ZONE3000 has been a pioneering force in the software development industry, offering comprehensive solutions in domains, hosting, and web services for over 25 years. Despite facing adversity during the Ukrainian crisis, they continue to thrive and expand, showcasing an impressive adaptability to emerging industry trends, such as AI integration.
Website Planet had the opportunity to speak with Serhii Skurikhin, CEO ZONE3000, one of the TOP 10 Ukrainian IT Giants recognized by DOU rating, to learn more about their remarkable journey and the transformative impact they bring to the IT landscape.
Let’s introduce ZONE3000to our audience. What services do you offer?
Since 1998, ZONE3000 has been providing turn-key software development solutions in the domain and hosting industries. For 25 years already, we have been providing the following services:
- Creation of business processes
- Augmented and Dedicated Teams
- New software products development
- Improvement of the existing products
- Technical support
- Software Engineering Research and Development
- Product market launch
Our core branches are domains, hosting, SSL certificates, webmail service, and other web services that move the internet closer to people.
What are the key strengths and core competencies that set you apart? How do these strengths benefit your clients?
People
We gather the best professionals to work in our team. We invest in people’s skills and knowledge, so we are sure the job will be done on the highest level. Furthermore, we open possibilities for everyone within the company, that is why we have numerous success stories in our team.
Values
In ZONE3000, we value partnership and cooperation between our clients, team members, and the company. These values encompass traits such as trust, transparency, responsibility, unity, mutual support, and a shared commitment to a common goal.
Technologies
Working with the latest technologies is the basis of our business processes. We use modern tools for data analysis, customer insights, and process automation. AI and ML enable improved personalized product development. Additionally, cloud computing empowers our infrastructure to be scalable and flexible with easy access to resources, promoting collaboration and cost-effectiveness.
- As for processes, we use Agile, Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, CI/CD methodologies that help to operate and design products more effectively and faster.
- For software development, here I can mention such languages and frameworks we work with: .NET, .NET Core 2.0, TypeScript, React.js, MSSQL, ASP.NET, WebApi, SOA, REST services, JavaScript, Python, etc.
- As for infrastructure, our core instruments and platforms are: AWS, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Cisco, Juniper, Terraform, VMWare, Zabbix, Graphana, Prometheus, and much more.
Experience
We have accumulated knowledge and expertise for over 25 years. This gives us a deep understanding of the IT industry, market trends, and customer needs, as well as enables us to make well-informed decisions and deliver high-quality products and services.
What kind of support and resources do you provide to your clients?
Construction of business processes. By constructing well-defined and optimized business processes, we help our clients to enhance productivity, reduce costs, minimize errors, and ultimately achieve their business objectives more efficiently.
Software development. ZONE3000 services are characterized by a set of key attributes that ensure that the product exceeds client expectations and delivers a seamless user experience. Skilled teams, Scrum and Agile methodologies, deep business analysis, quality assurance and testing, security and data privacy, process transparency, and open communication are the basis of top-notch software products.
Technical support for software products. If a client has a product, we can build 24/7 customer support for this product, including organizing teams, staff training, QA, and technical support at different levels.
Augmented and Dedicated Teams. Organizing teams upon clients’ request. Our experience provides an efficient way to augment a client’s internal team as and when he needs it with project control through Agile, Scrum, or any other management tool. Our teams can either be autonomous or work collaboratively to ensure your project time to market is on schedule.
Research and Development. This company’s line drives innovation, improves existing technologies, and creates new solutions to address emerging challenges and client’s requests.
Trust and transparency are among our core values. We are open to our clients and are expecting the same from them. As long as we talk frankly, we can understand the client’s needs and possibilities, and therefore – produce products that not just correspond to those expectations but exceed them. We are open to our team as well: the processes and tasks must be clear for everyone. This is the way things will be done properly, with less (or no) misunderstanding.
What is your track record of success? Can you provide any specific examples with numbers?
We are facing several difficulties due to the full-scale Russian invasion on Ukraine, but we are doing our best to overcome challenges as quickly as possible.
For example, during the first weeks after February 24th, 2022, we evacuated team members from Kharkiv, which was at the center of shelling and bombing by the Russians. Partially, people stayed there in the shelter that we had prepared beforehand.
Later, we managed to adapt the infrastructure so all the business processes could operate properly and people could continue working (if they had such a possibility). At that moment we tried to keep the team, give it safety conditions as well as not to violate partner agreements with our clients. And we succeeded.
During 2022, we adapted our processes to the wartime conditions as much as we could. We opened 14 team hubs in Ukraine, so our people could work safely from different points in Ukraine. The hubs are equipped with power generators, uninterruptible power sources, Starlinks and there are shelters nearby. Also, 1 team hub was opened in Bulgaria together with our partner Namecheap. The team members who are in Europe have the possibility to live and work in our Bulgarian hub.
To sum it up, in 2022 we could invite 200+ new people to our team, and the company’s total income grew by 20% despite the war.
Another example of the company’s success is its cooperation with Namecheap. It is a worldwide domain registrant that is in the TOP-3 of the biggest global domain registrants (2-nd place according to ICANN). We started our partnership in 2006, as we build technical support for Namecheap products, but at the moment we are providing them with a much wider range of services.
As of 2023, we are supporting 20+ active products, 12 mln users and 17 mln domains registered at Namecheap, and these numbers will grow yearly.
How does your mission differ from other companies in your niche?
I am a technology geek – I started learning programming when I was 9. I was inspired by my father, who took me to the place where he worked – there I saw the first computers of that time (they were giant!). Since then, I started to learn programming. At the age of 16, I already worked on my first software projects as a freelancer.
Later, I started to email companies who posted job offers and offered them my services. It was the beginning of 2000’s, and it was a golden time for software developers – easy-to-find projects and the rates were pretty high.
We always try to solve a client’s task in the most efficient way to contribute to his business. We never try to squeeze an extra dollar from a contract in order to keep it running longer and make more profit.
Client satisfaction is our highest priority. We help to build products and services that help our clients to stay in business and make a profit. We’re open and collaborative.
What industries do you typically work with, and what are the common pain points your clients have when they come to you?
Our main business lines are domains and hosting – most of our products and services are created for clients from these industries. However, we are working on a new market strategy and are planning to launch in European and Middle East markets soon.
We help our clients to build thoughtful turn-key business processes that operate effectively. For example, if a client has an idea for a software product but doesn’t know how to realize it, we help him from the very beginning. We start by working on business strategy, moving to the processes’ organization, gathering a professional team, supporting operational processes, etc. And it’s up to launching this product and supporting it during its lifecycle.
Also, one more problem our clients suffer is the lack of highly qualified staff. Ukrainian teams are known for their great skills, high productivity, responsibility, and reliability. We know how to work properly and satisfy customers’ expectations. Moreover, in comparison to the US and EU markets, the cost of software development services in Ukraine is lower. So, we also help our clients to save money as well.
It is a well-known situation when US and EU companies outsource/outstaff their development needs to other countries. At some point, their vendors try to cut corners in order to keep the price at the bottom and win the contract. This usually leads to degradation of product quality, higher support costs in the long run, and unsatisfied end users. Unhappy customers will hurt the client’s bottom line and may take him out of business.
Moreover, many clients normally push their vendor to supply more resources (engineers) in order to get the project done in time. However, complex projects need professional management and implementation. This is something low-level specialists can’t achieve, no matter how many of them are working on a particular project.
At some point, the client gets tired of the never-ending story of missed deadlines and poor-quality results, and they start to scan the market for more experienced and more expensive vendors. We never give false promises and never try to sweeten the pill in order to get a contract.
And what makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?
These are the parts of our services that are most beneficial to our clients:
- Our ability to build complex turn-key software development solutions
- Our highly qualified teams gather the best industry professionals
- Our top-notch customer care sets new standards in customer support
- Our ability to keep the company running and growing at these uncertain times
But in the end is tangible results they are looking for:
- Business growth and development of new business lines and products
- Number of clients (end users) growth
- Income growth
- Many processes are more efficient and take less time and resources to achieve the same or better results
They can sleep better knowing that their product is better in many ways, the support is always there to help, and their customers are happy.
They can plan better knowing we can cope with the tasks and get the job done, so they can expand their business more and more.
Just to give an example, one of the clients came to us struggling with skyrocketing support needs for his growing business. The amount of support incidents was growing faster than the client base, and so were the support costs.
We’ve spent some time examining his business processes and infrastructure and come up with a plan to improve the quality of the infrastructure and keep the number of incidents at a minimum. We’ve proposed to hire highly skilled engineers who’re capable of managing and supporting client’s products in the most efficient way.
After the implementation of our plan, the number of incidents has dropped significantly within six months. Our engineers were more expensive than their previous vendor but the amount of issues that they had has dropped dramatically, requiring less resources to do the actual work. The bottom line was happy and gave our client the needed air to grow his business and stay on top of the competition.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?
AI is shifting our industry dramatically. A good deal of software development and support companies are facing the risks of shrinking or getting out of business because human resources demand will drop, being replaced by AI in many areas.
We treat this as an opportunity. Fighting the progress is a dead-end. AI will never completely replace humans in our industry and in order to stay in business and grow we need to change and adapt to start using it to help us solve client’s needs. We already have a few R&D projects in this area and even more to come.
