the quality of their work. We were looking for senior class front- and backend developers, and that’s what we got. They were so top-notch, we actually ended up hiring one of their developers to our full-time team. Hooloovoo was very inclusive in the recruiting process, allowing us to handpick resources according to our needs. It’s worked really well.

How did Hooloovoo perform from a project management standpoint?

Predrag took care of everything surrounding the developers, who were part of our team as any other member. They took place in sprints and were in the management loop. Predrag made sure they had everything they needed, and he was in regular touch with us about how things were going. Hooloovoo was extremely easy to work with, and we really appreciated that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Working with Predrag was amazing. He has great philosophies, and as a senior developer himself, he had a fantastic understanding of what we needed in terms of technical skill sets. It was a relief to work with a recruiting company that had such a high level of technical knowledge. The process was very simple; we never had to explain our needs on a high-level basis. 

Hooloovoo was also very flexible: if our needs ever changed, they were extremely supportive of that.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They provided everything we asked for, but they could’ve participated a bit more in practically suggesting and coaching us the other way. Having an external party inside our development team could’ve provided third-party insight into what works and what doesn’t on our end. That said, it can be a bit of a slippery slope, and it’s not something that we asked for. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Talk through the goals and the vision for whatever you’re building. Hooloovoo will not only understand the technical specifications but the end goal.