Vision from the Top 2012: Taras Kytsmey, SoftServe
Given that the economic outlook in many parts of the world seems uncertain:
What's your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?
Innovation is core to the services and products we offer our clients. Our associates are highly motivated to provide innovative ways to enhance improve, or expedite the Software Development Life Cycle. Since market conditions are constantly changing, and our clients focus - or lack thereof - on innovation may become a decisive factor in their success, we fully realize how important it is to advance innovation and to continuously improve, increase, and move forward our services in there behave. Our annual Innovations Conferences as well as a number of various networking events proved to be extremely valuable in that respect; and the effectiveness of our strategy has been repeatedly confirmed by multiple industry awards. At present, innovation alongside with the operational excellence is central to software development market.
How do you encourage and foster a growth mindset with your employees and partners?
From the very beginning our company's philosophy on the importance of growth has been a driving factor. As a result of this culture, it's our employees and partners that are the catalyst behind our company`s growth. Our strong commitment and investments in open dialogue, mutual trust and strategic partnerships has resulted in a consistent growth year over year of our business and partnerships. Last year was very successful for our company: we greatly expanded our services in the focused areas of the SaaS/Cloud and Mobility solutions and launched vertical software solutions into the Healthcare and Education domains. We also launched a comprehensive service for Operations and Product Infrastructure management, our partners and clients in Eastern Europe were among the first to benefit from this offering. With over 2 thousand employees we are a large and fast-growing company. In 2012 we plan to further continue our expansion and increase our market presence.
What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?
The corporate culture at SoftServe is very strong, and all the employees share the same beliefs and core values. "Client-fist, partnership-oriented" has become our slogan and mantra. We have developed an extensive system for professional development which includes our corporate SoftServe University, a full-scale educational institution with its own Certification Center and Training Center. Our commitment and steadfast approach towards professional development has not only earned us the title of the Best Employer 2011 in Central and Eastern Europe, it's also enabled us to maintain excellent work ethic with the main focus on delivering value to our partners and customers.
Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?
Mobile has been one of our top priorities for a long period of time: SoftServe has been dealing with mobility for more than 10 years; we have delivered more than 200 mobile projects, influenced Android and Silverlight technology improvements and created successful applications, which nowadays help millions of people throughout the world.
The impact of Mobility on business is huge, easily comparable to the PC impact 20 years ago; and all the possibilities of greater ROI, improved sales and communication are far from being exhausted. In 2012, we`ll continue perfecting our Mobile software solutions and related consulting services for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and technology-enabled businesses. This includes: measuring businesses maturity from a mobility perspective; assisting companies create mobility strategies and roadmaps; mapping the best processes, providing recommendations on benefits and risks; as well as developing and deploying applications from desktops and laptops to mobile technology.
What's the future for hybrid cloud strategies?
Software as a Service implementations running on cloud computing infrastructure and deployed in hybrid configuration...accurately describes the trend in many current enterprise IT deployments. Hybrid aspects include:
- Periodic data integrations between SaaS and on premise applications
- Intelligent shifting of on premise work load to low cost public cloud facilities for compute intensive tasks
- Integration of user directories between on premise and cloud applications
- Cloud based storage and back up of on premise data
- Cloud based disaster recovery for on premise systems
A wide variety of on premise systems and services are being monitored and controlled by new SaaS management applications running in external clouds. SaaS based CRM is frequently integrated with existing on premise ERP systems.
Large enterprises running multiple data centers are also seeking greater efficiency in the management of computing resources by migrating existing systems to private cloud configurations. The majority of these new private clouds are connected through a variety of mechanisms to external cloud computing platforms and services. The enterprise IT landscape includes significant investment in a wide range of on premise applications and services. SaaS and cloud computing vendors, systems integrators, and value added resellers continue to invest significant effort in smoothing the way for adoption of new services by delivering integration with the in place IT inside the enterprise. Hybrid cloud computing implementations often require professional services, particularly if the implementation involves custom developed in house legacy systems. Integration patterns for popular applications can be re-used, but often still require customization around workflow or enterprise specific data models.
Another established pattern in hybrid cloud computing is coming from the vendor side. ISVs have leveraged SaaS and cloud deployment for software distribution requirements to on premise solutions for the last ten years. Desktop anti-virus database updates for the largest security vendors are driven by large scale cloud computing solutions. Collaboration applications rely upon the delivery and re-delivery of heavyweight browser components which deliver rich graphical user experience. Next generation mobile devices include cloud file storage and cloud backup. On premise appliances often receive daily configuration and database updates using purpose built cloud computing services.
At SoftServe, we expect 2012 to be a year of continued rapid growth in all aspects of hybrid cloud computing. We are set for continued high growth in the demand for our consulting and development services that facilitate hybrid implementations. As a response to market demand we propose our intellectual property that allows an end-to-end delivery of hybrid cloud services. We introduced Cloud+Appliance deployment platform and Infrastructure Management Framework to provide the ability for our partners to put their hybrid cloud solution on a market with the maximal efficiency.
This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2012.