Unicsoft

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We build digital saas products and as operational director I am responsible for partner management and sourcing our projects.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

For our projects, we are always looking for experienced developers to extend our teams. The developers need to be able to get up to speed quickly and work together on building the products for our clients.

SOLUTION

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

We had already been in touch a few years ago and they reached out again. The was a good culture match and they were able to introduce a very capable developer for our project.

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

As a partner, they really think along to offer us the best possible candidates suitable for the project at hand. Their processes facilitate this.

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

We have been working with 5-10 people. They were all experienced front-end and back-end developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have always been very happy with the developers they supplied and they were a good addition to our team. Both in terms of expertise but also nice to work with on a personal level.

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

Due to their processes and personal approach, it's a pleasure to work with them. They say what they do and do what they say and are very diligent.

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

Their big pool of developers and the speed with which they deliver us new, good candidates for our positions. They listened to what we needed, and our feedback resulted in improvements immediately.

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

Not so much they can do better.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company is a provider of SaaS: document management system Schrift.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We cooperated with Unicsoft using both models of work they provide - fully managed development and team extension services. Fully managed team worked on the software development of a separate module to be integrated with our existing system that we develop internally.

Unicsoft provided full delivery service including BA, UI/UX design, development, QA and management. We started our cooperation with an engaging remote BA specialist who worked closely with our internal team to prepare detailed technical specifications. Based on the results of our first phase, we decided to continue with a fully managed development project choosing Unicsoft as a trusted vendor.

After project completion, we again extended our internal team with the Frontend developer from Unicsoft to boost the work of our internal team and decrease the time to market. To build the payment module and successfully integrate it with our system so that to prepare an existing system for external customers as SaaS go straight to market.

SOLUTION

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

We had a provider who was helping us with the landing page, and when we mentioned that we might need help with the billing module for our document management system, he introduced us to Unicsoft as a trusted software development company. During our first calls and demos they seemed to us as a team of professionals and proved their solid technical experience.

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

This was a full cycle project requiring special background with payment integration. Billing module consisted of many related features - payment plans/subscriptions with different sets of tools, promo codes, payments management, possibility to pay by credit card or bank transfer, etc.

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

PM, BA, designer, 3 developers, QA

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Unicsoft’s team successfully completed delivery of the billing module that has been already launched. Functionality developed by Unicsoft is available at https://www.schrift.ostrean.com Due to Unicsoft’s flexibility in terms of cooperation models and team scaling up/down, we managed both to enhance capabilities of our internal team and deliver billing functionality from scratch.

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

Unicsoft team cooperated on a daily basis with our internal team of developers to match our standards and align all technical details. We appreciated smooth & professional collaboration, together with timely communication thanks to the effort of the account management team.

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

Everything was good

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

Everything was on the high level. I recommend my peers to allocate such project teams which have already worked together and members do not need time to get used to each other.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO. Our company provides a platform as a service solution for publishers looking to distribute ebooks and audiobooks to consumers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We needed to scale our backend team with senior developers who could work within our existing team.

SOLUTION

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

We considered developers from a number of companies but found the candidates from Unicsoft to fit the bill and started working with the company in Q1 this year.

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

The work is based around feature development and improvements on our backend code base which consists of a number of different languages.

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

We have hired 3 developers working in our backend team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have filled some of our discrepancies in terms of capacity to run our projects. We have been very happy with the capable developers we're working with.

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

We have incorporated the developers into our existing teams and they have blended in well, using Slack, Git, Notion and the usual tools for communications.

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

Unicsoft has been able to find the right candidates for us. The developers have been able to work effectively on our code base from just a few weeks after starting in the project.

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

As the developers we hire are now part of our dev team, we are continuously working on improving our ways of working. There's nothing in particular needed from the developers hired through Unicsoft.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am director responsible for software delivery and client engagement for AlphaWallet. We are a blockchain start-up that provides a crypto wallet for consumers and businesses. Our company size is around 10 people at the moment and is about to go into Series A funding.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Unicsoft?

We hired Unicsoft at first to support our iOS app customisation efforts. Then we also used Unicsoft for other efforts such as WooCommerce customisations etc.

What were your goals for this project?

Deliver quality and stable application, in an agile fashion, to customers of AlphaWallet who wants the core app tailored to their unique needs and demands.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Our CTO had been introduced to UnicSoft during an international conference. As good talent in crypto space are hard to come by we started engaging Unicsoft short term and then extended the relationship to on-going long term engagement.

Describe the project in detail.

Our core product is a consumer-facing application. We also offer it as a white-labelled wallet to corporate customers. We hired Unicsoft at first to support our iOS app customisation efforts. As the quality of the talent was really good we eventually extended the co-operation to core wallet development as well as other support such as WooCommerce customisations etc.

What was the team composition?

Initially the team was composed of Project Manager and Developers, managed through an Account Manager. As we started integrating the developer into our processes we took on project management from AlphaWallets side and engaged only the developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The talent from Unicsoft are really good and was able to pick up the nuances of the project and adapt to our style of working really quickly. Through the engagement, we are continuously able to deliver value to our customers.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Really good relation between both the teams at AlphaWallet and Unicsoft

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They listened to our requirements and always shared really good candidates. The developers are easy to work with and delivered the results committed. The account management team are also helpful in ensuring the right support throughout the engagement.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing particular

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

GFI is a car hauling digital platform that unites all market players in one application. I'm COO in GFI.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Unicsoft?

Custom software development

What were your goals for this project?

To build a well-design, smart, and sufficient application that can lead the car hauling market, help all market members to speed the processes of car transportation, and reduce side costs.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Based on the friend's recommendation.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Unicsoft created the platform from scratch. So we had all the phases: planning, UI/UX design, implementation, testing, prod release, and now support.

What was the team composition?

We had a PM/BA, 4 developers, 1 tester, 2 designers,

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I can definitely recommend Unicsoft as a reliable partner. They have flexible working approaches, pleasant and dedicated staff, and always trying to solve the problem - not to redirect it. Reasonable price model, technically strong engineers, and quick and efficient staffing process. Separately, I would like to admit they have a very intelligent, confident, and full of positive attitude account managers.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We have a fully managed service model. Unicsoft was able to manage all development related activities very well.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Reasonable rates, pleasant staff.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There is very little they could improve. My only suggestion would be to document technical decisions and to have technical specifications. Validating your project requirements will be much easier with thoughts already articulated.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are an international full-service design and branding agency from Germany. Our core expertise is building and implementing brand strategy for large enterprise companies across various industries including automotive, retail and logistics. My position at the company is Director Digital Solutions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Unicsoft?

We hired Unicsoft for development of new features for some of our products, customizing the system for new customers, and fixing issues in the existing setups.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal was to bring more value to our existing customers as well as to create a powerful marketing tool for international corporations and gain access to new group of customers.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We wanted to avoid diluting our company’s focus by hiring additional software engineers and product delivery departments. Therefore, we decided to involve a delivery partner to support us during large developent projects. The search for the right development partner was not easy and did not work out from the first attempt. By the time we reached out to Unicsoft, the product’s roadmap was strongly delayed. On top of feature release delays, the existing customers were reporting a significant amount of bugs in their implementation. This is where we started working together.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Unicsoft started our partnership with a legacy code review to know what issues it had and what needed to be improved in the product. The code review allowed them to identify primary points for improvement of the system: to retain the existing customer base and, at the same time, build a stable foundation for the new versions of the product. After partially re-working and stabilizing the current version of the product, they were ready to start work on the next version. It had an ambitious roadmap which included:

• Centralized media library for storing brand identity elements including images, documents, and video materials;
• A content management module linked to the media library. It eliminated the risk of releasing media communications with wrong or outdated identity elements;
• A content localization tool, which significantly simplified a coordinated launch of marketing communications in different languages across several countries. Such capabilities were facilitated by integration third-party services based on Adobe InDesign server;
• Significantly improved user and permission management as well as powerful search across the content.

What was the team composition?

We started for the first big project with a full team consisting of - Project manager - QA manager - 3 full stack developers - Account manager When it came to supporting tasks later during the project we reduced the team size a bit, always being able to scale up for new projects.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The stability of the product has been constantly improving over the 2 years partnership, and now is in-line with enterprise customer’s expectations, resulting in high customer retention. High-quality and timely roll-out of the solution to new customers is crucial in extending our customer base. The onboarding heavily impacts the first impression, and it can only be made once. During our partnership, there was not a single case when a customer churned due to onboarding issues.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Depending on the project size, we use our internal project managers or we rely on the project management team provided by Unicsoft. As working for large enteerprise clieents, we fully provide our own infrastructure for development, testing, issue management and collaboration - so Unicosft is fully integrated into our workflows

What did you find most impressive about this company?

There are some basic rules of cooperation, we stress out in every partnership and with Unicsoft we found a partner that has the same understanding as we do: - We work together at eye level - We communicate open and honest - even bad news - If shit happens, we solve the problem together

Are there any areas for improvement?

Today: There is nothing to improve for us, but on the long run it could be helpful to have a counter-part for our development lead at Unicsoft, who would be able to do the onboarding of new team members.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We're a computational finance company with a core competence in econophysics and complex systems science. We develop trading strategies and financial market analysis tools. I am a company co-founder and a Chief Science and Technology Officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Unicsoft?

About two years ago (at the time of writing) we have developed a new approach for investing in cryptocurrency aimed at reducing the risk.

The strategy seemed very appealing particularly in the aftermath of the early 2018 Bitcoin crash when lots of investors lost considerable funds and were afraid to participate in the market in a plain buy-and-hold way.

We decided to build a financial product accessible to a wide variety of customers globally (without the accredited investor restrictions) and negotiated a collaborative deal with a global financial platform to make that possible.

What was left to do was a custom software development task that would link platform's accounts to our algorithmic trading strategy logic, provide a web and mobile application front-end for the users, and integrate the required pieces in the cloud. After some research and in-person interviews in Eastern and Western Europe we have chosen Unicsoft for that task.

What were your goals for this project?

Our objectives included:

1. Finding a way to make our proprietary algorithmic trading strategy drive user transactions within a global financial platform's API restrictions
2. Developing a web and mobile application for the users to opt in/out of the offering and to provide a user dashboard.
3. Integrating several pieces of software in the cloud.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had a few rounds of in-person interviews in Eastern and Western Europe that included representatives of Unicsoft. We had specific requirements in particular with the AWS serverless stack which was fairly new at the time, and Unicsoft demonstrated a good working knowledge of that stack.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They designed and developed web and mobile applications per our specifications and using the stack we have selected for the project. They were able to follow fairly rigid time constraints dictated by our marketing effort and developed the product in relatively short time.

Unicsoft engineers were constantly adopting to changes in the affiliate platform API we were integrating since that API was evolving in the process of our application development. All objectives listed above were met with the custom cloud-based event-driven software.

What was the team composition?

Unicsoft provided us with a Project Manager, several backend engineers, a web and a mobile front-end engineer, a designer, and an AWS devops specialist.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have launched the Hedged Bitcoin product at the end of 2018 and onboarded early users in January 2019. To date we have over 10,000 users who have authorized the application on a global financial platform. In the retrospect, we can claim we had a successful launch.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The Project Manager at Unicsoft successfully coped with a number of changing API requirements and motivated the engineers to keep refactoring their code in order to accommodate to those changes.

The team was managed in a transparent way and we were able to follow the development both in terms of the code and in terms of the user load. Overall, I can say the project management was excellent.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Familiarity with novel tools and the ability to evolve. We have seen quite often other companies trying to fit ones needs into their well established and somewhat outdated software development conveyor.

Unicsoft was the opposite, they were ready to adapt to new challenges as needed even if that meant more learning on their end.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There were a couple of times when we received invoices exceeding what was expected based on the estimates. Everything was clarified afterwards, but I wish the PM or Accounting would have given us a heads up that more expenses than originally estimated were coming our way 1-2 weeks ahead of the invoice.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm CEO of a software development company. We mainly help a few clients develop and maintain applications to aid their business.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Unicsoft?

One of my developers quit, which jeopardized the delivery of a project. My staff had neither the time nor the skill to take over.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed to quickly catch up on development to keep the project going and please the client. 

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I hired Unicsoft a few years ago and was happy with the results, so I didn't consider other suppliers. I contacted Unicsoft and began the process quickly.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

Two developers from Unicsoft worked with my developer. The project was fairly complex, including several standalone Node.js applications, a Laravel PHP application, MongoDB components, and a React.js application.

What was the team composition?

We had three or four developers. I served as project lead.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We're currently deploying and using this application. Our client has spent considerable time and money, but that's necessary to stay competitive.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We managed the project, using Trello for task management and Slack for communication. Their documentation was fairly good. We met several times to set up local development environments. 

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They produced two strong candidates, and we were happy to get help so quickly. They were genuinely interested in ensuring our satisfaction.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

This question isn't applicable to this project, since their developers were excellent.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the owner of KOKORO, a company that builds tools to measure emotions and uses gamification to capture anonymous, real time results, and returns actionable recommendations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Unicsoft?

I hired Unicsoft to build the architecture, internet presence, and product.

What were your goals for this project?

My goal was to deliver a deployable product within six months.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

A third party recommended Unicsoft to me about four years ago.

Describe the project in detail.

Unicsoft developed the backend of a fast mobile website and a hybrid web app to structure the data in such a way that we can build dashboards for our clients. We also had to ensure it complied with the General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] requirements.

What was the team composition?

We worked with one project manager and two developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What outcomes or results can you share that demonstrate progress and/or success?

Based on the work done so far, we were able to close a first round investment with one of Berlin's top investors. We are now on schedule and looking to deploy a second product I have built with Unicsoft in April.

How effective was the project management?

It was excellent. We have never been disappointed. Problems did arise, but Unicsoft maintains a wonderful platform for collaboration through which we found solutions.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They really analyzed and tried to understand the business use of the tool I wanted to develop.

What tips or recommendations do you have?

They are a fast growing company because they serve their clients well. I recommend that they take the time to stop and reflect on what tools they still need to learn so that every customer can experience what I have.