Second wind. How to go from an ordinary company to a regional leader of the IT market in three years
Three years ago, after moving from a well-known international oil structure to the domestic IT company Norsec Delta Projects, Kuanysh Imangali and Galymzhan Adilov firmly decided that in their new place two tasks would be a priority: first, to become the best business partner and employer in their field, the second is to make the maximum possible efforts to develop the regional IT community, involving colleagues in large and interesting projects.
By that time, in his native Atyrau, a certified engineer of automated control systems for technological process Imangali and a systems engineer Adilov gained rich experience in various structures where they could their knowledge related to IT is useful - from computer stores and the then independent Kazkom to IT departments of Universal Business Systems, CPC, Halliburton, North Caspian Operating Company. At that time, mainly foreign players, for example, the same UBS, worked in the market of the Atyrau region. Large oil companies were on contracts with vendors and organized the purchase of everything related to IT through foreign suppliers, since it was cheaper. For 15 years, Imangali and Adilov have worked with all types of IT infrastructure, went through a good school and realized that from a professional point of view they are in no way inferior to their foreign colleagues.
With new forces
“We had a choice: to open our own business or to join a company that is already operating on the market. It seemed impractical to create your own business: the city is small, the market is divided, at that time there were offices of such powerful companies as Logycom and Alsi. The second option provided faster mobilization, entry to the market, the ability to quickly use their knowledge. This is how the decision to join Norsec Delta Projects, which by that time had almost 10 years of experience, reputation and contracts in the oil sector - almost any activity in Atyrau is connected with it in one way or another. True, there was no talk of large orders at that time, and the company employed only three dozen people. We offered knowledge, experience, changed the company's strategy, formulated long-term goals, ”says 36-year-old Adilov, director of business development. In three years the number of the company's personnel increased to 160 people, the turnover averages $ 20 million per year.
According to Imangali, who now works for the company as a commercial director, one of the first tasks after joining the management of Norsec Delta Project was training specialists, passing certification and obtaining the maximum possible official partner statuses that vendors assign to IT suppliers. Today Norsec Delta Projects is a partner of Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, Lenovo, HP, Dell / EMC and other major market players. An IT company from Atyrau has become almost the only Kazakhstani company that has received the status of a certified OSIsoft system integrator and the ability to service the product of this vendor's Plant Information System. This is a solution for managing the production chain, a software package that provides data management, including their collection, storage, processing by organizations, enterprises and individual processes. It is being implemented in almost all industries in the energy, oil and gas, metallurgical and other industries, and, as a rule, only Russian companies operating in Kazakhstan through partners have the relevant competencies.
“Passing the certification process, of course, required investments, and it was quite costly to invest a lot in training employees, at first without getting any return. But we deliberately went to these costs, realizing that in the end they will pay off. Our principle is to invest the earned funds in the development of the company. This helps a lot in working with customers, since large oil players regularly conduct audits, carefully check financial indicators, development dynamics, and business transparency, ”the interlocutors explain. The reinvestment of funds in the Norsec Delta Project ensured the availability of non-borrowed capital, which was a big plus when participating in tenders for high-value projects of oil and gas companies.
Obtaining certificates and partner statuses made it possible to remove the pricing problem from the agenda: vendors expressed their readiness to offer a certified partner lower prices, and clients, in turn, were able to evaluate the benefits of fulfilling orders by a team of qualified specialists at a more favorable price than the market offered at that time. After some time, Norsec Delta Projects started promoting its brand with the #bestdeal hashtag - the best deal on the market. Since last year, the company has been working on a new business strategy together with the EBRD experts as part of the International Advisory banking program.
The specificity of the region is such that oil companies are the largest players, they also largely determine the development of the IT sector, dictate the standards that the market picks up. If TCO, for example, implements a good IT product or solution, there is no doubt that soon it will appear among general contractors, subcontractors and further along the chain. The IT firms themselves prefer to use the best practices from global vendors in the oil sector. In production, it is necessary to ensure the IT network level, high-quality data transmission, fault tolerance, the system must be designed in such a way that there are no losses and downtime.
“This is a difficult task, respectively, and the staff of IT specialists in oil companies is large, at least 200-300 people. It is problematic to maintain such a large number of systems and software products with fewer forces. Cooperation with major oil players taught us how to work according to standards, the ability to see the IT infrastructure in a complex and predict its development in the horizon of several years. Of course, companies engaged in other industries may not have such financial opportunities, but oilmen know how to count money, they do not invest in IT, regardless of costs, ”says Adilov.
Having come to the management of the company, experienced IT specialists decided not to scatter their efforts, but gradually and in detail to master all levels - from the network, server level, data storage systems to the level of operating systems and applications. Today Norsec Delta Project provides a full range of IT solutions and related services, equipment and products, performs turnkey projects with the efforts of a fully staffed team, which includes not only "pure" IT specialists, but also business analysts, management specialists. projects, provides warranty and post-warranty service. One of the large-scale projects that the Norsec Delta Project is currently working on is the implementation of SAP HCM human capital management solution in a large oil and gas company.
Norsec Delta Projects specialists regularly visit the fields, and for customers from the oil and gas sector, the benefits of cooperation with a local player became evident during the quarantine, when neither Russian nor foreign specialists, if necessary, could come and provide technical support on site. In principle, Imangali notes, in IT, the remote format of work has been practiced for a long time and successfully, correctly designed systems allow you to painlessly switch to remote work, but one cannot exclude the occurrence of a situation in which the personal presence of a specialist is required.
The implementation of the ambitious plans of the new Norsec Delta Projects team largely depended on the solution of the personnel issue. According to Imangali, the level of training of Kazakhstani IT specialists in highly specialized areas, as a rule, does not meet the requirements of foreign customers, and IT companies are forced to take on personnel training. In the early 2000s, the practice of attracting expats became widespread. A few years ago, at the level of senior specialists, foreign workers outnumbered the forces of domestic IT specialists in Atyrau, but today, thanks to the efforts of Kazakhstani players, the situation is changing; world practice is being introduced, ITIL, Agile, SCRUM and other methodologies, business processes are being applied, the qualifications of local specialists are growing, although this is not easy, at the cost of great efforts.
“Experts with good experience who have passed the necessary training are very expensive and do not stay in Kazakhstan. On the other hand, you can take a person with experience, pay him a high salary, but if he believes that he knows everything and he is not interested in growing, his knowledge quickly becomes outdated. Therefore, we prefer to recruit employees from the student's bench, children who are interested in learning new things. There are many areas in IT where there is a shortage of specialists, ”Adilov notes.
Источник: https://m.forbes.kz/process/technologies/vtoroe_dyihanie_5_1601022370/
Перевод статьи: Мусладин Айдана
By that time, in his native Atyrau, a certified engineer of automated control systems for technological process Imangali and a systems engineer Adilov gained rich experience in various structures where they could their knowledge related to IT is useful - from computer stores and the then independent Kazkom to IT departments of Universal Business Systems, CPC, Halliburton, North Caspian Operating Company. At that time, mainly foreign players, for example, the same UBS, worked in the market of the Atyrau region. Large oil companies were on contracts with vendors and organized the purchase of everything related to IT through foreign suppliers, since it was cheaper. For 15 years, Imangali and Adilov have worked with all types of IT infrastructure, went through a good school and realized that from a professional point of view they are in no way inferior to their foreign colleagues.
With new forces
“We had a choice: to open our own business or to join a company that is already operating on the market. It seemed impractical to create your own business: the city is small, the market is divided, at that time there were offices of such powerful companies as Logycom and Alsi. The second option provided faster mobilization, entry to the market, the ability to quickly use their knowledge. This is how the decision to join Norsec Delta Projects, which by that time had almost 10 years of experience, reputation and contracts in the oil sector - almost any activity in Atyrau is connected with it in one way or another. True, there was no talk of large orders at that time, and the company employed only three dozen people. We offered knowledge, experience, changed the company's strategy, formulated long-term goals, ”says 36-year-old Adilov, director of business development. In three years the number of the company's personnel increased to 160 people, the turnover averages $ 20 million per year.
According to Imangali, who now works for the company as a commercial director, one of the first tasks after joining the management of Norsec Delta Project was training specialists, passing certification and obtaining the maximum possible official partner statuses that vendors assign to IT suppliers. Today Norsec Delta Projects is a partner of Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, Lenovo, HP, Dell / EMC and other major market players. An IT company from Atyrau has become almost the only Kazakhstani company that has received the status of a certified OSIsoft system integrator and the ability to service the product of this vendor's Plant Information System. This is a solution for managing the production chain, a software package that provides data management, including their collection, storage, processing by organizations, enterprises and individual processes. It is being implemented in almost all industries in the energy, oil and gas, metallurgical and other industries, and, as a rule, only Russian companies operating in Kazakhstan through partners have the relevant competencies.
“Passing the certification process, of course, required investments, and it was quite costly to invest a lot in training employees, at first without getting any return. But we deliberately went to these costs, realizing that in the end they will pay off. Our principle is to invest the earned funds in the development of the company. This helps a lot in working with customers, since large oil players regularly conduct audits, carefully check financial indicators, development dynamics, and business transparency, ”the interlocutors explain. The reinvestment of funds in the Norsec Delta Project ensured the availability of non-borrowed capital, which was a big plus when participating in tenders for high-value projects of oil and gas companies.
Obtaining certificates and partner statuses made it possible to remove the pricing problem from the agenda: vendors expressed their readiness to offer a certified partner lower prices, and clients, in turn, were able to evaluate the benefits of fulfilling orders by a team of qualified specialists at a more favorable price than the market offered at that time. After some time, Norsec Delta Projects started promoting its brand with the #bestdeal hashtag - the best deal on the market. Since last year, the company has been working on a new business strategy together with the EBRD experts as part of the International Advisory banking program.
The specificity of the region is such that oil companies are the largest players, they also largely determine the development of the IT sector, dictate the standards that the market picks up. If TCO, for example, implements a good IT product or solution, there is no doubt that soon it will appear among general contractors, subcontractors and further along the chain. The IT firms themselves prefer to use the best practices from global vendors in the oil sector. In production, it is necessary to ensure the IT network level, high-quality data transmission, fault tolerance, the system must be designed in such a way that there are no losses and downtime.
“This is a difficult task, respectively, and the staff of IT specialists in oil companies is large, at least 200-300 people. It is problematic to maintain such a large number of systems and software products with fewer forces. Cooperation with major oil players taught us how to work according to standards, the ability to see the IT infrastructure in a complex and predict its development in the horizon of several years. Of course, companies engaged in other industries may not have such financial opportunities, but oilmen know how to count money, they do not invest in IT, regardless of costs, ”says Adilov.
Having come to the management of the company, experienced IT specialists decided not to scatter their efforts, but gradually and in detail to master all levels - from the network, server level, data storage systems to the level of operating systems and applications. Today Norsec Delta Project provides a full range of IT solutions and related services, equipment and products, performs turnkey projects with the efforts of a fully staffed team, which includes not only "pure" IT specialists, but also business analysts, management specialists. projects, provides warranty and post-warranty service. One of the large-scale projects that the Norsec Delta Project is currently working on is the implementation of SAP HCM human capital management solution in a large oil and gas company.
Norsec Delta Projects specialists regularly visit the fields, and for customers from the oil and gas sector, the benefits of cooperation with a local player became evident during the quarantine, when neither Russian nor foreign specialists, if necessary, could come and provide technical support on site. In principle, Imangali notes, in IT, the remote format of work has been practiced for a long time and successfully, correctly designed systems allow you to painlessly switch to remote work, but one cannot exclude the occurrence of a situation in which the personal presence of a specialist is required.
The implementation of the ambitious plans of the new Norsec Delta Projects team largely depended on the solution of the personnel issue. According to Imangali, the level of training of Kazakhstani IT specialists in highly specialized areas, as a rule, does not meet the requirements of foreign customers, and IT companies are forced to take on personnel training. In the early 2000s, the practice of attracting expats became widespread. A few years ago, at the level of senior specialists, foreign workers outnumbered the forces of domestic IT specialists in Atyrau, but today, thanks to the efforts of Kazakhstani players, the situation is changing; world practice is being introduced, ITIL, Agile, SCRUM and other methodologies, business processes are being applied, the qualifications of local specialists are growing, although this is not easy, at the cost of great efforts.
“Experts with good experience who have passed the necessary training are very expensive and do not stay in Kazakhstan. On the other hand, you can take a person with experience, pay him a high salary, but if he believes that he knows everything and he is not interested in growing, his knowledge quickly becomes outdated. Therefore, we prefer to recruit employees from the student's bench, children who are interested in learning new things. There are many areas in IT where there is a shortage of specialists, ”Adilov notes.
Источник: https://m.forbes.kz/process/technologies/vtoroe_dyihanie_5_1601022370/
Перевод статьи: Мусладин Айдана