Romexsoft

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of a healthcare marketplace based in Cambridge, UK. We are the leading online platform that digitalises consumer medication, an industry that is still 98% manual. They are the only B2B2C marketplace in this space, offering a quick and seamless prescription experience for patients by bringing thousands of local pharmacies to an online digital platform. With this unique model, they offer a faster, more scalable service than online pharmacies without incurring any of the logistics and admin costs.

For what projects/services did your company hire Romexsoft?

Development operations on managing all of our AWS infrastrcuture

What were your goals for this project?

We would like to focus on product delivery with our internal team and utilise the external resources to manage infrastructure operations 24/7 so that we can fulfil our SLAs to our enterprise clients.

How did you select Romexsoft?

We evaluated a couple of DevOps companies in the UK and remotely. Romexsoft was able to offer very detailed technical solutions and had experience managing different cloud services for UK companies. Also, they were able to provide improvements work on the top of the daily maintenance and support work.

Describe the project in detail.

Coordinated with AWS/DevOps to run a Well-Architected Review to identify the improvements.

• Setup monitoring and alerts system and improved by DevOps
• Moved all our services to containers and re-engineered our deployment using ECS and Fargate to enable our releases to be smoother and easier and provide the building blocks to a more automated workflow. Audit and deleted unfinished projects from previous DevOps to save cost.
• Scheduled disaster recovery process.
• Cost reduction on AWS and Twilio, intercom and shut down other systems. Design and implemented Android CI/CD with AWS

What was the team composition?

We have 4 backend developers internally and they have 5 devops engineers on rotation.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We were able to increase our SLA from 99% to 99.5% with transparent status page and escalation process. We also had disaster recovery and post mortem reports.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We were able to communicate via slack via the right channels on a daily basis. We have set up all of the alerts and monitoring system on Slack. and web dashboard. We use JIRA and confluence to manage workflow and backlog items.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are very technical and hands-on when incidents happened.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Improve their reporting and communication style. Would love to see more proactively reporting and suggested improvements.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We link together technology and the cloud, turning a factory into a smart manufacturing environment. Together we create a solid base, add intelligent cloud-based software and help our customers optimise, predict & innovate with real-time data. Our cloud-based applications reassure that any process becomes more efficient, reliable & accessible. Remi van Wijngaarden, Founder

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

Front-end development services. Deliver a high-quality OEE solution with good-looking, creative dashboards that meet the needs of the customer.

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

Via our hardware partner.

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

David was responsible for translating our base UI design to a fully working product grade single page app in Vue (with Typescript). David showed autonomy and curiosity in solving things the right way. He did not only implement what was asked but also experiment with new ideas and improvements. 

Our Vue app integrated with a AWS AppSync GraphQL api, and AWS Amplify for authorisation. All business logic was covered with Jest unit tests and Cypress blackbox tests.

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

• 1 tech lead
• 1 senior developer 
• 2 medior software developers
• 1 PLC developer
• 1 front-end developer
• 1 program manager
• 1 project manager

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

With our OEE solution, the customer has insight into whether his production level is being achieved to the maximum and which teams are most effective (efficiency), its machines need to be scheduled for maintenance (predictive maintenance).

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

The professional, pleasant cooperation and the range of skilled developers who are very pleasant to work with, both as a person and in terms of knowledge.

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

no

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of LearnCube, we provide white-label Virtual Classroom software for live online education.

For what projects/services did your company hire Romexsoft?

The challenge was scaling out services rapidly to deal with a peak in demand as a result of Covid-19. The Romexsoft team has helped us monitor and scale our I.T infrastructure while optimizing costs.

By improving our monitoring and server performance we were able to identify bottlenecks and performance issues to improve system response time and reliability. They also helped us improve our autoscaling infrastructure while reducing costs.

One significant project to reduce costs was replacing our third party real-time messaging (pub/sub backend) with a custom WebSockets solution using AWS API Gateway, lambda, and ElastiCache services. Since then we have worked on proactive load testing and to help us to continue to scale while optimizing costs.

What were your goals for this project?

Increase scale, improve reliability, decrease costs, proactively identify performance issues.

How did you select Romexsoft?

Originally we found on google, they showed a good understanding of our current AWS infrastructure, reasonable price structure and had the team and service that would help support us as we grow such as adding fully manged 24/7 monitoring.

Describe the project in detail.

There were several small projects in total but the main project was a real-time messaging system using AWS API Gateway with WebSockets, Lambda, and ElastiCache services. We needed a real-time backend for synchronizing whiteboards and classroom data between students and teachers. Reliability, latency, cost and security were all significant factors.

Romexsoft recommended Amazon's API Gateway as a fully managed service that handles APIs at any scale. It also supports two-way WebSocket messaging and event handling events handling, which was important for us to trigger a call back function based on the message/event type.

The WebSocket connections are initiated from the client-side via Vue.js and passes through API Gateway to a Node.js AWS Lambda function that facilitates the WebSocket communication and storage using AWS ElastiCache (using primary and read replicas in different availability zones to support high availability and performance.)

We have logs setup in cloud watch and can easily scale this solution further if needed.

What was the team composition?

In house we had 2 fullstack developers assisting with this project but the bulk of the work was completed by Romexsoft and their team of engineers and system architects.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The system has shown to be significantly cheaper than our previous third-party alternative, since implemented we have it's proven to be reliable and can be scaled our further in the future if needed.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The Romexsoft team are easy to work with, we used Slack, email and zoom calls to do regular catchups and when needed. They facilitated direct calls with AWS when additional expertise was required to increase API quota limits. The team are always quick to reply.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The team is very knowledgeable and quick to acquire answers if further research is required. They were also very efficient in handing over the project upon completion. They are also proactive in recommending/identifying infrastructure problem spots and potential cost reductions.

They also provided payment plan that helprf de-risk the project cost and timeframe this gave us peace of mind as this was a migration from one solution to another and this way we reduced the need to pay the costs for both the new and old solution at the same time.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We've been happy with Romexsoft and have several future projects we will be working with them on.

Please describe your company and your position there.

DevOps and Support manager in Israeli AdTech company. Company provided millions of concurrent users with digital, video and audio advertisement assets.

For what projects/services did your company hire Romexsoft?

Company decided to go outsource with NOC, DevOps and IT services. I contracted Romexsoft to provide those and managed their engineers on daily basis.

What were your goals for this project?

Took overall responsibility for: 24/7 NOC DevOps and Support Scripting and consulting service Monitoring and Alerting 1-st, 2-nd and 3-rd tiers supporting developers

How did you select this vendor?

Found online several candidates, decided go with Romexsoft after interview

Describe the project in detail.

Company is 24/7/365 online service with high-load activity. Due the business model, everything need be optimized and always available - company makes its profits from arbitrage and from providing advertisements to end-users, so no chance for mistakes, or you are being kicked off the partner platforms.

Those are the reasons we need provide 100% effective and smart service. Servers and systems need be planned wise and run smooth. Everything need be monitored and failures fixed quickly. All IT systems and software is permanently reviewed and optimized to make ROI higher and survive in this hard market of online advertising.

What was the team composition?

We were assigned team of 1-st level/NOC 24/7 engineers who planned and built overall monitoring/alerting of all key assets of company. Documentation was prepared to provide playbooks for night/weekends. Everything was monitored and triggered 2-nd level engineers who act to solve the issue and provide reports/recommendations to 3-rd level/architects.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

After years of operation, we can summarize:

1. Zero failures, besides coming from parts of system which is not cost-effective to be redundant.
2. We respond in minutes far below the SLA limits.
3. All possible media involved: chat, emails, tickets, weekly meetings
4. Company success to survive and make money, cash-flow positive.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Workflow is smooth. Both tech levels and C-levels communicate effectively

What did you find most impressive about this company?

During pandemic Romexsoft show flexibility and adapted both their offer and understanding of changing needs, we are together in this boat.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Few 1-st level engineers may improve their written English skill

Please describe your company and your position there.

TIM Media is powered by Somoto - a publicly traded company in the TLV stock exchange. We are Adtech veterans with years of experience and a deep understanding of the publisher landscape. We work closely with publishers to tailor the right solutions that will keep both you and your readers happy.

I am the COO of the company focused and I manage all of the company's products

For what projects/services did your company hire Romexsoft?

We have identified in our organization a risk in having all the development teams in house in terms of recruitment and replacement of employees. In order to solve it, we decided to test an offshore team for one of our products.

What were your goals for this project?

We have chose to start with a team for our newest product at the time. In order to build the product, we have decided to start with a 1 self-sufficient team of full stack developers with frontend and backend experience (mostly vanilla JS, php, vue and node js).

How did you select this vendor?

In order to find the write vendor we have created a document stating our company portfolio, projects and development needs. We have asked for recommendations from colleagues and friends and created a list of 15 companies that could fit our services.

We have talked to all of the vendors about our requirements and expectations. For the companies that met our needs, we have also conducted technical interviews with some of their developer to estimate their recruitment abilities.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The project is still ongoing so I can't conclude it just yet. As we tend to work in agile flow, we work with the developers on all the features and functionalities together. The vendor is responsible for the employees - everything from their recruitment, equipment and up to well being.

What was the team composition?

As mentioned, Romexsoft are involved in recruitment of the developers and their growth by providing different courses and activites. The team have almost tripled in the past year.

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

The development team is very significant to the company success. While maintaining a lower development cost we have managed to scale our adoption by more than 100x and signed a few key clients.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mcclatchy-launches-text-to-speech-audio-feature-across-its-30-local-news-sites-301048817.html

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

First it is important to mention that all of the developers who joined the team are not only good developers, but extremely great people. We have become great friends and it is great to see that the success of the project means as much to them as it is to us. In order to manage the work, we use GitHub, Jira, Slack and zoom.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We have found a team of devoted people who care about their clients and are very attentive to our needs and solving challenges.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I believe that as with every project, it is extremely important to do a proper due diligence in order to avoid conflicts in the future.

Please describe your organization.

We are a product development consultancy specializing in product and project management for medium to large companies, as well as startups. We provide other expertise, like product management, customer development, development of software and hardware, as well as UX/UI [user experience/user interface] design.

What is your position?

I am the head of project management.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Romexsoft?

Our primary focus is on product management. We partner with a number of studios for technology development work. Romexsoft is one of those studios and we leverage them to help us build solutions faster than we would be able to otherwise

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

Romexsoft has worked on quality assurance for a number of our projects. We have a research and development studio that collaborates with their team in order to ensure that our technology is of the highest quality. They handle everything, from software testing to documentation.

They've worked on a healthcare platform for feedback and surveys aimed at users in the United Kingdom. Another project involved online transactions. Our products come as web and mobile applications for iOS and Android.

We work on regression testing, manual as well as automated tests, usability testing and so on. We've used the environments set up by Romexsoft and we’ve found them very effective.

We've worked on four or five projects simultaneously with Romexsoft. At the moment, we only work with them for quality assurance projects, but it is possible that we will contract them for technology development in the future.

How did you come to work with Romexsoft?

Our main office is in London, but my partner is based in Ukraine. He is in charge of creating a partner network and forging contacts. He participates in a lot of events as a result, and came across Romexsoft at one of them.

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

The total cost for their services has been between $14-28,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Most of our projects remain ongoing. Our most recent quality assurance project was for our financial application.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Once we've decided to engage in quality assurance services from Romexsoft, the quality of our projects improved significantly. The company we'd employed to develop our technology also handled our QA, so we needed to apply an external perspective into the work they provided. Romexsoft brought in a lot of knowledge and insight into how the developers for that project were performing and what their level of quality was. Their project manager is in charge of the QA department. He is very knowledgeable in this area, and we've had a generally positive experience. We’ve never had an issue in which we’ve delivered a defective solution to and end-customer.

How did Romexsoft perform from a project management standpoint?

They're a professional company. Estimations are done on a two-week basis. Romexsoft has always stuck to them in terms of delivery time and cost.

We use Jira and Taiga for project management. Romexsoft is also developing a custom platform for status tracking, which will be available to users very soon. We communicate primarily through Slack and Skype. Romexsoft also collaborates directly with our other partners, sometimes coming to work in the same building. Face-to-face relationships are always positive.

What distinguishes Romexsoft from other providers?

From my experience in working with a number of partners, I found Romexsoft to be driven by knowledge and always keen on extending their expertise. Their team attends various seminars and classes constantly, which keeps them on the cutting-edge.

Please describe your organization.

We offer a comprehensive product for credit unions, banks and other vendors, which allows their clients to have access to credit scores and find savings opportunities on an ongoing basis.

What is your position?

I am the vice president of products.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Romexsoft?

Keep costs low and leverage scaling up the development organization as we grew.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

Romenxsoft handles most of the software development for our key website. They also provide QA [quality assurance] services for us.

How did you come to work with Romexsoft?

They were referenced by a staff member. We considered a couple of other companies, but Romexsoft stood out through their ability to scale their resources. They were able to give us a dedicated team with a project manager and organized them fairly quickly. The cost was a big contributing factor, as it always is when outsourcing, but their flexibility and scalability mattered most to us.

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

On an annual basis, we spent between $200,000-1,000,000 with Romexsoft.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have an ongoing relationship with them.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We don’t publish metrics.

How did Romexsoft perform from a project management standpoint?

They delivered their work on time and within budget.

We used standard tools for project management, including Jira for tracking our bi-weekly Scrum-based sprints.

What distinguishes Romexsoft from other providers?

They have very good developers. The Romexsoft team is fairly well versed in English, both written and spoken. We haven't had the same problem with them as with other vendors.

Is there anything Romexsoft could have improved or done differently?

Comparably, Romexsoft is smaller than traditional outsourcing companies and, thus, they don’t always have resources available to us on-demand, especially when more specific technical expertise is needed for a short project.

This is not so much a negative, as it is an observation. We expect that Romexsoft will have a richer roster as they grow.

Please describe your organization.

We're a software company. Our software is designed for the home health industry.

What is your position?

I'm the founder.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Romexsoft?

We were looking for developers to implement the product that we envisioned. We outsourced the entire development. We did a bit of research and ended up with Romexsoft.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

They are our entire development team, and they've been able to accomplish every challenge that was thrown at them. The product has been functioning and has been on the market for a while. It's very successful, and that speaks for itself.

Our system enables companies in the home health space to operate all aspects of their activity: business operational aspects as well as clinical. There are thousands of implemented features. The product is evolving constantly. We're adding new features and expanding to other niches of the home health industry. Development is going on all the time.

They use a variety of tools. The software itself is Java-based. We also use Adobe Air, which is a client development tool. I pass on some of the architectural aspects and business requirements to the team lead. I work with that person, and he manages the team there. We have five developers and two QA [quality assurance] people.

We have some influence on the people assigned to our project but, mostly, we leave it up to them.

How did you come to work with Romexsoft?

I scoured the Internet, and asked my colleagues. I don't exactly know who passed the information to me, but we began conversations with them and brought them on board eventually.

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

We've spent roughly $1.5 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in 2009. It's an ongoing relationship.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The success of the product speaks for itself. We are far ahead of our competition in terms of features, usability, and overall strategic direction. The team at Romexsoft has added to our internal strength. Together, we have been an unmatched combination.

How did Romexsoft perform from a project management standpoint?

There will always be defects, but there is a QA team to catch them. They have been very professional and competent about delivering objectives. Their technical strength is bar none as far as my own experience goes. Their competence is one of the key elements of our success.

We collaborate through our tech software, JIRA, with which we track features, bugs, and overall progress.

What distinguishes Romexsoft from other providers?

I haven't worked with any other offshore company, but I know that I wouldn't even consider working with anybody else at this point, having experienced their quality of work. As far as unique capabilities, I couldn't compare them to another offshore firm, but they deliver all their requirements successfully, and we've had a productive relationship.

Is there anything Romexsoft could have improved or done differently?

I can't really cite anything specific. They had their process down 100 percent. Any issues that came up, they have resolved. No relationship or company is going to be immune to this. The question is how well those things are dealt with, and how many people are sitting on top of them. That is critical, and it's never been an issue.

My recommendation for prospective clients is to have someone engaged on their side. I am that person here. I don't know if the relationship would be as successful if we had a hands-off approach. We are very much engaged. We don't actually do development work, but we're involved in user acceptance testing, and providing good, solid specifications. This isn't anything specific to Romexsoft. It's going to be true for any firm of that kind.

Please describe your organization.

We make digital color tools for the home deco industry. For instance, software that allows you to upload a photo of your own home and apply new colors onto it. We have product configurators and so on.

What is your position?

I am the founder and chief executive officer.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Romexsoft?

We couldn't find enough qualified engineers in Holland. We started to look elsewhere, and came across Romexsoft. We just needed more resources available to complete our project work within our timeframes. Scalability and cost effectiveness were big factors in our search. 

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We have projects that use Flash and Java. We have staff in Amsterdam that supervise the people at Romexsoft. After awhile, we started giving them more and more responsibility. Eventually, they did things on their own. We interact directly with the engineers.

When we started out, they operated as a contractor for us. During the course of the years, they became kind of an extension of our own team. That's worked very well for us.

Delegating developers for our projects is a shared responsibility. They will come up with some people that might be a good fit, and we discuss it. They don't impose anyone on us. It's really a two-way discussion. We always have the power to switch people around if we feel like we need to.

How did you come to work with Romexsoft?

We found them through general research. Resource availability was a determining factor in choosing them, along with price.

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

It runs in the hundreds of thousands, but I'd rather not be too exact.

What is the status of this engagement?

The relationship is ongoing although, at the moment, we don't have many projects. That's not their fault, though. If the work picks up, I'm certainly planning on extending our collaboration.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We have collaborated with other IT [information technology] companies. By comparison, our team, including Romexsoft, was able to deliver faster and at lower cost. Together with them, I think we work more efficiently than much of the competition. At times, I need to slow them down a bit. They keep working during the night and on weekends, and I have to tell them that it's not that urgent. That has been my problem, rather than getting them to work.

How did Romexsoft perform from a project management standpoint?

They've always delivered on time, although that has been largely my own responsibility as well. I acted as project manager in most cases. The tools we use for project management are JIRA, Basecamp, Google Hangouts, and agile.

What distinguishes Romexsoft from other providers?

They take it personally to deliver upstanding work. It's very much a part of their corporate culture. I appreciate that about them.

Is there anything Romexsoft could have improved or done differently?

I couldn't think of anything. Through the years, we've worked as a joint process and, whatever we do, we always keep improving.

My advice to anyone looking to manage an IT [information technology] project is to know what they need. I always define the problem first. Every piece of software exists to solve a problem. When that is clear, the management becomes much easier. You can delegate to developers, and they can come up with solutions. When the problem is not clear, and you just need a page with a button here and there, they won't understand what it's about, and the solution will be below par.

Another tip is not to try to control them too much. Give them some space to do their own work. You have to remember that they're the experts, and your job is to guide their thinking, not actually manage their problem solving.