Sunbytes

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Empire Software Holdings, the tech arm of a publishing company. We build software primarily for in-house use, but we also build software and SaaS tools to sell to the broader market in the digital publishing space. We create content management and advertising solutions, as well as other solutions for the various aspects that come from digital publishing.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sunbytes?

Initially, we wanted to scale our engineering teams efficiently and cost-effectively, especially within niche areas like WordPress development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, Sunbytes provided us with their PHP and JavaScript expertise on a full-stack development approach, specifically on the PHP side. Their WordPress experience was a major plus, and we soon discovered their ability to think outside of the WordPress context regarding app and software development.

As we continued working with Sunbytes, we hit other use cases. Now, we’re growing our team in-house and abroad, ensuring that we have enough engineers to tackle the development challenges that arise.

We have a pretty large organization, and Sunbytes is now one of the key parts of our operations. They’re integrated into our product and our regular software development lifecycles, and they handle a lot of operational tasks on top of the specific areas of expertise we hired them for.

Their approach has been pretty flexible, and they’ve integrated very deeply into our organization. As they act as part of our in-house team, we never exclude them from any day-to-day decisions.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked directly with eight people from Sunbytes, and we’ve received support from another 4–5 people. These people don’t work directly with us, but they’re communication liaisons from the Sunbytes’ side.

We initially started working with a single engineer, and their involvement was pretty straightforward. As we’ve grown, their team has become larger, and we expanded the number of engineers. Aside from developers, we also get DevOps help from Sunbytes as well.

How did you come to work with Sunbytes?

I did a pretty broad, worldwide exploration, looking for various offshore and onshore options in the market. The key factors I was looking for during that search were a specific skill set and a great level of dedication. I was also looking for a smaller boutique shop that would treat us as a priority.

Most of my search was through Google, during which I identified a couple of key players inside that market that would fit our needs. We found Sunbytes when we were exploring the Asian market. We had an interview process with them and various other competitors worldwide, and we narrowed our options down. Ultimately, we chose Sunbytes, and we’ve been working with them ever since.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent over $500,000 at this point.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in January 2020, and our partnership is ongoing. We’ll continue working with them for the foreseeable future.

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

The biggest success metric is the code development throughput that Sunbytes has helped us achieve. Our organization is growing rapidly, and we’ve gone from eight to 220 in-house staff members across multiple companies within a year and a half, not counting the resources that Sunbytes provides us. We’ve been able to sustain that growth, keep our clients happy, and keep our business profitable, and Sunbytes has been a big part of that; we wouldn’t have been able to expand without them.

How did Sunbytes perform from a project management standpoint?

Sunbytes’ flexibility and onboarding timeframes are very helpful. Whenever we’ve requested extra help for one of our various projects, they’ve been able to identify resources and get them up to speed very quickly. The average onboarding time takes 4–5 weeks, which is below the average of other development companies I’ve worked with.

As for project management, we use Jira to manage the tickets and workflow, and we have some of our own GitHub infrastructure set up.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The communication and collaboration with Sunbytes’ leadership are impressive. We’re capable of having very open and honest conversations, which help us identify areas of improvement and, ultimately, get results.

Together, we’ve figured out other ways to go, and they’ve been with us along the way. This approach has also helped us manage the team efficiently, even though we’re in opposite time zones.

Additionally, Sunbytes’ WordPress expertise is also impressive. We didn’t have a lot of in-house experience with WordPress when we started working together, so working with them as part of our own team has been great. Our direct collaboration is very important.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The biggest challenge of working with Sunbytes was figuring out how to handle the different time zones. However, they were very flexible and willing to work in our time zone. That was the biggest improvement we were looking for, and they were able to adjust accordingly.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Talk directly to Sunbytes’ leadership and be honest about what you need.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a project manager in 'digital counseling'.

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

We needed ongoign support and development in Online Dossier, a product that was already used for client communication. The goal was to make it the production system for all of our professionals, to register their work and realize that clients always have access to their data.

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

The project leader knew Sunbytes/Simplefly form a past project.

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

As a project manager I am mainly working on the user side. I cannot answer this question.

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

The team grew to one project leader and four developers.

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

We had happy professionals and clients. And that's what matters to me.

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

We have a team where FUN is one of the things that comes to mind. Also, we have very short lines; When we contact each other, it usually takes less than five minutes to respond and react.

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

Together, we grew into a partnership. I knew I had to teach them about social work, they knew I am a social worker with a little technical knowledge that needed to grow.

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

We sometimes had difficulties in getting a realistic scope. That has improved last year.

Please describe your company and your position there.

As an external IT consultant I've been tasked with guiding the development of Online Dossier and newer version of the Electronic Patient documentation system for our customer Kwadraad. Kwadraad is a social work organisation providing social work guidance to people in over 40 municipalities in the sout-west of The Netherlands.

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

Sunbytes has provided us with a team as a service where their developers where fluently integrated in our team to develop software in an agile way. When customers including Kwadraad would come up with requests this would be translated into epic's and user stories, given development weight and planned from the backlog if needed.

The developers would then proceed building those features and have them tested untill the point we can release them. This way we where able to do releases every day. Furthermore there was technical debt so we decided to build a complete new Online Dossier, where Sunbytes delivers UX/UI capacity for, architecture support and a multi disciplinary development team. All with people both in Vietnam as in The Netherlands.

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

Offshoring work often finds its root in cost saving, availability of skills, focus of the team and flexibility of hiring people in another timezone. For Kwadraad all of these apply: where working with people that have 4 hours of work time before the Dutch working day started has added benefit in development and releasing software, every Vietnamese morning this could be easily done without interrupting business.

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

We're using several software development supporting tools, project management tools and agile scrum related tools to build a way of tracking work, planning work and gathering the needed information to have beautiful software build by our team in Vietnam. The Vietnamese side has it's own project manager that takes care of the planning over there and focusses on development excellence, showing the build speed and planned speed and delivers the overview of frontend and backend development points.

The new platform is fully containerized and build with latest development technologies.

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

Company owner, project manager, quality manager, several level 1 to level 3 engineers and developers, depending of the project phase 4 to 10 people in total.

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

We've been around 10% ahead of planned development points, that we could use to build special requests from customers.

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

Very open, consequent and complete. At any time I can easily see where we stand. The cultural differences are automatically solved due to the fact that Sunbytes is a Dutch-Vietnamese company. So you get a mixed style of focus and a can-do mentality and an open and honest approach to your project.

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

They have relentlessly worked on our software. The working ethics are different then ours - we feel like we need to slow down things sometime more then having to ever push anyone.

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

At the start we had to learn about Vietnamese culture while working with our team. Saying no is not something someone from many asian countries easily does. So having guidance in this aspect from the Dutch co-worked towards the Vietnamese team members proved helpful optimizing a realistic approach on planning and realism of our requests.