Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Syberry is a custom software engineering services organization, and my role in it is building a fusion of professional team, engineering culture, technology, and robust processes to provide the best service scalable to any demand, allowing our clients to focus on the business and be confident that their technology is in the right hands.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
The main idea is building a true engineering organization and providing value to our clients in the form of managed services instead of just software developers’ hours. Our goal is to continually improve our practices in all areas of software engineering up to the point when they become useful even outside of the organization for the industry in general.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We rely solely on an in-house team of all types of specialists, as we believe that it is needed for the end-to-end delivery of quality software.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
We value our commitments to the clients and pay a lot of attention to making sure that we promise the right things and that we are able to deliver what we promise. This process requires certain skills and qualifications both from us and our clients. We invest considerable efforts in educating them on how the software development processes work, and this ultimately helps us making successful projects together.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?
There is no specific industry that we could say is our exclusive expertise. The nature of custom software and right custom software development service is based on the fact that we are able to create software solutions for almost any industry, as long as the requirements are logically and clearly defined. At the same time, we see a major inflow of customer from such industries such as Healthcare, Finance, Energy, Manufacturing. As for the customers’ retention, we can proudly say that most of our customers (about 90%) stay with us for a long-term fruitful business relationship. We value our customers, and it is exciting to see how their businesses grow and become more effective with our help.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing software.
- Sizing and scope of the system modules, components, and features
- Non-functional constraints like compliances, performance, security, etc.
- Identified risks (level of details for requirements, new technologies, integration, etc.)
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the frontend and backend of software?
There is no single answer to this question as it may vary greatly depending on the system’s nature. A frontend-heavy start-up product focused on browser-based visual editing capabilities may have up to 80% of the efforts spent on the frontend, while a business system with a lot of domain-specific logic may have the same 80% spent on the backend only. Generally, when it comes to our expertise, it is evenly balanced between front- and backend.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right framework for developing software?
- Type of the product and project
- Client-specific constraints
- Maturity of technology
- Non-functional requirement for the system
In addition to this, we try to understand the business, and place ourselves in the shoes of our customers, to see both strong points and the areas for improvement. Our goal is to make businesses of our clients more effective, and all our activities are around this purpose.
Which languages & frameworks do you prefer to use in development of software?
We are technology-agnostic organization and believe that the proper tools may only be selected after careful consideration of the specific client’s needs and issues at hand. Therefore we focus on the general engineering skills of people rather than specializing or preferring any single solution and thus we are capable of working with any major technology stack. In general, one can find all major technologies being employed in our everyday work, but it always comes down to a specific business what would work best.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of software?
- Set of functional features
- Non-functional requirements
- Potential risks
- Timeline of the project and special objectives like external integrations or compliances.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
For the fixed-bid projects, we usually employ a “pay-as-you-go” structure, meaning we bill our customers upon execution of the milestones as agreed per our contract. It provides great visibility for a customer as they see the progress and therefore, easily justify their expenses. When we offer a dedicated team or Time & Material model, i.e. when the scope of work is not strictly determined, we use a “retainer scheme” so that the customer is billed for a specific period of time (usually a month), and the size of the bill is determined by the forecasted team size, structure, and performance for that period. While offering an option how to arrange the payment scheme, we always try to make it as forthcoming and transparent to our customers as possible, as it helps us building trust with them, and forming long-term business relations.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
Although we don’t have a bottom cap for taking a project, we believe that our efficiency pays off the best on the bigger and long-term projects, rather than one-time or small-cap ones. As a company, we naturally provide guaranteed service regardless of the personalities of our employees, but it is accompanied by an increased overhead. That said, we sometimes advise a prospecting customer to try a freelancer to execute a certain incremental task, but the truth is that we always beat any freelancer when it comes to a long-term or more complex work, as we naturally have times more capabilities and capacity as a company vs. one-man show.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2018?
We never disclose financial information associated to a customer or a group of customers of ours, but as for an average number, it varies for certain incremental activities from 30-40K apiece, to the ongoing projects above $1M a year. These numbers is a true reflection of our performance in 2018 as well.
Kindly share your feedback on how Goodfirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
We believe Goodfirms is doing a great job in improving our visibility as a brand to our potential audience. We see a lot of exposure and unique traffic on our website coming from Goodfirms while providing us with an option to hear what our customers say on Goodfirms is an obvious benefit of the platform.
