180° – a review of spring ‘17 at Sonalake

Welcome to our regular summary of recent highlights, as we move into summer with a spring in our step.

New faces and places

Like many of our clients in software, we have a relentless focus on recruitment. Spring 2017 was no different with a burst of growth in both Dublin and Poznan, bolstering the teams in development, QA, UX design and project management.

It was nice to add Brazil and Hungary to our growing roll call of nationalities within Sonalake, and we even did an office refurb in Dublin to make everything more comfortable and welcoming!

Industrialising University Research in Analytics & AI

We love working with university startups at Sonalake. They need a unique level of service and engagement delivered at a rapid cadence with minimum bureaucracy.

For example, during May we commenced work with a machine learning spinout company from the Science Foundation Ireland Insight Centre for data analytics. We’re helping them deliver on their rapid market traction in the FinTech sector.

And now we are going a step further back into the research pipeline by collaborating with an in-situ university research project, industrialising the text analytics output for a global client. This research has been developed within the CeADAR technology centre for applied data analytics, funded by Enterprise Ireland and the Irish Development Authority.

These projects both point to the increasingly healthy state of commercial research in the third level sector.

Tech Excellence recognition

We were delighted to be nominated in three categories at Ireland’s premier technology industry awards ceremony - The Tech Excellence Awards. We were shortlisted for the IT Project and IT Architect of the year awards and came out on top in the Professional Development category.

It’s great to be recognised by industry peers and we really enjoyed the event and the experience.

Events: FTTH, Gigabit Access and Smart Cities IoT

With a rich history in telecommunications, our largest industry vertical, we were delighted to attend two notable conferences in France and Belgium focusing on the huge investment in Fibre Broadband across Europe in the coming years. Software automation is central to supporting fibre networks and our work with enet is paving the way in Ireland, while we are targeting implementations in similar scenarios around the world.

Following our successful deployment of the Verax NMS & APM to monitor the health of Poznań’s public transport infrastructure, our experts delivered well-received talks at Warsaw’s Smart City Congress in March and Dublin’s Smart Cities Summit at the end of May.

These talks mark Sonalake’s continued participation in Smart City initiatives through an IoT R&D consortium that will continue throughout 2017.

Annual Business Intelligence Tooling Analysis

Selecting the right BI solution for your process or your product is a multifaceted consideration and something that we regularly help our clients with.

Over the last quarter we completed our annual in-depth hands-on analysis of products in the space. From established players like Tableau, Qlik, SAS and Jaspersoft with impressive feature sets, to the challengers like Looker, Birst, Pentaho and YellowFin, all quickly closing the gap, unconstrained by legacy paradigms and using more modern technologies.

The output of this work allows us to accurately design and deliver the best solutions for our clients’ individual needs in the reporting and dashboarding BI space.

Distributed Software Development

Alongside and often in unison with our end-to-end Product Development service, we continue to grow our Team Augmentation business, growing dedicated nearshore teams and adding development capacity for software customers across verticals including FinTech and Traveltech.

The drivers and benefits are extensive and often less than obvious, however there are also challenges and risks that need to be mitigated. We capture this experience, continuously improving our domain expertise to ensure success. If you are considering distributing your development across a number a teams, we would be delighted to share our experience with you.

Well that’s not everything, but we want to keep it brief!

Please do check back from time to time for new posts on what is keeping Sonalake focused in the ever changing world of software.