Altoros

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am founder and CEO. The company provides Saas services to customers.

For what projects/services did your company hire Altoros, and what were your goals?

We had need to get tailored SaaS Service and mobile app on market. We wanted to use the latest technology and SW.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We founded the through a referral and considered them along with 2 other vendors. Because the project was such as high priority, we needed a result-driven partner that was committed to deliver new products on time with high quality. We were also looking for open minded and flexible with high skills.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

They designed and developed customer specific solution. We first started with a discover workshop to go over our business challenges. Then, they gave us workflows and design mock-ups to approve before starting development. They completed the project in 4 weeks sprints, which allowed us to review and test functions and give feedback. The final product was ready for testing in 5 months.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were 6 people in the core team, including a project manager, a designer and 2 senior developers. Other resources would come and go depending on the project needs

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Were were able to launch the service on time.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Their project management was great, especially when compared to other vendors we have worked with. She really wanted to understand the real business case to be able to get best outcome in the project. She also pushed developers to move to a new areas to able to find out new ways to develop the final product

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Readiness to find out new and cost-effective way to develop the final product. Open and honest communication throughout the project game us room to review different UI functions on the service.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

While the quality of the work was great, they could have more diligent about documentation and more accurate estimations of the work packages. Open issues were fixed during the project with open and honest communication.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a software development company. We’re an agency that focuses on development and marketing for e-commerce and other sales-oriented, marketplace-style vendors.

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

They’re helping us with our development and software engineering needs for the creation and maintenance of applications and e-commerce properties in the marketing sphere.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The key deliverables are their expertise and finished applications. Altoros’ ongoing development is based on our designs and specifications, and these projects are largely for our clients. Occasionally, they build tools for internal use.

What is the team composition?

It ranges from 2–5 people depending on the number of projects we have going.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

They were a reference from a friend about 10 years ago. I’ve worked with them while at a number of companies.

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve spent around $600,000–$700,000 with them on this engagement.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together at my current company since January 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Altoros provides very high-level engineers. We haven’t had to switch any out. We’ve always appreciated their work. They’re as good as I can want, and I’m happy to continue working with them.

Our clients’ feedback has been very positive as well. They say Altoros’ offers excellent service and quality that they haven’t received from other providers.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re excellent. They don’t force us to use any specific tools, as they’re happy to go with whatever we want. We go with whatever fits our client’s needs. Altoros is extremely flexible and performs well with whatever tools we give them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of Altoros’ engineering work, their speed, and their ability to learn new technologies as needed stand out. Additionally, they work well independently, requiring less management than is traditionally needed. They’re easily comparable to any excellent domestic engineer.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I wish they had more staff so I could fully scale with them. Their engineers are very in-demand so they can only provide us with so many.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Even outsourced engineers cost a six-figure salary, so make sure you have your requirements together. Make sure you’re organized and have your designs in shape so you’re using Altoros in a focused manner like you would use a domestic engineer. You’re going to get domestic engineering quality, and it can have a high cost if you expect them to design the whole product for you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of an HR and staffing technology company. We focus on employment compliance for the entire employee lifecycle in multiple countries.

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

They’re helping us with staff augmentation, particularly for backend development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They work with our internal product managers and external frontend developers to deliver within an ongoing two-week sprint framework.

What is the team composition?

They’ve provided us with three developers, with one of these three serving as the team leader and our main point of contact.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

We were looking for someone operating in their region and time zone who focused on the technology stack that they do. In our review process, they impressed us with their skill set, knowledge, and experience.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $25,000 per month with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since February 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our internal QA team reviews their deliverables, and we also assess their completion of the sprints. Based on these assessments, we’ve been satisfied. Their code is quite good and their team is up-front about areas that may need to be altered or improved. They’ve got a strong understanding of how to best apply current technology stacks and approaches.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been effective. We have a project manager on our side who keeps everyone accountable. We get all the teams together as we plan each sprint and hold a retrospective meeting afterward. These meetings have helped everyone communicate well. We communicate via Slack and use Jira and Confluence for project management purposes.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There’s a clear drive on their end to keep everyone knowledgeable about new technologies. We’ve all learned a lot during this project, but they’re always able to effectively apply anything we’ve asked them to apply.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’m pretty happy overall, and I’d have to be picky or unreasonable to criticize anything.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

When you’re looking for outside resources to support your team, you have to consider how they’ll fit with your team. It’s much like making internal hiring decisions.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the head of architecture and innovation for Tokentrust. We are aiming to facilitate the digitization and tokenization of commodities, enabling them to be traded in a simple and secure way, as well as provide accessibility to illiquid markets.

To achieve this target we based our platform on permissioned blockchain technology.

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We were looking for specialists and experts to help us with deployment.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We are working with Altoros with a staffing model. They provide us with needed specialists on request and we integrate them into our team. They focus on infrastructure architecture and deployment.

At the moment, they are working on enterprise-grade platform deployment. They are responsible for ensuring that the deployment has all the necessary qualities from the perspective of regulators and auditors.

What is the team composition?

Currently, we have four engineers from the Altoros team.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

Altoros was recommended by one of our partner companies. Before that, we were in contact with many companies but none of them were able to provide us with adequate specialists in the area we were looking for, except for Altoros.

This made them very valuable to us. The price that they proposed was quite fair taking in account qualification of proposed specialists, so we decided to work with them.

How much have you invested in them?

We invested about $30,000 on average per month, and so far, it is about $200,000 total.

What is the status of this engagement?

In September 2020, we started active development with them on phase one, which was successfully completed three months ago. Now we are working with them on phase two. I assume our relationship with Altoros will go further after ending phase two.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Altoros seem to be very good at providing specialists who really meet our requirements. This is rather rare vendor's quality based on my experience. If you ask them for certain specialists, they understand what qualities the specialist needs to have. They don’t just try to find someone who fits from any perspective.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

We use an agile approach. 

In general, they react very quickly. As a startup, we have often some changes, and they are very flexible in this regard.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of their specialists and the price that we are paying for that quality is fair. Altoros is very client-oriented. There is nothing that I could complain about.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they continuously ask us for feedback. There is nothing that would cause me to complain.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Consider Altoros because they are qualified specialists, they are experts, and the price is fair especially in the context of their qualities.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a technology company. We're essentially a cleaning facilitator for delivery drivers. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We started the company from scratch, so we had all the challenges of a startup, which included visualization, pipelining, and technology.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I recognized that when delivery drivers needed to use the bathroom, they didn’t have many options, especially during COVID-19. I wanted to connect drivers with crowdsourced bathrooms during delivery trips. Altoros took that idea and built it into a product from scratch. They did all of the code — about 600 hours of code to create the proof of concept and MVP. Their team also created the API for drivers and then integrated it into their platform. Their work also involved cloud consulting.

What is the team composition?

Our main point of contact was on the business development side, but we also worked with software engineers. In total, we worked with 5-6 people, including frontend and backend developers, and QA analysts.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I searched Google and liked their reviews. I did a little more research and chose them based on their size and specializations.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent close to $30,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the project with Altoros in September 2020, and they completed what we needed in January 2021. However, we’ll likely use them again in the next phase.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We measured success based on the project's timeframe and the quality of their work. Our CFO said that Altoros created great technology and their code was excellent. The timing of the project was great too. To complete this project within four months was excellent.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

Overall, their team was great. We communicated via Zoom and had weekly meetings with their project manager in the beginning. Once everyone was on the same page, we cut back to meeting every two weeks. Although there was a hiccup with communication, it was quickly resolved. However, that happens when working on big projects.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Altoros’ communication was excellent. It was hard to illustrate my idea because it was complicated. Their team was able to create a physical product based on my idea, which was crucial. They also owned the project. Instead of blindly executing our requests, their team gave us suggestions to improve the product.   

Are there any areas they could improve?

This was a difficult project. Altoros hit it out of the park, so I don’t know how they could improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Stay on top of your communication with them. Don’t assume their team understands your idea because you do. That's just general advice.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a ratings and reviews SaaS company. We offer retail management software in the public marketplace.

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

Our internal development team needed support in developing additional features and functionalities for our software product. We hired Altoros to increase our software development capacities.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Altoros provides staff augmentation services. This is a long-term engagement, as opposed to project-based.  We work with a developer who does front- and backend development. They also do API development. We work in Node.js, Angular, React, and MongoDB.

The assigned developer is part of our planning process and daily scrum projects. He is also involved in QA and code reviews. Although he is remote, he works like a fully-integrated member of our software development team. 

What is the team composition?

We work with one full-stack developer who does both front- and backend work. Last year, we had a part-time resource who worked on a specific redesign project for three months.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I researched different nearshore companies and looked at their portfolios of past clients and projects. We chose Altoros because they provided a better developer profile than others.

How much have you invested with them?

My company has spent more than $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2018, and it’s ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We do continuous development of our product with Altoros. We can’t really speak to a project that had a clear beginning and end — rather, we’re continuously checking our software’s code, and that’s how we measure the success. Since we continue to work with the same developer, it’s obvious we’re happy with the deliverables.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

This engagement is very small. Although Altoros offered project management, we declined; we just have to manage a single developer. We have calls and check-ins to make sure everything is working out and to see if there are issues.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Altoros offers really impressive developer profiles to their clients. They’re very responsive to any type of questions, whether they’re related to the work or something administrative, such as invoicing. Any queries are usually answered within one working day, which shows a good level of service.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’re happy with the developer we have. In the past, we have needed DevOps resources, and they’re hard to find. If they had part-time DevOps resources we could draw upon to help with our servers and cloud management, that would be good. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The main effort is in the initial recruiting process. The return is always based on the quality of the developer, so the bidding and interview process should be very detailed and thorough. Make sure to check out the developers’ capabilities.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the President of a software company that provides mobile software solutions to wholesale distribution companies in the United States.

For what projects/services did your company hire Altoros?

Altoros helped us take an existing suite of applications that were Windows based and get them on iOS using iPhones and iPads.

What were your goals for this project?

To be able to transition thousands of existing users from windows laptops and tablets to iPhones and iPads.

How did you select Altoros?

We searched for companies that had core competencies in the following:

• Windows Servers
• MS SQL Server
• Amazon Web Services
• native iOS developers
• Android developers

Altoros was able to demonstrate to us, via white papers on various projects, that they were very strong in every one of these competencies.

Describe the project in detail.

We had worked for several months building a detailed mockup and provided many detailed drawing mockups. This allowed the team to come to a basic estimate for getting started, both sides acknowledging that the estimates would be knowingly exceeded, but that care would be taken to minimize scope creep. We were very successful in that.

The Altoros team members have always been extremely competent and careful.

What was the team composition?

Altoros provided a project manager, two developers, and had an art team, server backend, and AWS experts available as needed. Our team consisted of our lead designer and two PC developers.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We have successfully converted all of our customers to iOS devices.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

All communication, verbal and written, has been clear and precise.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

There is a lot of heart that shows through from all of the people and the processes that take place. It is a very pleasant company to work with. Life is short, work with the people you enjoy working with. For us at Inventiv, that includes Altoros.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None to speak of.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a small software company in the Atlanta area with about 10–12 active engineers working on our product. I’m the engineering team lead. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We had a new product idea but didn’t have the resources to devote to it. Because of COVID uncertainty, we wanted to experiment with outsourcing this work. We didn’t want to go through the recruitment and interviewing process to hire in-house resources either.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our product functions as a video portal, or learning library, for customers. Our main product is a massive, complicated software package. We found that we were spending a lot of time and resources training customers how to use our software. That tech support and onboarding was costing us. The global pandemic exacerbated the problem because we couldn’t travel or hold in-person meetings with our customers.

As a solution, we decided to create a series of instructional videos. That way, customers could help themselves whenever they needed through the portal rather than contacting someone on our staff. To start the project off with Altoros, our design department determined what we needed and provided them with a 120-page document detailing how the product should look and behave. That jumpstarted the collaboration between their team and ours to implement the design plan. Team members on our team and theirs worked on the project together using Angular. 

What is the team composition?

I’m the overall project manager for this effort, but they have a project manager who coordinates the work on their side. However, I speak directly with their three developers, their project manager, and two developers from my team. 

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I did a lot of research to find the right fit for this project, keeping a spreadsheet of companies that were ranked highly on top outsourced companies lists. We’d tried outsourcing to other companies but found issues with time zones as well and language and cultural barriers. To address each of those past issues, we decided to look for a partner in South America.

There would be less of a time zone difference and easier communication, especially because I speak Spanish. They were one of the few finalists in our search, and we chose to hire them after interviewing them and the other finalists.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $60,000–$70,000 so far. Our contract for the year amounts to $220,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since October 2020. This project is complete, but we’re now looking for more work to do with them.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our team expected this project to be complete several months later than it actually was. We’ve finished the work and are preparing to deploy the solution to customers. Each of their team members is very strong in their skills, which is why we were able to finish the project 2–3 months early.  

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

I meet with them every morning to discuss yesterday’s progress and today’s plans. We communicate if there are any questions or problems at that point as well. If issues come up throughout the day, we have open communication through Slack channels. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I chose to give this review based on how pleasantly surprised we’ve been with their work. The candidates they found and provided to our team were great. We appreciated being involved in the interviewing and onboarding process for those teammates. They gave us fantastic people to work with. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There were slight hiccups with setting up the initial billing, but those issues could’ve been on our side. I can’t think of anything for them to improve upon. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Try to plan out your project, breaking it up into stages. Once they get working, they power through tasks and tickets very quickly. They worked more quickly than I was expecting them to, which was a great problem to have.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a lead telematics mobile engineer for a financial services company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We hired them to develop our apps.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Altoros is responsible for developing the iOS and Android versions of five apps. In terms of the life cycle, they’re only responsible for the development. We give them designs and specifications through Jira tickets. They then address the tickets and perform a bit of testing before committing code and running our automated tests.

What is the team composition?

There is a project manager on their side who we don’t interact with too often. We mostly interact with two iOS and two Android developers through Jira tickets.

How did you come to work with Altoros?

I’m fairly new to the project, so I wasn’t part of the process.

What is the status of this engagement?

The most recent project started around June 2020, and it’s ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I thought that working with a team from another country would be difficult. However, it’s been great working with Altoros. They perform their work at a high standard but also maintain quick turnaround times. Their team is always happy to help and willing to work long hours.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

We chat on Skype and recently set up weekly meetings, which is essentially a sprint planning and feedback session. We interact with their project manager about once a month to handle invoices and feedback. Altoros is on the project but we’re responsible for implementing any feedback and communication mechanisms. Anything we suggest, they take to heart. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

We value the quality of their work and their willingness to comply with our standards.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There could be a bit more proactive feedback from their side. Had I not set up a weekly meeting to find out about any issues or problems that information could have taken a bit longer to come across.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have open lines of communication.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and director of a custom software company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Altoros?

We needed help with the ongoing development and customization of our custom software.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Originally, we hired them to move our Microsoft infrastructure from a physical server to an Azure cloud-based environment. They managed the process and scaling of our software across those platforms.

In addition, they added in administrative improvements, in terms of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and ways our deployments could be improvements. We also hired a number of developers to help with a range of technologies we use in our stack. They were able to streamline and improve our performance as well as our architecture as a whole.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Svetlana (Developer), Roman (Solutions Architect), and Elena (Project Manager).

How did you come to work with Altoros?

We found them on the internet they were a fit in terms of flexibility, cost, and ability to meet our requirements.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around £350,000 (approximately $477,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2017, and our work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We have various performance metrics such as maintaining or improving site use and performance as traffic increases. We also use New Relic as an infrastructure to guide us on the improvements they’ve been making on the software. The specific team that we work with is a perfect fit for our needs.

How did Altoros perform from a project management standpoint?

Our project manager, Elena, is invaluable to our work. She’s outstanding. We use Jira for project management. We also use Git to support our coding history and management. The team thinks through the goal or user experience we seek and Elena manages the team to suggest ways to achieve it.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re open to feedback and quick to discuss elements of the project as we see fit. They proactively and dynamically manage our relationship with us as best as they can.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be great if they had more support in place for companies like us. Our current staff is perfect but I’m not sure how effectively they’d be able to replace teammates if we lost both of them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The key is to discuss and be aware of all of your requirements. Have an exhaustive list of all the things you may need from them. It’s important to ask questions up from and how working together could change in the future.