TechChannel announced the honorees of its 2024 IBM Z Rising Stars recognition that highlights emerging talent in the IT ecosystem. This year’s list includes Uladzislau Kalesnikau and Aliaksandr Shautsou of IBA Group. The young mainframe experts are acknowledged for their innovative work in advancing IBM Z technologies.

Mainframe Modernization at IBA Group

Uladzislau Kalesnikau, a team lead at IBA Group, is committed to modernizing mainframe technology. As the lead developer of Zowe plugins for IntelliJ IDEA, Kalesnikau makes it easier for young developers and newcomers to engage with the mainframe environment. With four years in mainframe development, he made an outstanding contribution to integrating modern tools into the mainframe environment. Kalesnikau also plays an active role in the global mainframe community, promoting Zowe plugins and DevOps practices.

Aliaksandr Shautsou is a middle software engineer at IBA Group’s mainframe development team. He has contributed to Zowe initiatives that empower developers to work in modern integrated development environments like IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code.

Background

The Intelligent Automation software of the client is designed to automate industry-specific manual operations and is used to solve critical business problems, particularly in banking and financial services, as well as other highly regulated industries. Customers can automate initiatives such as anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), lending, capital markets, treasury services, and more by enabling rapid and reliable automation of document-heavy work at scale.

At the time of working with IBA Group, the startup raised $220 million, and set itself the task of active growth, by increasing the number of product users and sales.

Challenges

#1

The first challenge the client identified was the lack of the necessary number of staff and teams. They needed a solution that would help them quickly adapt the platform to as many customers as possible. However, this task required a lot of human resources.

#2

The second challenge was scaling the platform as fast as possible to speed up the implementation of the client’s product by its end customers. This was supposed to lead to a sharp increase in sales.

#3

The third challenge was identified in the process of interacting with the client. While working with an existing automation platform, the IBA Group team found that the tools provided by the platform didn’t allow for automating processes quickly enough.

Solutions

First, to solve the lack of human resources issue, IBA Group provided the required number of qualified personnel to implement the product for customers. IBA Group’s delivery model was based on agile approaches. We used iterative implementation with Scrum.

As the main users and implementers of the client’s product, the IBA Group team helped them develop, test, and set up their intelligent automation system. As partners, IBA Group identified and helped fix problems before they reached the end customers, which literally meant that IBA Group took on some reputational risks of the client.

To solve the automation processes issues, the IBA Group team developed a new methodology for automating processes within the platform. To implement this concept, IBA Group developed a framework to be implemented in automation. Thus, automation was built not just on a platform, but on a framework that works based on this platform. As a result, it turned out to significantly speed up the automation of processes. As the client liked this approach, IBA Group helped adopt and implement the framework on the main platform. Until now, the client actively support it and expand it independently as part of their product.

This solution allowed the client to significantly speed up the automation processes for its customers. This led to the solution of another challenge – the product sales increase, as well as an increase in customer satisfaction.

Working with IBA Group Startup Assistance Service, the customer achieved the following outcomes.

• Quicker time-to-market
• Accelerated process automation
• Availability of qualified personnel to implement the product
• Increased product sales
• Higher customer satisfaction
• Expanded customer base
• The solutions developed by IBA Group allowed the startup to grow (up to 500 employees).

This led to the startup receiving three further rounds of investments totaling $300 million.

Recommendations on How to Raise a Startup

Find a mentor who has experience launching startups

Studies say that founders with mentors have a much higher rate of startup success. Entrepreneurs who work with a mentor are more likely to follow through on their ideas and their businesses are much more profitable. Mentors will guide and support you as you work toward your goals.

You can find answers online, but keep in mind that implementing the tips and strategies you learn will take time and money. You may not realize it isn’t the best decision until you’ve invested resources that could have been better spent. If you’re looking to build a team, hire someone who has experience launching startups. As a result, they can act as mentors and provide startup assistance for your business.

The importance of planning

As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Sales, development, staffing, skill shortages, and funding are not things to put off for later. They should all be included in your business plan from the start. Not only that, but you must plan for future mishaps. That is, even if you cannot plan for every contingency, you must know what you will do when events take an unexpected turn.

Building the right team

Certain abilities are required not only for your business to survive, but also to grow. Knowing what skills you need — and how to get those people on board — could be the deciding factor in how well your startup does. The recruitment process consumes valuable time that could be spent on other areas of the business for a small team, but not having the right people can create severe bottlenecks and stall the launch of new products and services.

A team of professionals is the most important component of a startup’s success. Twenty-three percent of failed startups mentioned team issues as a major cause. When looking for qualified employees, you may encounter the following difficulties:

• Slow communications
• Long onboarding (access settings, privacy, info sharing)
• Problems in the development process
• Weak soft skills of the outsourcer team
• CV does not meet project requirements

And the last, but not least point that you should keep in mind: investors invest in strong teams. In the above example, you can see that team expansion with experienced professionals attracted multimillion-dollar investments to a startup.

About IBA Group’s Startup Assistance Service

IBA Group’s Startup Assistance Service was created to assist you in growing your own startup as quickly and easily as possible with a great pool of experienced professionals. With the help of the IBA Group Startup Assistance Service, you’ll get:

• Comfortable collaboration between the outsourcer and the internal team
• Fast communication and decision-making
• Synergy in the team when the outsourcer participates in the same way as internal employees in your work
• The proactivity of outsourcing teams within a startup – so that they participate in discussions and recommend what needs to be done, and not just execute
• Long-term relationships with an outsourcing company (starting small and growing and expanding)
• Your project implemented exactly on time and within the agreed budget

We’ll also assist you in developing your business idea, writing a business plan, identifying a profitable market, and determining a clear path to success. IBA Group is a one-stop resource for all of your business assistance needs. Business development managers (BDMs) are assigned and act as the point of contact for your startup, coordinating all state services to ensure your success, leading to higher revenue.

Background

The customer is the company’s business unit engaged in training management. Previously, reports on the implementation of training programs were prepared manually: they collected data from various training systems and summarized them.

Business Challenge

The company has several training apps that collect a variety of data about students, instructors, and training programs. This data needs to be collected in one system and automate the reporting process.

Solution

Since it was required to build a solution framework in a short time, we decided to use an open source solution. The IBA Group team developed a test version of the data warehouse with integrated Tableau BI system. Dashboards and reports are now created in this software.

The challenge of the project was that the various applications of the training platforms had to be taught to communicate with each other. For example, there is an application where employees take courses and another application where they provide feedback on these courses. The task was to write a utility that would automatically forward users after completing the courses to the feedback page which already contained the details of the course.

Result

Previously, report preparation using MS Excel took about a week. Now this process is fully automated with a ready-made dashboard in Tableau.

The customer is also able to track and analyze the content: demand for courses, percentage of fully-completed courses, and number of certificates received by students.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The customer develops a banking global application that allows bank employees to track banking operations, transactions, payments, transfers; work on several batches of documents at the same time; complete different types of deals; manage customer accounts, access etc.

The customer had manual testing process only. That took too many resources, especially during regression testing.

The purpose

Build automation testing process from scratch. The main purposes of using automation testing are:

• speed up delivery;
• save cost;
• manage scale (between all environments).

Solution

The project involved working on a web-based application and a mobile application.

For the web-based application, the challenge was:

• design automation testing framework for web-based applications from scratch;
• a big part of functionality should be covered by auto tests;
• the same tests should be run on 4+ environments.

For the mobile application the team needed to do the following:

• implement automation testing framework for mobile applications from scratch;
• the same tests should be run on two OS.

During the project, the team also worked on the following tasks:

• CI pipeline setup to execute test automatically;
• configuration automatically generated reporting.

Project results

1000+ auto tests implemented and run automatically every night on 4 environments.

Test Team setup stable and easy-to-maintain test automation process.
Significantly reduced manual/regression testing time. Automatically generated report helps to find issues in minimal time.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The project involves testing of the leading learning management system in multifamily of several applications in a training platform.

This training platform develops best-in-class online training courseware and administration solely for the Property Management Industry, designed to help people, teams and companies improve performance and reduce risk.

The customer had manual testing process only.

The purpose

Build automation testing process from scratch. The main purposes of using automation testing are:

• optimize testing activities, reduce manual testing time during regression testing;
• speed up testing;
• maximize test coverage.

Solution

During the project, the team worked on the following tasks:

• approach and tools selection employing best practices in automated testing;
• smoke and functional tests coverage by auto-tests;
• CI pipeline setup to execute test automatically;
• configuration of automatically generated reporting;
• transfer automation testing workflow to customer.

Project results

Test team provided stable and easy-to-maintain test automation process.

Smoke (fully) and regression (partially) tests covered by automation testing.

Custom automation testing framework was implemented with all JUNASE solution benefits.

Automatically generated report helps to find issues in minimal time.

Test team provided framework documentation (detailed Guideline with whole information regarding framework setup and usage) and knowledge-transfer sessions for team from customer side.

Business Challenge

Migrate existing functionality from the old customer portal to the new Hybris platform.

Project Overview

Create an application to support the customer’s sellers and business partners selling support and maintenance services.

Solution

Certified Salesforce developers from IBA Group commenced work under the project in September 2019. They joined a distributed team of 100 people, which includes experts in Salesforce, Java, etc.

The application is built on microservice architecture (REST). To manage support contracts, a new solution for Quote-to-Cash processes has been created. The system will be integrated with CRM and ERP platforms.

If the system identifies that the support contract will expire in the near future, then it automatically creates new sales opportunity. A separate customer structure – Territory Alignment – is responsible for the distribution of opportunity between sales specialists. When a sales specialist receives a notification, he/she can proceed to upsale in a timely manner – extend the contract or transfer it to another manager.

Project Results

Now the project is at the MVP stage. The customer can already try the main functionality of the solution, which will be improved in future releases.

Business challenge

• Conduct code audit, review of QlikView applications UI
• Customize QlikView Applications
• Implement Best Practices.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

IBA Group has developed an Enterprise Data Warehouse, multidimensional data arrays (OLAP cubes) and step-wise data import from various sources: transactional database, Sharepoint, Web services, SAP. Our experts analyzed the company’s processes, set up ETL processes and data cleansing, developed and customized SQL. They also introduced an abnormal event alert system for the ETL-system, configured information collection with the least load on database sources.

For the data warehouse of internal projects, we developed new models and processes for preparing data for QlikView. An IBA Group specialist checks the application for compliance with multiple criteria: design in accordance with corporate styling and coding standards, inclusion of certain visualization objects and proper optimization.

Auditors receive engagements to review the code and UI of applications. The customer receives reports in a standard format, and the developers receive revision lists. After correction, the application is subject to audit again. To speed up the process, the central office delivers some of the applications for refinement to experts from IBA Group.

Result

The Customer is continuously optimizing and improving the quality of QlikView applications and corporate data.

Business challenge

Deploy a new CRM for developing an IT company’s business in the area of sales of SaaS products. For this purpose, it is necessary to adapt CRM to the customer’s business processes, and perform several integrations: transfer data from several different systems into one.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

Certified developers and administrators from IBA Group joined the distributed Salesforce team in January 2018. The team consists of 200 people from several countries, including developers, configurators, business analysts, and test automation specialists. 13 of them are IBA Group employees.

The application consists of two parts: CRM – Salesforce Sales Cloud and Quote-to-Cash. At one of the stages of the CRM system, a valid lead is registered and transformed into an opportunity. At the final stage, the Quote-to-Cash process starts: configuration -> quote -> proposal -> contract -> invoice—> ordering -> billing -> provisioning.

The opportunity has various attributes: product, point of sale, customer language, etc. Based on these attributes, the system generates a list of recommended content for sales specialists: selects presentations, white papers and other materials. The application may be integrated with the customer repository to avoid copying of all documents into Salesforce.

In their work, administrators and developers from IBA Group used middleware – the Tray.io platform. Its advantage is that it facilitates integration of Salesforce with many databases and services due to the large number of connectors and ETL (Javascript). The application has been working since April 2018 and is now gradually switching to the support phase.

Result

A convenient solution for sellers and business partners of the customer who sell SaaS products. Integration with the customer’s marketing platform: its leads are transferred to an external system. Over 2 years, revenue from orders that were switched to quotations in this system increased 10 times.

Business Challenge

The company’s management needed to monitor business processes in real time and quickly make strategic decisions. It was necessary to reduce the costs of maintenance and repair of infrastructure and rolling stock, increase profits, reduce inventory and make use of free surplus of turnover.