What was the past year like for the company? Tomáš Topinka - Technical Director of TIP IT Solutions talks about some key areas of operation and development of the company.
Last year, just like the previous year, was crucial for us. It was a period of exponential growth and development for the company in key areas. We have become an external part of our client's infrastructure team in the field of energy and I dare say that we have contributed to the successful completion of the transformation project. But 2020 was also crucial for another reason. A number of skilled people joined our internal team who trust us and see the potential in our company
Which technological or product trends will become more important for your customers in the near future? Are you preparing for them now?
With the situation around the pandemic, new trends are coming and others are deepening. The trend of communication with companies/authorities and online work in general has accelerated significantly. This is then linked to the "evergreen" in IT - digitization and automatization. It aims to minimize manual steps to complete automatization, increase response time and provide better process control. We believe in the constant development of this area and therefore it is one of our strategic goals in which we invest and develop. In this regard, we support the BPM and Business Rules platforms. Efforts to increase efficiency go hand in hand with cost optimization, which we see in low-code platforms, where we see a synergistic effect on our customers in accelerating the entire delivery cycle.
The basic premise of the success of digitization and automatization also lies in the integration. It has always been here and still will be, but lately subregions such as microservices, event streaming or API management have been constantly growing in importance. We have extensive experience in all of these areas and in the latter (API management), for example, we are able to deliver a complete "turnkey" solution from analysis, through delivery to subsequent support for most available technologies.
Last but not least, the market is increasingly opening up to the idea of a hybrid cloud, which combines internal systems with the added value of public clouds. In this area, as seen in Amazon Web Services AWS, which have specific advantages over other alternatives in the market.
There are many top people on the Czech IT market. We choose the most qualified ones and carry out detailed internal scoring before we start working with them.
The situation around the pandemic has forced many companies to change their business plans. How did it affect you? Did you manage to find a new opportunity?
The pandemic has generally accelerated IT. The companies started to invest more in this area and this logically affected us in a positive sense. Last year, we doubled in all parameters, made important acquisitions, moved to a new office space and expanded management with very experienced people, which we believe will allow us to maintain the growth rate.
From a practical point of view, we decided to focus more and invest in the above-mentioned areas for enterprise customers in the field of finance, energy, telco and others.
We applied the transformation of the onsite infrastructure to a hybrid cloud on several projects. We used our knowledge of AWS vs. MS Azure and were able to offer a solution that was subsequently implemented. Building knowledge and expertise in the field of AWS is one of our corporate priorities, all supported by the certifications of our specialists
There has been a shortage of IT professionals in the IT industry for a long time now. What are you doing to make your company an attractive place for job seekers?
There are many top people on the Czech IT market. We choose the most qualified ones and carry out detailed internal scoring before starting any cooperation with them.
We are well aware that the real value of a company is the quality of the people who work for it.
As the team grows, so does our range of benefits, which have become a matter of course for us. We are convinced that, in any uncertain time, the basis of caring for people, will ensure financial security and job stability. We also manage to maintain a virtually zero turnover by offering work on interesting projects, internal academies, expanding the knowledge of our people and the family atmosphere in the team.
What interesting projects have you come across lately?
For one customer, we worked together to create a virtual assistant in the form of a chat booth built on a component from Amazon (AWS). We believe that it is only a matter of time before the ability to recognize and understand written text, spoken word (along with emotion recognition) will shift in this area to such an extent that communication with a virtual assistant will be quite common and over time highly preferred by the public.
The easing of legislative restrictions on the public cloud generally opens up many more possibilities in this area. We can mention, for example, the cooperation of some customers in migrating systems from on-premise to AWS or the ever-evolving use of Office 365 and many others.
As part of production, we also supplied interesting solutions in the field of working with serial numbers for drug flow monitoring (so-called serialization) or a product based on blockchain technology related to cryptocurrencies.
There is simply a lot.
Despite all these technical topics, we do not forget the situation around us. Unlike some others, we are lucky to work in a stable sector and we are aware of that. We don't take it as a "project", but in addition to taxes, we try to give the company back a piece of our success. Last year, we provided donations to the non-profit organizations Food Bank for Prague and the Central Bohemian Region, Health Clowns and non-commercial sports events. We take it for granted and it should be, we believe, for all successful (not only IT) companies.