Intellias is one of the few employers in Ukraine that offer positions in the area of geospatial technologies. The company is also the organizer of “Map Solutions”, a digital mapping, navigation, and LBS conference.
50 North had a chat with Intellias’ co-founder and COO, Michael Puzrakov, about the story of creation and development of the best IT-employer of 2017 in Ukraine, interests and spheres of focus of the company.
Antonina Kostruba:
What were your first steps when the company was founded?
Michael Puzrakov:
It’s been a long time ago, in 2002. We started together with my partner, Vitaly Sedler.
I attended the Lviv Lyceum of Physics and Maths and that’s where we met. Then we were studying in different classes, and at the university, we were studying in the same group. Then we went to work in the same company in 1997. At that time, outsourcing was just beginning. After that work, we got a little bit of experience, and already in 2001-2002 have decided that it was time to create our own company. We were driven by our own motives for self-realization to create our own company exactly as we wanted it to be, and not to someone else’s liking. The company that we founded was named Intellias. We came up with this name together, it is a synthetic name. It comes from the English word “intelligent”.
AK:
Please, tell us about the course that you have chosen for your company at the beginning.
MP:
We tried looking in various directions, knocking on various doors. And so it happened that from a technological point of view our first major project was in .NET. The customer considered different options. .NET then was virtually just created and this technology was new. But we analyzed it and decided that there is a future for it. We offered it to a customer from Austria. Our previous experience was with the German-speaking market, and we decided to cooperate with German-speaking countries. In order not to compete with the previous employer, we decided to work not in Germany, but in Austria and to look for customers there.
Michael Puzrakov
AK:
Can you analyze how your strategy of work has changed: first you went and knocked on various doors; when has that turning point when they came and knocked on yours?
MP:
Probably, this is when we got a critical mass, a certain size of the company. Maybe when there were 100 people. That’s when we started to be a company that people are looking for, and we became a company that is known in Lviv. Customers that are looking for contractors in some regions in Ukraine, or in Lviv, already consider those companies that are there and turn to them.
AK:
I personally learned about your company at the 2015 GIS conference. When looking at your website, I have noticed that at the time it had 18 major projects, among which there was only one GIS project. Can you tell a few words about it?
MP:
As a matter of fact, the project on geolocation services development for HERE is the largest of our projects. In reality, it is not just one project, but a program within which many projects are being developed.
When we started working with this customer, we were only involved with one component of the system. As we demonstrated the high quality of our services and the high level of our specialists, cooperation has evolved, and now our teams play a key role in developing a wide range of customer products. The number of specialists on these projects has increased significantly, and now about 400 people are working on developing the services of this global company.
Today, Intellias is a strategic R&D partner of HERE in Ukraine. Intellias is involved in the development of cloud computing solutions for the dynamic collection and sharing of IoT map data, the development of SDK for automotive navigation, real-time traffic information processing systems, libraries for route design, geolocation coding and search. Also, we are engaged in 3D rendering, that is, visualization of three-dimensional maps.
The software partly made by our company for the customer is installed in many new premium cars and offers drivers the most convenient and efficient experience of using the car: it allows you to draw up routes and synchronize them with a car through a mobile application, allows you to optimize the route according to the situation on the roads taking into account weather conditions, allows you to quickly find a parking space, etc. The decisions that our teams are working on are widely used and recognized by leading automotive manufacturers.
It so happened historically that this sort of work became our priority. However, we have other projects related to GIS.
AK:
Why did you decide to organize a GIS conference? What is the purpose? Involving new people? Communication?
MP:
We aim for several goals at once: strengthening our brand, introducing our company on the labour market, as well as increasing the information about our company for potential customers who learn that we have this experience. For our employees, this is also an opportunity to learn something new in this area.
Map solutions 2016
AK:
Tell us a little about your current projects. What generally, besides this big project, are you doing?
MP:
One of the new interesting projects is the navigation system for the drones, which can be called the sky atlas for UAVs. Our team, together with the specialists on the customer side, develops software – services that allow the owners of the drones to manage them while choosing an unobstructed route.
In general, if we talk about the industry, we are currently working in Automotive, GIS / Location-based Services / Navigation, Facility & Energy management, Edutech, Fintech.
Several new projects started in Germany, we have German-language markets prevailing.
AK:
Where are the projects from?
MP:
Mostly European. And several customers from the United States of America and Canada.
AK:
How is it working in the American and Canadian markets?
MP:
It’s going well. Probably, because of the history of these countries, they are open to other nationalities, migrants, and more open to international cooperation. There are some inconveniences associated with the time zone, with long travel time. But, on the other hand, there is a positive experience that they trust our experts. We have not opened this market for ourselves yet, but we are working on it.
AK:
Questions about working with projects. When you get a big project, how often do you have to bring in new specialists? Do you already have a group of people who are ready to work?
MP:
Our company is focused on growth, and we have grown by about 40-60% per annum in recent years. It is impossible to simply take new projects, and perform, growing at the expense available specialists. Obviously, we are taking in a lot of employees. When we are taking a new project, the team may consist partially of existing employees and partially of those that we are hiring for this project.
AK:
What about the critical mass. In your plans, to which critical mass should you go to start changing something? How many people and projects should you have?
MP:
In fact, we are changing something constantly. We change the organizational structure, new departments, new offices are opening. There are new centers of development in Kyiv, Odessa, and so on.
AK:
Do you plan to expand the network to other cities or is it enough for now?
MP:
We are fine at the moment. But it is not impossible that over the course of a year, we will possibly open an office somewhere else: in another city in Ukraine, or even in the Eastern Europe.
AK:
Do you also have a representative office in Berlin?
MP:
We have one representative in Berlin, who mainly helps in dealing with our customers. But when I meant Eastern Europe, I was rather talking about a development center, to which it would be possible to recruit staff more or less massive way.
AK:
The choice of cities in Ukraine. Before you think about opening a new office somewhere, are you primarily focusing on the qualifications of the workers or on the market prices? What are the key points that influence your choice?
MP:
Availability of specialists is most important.
AK:
Did you think about opening your own school and preparing specialists for your projects?
MP:
Yes, we have been considering such an idea for a long time. But it turns out that the projects that are important for us in recent years require a very high level of expertise. It takes a lot of time to teach this level, and we do not have time to do it. If we started moving in the other direction, getting other projects with lower qualification requirements, this might have been possible.
AK:
Having a great deal of experience in the development of different topics, you have a lot of specialists who could be involved in the development of your own product. Have you ever thought of this?
MP:
Yes, we think about it every year. But, in fact, this is another business line that requires separate organization and focus. If you simply involve some developers, it will not work. There are many unsuccessful cases like this. For a product to be successful, you need to invest a lot more into marketing to promote the new product than in the development. It is on our list, but time has not come yet.
