This question comes to my mind from time to time. Why do we put online the CVs of ALL our members? Moreover, why do we identify them by publishing their CVs? I see a couple of answers. First, it is a marketing choice because IT consulting companies (offshore or not) only exist thanks to their team. We prove that Pentalog is a human, social and personal reality. I personally hate smooth corporate images that can be seen on our competitors’ websites, showing “united-colors-type” faces that only exist in Hollywood. It is irritating, how alike their websites look! However, no software activity is possible without the gathering of individuals.

But it is even worse in the offshore business. I know dozens of companies that employ less than 10 persons, using the same photo galleries as big-sized companies’ websites and thus end up resembling them. They are kind of cheating. I love the Minsk or Bengalore-type company websites showing a tall, dark-skinned, female consultant, next to an Asian IT manager and two Wall Street bankers… Eventually this emphasizes that we are different and shows the reality of our forces, either to potential clients or to our employees. Especially in the offshore business, companies have to prove their human and social reality. Also, it is a means to give all our potential clients the possibility of building a real offshore team. The videos, when available, may also help. Finally, I am considering the idea to organize some sort of Pentalog social network, made of all the personal CVs of our team members, linked with each others by practical case studies, and to find this network among the most accurate public social networks, as a group of skills. We are not far from this now.

With this economic crisis which get’s day by day more serious, I believe that it is crucial to foresee, after a first period potentially favourable to the low cost production modes, that these countries will also be affected by the economic slowdown. The Indians already know it since many giants have already reduced their workforce by 10% or more.

A number of our colleagues, Romania and Moldova, working for the U.S. or the UK (countries with an already major offshore maturity), know it. What should do the IT specialists in order to prepare themselves for the crisis? I see two key strategies: choosing an employer who knows how to manage his risk portfolio and to upgrade his versatility.

1. Choosing an employer with a strong commercial dynamic: many projects, many clients, frequent opening of new projects, multiple geographic origins, avoid companies too specialized or sector niche. Prefer outsourcers to software editors. Choose multi-specialized companies. Prefer a developing start-up on non-mature offshore markets (France, Germany, Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux..). Does this remind you of such a company? However, I truly believe in it. It’s an old technique spreading the risk. Although probably no sector will be spared by this crisis, some are more concerned than others.
2. Be more versatile: the IT specialists from low cost countries are often specialized to idiocracy. They are frequently trained by Microsoft during University (through partnership programs). They are often convinced that we can not be Java when we are dotnet or otherwise. Often they confuse language and technology. We recently had to let go two people REFUSING Java training. Can you believe it? An IT specialist saying “no” to training. As if their whole career will use only one language! Or that being trained to Java will exclude them from other Microsoft projects! I am on my third economic crisis since the beginning of my career. The one of 92-95 (after a burst of real-estate bubble), the one of 2002-2004 (the Internet burst bubble). We innovate today with a banking crisis. All I can say to everybody is that those who have crossed the most difficult years were those who knew best to move from one folder to another, no matter the language they used. It’s pure arithmetic, since there are fewer projects, we must be more agile to be part of it. We don’t choose a language as we were choosing our religion. Personally, I am very proud that I can speak French, English, German and Romanian and this allowed me to multiply by 3 the geographical origins of our client projects and likely to increase by 3 the commercial signatures. It’s the same thing with Java, PHP or Dotnet. Knowing several languages is certainly a way forward to the positions of manager and management techniques. Add that what I say about the languages may also be extended to different specialties: DBA, Business Intelligence …

The question now is at what point would the economics of IT offshore be affected by this storm, but its violence has surprised many countries in only a few days. Its spread is staggering. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to prepare before being affected! We belong to a profession that eludes most of the time more unemployed than others, but you must know that this rate has exceeded 10% for several months in the early 2000s! Offshorers, nearshorers, developers, analysts, administrators, let’s prepare for the storm! Maybe this will scare it off!

The last week-end our office from Chisinau changed its location. During 7 days, Pentalog’s support team had to move 2 offices, therefore 2 local data-centres and 110 collabs (of 265, that’s not bad, isn’t it?).

At Chisinau 3 we think big because we are going to double our number of potential openings. The office has 1000 m2 and it can accommodate more than 130 people.

Our office from Chisinau is the only one covering at 100% our offer of “Embedded systems”, “IT systems and software” and “BPO”.

It could also host the headquarters of a new joint-venture, developed with the second French operator of the call-centre market in order to provide solutions in French, Italian, Russian, Romanian and German languages. Its main domain of activity will be the multilingual technical assistance.

I will give updates about this the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, I wish godspeed to this new flagship of our Eastern fleet, its captain and all the crew!

Here we are. Last week end Greg and his staff moved to their new office, a more prestigious and commodious building. It’s true that the one on Sfantu (Saint) Lazar street had become a bit tiny and this is an euphemism! Last week we had reached a level of 32 employees on 180 m2, including the meeting room and the bosses’ office (we were lucky that the toilets were on the floor! ).
We chose the 2 highest floors of the most beautiful business buildings of the city. We doubled our surface and now enjoy a big terrace next to the meeting room. Greg just sent me some pictures.
So what is our new development plan in Iasi and how does it integrate with our strategic plan? Iasi 2 takes part in Pentalog’s « 14-2010 plan » that is meant to lead the group to a 14 M EUR sales figure by 2010 (only by means of organic growth, which means a rhythm of 35 to 45% p. a.). This figure is based upon our forecasted expansion in the countries where our company is already established. The second plan, « 30-2013 », is based on new production and sales areas.
Pentalog Iasi is thus expected to double its number of employees whithin the newt 12 months, which means repeating what was already achieved since last year (since we opened our office in August 2007). Greg and his team will rely on the city’s key factors of success:

In addition, the Pentalog in Chisinau (Rebublic of Moldova) is at a 2,5 hour-drive from Iasi and the two sites collaborate on several projects. Iasi is located in the ancient Moldavia. So there will soon be 200 of us in this region split between two countries. For now we are 265 people, among which 105 in the two parts of Moldavia.
Next week, it will be the turn of Pentalog Chisinau who will leave Puskin street, to double the office surface as well, in the framework of the 14-2010 plan.
I want to thank the support team of Alex who enabled the 35 Iasi people to start working in the new office without any technical problems. Good luck for next week in Chisinau!

What do you think of that?

This piece of news is likely to further strengthen the recently established partnership between ST-NXP Wireless and Pentalog Technology. Our Bucharest-Sibiu platform is clearly part of the greatest European adventure in industrial wireless technologies. It may even be the greatest European industrial adventure of the last 5 to 10 years? To be continued…

We are hearing more and more on Agile software development projects (XP, Extreme Programming). Without being related to big projects, this methodology is used in significant-one that are mostly carried out internally, but in this post I will give you the keys to achieve a successful offshore Agile project.

In the case of a classical V cycle-based project, drafting the functional requirements is done prior to the technical specifications. Then come the conception, unitary tests, coding, tests and finally the validation. All these phases unfold one after another. Even with intermediate deliveries, this cycle can last for several months.

The objective of the Agile method is to reduce as much as possible phase compartmentalization, thus allowing to shorten the cycle drastically in order to have frequent and relevant deliveries. XP is governed by several rules (http://www.extremeprogramming.org) that everybody can adapt to his own environment.

One of the keys for a successful project is the closeness between functional and technical participants. But in an offshore project, this is contradictory. Communication tools are thereby fundamental to improve closeness because in this type of project, the exchange of information and its traceability become critical. The use of a wiki can effectively meet this type of demand for it avoids fixed structure constraints. Also,Web Conferencing tools are useful for daily meetings in order to assess the current situation of the project (problems encountered, etc). Dreaded events in fixed price projects (modifications, misunderstanding, etc) become recurrent and a token of good project dynamics. Still, the fundamental criterion for a successful project is the implication or availability of the functional participants (contracting owner); but it is not easy with the distance between the teams. When starting a project, wishful thinking and hopes are often faced with a reality that was forgotten in the euphoria of the beginning. One should not forget that the Agile method is an equivalent to just-in-time production management. A lack of information can result in a stuck team waiting for more specifications. With the Agile method, the technical requirements and specifications are not completely drafted at the beginning, but this effort will be spread along the project.

As for all projects, the starting phase is critical. The users (or their representatives) must be carefully coached in order to guarantee the coherence of an homogeneous system: the expected solution. Indeed, to keep a common purpose, all the participants must refer to the same identical framework that will not be as precise as specification sheets would be. The coach must make sure that the successive demands are in accordance with the initial purpose. This is not a matter of scope because this type of organisation must allow an evolution of the scope of work thereby meeting the reactivity needs of the projects for which the time to market has to be as short as possible. The development team has to be familiar with this type of project. There are lots of developers and project managers dreaming of projects where changes and events would not exist. But Agile projects are made of changes only. Therefore, team members must have experience working on “classical” projects in order to adapt more easily. An Agile project cannot be based on a fixed price contract. Therefore managers will not have a complete view on the project. However, regular reporting (dimensions of the identified scope of project, to-do list, roadmap for the solution, …), using clear indicators for everyone, is very important. The budget cannot be a blank cheque. It is therefore essential that decision-makers interfere in major orientation changes and events that impact on the budget. So, the traditional steering committees are still necessary.
As a conclusion, there is no big difference between an offshore and an onshore Agile project. Besides the financial matter, efficiency means enjoying good mutual understanding between the participants and using the right tools (knowledge sharing, Web Conferencing, …).

There we are, the papers are signed and the technical teams have started to work on this project. We are moving to a new step in the strengthening of our hosting platform.

To sum up the story, Pentalog has been equipped with a hosting platform since 1999, with LEVEL3 at that time. After several years in Nanterre (near Paris), and then with NetCenter 9 in Courbevoie (near Paris), we migrated our equipment to the NetCenter in Orleans at the beginning of 2005 in order to enjoy more proximity, having regard to the migration of our platform towards a blade center based infrastructure.

Our needs have expanded since then. We need more bandwidth, more sturdiness through a double transit; we need escalation capacities and we need to access peering points in order to interconnect with international operators.

So off we go! After a selection phase we accepted the offer of Dimension Telecom / Alphalink. They knew how to find solutions and precise answers to all our issues. We are a small company (230 employees among which 200 in our offshore offices) with operators needs. After working with the most important operators on the French market (FT and then 9Cegetel), we now work with an operator of our size who can thus better understand our needs and bring us effective and financially acceptable solutions. We are only at the beginning of our relationship but we are confident that we are dealing with real specialists.

So why a new platform? The migration of our former platform to the blade center allowing virtualization ensured high availability of our server infrastructure and most of all almost totally remote administration. More recently we integrated a storage bay in order to increase our storage capacity to several Terabytes. With this new platform we will have the following services at our disposal:

- Internet transit through two redundant links of 100Mbps bringing 200Mbps in operational service.
- Access to local xDSL loops to interconnect our clients with our platform for a higher security level in our development projects and in facilities management activities.
- Possible interconnection with international operators in order to establish a direct connection between Paris and Bucharest in order to have our services converged (voice, video and data) on a dedicated and secured link of 100Mbps. It’s the next step.
- Even it may not seem very important to som of you, we have integrated a tool to follow-up our platform’s power consumption. I will come back to this subject later because it is an important issue for Pentalog.

We still have a lot to do, the support team in charge of deploying and managing these solutions as well as top-level managers are aware of that. The coming projects Fred mentioned and the ones that we expect with our clients and prospects will fully benefit from these new infrastructure capacities.

On writing these lines, I am in the departure lounge to join Alex, who has been in Munich since yesterday, for the System fair. The schedule comprises two meetings with very important customers and a potential partnership.
I am going to spend two days there, then, on Thursday evening, I will return to Bucharest to review the development stage of Pentalog operations on the local market (in full boom).
On Friday evening, the gathering of all Branch Managers in East Europe for our quarterly review. The agenda include a harsh overheads exam, especially pertaining to middle managers (the topic, among others, of my next post). The agenda of this gathering evening also includes a little exaggeration, on purpose, of the Jaristea overheads, a one of a kind place in the world where the cabaret, restaurants, the opera and the dance floor overlap. One of the musts in Bucharest … Monica, will you pls make the reservations? That, if you don’t have a better idea)
Saturday we will experience the harshness of the quarterly meeting. Sunday rest. Sunday evening, departure for Iasi where we will meet our Scandinavian customers on Tuesday.
Tuesday night or Wednesday, return to Buc.
Thursday, departure for Kiev, to see whether our East European forces can lend a hand to an important three-colour operation. Friday, return to Romania … still nothing in store. Return to France around 7/11.

It happened one evening, last January, when a prospector who had appreciated that the Pentalog.com approach was launched clicked the chatroom icon. Just like he told me much later : ‘if there hadn’t been anybody behind it, I could have continued my Google search and found another supplier !’ And then, he added ‘anyway, at 8 pm and at that moment, I would not have made a phone call, the chat approach was the anonymous contact that I needed for the first steps in our relation.’ Great; a several months later, he contacted me again, and after just one breakfast we would start a large-scale and great-effort business … that progressively took us from 0.5 to €1m CA. All that, undoubtedly, due to an additional chat channel.
With this new business, the chatroom and chatters are now exceeding €1.5m in 2 years. Not bad, is it?… and how the other said “Markets are conversations!”