How Ukrainian Software Company Aimprosoft Thrives During War Times

The IT industry in Ukraine has grown by 5.8% in 2022, which is an outstanding result for a country at war, and it significantly contributed to the country’s economy in 2022, generating $7.35 billion in export revenue.

Today we will top brands from all around the world keep working with Ukrainian software companies like Aimprosoft, contributing to the record $3.74 million of Ukrainian IT export service

Website Planet had the opportunity to speak with Maxim Ivanov, CEO and Co-Founder of Aimprosoft, to learn how this Ukranian software development company managed to keep thriving in the face of the Russian invasion, winning awards and mantaining a solid track record of delivering 600+ high-quality software development services to this day.

Let’s introduce Aimprosoft to our audience. What services do you offer?

Aimprosoft is a software development company offering full-cycle services for startups, SMBs, and enterprises.

Long-term projects often go with a dedicated team model. Direct access to each team member, flexibility in task scope, and accommodation of change requests. When it comes to hiring for startups, every candidate is seen as a precious tech gem, as founders are determined to build their businesses with the best talent. Startups have less room for error. On the other hand, enterprise hiring can be lengthy, as big companies already have working systems they want to scale. This is where the dedicated team model shines, with carefully crafted onboarding processes to ensure optimal outcomes. The difference is clear, and we understand it well.

Full-cycle development is one of the popular options for startups requiring a complete development process. Complex development projects of companies with understaffing or small IT departments can be implemented with this model. Aimprosoft is fully staffed with experts who can support the entire software development lifecycle from idea validation to support. This model perfectly shows the transparency of budget planning as we provide estimation and proposal. So clients can see the actual up-to-date cost estimate from start to finish. It’s pretty comfortable, isn’t it?

At our company, we have a pool of talented experts with exceptional expertise who can seamlessly join and extend an in-house team. Team augmentation works well here for urgent business objectives or a demand for specific skills to complete a project, fostering short-term cooperation. Only some people need a full cycle. For the rest, outstaffing will work.

There is cost-effectiveness, the flexibility to scale a team as required, the ability to initiate development with a minimal budget, and enhanced control over team management. It is about having the right expertise at the right time to meet immediate and short-term resource requirements.

What are the key strengths and core competencies that set you apart? How do these strengths benefit your clients?

Diverse technical expertise

Diverse technical expertise for product launch, development, and support, including Business Analysis for the discovery stage, system architecture, and UI/UX design for laying the ground of the project, development, QA, and testing with PM supervision, DevOps activities, and support.

Niche teams

Also, we differ by offering niche teams for SAP Commerce, Alfresco, and Liferay development. That means a client can get all-around support by addressing us with a request for the above mentioned solution development. Ecommerce B2B/B2C stores based on SAP Commerce (Hybris), business process automation with Alfresco suite or Liferay-based corporate portals can be implemented faster with dedicated experts than with IT specialists of general experience. I mean, both a Hybris developer and a Java developer write on Java. However, a Hybris developer knows the Hybris platform better than Java language.

High project involvement

High project involvement is a top priority for us. A close collaboration with our clients throughout the entire development process ensures meeting the expectations. Multiply, we had proof of its importance. Acting like a single team helps achieve the set goals. Active engagement and open communication are the cornerstones of our approach. But it’s not a one-way game. We actively encourage our clients to be involved in every project stage, ensuring transparency and efficiency in our partnership. By working closely together, we can ensure that the solutions we deliver align perfectly with your business needs.

Cooperation and pricing models

A variety of cooperation and pricing models provides clients the flexibility to choose the model that best aligns with their goals and budget. Whether you require development outsourcing services, including building applications from scratch or modernizing legacy systems, or you need to expand your internal team with missing specialists through dedicated teams or staff augmentation, we have the expertise to deliver.

Cost-quality balance

I’ve been advocating a cost-quality balance from the early beginning. Aimprosoft started its path, prioritizing solutions that meet our clients’ needs without sacrificing their budgetary constraints. Delivering high-quality products and services at competitive prices differs a casual business partner from those with whom clients want to continue going ahead.

Timely product delivery

With over 600 successful completions under our belt, we have refined an ideal formula for ensuring timely product delivery. An approach experienced for years and preventive measures to minimize potential delays helped us to renovate our operation three days after the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022. Our project managers allocate resources effectively, ensuring that the right talent is assigned to each project.

Multifaceted portfolio

Over the past two decades, we have accumulated a wealth of experience in providing development services, resulting in a multifaceted portfolio that showcases our capabilities. From promising startups to large-scale solutions, we have successfully delivered projects in domains such as healthcare, e-commerce, e-learning, finance, and many others. This breadth of experience allows us to tackle development challenges effectively and provide valuable insights to our clients.

What is your track record of success?

We have the most extended project with Motive Retail, an industry-leading US company with which we have partnered since 2009. Together, we transformed the automotive sector with digital products that help unify documents for dealer verification.

Genesys PGR is a project aimed at supporting genebank information systems and ensuring crop diversity worldwide. It is an online platform with over 4.3 million genebank accessions. Aimprosoft was addressed to transform an outdated PHP-based website into a robust platform using Java capabilities and keep the data safe and the website fully functional during the upgrade process. We developed a system by structuring all entities and user-based access.

Another case is a TMI web platform catering to do-it-yourself investors. Our primary objective was to rebuild and redesign the existing platform. We resulted in a scalable, high-performance product capable of handling heavy loads and providing users with comprehensive tools to monitor stock market changes, identify trading and investment opportunities, and access insights from industry experts.

Since 2016, Aimprosoft has been helping pr.business, a B2B-oriented aggregated local business directory in the US and Canada, to develop a leading local business directory. Today, it is a Yellow Pages for SMBs with three times faster search speed, over 70,000 page loads daily, and over 8 million businesses using the platform.

How does your mission differ from other companies in your niche?

Our mission is to make a digital transformation for companies for business growth.

Looking back, I remember when the world had entered the new millennium, and it was time for me to move forward. I wanted to join one of the few software companies in my city. I dedicated myself to learning Java day and night and began searching for opportunities after the dot-com crisis, although it seemed nearly impossible in our area.

After a series of rigorous interviews that spanned several days, I was offered a position as a junior Java developer at CS Ltd. The experience taught me valuable lessons. It reinforced the importance of setting goals and maintaining focus even in challenging times. I learned to trust my instincts, persevere, and never give up. It also highlighted the significance of taking risks when pursuing your desires.

By a stroke of fate, I found my first job and met a business partner along the way. Igor interviewed me then. Aimprosoft today is imbued with the spirit of “aim.” AIM implies focusing on a desired outcome and working towards it with purpose and precision. It’s all about us, 350 people working at Aimprosoft.

Our first clients were US companies required to automate their business processes. Back in 2005, the IT outsourcing market started to evolve in CEE, offering a cost-quality balance. The young people in Ukraine were excited to develop world-class products for the international market. So we devoted much time to our company, improving project management, communication, and methodologies and growing vertically and horizontally.

Quality and dedication are what make our clients come back and recommend us. As said Michael Walker, CEO and founder at Vesta, a SaaS Real Estate startup from California, “Aimprosoft has a more curated approach than most other consultants.”

We have a curated approach and are open to getting extra certifications to meet the client’s needs. We encourage upskilling so our engineers are eager to learn new technologies in a short period.

What industries do you typically work with, and what are the common pain points your clients have when they come to you?

Our primary target is the US, UK, and Germany. Aimprosoft delivers software solutions for e-Commerce, Healthcare, IoT, Real Estate, Retail, Telecom, Fintech, and Education.

Our clients are startups and companies that lack tech expertise. To close tech needs for short-term or long-term projects is sometimes more accessible by outsourcing tasks to experts. Staff augmentation or dedicated teams are the most common cases we work with. Also, turnkey solutions with idea validation to product launch and support are among our competencies when we act as a software partner for dedicated projects.

With outsourcing, clients can plan out their budgets cleverly and take advantage of favorable legal conditions in IT hubs of Eastern Europe. CEOs can focus on vision as CEOs should do instead of trying to manage everything. Business leaders gain access to numerous opportunities and offerings by partnering with a software provider. This single connection allows them to unlock a range of technology solutions tailored to their specific needs. Implementing these solutions provides the company with a substantial competitive edge.

The outsourcing vendor takes responsibility for hiring new employees. At the same time, the company leader reviews progress through periodic reports and deliverables. We ensure ongoing training and skill development of the development team to deliver high-quality services and products. This is the way it works.

Tech leaders repeatedly face a local tech shortage and know there are better approaches than hastily closing a gap. Aimprosoft can ensure access to the pool of tech talents so that CIOs and CTOs can save time searching for individual candidates by hiring project teams in one place. By the way, a CTO spends up to 50% of their working hours on search. Just think about it. Thus, sourcing, screening, and onboarding made by the hands of a software vendor is a normal strategy for busy tech leaders. Add to this a team setup, and you’ll get the problem-solving solution you need.

The inherent characteristics of IT infrastructure, along with a well-defined security compliance strategy and associated procedures, facilitate seamless navigation of regulatory challenges, including those specific to cloud-based environments.

Software development firm employees are well-versed in remote communication tools and agile development methodologies. As a result, you have motivated and satisfied individuals inspired by their work.

And, of course, quality. Being in a decision-making circle, business leaders can check the quality during a trial period prior to main development, order a Proof of Concept project, ask candidates to make a test task and review the code on GitHub.

And what makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?

Let me give an example of our recent case.

After passing a series of interviews with tech leaders from our departments conducted by our potential clients, it is a great pleasure to receive a message that we were approved as a software development partner for our exceptional skills, professionalism, innovative approach to problem-solving, and clear understanding of the project objectives.

For example, Mark van der Waal, Head of Product Design at Triall, appreciated our unique combination of development expertise, collaboration skills, and great value for money.

A CEO of a Sweden e-learning platform, who preferred to stay incognito, shared that the key reason for working with Aimprosoft is how we care about the success of their project and business.

Salvator Martino from Optima Italia values high-quality app development and a timely manner of our work.

Building for the #1 wholesale telecom service in the UK

One case I am proud of is our cooperation with Virtual1, a #1 wholesale telecom service provider in the United Kingdom. Together, we’ve passed a path from developing a corporate Liferay-based web portal to scaling into full-cycle services with a dedicated team.

Back in 2010, we received a client’s ambitious vision for a portal solution that would serve as a central hub for wholesale digital providers. To ensure efficient and timely delivery, we harnessed the power of Liferay’s out-of-the-box functionality, enabling us to meet demanding deadlines while meeting all necessary requirements.

Today, Virtual1 has a 75% coverage of businesses in the UK and continues to grow. I admire the vision of their business leaders that go ahead of time with technology. Timely digitization helped our client to experience a rapid expansion of its partner network, firmly establishing their position as the leading provider in the UK’s digital service market.

We take immense pride in the dedication of our team and the remarkable growth achieved through this innovative portal solution.

What challenges and opportunities do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?

The IT industry in Ukraine is the only one in the country that has grown from $6.8 billion (2021) to $7.3 billion (2022), and “only” 5.8% in 2022, which is an outstanding result for a country at war. It is the only industry that has shown positive growth in 2022.

The ability of the Ukrainian tech sector to build a strong foundation for the economy is demonstrated by its resiliency in complicated situations. There are incredible, strong personalities who illustrated the most crucial traits during the most trying circumstances standing behind the name.

By overcoming the difficulties that started on February 24, 2022, we provide hope for a prosperous future and actively work toward it daily, bringing victory closer.

Ukraine’s IT industry significantly contributed to the economy in 2022, generating $7.35 billion in export revenue, representing a notable growth of nearly 6% compared to the previous year. This sector is the most stable in Ukraine.

Small foreign startups and global international businesses are returning to hiring in Ukraine after a short break. The main reason is a cost-quality balance for the services of specialists of the right level. Salary ranges in Eastern Europe are 10-30% higher than in Ukraine, demonstrating a difference with the U.S. tech talents of up to 50%.

In addition, businesses cannot always afford to wait for candidates to work for up to three months, which is the norm in Europe today. While in Ukraine, candidates go to a new job 2-4 weeks after accepting the offer. Applying to Ukrainian companies for services, clients from Europe accelerate the implementation of solutions for at least two months.

Ukrainians have shown themselves to be an indomitable nation, able to adapt to even the most difficult changes and cope with force majeure.

On February 24, we had a fully equipped office, so our team had a safe workplace. Understanding the critical role of being connected to the power network to perform work tasks, our company was concerned in advance about the autonomous work of employees. The office of Aimprosoft in Ivano-Frankivsk is fully equipped with everything for continuous delivery: there are Starlink internet terminals and generators to sustain continuous office operation for one week.

The entire IT business was able to adapt to working remotely during the pandemic. The practices that were applied and worked out during the COVID showed themselves effectively during the war. All the processes of Ukrainian IT business are built in such a way that we can provide a smooth delivery remotely.