ScienceSoft

Please describe your organization.

At the point in time that we worked with ScienceSoft, it was called something else, and it offers a cashback portal to customers. A customer may affiliate himself or herself with the portal, make an account, and then when they proceed to follow links and shop at their favorite brands, like Wal-Mart or Amazon, they can earn cash back through what's normally termed the affiliate marketing. We then share those profits with the customer. That is our core portal and platform.

What is your position?

At the time of the ScienceSoft integration, I was vice president of engineering, but now I'm the CTO.

What business challenge were you trying to address with ScienceSoft?

I inherited the contract. They were about a month into it. The original idea was to facilitate a migration from the prior hosting to Amazon Web Services hosting and, as such, to implement some of the best standards for hosting, databases, and servers.

We haven't since expanded the scope of their involvement, mainly because the system that they were migrating, and assisting with migration, has been slated for sun setting, and a new system will be replacing it. Their expertise was no longer required with the team that we had assembled for the new system. Essentially, with the additional staffing in-house, we now have the talent internally.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We were allocated a team of four developers. Two were working, one was the account manager, and one was the project manager. Our interactions were mediated by the project manager. Our developer was working with their developers when they were on specific things, like moving a specific service, to understand the implication.

How did you come to work with ScienceSoft?

I'm actually unaware of that. That was done prior to my start, in a period of time when there was no CTO or vice president of engineering. It was kind of an interesting period for the company. I'm not actually sure about the selection criteria. If I had to put a hunch on it, it was most likely a personal reference from somebody. Most of the decisions seem to have taken that route.

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

I'm not sure. I know it was hourly, and there were a few extensions. Obviously, the costs were beneficial, compared to a United States-based consulting agency, due to the currency situation, but I do not recall the actual financials. It was an hourly-based project, so their statements of work were basically estimatations for the amount of time that it would take. It was a fixed price but based upon hourly.

What is the status of this engagement?

The relationship has ended, due to the implementation of a new system and the addition of in-house staff.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

They were able to increase throughput approximately twofold. That's not saying too much, however. There were signs that this was one of their first gigs on an Amazon migration, merely from the way that they configured the environment. They didn't follow some of the best practices for security and for performance speed. The way that they configured the databases in the replica, the server access, the auto-scaling isn't there. However, a lot of that was hampered by the old codebase that they were having to migrate. It did not lend itself to Amazon's scale. It was not designed for a cloud's scale, and they did not have the scope or the time to re-architect the system.

It was to basically take a giant, monolithic, old stack and place it into Amazon. They were successful in that and they were able to make out approximately a two times throughput compared to the old system, by load balancing the few components that would allow them do to that. It's kind of a hard one to judge them. The stack does not lend itself to cloud scale. However, there were some of the small things that made it clear that they were not as experienced with Amazon as they perhaps sold themselves to be. Then again, I was not involved in the selection process, so I don't know how they presented themselves and their services. If they sold themselves as experts, or if they sold themselves as experts on PHP and MySQL and they were willing to incur the learning cost of Amazon, I'm not sure.

Since we have terminated the contract, we have fixed malfunctions in-house. We did bring them back on for a very short spike when they needed to modify the database backup solution that they had elected. That's another weird one, Amazon does that for you, and you don't need to pay somebody to do that. There are some examples of things like that, but they were able to come back in, they were able to bring on the same team members who had been involved beforehand. They were able to resolve that little bug quickly and get it up to date, and it's been running smoothly since then.

How did ScienceSoft perform from a project management standpoint?

They delivered the majority of their milestones on time and within budget. They're good at communication as well. We used JIRA for managing the project. It was our in-house JIRA, and we created the project specifically for them. We appreciated how flexible they were with that.

What distinguishes ScienceSoft from other providers?

Nothing that stands out. ScienceSoft has very solid project management, and they do very well on the communications, which shouldn't be a cause to stand out, but it actually is. I think they can be praised for that quite a lot. They were always very clear and concise on where they were. There was never that offshore consultancy dead air or silence that is often so dreaded. They're very on top of it with their communications and their scheduled communication, both written and in a verbal scrum-style updates. They did very well in that respect.

Is there anything ScienceSoft could have improved or done differently?

No. They did quite well both in written and verbal communication. They were on top of it. Their estimations were close. In software, there are always some surprises, and when those occurred, they were quite quick to prompt the conversation for a re-estimation based on newly learned insight.

Without being involved in the selection criteria, I don't know how well they pitched themselves as Amazon experts or if they did at all. If they had pitched themselves as Amazon experts, I would say that they need to reevaluate what that truly means. However, if they were forthright and it was a good learning opportunity, and they were more about being PHP MySQL experts, then they did a great job. They actually got it into place and it's functional. It's just that it doesn't follow some of the best practices with Amazon.

When working with ScienceSoft, I would say it's important to have adequate internal technical oversight, and use ScienceSoft in more of a staff augmentation capacity, rather than in a project bid consultancy style. For a migration like this, it would have been beneficial to have an internal insight that had the knowledge, but didn't necessarily have the time to do the work. Whereas, perhaps in other components of ScienceSoft's expertise, they could absolutely take a project 100 percent and run with it. In this case with Amazon, I would say that they could have done more staff augmentation. If they had guidance, it would have been easier and better for them.

Please describe your organization.

We've developed a turnkey photo solution for adventure tourism businesses. We provide everything an adventure tourism business needs to retail photos to their clients. However, really what we are is a marketing service. We see more value in what people do with the images and how they share the images and generate brand exposure and referrals for our clients.

We try to leverage and make the most out of the content that we sell so that more people are aware of the clients that we work with and more people return and visit those clients. We have a lot of different technologies in our product as far as how we gather these images, to how we retail them and view them, to how we deliver them, and how people access and share them.

What is your position and responsibilities?

I am the president.

What business challenge were you trying to address with ScienceSoft?

We had already developed a first version of our solution. It was more of a beta version software for our system that showed viability at our first location – the first company that we worked with. We had developed that with another company in Minsk [Belarus], but we weren't happy with the correspondence and the ability to work with that company. We were looking to redevelop what we had currently done, with some significant improvements as well. We had a proof of concept, and we had seen success with the technology we had developed, but we wanted to improve it. The other provider didn't allow us to do that, so we redeveloped the entire system with improvements, with ScienceSoft.

Please describe the scope of their involvement more detail.

They've developed Android applications and iterations of our existing app – too many to count. They've developed our web app, which is the system that our clients use to show and deliver the images to their guests. Then, the most recent project, they developed a consumer web application, which is used by photo recipients or people that purchase their images, to download and share their photos. There are really three main things. There is a second application that we developed for the RFID [radio-frequency identification] reader that is connected to our devices, to our cameras. They developed the application that worked with this RFID reader to associate images to RFID tags.

I can't comment on what technologies they used for development. That is above my skill set. Aside from the fact that they developed in Android and Java, and I don't even know what that means.

How did you come to work with ScienceSoft?

With the very first company that I worked with, I worked with a project manager who had left that company and started working for ScienceSoft. He was a very instrumental resource for me even though the development of my original product was with the other company. He was a third-party resource for me, one that I could use to bounce ideas off of because I have no experience in tech. That's not my background. I was just kind of a dreamer, I came up with an idea and I needed somebody to help facilitate it. He had worked for ScienceSoft, and then when I looked to redevelop, I had made the decision that I wasn't getting the feedback that I was looking for from this one other developer, and I decided at that point that I was going to switch developers.

I posted an RFP on Elance and a number of different technology providers made bids on the project. Then, I approached ScienceSoft not through Elance, but through this contact. They also bid on the project, and they were the most comprehensive in their approach. They weren't the most affordable, to be honest, but they were very detail oriented and understood the project from a business perspective. A lot of the other people were like, "Oh yes, we can do it," but didn't lay out a plan. ScienceSoft was very specific in their proposal. They wanted detailed information on what I was looking for and provided a robust estimation, along with a project plan that was very detailed and specific to what I needed. They were clear front-runners of the project, but not the most affordable.

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

On average, it's been around $50,000 a year for four years.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have used them and we still use them. It's been four years.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

They laid that out for me. There are two different models, and we've been working on time and materials. There was another model, but I can't remember the terminology that they used, I think fixed price. I'm not even sure this is the right terminology, but one was time and materials, and the other is project based, where they create an estimation and stay within that quote. We began with more of a time and materials approach, but I'll probably work with the other approach moving forward.

What I liked was that they provided a very detailed project plan, and there is a cost associated with each feature that I developed within the system. Now, I work with a business analyst who takes my idea and puts it into a vision document with technical specifications, and then the project manager and the developers would put that into a project plan. They would provide me with a detailed summary of what pieces they were going to develop, how long it would take, what date they were starting, and when they were finishing.

Then, we would have regular meetings to find out if they were on schedule. They would include some additional time for unexpected contingencies. They were very good at that, and they stayed on schedule. Every single piece that we were developing, they broke it out from the technical specifications and associated a time and cost to it. We were able to maintain the schedule for that development, and they were very good at meeting the timeframe that they had set out.

We also worked on a time and materials basis recently. They actually lined it out the exact same way. They provided options like, "We can develop it based on project or we can be more nimble." I can't remember the terminology they used – it's not time and materials. There was a framework for completing projects where we were more nimble, and we could move in different directions, so we weren't held accountable to the actual project plan. That's what they did for the last development.

I like having something fixed, a very specific plan, especially when we included the business analyst who helped us define our requirements. When she came on board, we were extremely prepared. Previously, I was still in that role of developing technical specifications with the project manager, but we were very detailed this time through. I'll probably work with a business analyst again and work project based, not do time and materials moving forward.

The feedback from other stakeholders and end users was absolutely positive. We're having success, we're growing, and we're receiving more clients all the time. It's our company's vision and value proposition that I think matters to our clients, but the product meets our needs from a value standpoint, and it's been consistently working for our clients. We've had a little downtime in the past and a few minor challenges with delivery. There's always bugs in developing, and it's frustrating, but it's filled our exact requirements and allowed us to build our business.

How did ScienceSoft perform from a project management standpoint?

ScienceSoft met the project deadlines and remained within budget on their side. It's difficult on my side. You want to develop everything, so it's hard once you start down a path. You want to make changes and improvements. I think the only challenge comes with our company trying to be more conservative with what we develop and taking the right approach.

I think you get frustrated because it's expensive to develop things, regardless of whether you're using overseas resources or not. There are a lot of costs associated with developing technology from the ground up, which is what they've done. They've coded everything, so that's expensive. Then, there are challenges with bugs, and it's difficult to expect until you deploy.

In some regard, maybe we've gone over budget, but it's been our responsibility for that. That's where when moving to time and materials, you have to be careful. Probably moving forward, just for my company's sake, we won't be using that model. Then, you create clear expectations of what they're going to develop and what the timeframe is. I like that better, rather than freewheeling.

They provided tools for project management, and one of them was JIRA. Many times, it was more resources that we developed in-house. We were using just their documents. A lot of this stuff is like speaking a different language to me. We did a project where we tested the system, and I think they used something called JMeter. I'm sure there's a number of tools they provided me access to, but I'm not really familiar with them.

Is there anything ScienceSoft could have improved or done differently?

I think there's definitely some waste when you end up working with an overseas vendor, and it's probably around communication. Most of the issues that we've had have been with communication or miscommunication. I'm not saying they can't speak our language – we're absolutely able to communicate back and forth – but I think that there are challenges where they don't understand lay terminology. I think communication is a major issue in all business, and it becomes even harder when you're working with somebody overseas.

They're obviously in a different time zone – they're six hours ahead – so we have a window of opportunity to work with them every morning. That has been to our advantage, in some cases, when we want technology developed and it's critical. If we have a critical bug, they can get it resolved before the next working day, which is good. When we're doing development planning, it's hard because you have a window of opportunity to work with them, and communicating through Skype is not as productive as communicating in person.

There's definitely a waste that you have to anticipate, but it's not necessarily on their side. It can be communication breakdown, or timing, not being able to be with them for eight hours. If you look at an entire project, it would be at least 15 percent faster to do it if you're working with somebody in-house. The benefit is that it's much more affordable, and they have a number of different resources with expertise that I work with. I just can't bring in a business analyst, a project manager, a Java developer, and an Android developer. They can provide all those resources.

That's one area – the communication. Not necessarily a language barrier, but them taking a more active role in understanding what I need to accomplish because I'm not speaking from a technical background. I'm somebody that doesn't have a high expertise in tech, so taking a more active approach in understanding what we need to accomplish or what our goals are, rather than just putting your head down and developing. I'm probably going to go there for our next big development. I'm going to actually visit them and sit in a room together and develop the tech specs and vision document in-house. I think it would be far more productive.

Please describe your organization.

Our company is a systems integrator. We offer consulting, design and development services, and enterprise systems architecture to plan, design, and build enterprise platforms.

What is your position?

I am the chief solutions architect.

What business challenge were you trying to address with ScienceSoft?

They have completed a number of different projects for us. The first one was a SharePoint platform. They were customizing, upgrading, and implementing it for us as well handling our data migration. In this case, there was also a lot of custom workflow design, creating custom templates and views, custom security features, admin groups, migrating the users and permissions, usability, and functional testing – kind of the whole nine yards. There was no way we could have handled all of the work by ourselves within the defined timeline, so we really relied on them to support our delivery. 

Please describe the scope of their involvement in more detail.

None of the projects were that large in size. They lasted about a month here and there – two weeks of development there. I'd say, all in all, we've probably completed five separate SharePoint projects with them, but they also took care of a Salesforce integration with us with a Java-based app. They did an excellent job with that. It was impressive work. They've done a couple of SharePoints for us, in both SharePoint 2012 and in the cloud, Office 365 migration.

There's usually a SharePoint systems administrator. There's always a SharePoint developer for coding custom templates and workflows. Then, there's usually a custom visual design done by a front-end template developer, doing all the CSS-type work to get a custom look and feel to the out of the box SharePoint solution. Then, there's usually someone testing and a day-to-day server specialist, who sometimes troubleshoots network server or hardware issues. We log stories and such, using agile and a JIRA tool, where there's a project plan or a smart sheet.

How did you come to work with ScienceSoft?

I never know where these emails come from, but I get solicitations on a daily basis from companies saying, "We've got .NET developers" and so on. They look at our website, and they see all of our keywords. I don't know if these are automated tools or it's done by salespeople manually, but I think they emailed us, offering resources. I guess their timing was right. They weren't the only vendor that we were considering. We have a big partner network of vendors that we team up with on different specialties and solutions.

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

I'd say total ballpark, we've probably spent $50,000 to $70,000 – somewhere in that range.

What is the status of this engagement?

The timeline of the project was two months, and they completed the work within that allotted timeframe. We're about to do implement a WordPress platform and probably implement some upgrades to the Java app. We'll continue to turn to them for SharePoint-based work. They're far superior to the India or Asia offshore providers, in my opinion. This is just my two cents, but the United States kind of invented systems engineering and software engineering, and we dominate the software industry. Other than SAP and the like, there are no other global software providers outside of the U.S. We take for granted that we're the best at it, but India, Asia, South America claim to be great at it, too, but they're really not. I only really trust code out of Europe and the US.

What I mean by trust, I trust that they're sticklers for standards, syntax, error-free code, principles of object orientation, intuitive design, and so forth. That structured approach to coding and object-oriented design is completely lacking in the rest of the world, in my opinion. Not to make too blanket of a statement, but the fact that they're coming out of Europe helps a ton because they're extremely logical and structured in their project management, their analysis, and their documentation. It's all there.

Could you share any statistics, benchmarks or user feedback from this engagement?

We have a value-based consulting process, so we don't even get into a project until we understand the value it has to the business. Around that is some sort of ROI [return on investment], but that ROI is driven from either efficiency, saving hours, growing the company, helping it scale, eliminating bottlenecks and redundancies, so it's hard to say. In terms of standard metrics, moving all your documents into a SharePoint environment and moving them to the cloud has huge advantages in IT [information technology], infrastructure savings just from a cloud-based architecture, huge savings typically in licensing of all the Microsoft servers you would need to host traditional document servers.

I'd say infrastructure costs – there are a lot of business efficiencies in terms of how they find documents and collaborate. We typically aim for more than 100 percent improvement. For example, let's say it takes me five minutes to find a document now. We don't want to help you find it twice as fast – we want you to find it four times as fast. By consolidating all your documents in the cloud and tagging them for search, you should now be able to find documents in seconds that you probably would have never found before on a flat file structure. We routinely get 200 percent or 400 percent improvement in efficiency, workflow type solutions in a business process. All of our solutions are targeted at that.

They generally run their stuff tight. I think these guys being out of a Western European culture, and they run organized. Sprints typically run on time, they are deadline-oriented, and they can conduct meetings effectively. Even though English is their second language, they're proficient in speaking and writing. They're comfortable with written documentation, too, which is also somewhat rare in the software industry.

How did ScienceSoft perform from a project management standpoint?

The stakeholders that interacted with them were all satisfied with the quality of their work and the consistency of their project management approach. Generally, they are completing all the projects on time and within the budget that was prescribed. They are nailing the sprints, they are nailing the budget, and they're sticking to commitments. One project got a little bit sideways, but I don't know if it was necessarily their fault. The client had trouble nailing down the requirements. That happens from time to time.

I'm not going to say every project is perfect. However, when we're faced with challenges, they knew how to tackle them, and they did it in a fair way. They negotiated the scope or any additional hours in a reasonable way.

What distinguishes ScienceSoft from other providers?

ScienceSoft is pretty organized. A lot of companies tell you they've got all these processes and methods, and then when you start working with them, you always regret it. It's all out the window, and they all say they need more requirements. What's reassuring is that these guys really have in-depth expertise in the field. They're comfortable in that consulting role, like, "We've got this. We're the experts – we'll surface the issues. We're on top of it." That's comforting from a client perspective because we don't always have the answers.

While a lot of other outsourced contract-type people kind of rest back and let the client be the expert. These guys are like, "No, we've got this. We have our own testing techniques, our own this and our own that." They're very comfortable with that, and it's almost like a turnkey outsourcing solution.

Is there anything ScienceSoft could have improved or done differently?

The only one that we ever discussed is about having small teams, where the developer is also the tester. We did have a few defects that slipped through that could have been caught by external testing. We didn't put a tester on the team, so you could say that it's our fault. That's not about them – it's more like a best practice in development, that developers shouldn't be testing their own code. If it's a small project with a small team of one person, for three weeks, it's kind of hard to throw another tester on there.

They probably could have made a stronger recommendation toward an independent tester that would have caught the defect. Whether they made that recommendation and we didn't take them up on it, I can't recall. Anyway, it shouldn't really be a ding against them. Both of us, being systems engineers, should have known better.

Even in an agile environment, it's supposed to be testing as you go, not reserved for the end. But, how many people really have testing embedded in the scrum team? Not many. A lot of people do fall in that traditional waterfall, like, "OK, I developed it. Now, let's add a sprint in for testing." Pure agile is supposed to be releasing production-ready code at the end of every sprint. It kind of implies that independent testing is built-in to the development cycles. That's a minor talking point. I don't know if your clients geek out on such topics. Still, it's a useful piece of advice.

Please describe your company and your position there.

My Company is Bank , Head of Information security office

For what projects/services did your company hire ScienceSoft?

pentation test for web application

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

by searching the best companies in pentation test,it appear number one.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Black Box based on the OWASP Web Security Testing Guide. first test-report- time to fix vulnerability -second test-report

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

3 engineers, Senior Sales Manager-Project Manager-Lead Information Security Specialist

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

no

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow is very good

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

Good team , good response , good feedback.

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

No

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Director of Technology at Ghostlab, a company that makes software enabling people to use cryptocurrency as if it was fiat currency.

For what projects/services did your company hire ScienceSoft?

Gray-box security audit & penetration test.

What were your goals for this project?

Identify any security holes in our system and remediate them.

How did you select ScienceSoft?

We searched online for a list of the most reputable pentest firms and then selected ScienceSoft from a shortlist of 5 candidates.

Describe the project in detail.

Penetration test - they tried to break into all of our services and documented any successful attepts.

What was the team composition?

2 pentesters and a project manager.

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

We received a list of 9 identified security vulnerabilities along with mitigation instructions & ScienceSoft performed a retest to confirm our successful remediation.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very happy with our communication.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They provide high quality at a very reasonable cost.

Are there any areas for improvement?

N/a

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CTO of Appcast, a job advertising solution based on a pay-per-applicant model.

For what projects/services did your company hire ScienceSoft?

We hired ScienceSoft to perform penetration testing on our platform.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to establish our current security status, define vulnerabilities, fix them, and then test them again to ensure they were resolved.

How did you select this vendor?

We read feedback from other companies that had used ScienceSoft for penetration testing.  

Describe the project in detail.

Once we selected this vendor, we had a kick-off meeting with them. They explained their different testing methodologies and provided us with details of how they’d approach our situation. Their test identified a few security vulnerabilities. They assigned a severity to each, provided steps to fix the issues, and explained how they could impact us.

What was the team composition?

They assigned us a senior security engineer. We communicated directly with this resource. 

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

After we fixed these vulnerabilities in-house, ScienceSoft did additional testing to confirm they no longer presented a risk to us. 

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We communicated via email. ScienceSoft was highly responsive and helpful.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They were flexible with us, worked quickly, and provided good feedback.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, not that I saw.