Excellence in Strategic Partnerships

We have recently been recognized by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) for excellence in strategic partnerships as part of the Top 100 Global Outsourcing Companies 2020 List. Here is one of the stories behind this recognition: achieving customer success with a dedicated nearshoring partnership with Dutch software company, Info Support.

Partnership Overview

As a value-added software services provider, Softelligence has been engaged in a multi-year relationship with Info Support, a Dutch software integrator and software engineering company. The partnership started when Info Support’s Business Unit Finance (BUF) sought to identify a partner to assist in the delivery of a large-scale application development project for a major Dutch pension fund.

About Info Support
Info Support is a leading software company that makes high-end custom technology solutions for companies in the fintech, health, energy, public transport and agritech sectors. The company works with a talented team of 500 engineers embracing an agile mindset and software craftmanship. Info Support are proud to have several awarded engineers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, software architecture, Java, .NET and Cloud Technology, speaking at tech conferences around the world. Furthermore the company is supporting the developer community by contributing at several open source initiatives.  Info Support is headquartered in Veenendaal (NL) and has (research) locations in Amsterdam (NL), Den Bosch (NL) and Belgium (BE).

Info Support was looking for a trusted partner that would have the right expertise, a solid understanding of the Financial domain and a focus on high quality software engineering, while being seasoned in international projects with geographically distributed expert teams. Most importantly, the Dutch software integrator was looking to outsource to a nearshore organisation that they could have confidently rely on as a partner, and make sure they deliver complex financial projects using solid engineering.

Customer Success Story

The project that kicked-off the collaboration was large and complex: it involved more than 70 technical roles and 30 functional and operational roles in both the Netherlands and Romania.

Serban Ionescu Managing Partner, Softelligence Engineering

Looking back at how the partnership with Info Support has evolved in time, Mr. Serban Ionescu, Managing Partner of the Engineering division and Head of Software Engineering at Softelligence, declared that “we are proud of our accomplishments in delivering the required software solutions, but we are even more excited to look back at how we traveled the extra mile on this journey, together with Info Support, be it through joint technical meetups on topics such as webscale architectures, Agile project management, microservices, and more, or various hackathons, with mixed Dutch-Romanian teams”.

Additionally, the teams have organised many different joint team building activities and workshops, sometimes outside of the projects at hand, to help improve the communication between remote teams, gaining trust between team members and also with other teams, culture-add sessions, or simply to have fun together – inside or outside the office, company gatherings and family moments being shared and celebrated with the extended team. There is a shared investment in onboarding new team members and helping them quickly become culturally aligned with both Softelligence Engineering and Info Support. Public recognition of value being created quickly came with the largest common project, building a pension administration solution for an important Dutch pension fund, being voted Romania’s second best outsourcing project at the ANIS Gala 2019.

Maarten Giezen Nearshoring Partner, Info Support

“In the case of nearshoring, success to me is a fulfilled project assignment, with a blended high-performance team, that delivers great software based on craftmanship, with equal and shared understanding.” is how Mr. Maarten Giezen, Info Support Nearshoring Partner, defines success.

The four pillars of a great nearshoring journey

At present, more than three years after that project was started, both parties can describe their collaboration in one word: proud. In day to day practice, the relationship between the two companies is founded on four pillars: respect, trust, equality, and friendship.

• Mutual respect: delivering a high quality service to end-clients is in the DNA of both companies; there is an ongoing dialogue between the two teams that exceeds the boundaries of requirements and delivery, and enhances the feeling of having built software solutions that set new industry standards in terms of delivering business value.

• Trust: across the years of collaboration, the mindset guiding the partnership has shifted from staff augmentation and delivering “resources”, to well coordinated, blended Agile teams, acting as one, despite the geographic distribution. Everyone involved in the projects speaks the same language, delivers quality, resonates with the same business values, regardless of nationality.

• Equality: because effort is made on both sides to deliver excellence across every project; there is an ongoing personal and professional exchange between the teams, an investment in the relationship on both sides. Bonding regularly is part of the project and it’s not just a top-down initiative, but it’s really a human-to-human option. As Mr. Giezen puts it, the greatest strength of the partnership with Softelligence has been the “equal understanding and great collaboration on every level, from management to team members”.

• Friendship: this collaboration has evolved from a project requiring 5 people for 6 months to close to twenty people in the Romanian engineering center, working on multiple Info Support assignments, since 2017; naturally, through onboarding sessions, teambuildings and joint thought-leadership events, a sense of camaraderie has filled the distance between the Netherlands and Romania, ultimately bringing added value to the nearshoring factor, and building the foundation of a strong collaboration framework: the concept of the Blended Teams.  In this sense, one of the Dutch team leads remarked how “most persons (Dutch or Romanian) that contribute to this nearshoring experience are sincerely interested in the other person, professionally, culturally and socially. Spending time together and really paying attention to making nearshoring work, even brought friendships”.

“Partnering with another company should always bring something extra, to solve the needs of our customers, so shared values and a common mindset for us, as development companies, is important” says Mr. Giezen.

The benefits for Info Support, the Client company in this case, have been multiple: secure delivery to its end-customers, regardless of potentially scarce availability of internal staff in critical moments, reduced R&D cost, by using cost-competitive outsourced services from Softelligence, enjoyable  culture-add – a mutually rewarding social, cultural, and professional experience, low-risk and flexible resourcing, as the partnership enables Info Support to contract for the competencies that they need, when they need them, freeing up internal teams for other strategic initiatives, and, finally, gain quality through specialized skills and domain knowledge.

Achieving goals at both ends through a fruitful partnership

Mr. Maarten Giezen: Scaling together as a software development partner, as a flexible solution for delivering high performance teams. Investing in education, innovation and in own employees.

Of course, day-to-day isn’t always easy, but equipped with a strong will to succeed, and similar professional values, the teams are well poised to overcome challenges and future-proof delivery.

Concluding the journey, Mr. Ionescu remarked that “to make software development truly great, you need to be a great collaborator. The popular myth of the isolated developer is just a funny story, but in reality a great project is delivered through teamwork that knows no boundaries and is fueled by a sense of craftsmanship, communication, and work ethics that we’re happy to share that is vibrant in our blended teams with Info Support”.