Zitec

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the manager and a shareholder of Decorino, and we’re an e-commerce company that provides home decor products. We’re focused on rugs, carpes, and lighting materials. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Zitec?

We needed help in software development. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Zitec implemented improvements on our Magento 2 website’s order flow, payment process, and stock management. Our goal was to improve our customers’ shopping experience. They took over from another vendor who previously developed our website. 

In addition, Zitek integrated a new ERP system to our website. They transferred all the data from our Magento 2 website to the system and connected our site to the third-party apps we were using. They recommended the module that we used for this project. 

They continue to provide us with ad hoc support for our technical challenges. 

What is the team composition?

I work with one project manager and 2–3 developers. 

How did you come to work with Zitec?

We looked around for software development companies. We shortlisted 3–4 companies, and after meeting with all of them, Zitek stood out in terms of experience in Magento 2 and e-commerce. In addition, we also received positive feedback about them, so we hired them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent €10,000 (approximately $11,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2021, and it’s ongoing. 

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

Zitec has helped us automate our processes, increasing our sales and reducing our operational costs. 

How did Zitec perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re prompt and responsive — I’m satisfied with Zitek’s project management. We communicate through emails, phone calls, and Jira.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The competence of Zitek’s team is impressive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They can increase their developers to improve their overall services.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Define the project in precise terms. 

Please describe your company and your position there.

Token Payment Services SRL is a Bucharest-based Romanian subsidiary of Koç Group, the largest conglomerate in Turkey, which accounts for ~8% of Turkey’s GDP, and is a Fortune 500 entity with almost 27 billion USD global turnover. Token produces revolutionary, innovative products, value-added retail and payment services to retailers and creates a safe open platform for Fintech ecosystem. Token creates the devices and infrastructures to deliver intelligent payment and retail platforms, which shape future products and services while creating new revenue streams. I am CTO of Token Payment Services SRL.

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

We are developing merchant friendly payment service provider product with Zitec. This is going to be authorized by NBR for PI and EMI licenses. Token PSP product is an end to end platform for the merchants including onboarding, core payment transactions, integration with multiple banks' virtual POS, payment routing algorithms for best commission rate, merchant and admin dashboards, and all with high security, fraud management and QoS.

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

We have a series of criteria, the followings are the major ones: competency both in development and project management, upto date product software architecture (cloud, microservices, etc.)experience on similar projects before, agility for adapting requirements, optimum timeline and approach to the project with enthusiasm.

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

We develop end to end product with Zitec, including onboarding of the merchant, core payment, settlement, merchant and admin dashboards, security, fraud monitoring, PCI-DSS certification. The technology stack is based on cloud services and microservices.

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

Full fledge team from PM to developers to SQA and security team, around 15 people.

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

We are still in the process of development and Zitec team are inline with Token timeline. We had the first demo of core payment transaction very well.

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

PM is based on scrum, so we follow regular scrum rutines with Zitec. We as a customer and partner join grooming sessions and we have monthly acceptance sessions where our CEO joins and discuss about progress, support points, team and budget. Zitec has customized and very effective project management.

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

Their competency, agility, and enthusiasm to complete the project are impressive.

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

They are very open to design communication channels and project management in a customised way, according to your needs and expectations.

Please describe your company and your position there.

iELM was founded in 2013 in Sweden and started as a small family business, designing and manufacturing children's clothing, aiming to offer unique and high-quality garments at the right price. Having moved its entire operations to Romania, iELM has grown to almost 200 employees and 6 production lines in Petresti, Dambovita County. I am the Marketing Director of the company.

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

iELM has been in continuous expansion, with online stores opened throughout Europe, in countries such as Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Spain, Finland, Estonia, The Czech Republic, and Poland, but also in the United States of America. Each eCommerce launched in a new country posed a new set of challenges, from understanding the various types of users and their needs, the local particularities, and the different online purchase behaviors.

This is where Zitec stepped in, through digital marketing, software development, and cloud services and solutions, supporting us to achieve growth objectives. iELM has been relying heavily on technology to support business operations expansion across Europe, from custom software development to top-notch digital marketing solutions. We have been constantly looking for the best technology solutions to support business growth in multiple countries, optimize platform functioning and use data to drive better business decisions.

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

Zitec has provided digital marketing, software development and cloud solutions services around the main projects making up our longtime collaboration:

• eCommerce set-up for launching on new markets, including implementation of delivery features, payment processors, translations, configurations, process automation, as well as marketing tools
• Digital Marketing strategies to support iELM’s business growth through continuous market research, campaign monitoring and optimization.
• eCommerce update to Magento 2
• eCommerce platform deployment from AWS to Google Cloud

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

After a kick-off meeting, we started working together on improving the business until this day, and we will continue do so from now on too.

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

We are working with two teams, each one of them having its own project manager.

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

In 2019, the company registered a 500% boost in monthly sales, reaching EUR 1 million on a monthly basis, after an investment in promotional efforts up by only 20%. iELM is currently serving over 300.000 customers in 14 different countries.

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

We have daily stand-ups with the teams and the project managers in order to make things work flawless.

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

The most impressive and unique parts of the Zitec are their dedication and professionalism.

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

When we first started there were some minor communication issues, but in time we have made things work smoothly.

Please describe your company and your position there.

RGT Cycling is a virtual reality cycling simulator available for PC, Mac, and Apple TV. It is used in conjunction with iOS and Android Apps and supported training hardware. Users worldwide can Go Beyond and connect, ride, race, and train together in a virtual reality that recreates the captivating culture of real-world cycling. Role: Head of Operations

For what projects/services did your company hire Zitec?

Our goal was to migrate from Amazon to the Google Cloud infrastructure, while at the same time making significant changes in our back-end infrastructure that would optimize use of resources and significantly improve stability.

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

Zitec is a recognized, respected custom software development and digital marketing services company in the tech community in Romania, and we already knew they have deep technical knowledge of all cloud options. We felt that working with Zitec would both speed up the process, as well as accelerated learning in our own team.

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

In the migration phase, Zitec engineers first prepared the project’s structure, taking into account the recommendations from Google Cloud security foundations guide. Next, the development environment was provisioned using Terraform (for infrastructure) and Ansible (for configuration and deployments), backed by Gitlab CI where new CI/CD pipelines were being implemented in order to trigger the jobs.

Even if the applications were already containerized, Zitec reshaped the way to do it in order to automatically build on Gitlab CI every image, using triggers like merge request events or new pushes on master.

From a security point of view, Zitec promoted and implemented the existing GCP capabilities: IAP to control the HTTP(s) and SSH access to various resources from the dev environment and eliminate the need of a VPN connection OS Login for SSH control Container Analysis to scan for vulnerabilities all the Docker images OS Config to collect and review operating system information, especially for the packages with security updates available.

Being an “improve & move” migration that touched a lot of components, Zitec decided to minimize the number of components reworked during this phase and adopted only a few managed services, such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Memorystore and Cloud Storage. The containerized applications were deployed on Compute Engines using both types of instance groups, unmanaged or managed with auto scaling enabled.

In a second phase, the plan is to move all the components from Compute Engine to Cloud Run or in a GKE cluster. Other GCP services in use were Operations for Monitoring & Logging, Global LB with premium network for decreased latency, and Transfer Service to move the static data from AWS S3 to GCP Storage. When the production environment was ready and tested by the customer, the switchover to GCP was executed with a short period of downtime required only to sync the database.

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

The implementation team consisted of two DevOps engineers from Zitec's part.

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

In addition to supporting growing volumes at lower costs, the RGT Cycling infrastructure now allows for the company's future development plans to include integrations with services like Google Stadia, Google Maps, and analytics capabilities.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective: meetings went straight to the point, clarifying next steps and allowing each team to work well independently, without too much “down-time” while waiting for deliverable from the other team.

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

We were impressed with their expertise in cloud infrastructure. The ease in proposing practical solutions we would not have thought about.

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

None that we can think of.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Tazz is one of the largest quick-commerce platforms in Romania. It focuses mainly on food and groceries delivery. I am Chief Product Officer, managing the Product & Technology Department which has about 70 employees.

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

We hired Zitec for the development of the Tazz mobile applications (iOS and Android native languages).

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

Based on the portfolio presented and also by recommendations from the market, from previous companies which have worked with Zitec before.

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

The Zitec team was responsible for Project Management, Development (mixed team) and Quality Assurance. During the duration of the project, they worked closely with our product team. The technologies used for Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. The Zitec team had the main responsibility for developing the mobile application, while integrating it with the Rest API back-end which was developed in-house. The main features of the app are the common e-commerce features (marketplace, online commerce, push notifications).

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

1 Project Manager 4 Mobile App Developers 1 Quality Assurance

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

The app was developed in 6 months. In a short time it has become the No.1 app in Romania in the Food and Drink category. Since it was launched, it was constantly appreciated reaching now ratings of over 4.4 out of 35k reviews (Android) and 4.8 out of 29k (iOS). The Zitec team has reached all development objectives agreed in the project kick-off.

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

The development was done by using Agile methodologies, initially Kanban and later Scrum. The communication with the team was done in Slack and the backlog and issue-management was done in Jira.

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

I was really impressed with the sens e of ownership and responsibility of the Zitec team. They were real team players who worked very well together with our own developers.

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

I cannot think at the moment of any areas of improvement.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Project Manager and founder of the project Faces of Autism.

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

Faces of Autism is a non profit project showing portraits of autistic persons taken by an autistic photographer of 16 years old. We hired Zitec in order to build our brand, then create and implement the presentation website of our project. We rely on sponsorship so the main purpose of the website is to impress and attract sponsors. At the same time, we wanted to raise awareness and tell the story of the kids and young people with autism. We wished for something powerful, very usable, and memorable.

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

We knew about Zitec for a long time and we received a lot of referrals for them. The decision came from the way they proposed us a complex forget, not only a website but also visual id.

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

Branding, UX/UI Design, WordPress implementation of the Faces of Autism presentation website.

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

Brand Designer, UX/UI Designer, WordPress Engineer, Project Manager

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

All our stakeholders and supporters were impressed not only by the quality of the photos and realism of the stories but also by the clean design and usability of our website.

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

We had many meetings, used a Slack channel and Asana tasks.

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

They did not only delivered a solution but also supported us in learning how to manage this type of project and comunicate with other companies and stakeholders.

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

They have been proactive and always presented us many choices.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I coordinate the Online Marketing Department within Credit Europe Bank Romania, a bank focused on the Romanian credit card market.

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

The purpose of the project was to relaunch the bank's website www.crediteurope.ro as a site for sale, not just for presenting banking products. The challenge of the project was to integrate the site platform with core banking applications as well as with other databases specific to financial banking activities (exchange rates, money market indices, interest rate calculators for credit or savings products, etc.).

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

A pitch was organized to select the software development company. We chose ZItec for their professionalism in implementing solutions with a high degree of security.

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

The project was developed in several steps: evaluation, design of the structure of the data bases, development of APIs for taking data from banking software, development of a dedicated content management platform through which all the pages of the site could be subsequently generated.

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

More than 10 people were involved in the project.

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

The new site is very stable and allows us to use landing pages as a sales tool in collecting leads.

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

The project management team was very transparent, we had direct access to the Redmine platform to follow all the steps of the project, until the end.

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

We admire their flexibility and speed in developing alternative solutions to the problems inherent in large projects.

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

No