This Friday, 4th of September, our CMO at Apiumtech – Ekaterina Novoseltseva was invited to the English radio channel in Barcelona to give a speech about current software trends and how Apiumtech became successful.
“English Radio” provides a mix of great music and stimulating interviews and conversations with guests from the broad spectrum of the English-speaking community in Catalonia. Friday morning from 9 am to 10am with Katrina Logie and Sam Mednick. Interviews with successful companies based in Barcelona and individual guests talking about their ideas and businesses.
We started our interview with a question,
WHAT IS APIUMTECH AND WHAT ARE OUR CORE SERVICES
Apiumtech is an international digital company.
We have a team of highly skilled designers, developers, software architects and marketers, who are passionate about all the possibilities that high-end technology can bring to accomplish user needs and give them new ideas on how to advance with their growth strategies.
We have 15 years of experience in the IT industry, it allows us to face any type of project.
We are always moving forward, studying new trends, frameworks, processes and new approaches.
We provide multidisciplinary services in technology: Web & Mobile Development, UX design , Software Architecture , IT training & consultancy and digital marketing technologies: Push notifications, augmented reality and data analytics.
- Web & mobile app development is our core service, we constantly go to the conferences and events, we know latest technologies and we know how and when to use them. We do native app development, multiplatform mobile web services, responsive web and natural language processing projects.
- UX design is our cash cow, we receive numerous design projects every week, we help companies to obtain a clear, effective and creative design.
- Software Architecture – we drive architectural integrity, create short-term and long-term strategic guidelines, help to manage complexity and propose incremental upgrades in order to achieve scalable and stable project.
- IT training & Consultancy. Sometimes companies prefer to do everything in-house, therefore we also have a service called: IT training and consultancy, we work side by side with the client’s team to make it highly productive by teaching them best practices.
- Digital marketing services: Push notifications, Augmented reality and Data analytics. Also, this year we introduced digital marketing services, because now it is a current trend and 80% of the companies increase their digital marketing budgets. Now, it is extremely important to be in front of the customer and have direct access to him 24/7. Now almost every company invests in mobile, I mean Augmented Reality, where people can scan and shop, watch interactive AR videos. Push notifications and Geofencing allow companies to send targeted location based notifications taking into account preferences, habits and purchasing history of the client. Now people are tired of ads and brands search for an opportunity to create additional value with the help of mobile devices. So this is why we introduced those technologies because we are always following new trends, always trying to be in a constant evolution, and we want to be up to date. me-commerce is growing a lot and we want to be part of it and we want to be able to help companies with their digital strategy – development & solutions, proving key analytics data.
We believe – and have actually demonstrated – that we can reduce the development and maintenance time, delivering exactly what the client wants. We help companies to grow in an efficient way, helping them with their IT/Digital marketing strategies.
Second question was
HOW WAS APIUMTECH FOUNDED
Apiumtech’s founders all worked for important big companies like Roche, Aigues de Barcelona, NTR, Intersystems, Ono, Telefónica, Accenture, etc., due to our own experience, we were all aware of the advantages you get by working in big global companies, but as all of us had faced situations where we had to work with a lack of agility, flexibility or even endless timings for any modification, meetings and more meetings made it exhausting and impossible to feel satisfied with our work, we decided to join forces and open a new digital service oriented company.
We opened our first office – our headquarters in Spain, in sunny Barcelona, then we opened an office in peaceful Andorra, in Andorra la Vella and last year we also opened an office in exotic Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh city.
WHY HO CHI MINH CITY
1 year ago our CTO went to Vietnam, because LAZADA ( Asian ebay) had a project for us there. In Ho Chi Minh city, he saw an opportunity to grow faster and have scalability. Vietnam is a strategic place for us, because currently their government invests a lot in IT there and we found high level developers without any problem. Ho Chi Minh gave us an opportunity to have a very powerful brute force in coding. And since we understood how to combine development in Spain and in Ho Chi Minh, we have never had issues as a lack in human resources when it comes to starting a new project.
We are constantly growing, finding extraordinary people for outstanding projects.
WHAT IS OUR SECRET FORMULA OF OUR SUCCESS
Our secret formula is: Agile development + Unit testing + Continuous integration = 100% working software!
We are able to achieve high results because we use an Agile methodology.
Agile development is an approach to project management. We work with 2 weeks sprints, and start each sprint with “user stories” that we determine with the customers, it’s basically specific tasks to complete during the sprint. At the end of each sprint we do a demo, where client can see working functionalities, the idea is to do the most important features, and then add on them, instead of just delivering a product by the end of the project and incurring the risk of having to rework things that could have been avoided. Every day we are in touch with a client and he has control over the whole project because we use a program called JIRA which basically gives visibility to the client and lets him know what we’re doing and where we are with the project, which is something they usually appreciate a lot. By using Agile methodology, we improve project predictability, we adapt to the changes, we focus on business value, we reduce risk of failure and we deliver product to the market faster than others. So client gets ROI faster.
In fact, we are always transparent with our clients and one of the most important things is that every member of our team manages the project as if it were his own product.
We believe in continuous evolution. We are always searching for new technologies or paradigms that will help us to improve the quality and speed of our work, and that has been attracting new talented professionals, which has made the business scalable.
Today, we are not only have clients from different industries with different projects, but we also have clients from all over the world.
It has not always been like it is right now. It took us time to find the best way of doing business in a scalable and effective way. For example, at the very beginning, we tried to adapt to the client as much as we could. But now, we believe that it is much more effective to bring him to our side. What I mean by that, is that by making the client use our tools and methodology for project management, establishing requirements and deadlines, we deliver the project in a more efficient way.
As I mentioned earlier we believe in continuous evolution, which implies that we always follow new trends and adapt to changes in the market. Lately, we have decided to focus a lot on Digital Marketing. “Why?” you might ask. Well, we found out that 80% of shoppers research online before buying and that 60% of consumers use mobile exclusively to make purchase decisions. This has led to 80% of companies planning to increase their digital marketing budgets while 28% have already reduced their advertising budget this year to have more funds for their digital strategy.
Currently, the digital technologies that are the most demanded are Augmented Reality, Push Notifications, Geo-fencing, SEO and others. Why? Because as people have on average 65 apps downloaded on their phone, but only use 15 of them, brands are forced to fight to be among the most used ones. To do so, they use those creative ideas that are more and more engaging and tend to catch the customer’s attention.
For example, it was predicted that by 2018, there would be 200 million mobile AR users.
Obviously, companies want to invest in it to get a chance to increase their sales and engagement with the users. Also, companies have realized that 62% of the users who have enabled push notifications have returned to the app the month after, the technology has already been well established.
Always following new trends, we introduced those technologies to our portfolio and now we are able to deliver additional value to our clients. We actually provide a combo of Tech and Digital Marketing support to the brand – we help companies to develop their IT/Digital Marketing strategy.
WHAT ARE THE NEW TRENDS IN SOFTWARE
- In methodology the new trend is Agile like scrum and kanban.
- In development: TDD – Test Driven Development and BDD- Behaviour Driven Development
- Biggest tech communities: NodeJS, ReactJS
- In system administration: Containerization, for example Docker
FUTURE PREDICTIONS
We are pretty sure, that in the future everything will be on cloud. Natural language processing will be very close to artificial intellect.
As for us, keep growing, our idea is to launch architecture solutions, mvp prototypes, which could be easily adapted to the clients needs, reducing development costs.
