Developing competencies makes sense. Which ones and why did we choose them?
Petr Kikuš is responsible for project delivery, development of selected competencies and strategic opportunities with existing and new business partners at TIP IT Solutions. His previous experience in the industry was gained, among others, during six years at IBM, where he was responsible for part of the software portfolio for the Czech and Slovak markets. He is convinced of the need to modernize the IT environment of customers who are currently facing major global changes in society sooner than ever.
On the market, TIP IT Solutions is perceived more as a bodyshop company. What is the situation around competencies in your company?
We are aware of this and are therefore trying to change the market perception. TIP IT was indeed founded as an IT bodyshopping company, but for the last two years we have been focusing more on competencies and end-to-end delivery to be able to offer a broader portfolio of services to our customers. We have chosen the following areas for this goal:
Automation (especially process management and business / decision rules),
Integration (from point-to-point to messaging (Kafka) to API management),
Cloud (public mainly AWS, private Openshift),
Application development (including the topic of application modernization – where we advise and implement the conversion of legacy applications to new patterns (microservices, containerization,…)
With a team of more than 100 people already, we have real experts to rely on.
How would you assess the current situation of the IT market in the intersection with your competences?
The market is currently very influenced by the overall economic situation. Many customers are completely stopping investments and waiting to see what happens next with the market, or even just trying to maintain their existence. We are fortunate that our main customers are banks. They are still in good financial shape given the higher interest rates and are continuing to develop or even transform their IT, which was largely triggered by the situation around the coronavirus. In this segment, we are addressing literally all of these issues. Automation is closely related to integration. The corona-crisis era has also accelerated the adoption of the public cloud. Here, temporary disruptions in the supply of HW to the internal infrastructure also “helped”. To make applications easy to maintain on-premise or in the cloud, the containerization pattern helps, which in turn supports application modernization and development. Everything is beautifully connected, which is why we chose this competency set.
Why should customers in these competencies choose to work with you? What makes TIP IT Solutions unique?
We have the ability to quickly assemble a quality team for the required end-to-end delivery, from analysis, through design, implementation/development, testing, and follow-up support. With over 100 people already on the team, we have real experts to fall back on. We are not a big corporation and therefore we can adapt to the customer’s conditions, and last but not least, it’s fairness and willingness to fight when things are not always ideal. That, in short, is part of it, both on the part of the team members and the customer himself.
What are your plans for the future?
We are currently at a crossroads that has made us think about our next steps. With the number of people on projects increasing, and thus increasing operational demands, we are faced with a routine that takes away from our capacity for business and further development. For this reason, we are currently strengthening the sales team to cope with this transition as best as possible. We are looking for new salespeople so that they can also lead discussions around competence topics in which we want to further improve. We therefore want to enter the new year even stronger and more determined to face new challenges, which I feel we are starting to enjoy, even if it hurts a lot in places, but at the end of the day that’s part of it too :-).
