Get to know our Sevendos partners: Orangit!
Orangit - Smooth code care
Sevendos is a newly formed company joining the forces of Polar Squad, Hidden Trail, Wunderdog, Finitec, Cyberdo, AI Roots and the star of today’s interview: Orangit! Get to know our partners by reading our blog.
I’ve had the pleasure of discussing with both the Head of Technology at Orangit, Sami Bister, and their interim CEO, Tiina Hahtovirta! It was a really interesting perspective to hear about. Read on to get to know them as well!
What is Orangit about?
Let’s talk about what our typical customer’s journey looks like. They have built a software product for a certain amount of years, and now they want to have their developer team move on and work on the next generation of products. But the existing products they have built still serve their customers and require maintenance. They want to free up their development team from the maintenance work to focus on the company growth journey, but maintenance has not been their specialty from day 1.
This is where Orangit comes in. We are software maintenance specialists, and we work as a team. We are unlike the other six Sevendos companies in the sense that we actually don’t offer consulting but a software maintenance service, so it’s quite different. Our goal is to provide the smoothest software maintenance experience possible. In some sense, we resemble a combination of Polar Squad and Wunderdog at a smaller scale; we are about 20 software specialists at the moment.
Can you tell me about the history of Orangit?
Orangit started as a part of Wunderdog, as we had many customers showing the need for maintaining software. The process to implement to solve that problem seemed so obvious at the time, but someone had to pick up the idea and get it up and running. It was different from traditional consulting as it was more of a service offering and the processes were different from consulting, so it became its own company.
I think that this original insight was very valid from the beginning until today, and it will stay valid in the future as more and more companies build software which will eventually enter maintenance mode. Historically, we have been getting many customers from our ecosystem (Reaktor, Bravedo, etc.), so it’s good to have them as partners.
What problems are you trying to solve in the field of software maintenance?
Let us go through a typical customer’s experience.
First, there’s a handover phase for knowledge transfer where we take the application from the original developers of the software product and get familiar with its functionalities and requirements. This is the part where we take ownership of the software to free the original team from the responsibility of maintaining the software. It provides the customer with evidence that we can manage the product, make updates, deploy them to production, etc. However, we don’t have a say over the tech stack used in the products we maintain since they come how they are, so that definitely adds to our challenges.
From the customer’s side, we are providing them with a service, which means they are paying a fixed monthly fee. That amount is determined by the service level that they require and the complexity of the software. Any changes to the software is treated as billable work. Consequently, we have to be able to handle quite a lot of fluctuation in workload, which is not a minor challenge.
Solving the problem of software maintenance in general is not easy. Our applications have anywhere from 2 years of history to 20 years, so the diversity of the tech stacks can be quite broad. Our challenge is to be able to handle all these various technologies with a relatively small team. We have a process to do this, so our customers can be reassured that we have things under control, and any learnings that we get in one project are implemented in all of our projects, given that it would be relevant to do so. In theory, you could have a one-man-show maintaining a single software product alone, but our advantage is that we do this as a company and gain the robustness of doing this full-time with our team, making us (and by proxy our customers) more resilient in the long term.
Tiina Hahtovirta, Interim CEO of Orangit
A lot of companies attract developers using the latest tech stacks. How do you empower your developers in this environment?
There’s a few things that enable us to do what we do while still being attractive:
Working at Orangit feels like being in an academy where we constantly learn new things. We are very strict with our customers in saying that we are not selling individuals that will work exclusively for the company, we are selling our service as a team. This is what allows us to share knowledge among ourselves, reduce the pressure and stress on individuals, and make us more resilient, which is key to ensuring quality maintenance work. Having one individual do maintenance is not sustainable over many years since individuals go on vacation, get sick, and may eventually want to move on. But a team can last longer and keep this flexibility. That’s also what allows our developers to have some variety in their work and preserve a great company culture at the same time.
We strive to tackle our maintenance projects in a uniform way, so even if our developers work with multiple customers, they can rely on our process, even if the tech stack or customer changes. This process is constantly evolving so that it adapts to the changing market and gets better over time. Among other things, it involves having templates for different things and processes that can be applied on any of our projects. After a customer hands over a project to us, it must be “swallowed” by our process and ways of working, so we can function efficiently in a low-stress environment.
What are your future plans at the moment?
We plan to keep doing what we’re doing and doing it well, which is maintaining software. The landscape for our future projects’ tech stacks is always changing, so our success with on-going cases with certain tech stacks might not be relevant in subsequent cases relying on other technologies. So we need to prepare for the needs of the future. We have the advantage that the software we work on has been developed a few years before we start working on it, so we don’t have to predict the latest fashion; instead, we look at what has been used in the last few years, but this will expand the size our tech stack in the future.
We know how to make software successful. There’s no secret to it, really: software testing, CI/CD pipelines, resilient infrastructure and good documentation is what it’s all about. But software that comes to us doesn’t usually come in this state. Sometimes there’s no development environment at all, the documentation is a single and short README file, etc. If you’ve been programming in this century, you know how problematic software can be. So we need to have automations to easily add testing pipeline, provide templates for monitoring and alerting in an efficient way, and work via those automations to provide value for our customers. For instance, dependency management is fully automated here. Using those to make our developer experience more coherent makes it feel like you are always working on the same project, even when working with different customers.
We know for example that if we implement security measures, infrastructure changes, or new important features as an afterthought, the costs can be astronomical, and this is one of many things that can go wrong when developing software without the proper expertise at the very beginning. So we are there to help our customers save money by making the best decisions while improving our own developers’ experience, and we can now do it using all the skills of Sevendos companies combined, which is a huge advantage.
How do you see yourself in the Sevendos ecosystem?
We are already interacting with Polar Squad and Wunderdog on a regular basis. There’s quite a few cases where Wunderdog and Orangit are presented as one team to our customers, so our collaboration is very natural and provides a more comprehensive service. Recently, we began collaborating with Finitec more frequently since they can provide us with a lot of leads as well. We can easily imagine that the rest of the Sevendos companies will grow into invaluable partners also in the near future.
Our capabilities combined are unparalleled. Hidden Trail provides answers to ensure software quality, Wunderdog does great full-stack development, Polar Squad understands cloud infrastructure like nobody else, and our partners at Finitec, AI Roots and Cyberdo are great at finding freelancers to augment software teams. And then Orangit comes in the picture to tell at an early stage of the software development journey how to maintain your software. I think this is a very well-rounded team!