OceanoBe Technology

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CEO of Prometeus Tech, a Romanian IT services company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with OceanoBe Technology?

We needed a software development partner because we're a small team for some of the projects coming our way.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We've worked on multiple projects with OceanoBe Technology. We collaborated with the team for one of our local customer's project, a church that received some funds. They came to us with a project, and we found OceanoBe Technology to help us. The church wanted an internal management system for their employees, cars, fleet, and budgeting.

The project consisted of six modules, including online registration, since laws in Romania require all organizations to register any inbound or outbound document, maintenance for the projects that come from EU funds, and the last module was related to all the buildings they own.

We presented the project to OceanoBe Technology and told them to do the discovery phase and propose something to us. After that, they started the development phase. They did the design work and sent us a presentation with the proposal, architecture, and costs. They used Java on the backend and Angular on the frontend.

We've also worked on other small projects with them. One of them was on PHP.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 5–10 people. Two or three are responsible for management, and the rest are developers. The team has changed throughout the engagement since we're dependent on the customer's funds and needed to stop at some point.

How did you come to work with OceanoBe Technology?

We went to OceanoBe Technology because we didn't want a big company with many structures. We signed the NDA and the contract and started working.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent between $50,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2020, and the collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project itself is a success. We don't have other metrics because the project is on private servers. Moreover, the church is satisfied, and we have a letter of recommendation from them. OceanoBe Technology has a lot of projects with us, and they're our leading partner.

After the development phase lasted a couple of months, we did a ramp-down for the second phase and performed testing, and the church found a list of bugs. We addressed them on Jira, and OceanoBe Technology allocated someone to fix the bugs and offered us support.

How did OceanoBe Technology perform from a project management standpoint?

They've mostly delivered on time and within budget. We've told them the church doesn't have more money to invest, so we had a tight budget, but we are currently working on other smaller projects.

We use Jira and GitHub, and we have two-week sprints. OceanoBe Technology has shared the progress with the client, and we've been present at the big demos once a month. They've also helped us with the servers.

OceanoBe Technology has set up a Slack account for me and we also communicate via email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have very senior people who do the job quickly and well. The amount of work has been a bit much for the money, but they've understood it was for a social cause. They've taken a part of the code from the project and invested to ensure it was done. The resources they've invested in this project are certainly more expensive than they've charged us. I really appreciate that. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

It has been a bit tough when we've asked for different programmers. They didn't have PHP developers, but we had a project in PHP. It wasn't easy initially, but they ultimately got us the PHP project.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Contact them as quickly as you can. Consider OceanoBe Technology is working with many banks, so they're really trustworthy. If they manage those types of projects, they can manage any project.