The secret to fruitful collaboration
We sat down with Ian Meyers, senior product manager identity at LiveRamp, a San Francisco based tech marketing company that just started working with us, to get some feedback on their experience with finding the right partner for their IT challenges.
LiveRamp provides the identity platform leveraged by enterprise marketeers and their partners to deliver innovative products and exceptional experiences. The LiveRamp platform connects people, data, and devices across the digital and physical world, powering the people-based marketing revolution and allowing consumers to safely connect with the brands and products they love.
LiveRamp was looking to build a product from the ground up and got referred to us by Faktor, a company they had recently acquired and one of our long- lasting customers. Being listed at the New York Stock Exchange, LiveRamp is required to comply with a myriad of regulations, both legal and compliance-wise and as such they had to act very prudently in their selection process for a development partner.
Contract negotiations proved to be an iterative and collaborative endeavor, in which Levi9’s framework agreement proved to be both legally sound and able to meet LiveRamp’s requirements in a flexible way. Mutual trust and openness were at the basis of a fruitful process and led to an outcome that respected the interests of both parties. LiveRamp shared their product concept with us, our team wanted to understand exactly what they would like to achieve, to make sure we were in the best position to help them throughout the entire project.
The interactions during an orientation phase really shape a project. Through technical input and prototypes, a rough idea was converted into a detailed project that would truly help LiveRamp move forward.
We made sure that a 9 hour time difference wouldn’t get in the way of running intensive agile processes together. LiveRamp stressed the importance to have teams that collaborate and communicate closely and short-cycled – a foundation to make a project a success.
The communication between the team was not about preventing hurdles along the way but rather to iteratively keep fine-tuning the product.
LiveRamp never feared that things would go off track, they were in good hands.
Ian shared with us: “Even though we are your customer, the Levi9 team very much feels like our colleagues” Collaboration is key to us, and LiveRamp is the best partner we can hope for!
Hack9 – It’s not about the prize, it’s about the pride
Athletes spend years training to sharpen their skills. Years of dedication, sweat and tears, hoping to get a spot on the podium.
Well, our developers are not that different. You can be sure that when it comes to IT, they are ready to enter the arena. Our own annual hackathon event gives room to our developers to show what they are made of; 33 teams, 199 participants from 3 different countries – ready for an intense sleepless 24hrs of IT athleticism.
Every year, a different challenge needs to be met, and it’s all about apps, software, innovations and challenges. This year, following the immense success of our last Open Source themed hackathon Hack9, we gave our Levi niners something they can’t get enough of: fundamental IT. Our teams composed of Levi niners and teams from our customers came together to triumph over our new challenge: Designing the same highly performant app.
Everyone got briefed just a moment before the kick-off. The difference this year? Everything took place in the cloud – a technology progressively taking a bigger place in our daily work. Teams chose their own cloud platform and were encouraged to utilize all the managed services that the cloud of their choice offers, to cut down cost and the effort of implementation.
There was no jury this year. Every app was auto tested and its performance was displayed live on a big screen. The teams were evaluated on the functionality of their app, its performance, its cost efficiency and the team member’s ability to work with colleagues that they haven’t worked with so far. We sure love to get someone out of his or her comfort zone to explore new skills. On a practical standpoint, the skills we learned will definitely help every Levi niner thrive on an everyday basis. Yes, we like to learn a thing or two.
Events like this one, aside from celebrating our company culture and helping us to bring innovative ideas to life, allow our Levi niners to sharpen skills that we use regularly in our daily jobs and to enable our customers in their challenges.
It’s not about the prize, it’s about the pride. After an intense 24h event, it was time for some sleep. But you can be sure that we are already looking forward to the next Hack9 edition! Levi9 organizes several interesting events throughout the year, aimed to share insights and inspire. Check out our events page to find out about our upcoming events and to sign up https://www.levi9.com/events/.
Tech Doc Festival: Levi9 celebrates 15 year anniversary
It’s been 15 years since we started this, with a dream to create a truly unique company that would change the IT landscape like the comet Schumacher Levy9 changed space.
We kept on moving forward, looking straight ahead, always trying to be one step ahead. And here we stand today, stronger than ever, still working on the basis of our DNA and culture instead of KPI’s. We just welcomed our 999th team member and we felt it was the perfect occasion for us to look back at what we accomplished and, most of all, think about the path that lies ahead of us.
No better timing for our 2nd edition of Tech Doc Festival. Big-scale events in Belgrade Serbia, Kiev Ukraine and Iasi Romania. At unique locations, like one of the most beautiful theatres in the world, we invited all 999 levi niners plus invitee to expand their horizons and ponder on the way technology will change in the next 999 years. To give them a bit of inspiration, we curated though-provoking documentaries exploring technologies that are about to change society. From artificial intelligence to life-extension, from nanorobotics to extra-terrestrial encounters. The future remains a mystery, but we feel it is important to take the time to think about how our current actions can impact the next centuries.
While this event stands as a milestone of our achievements and a celebration of our rich community of 999 levi niners, the theme of this year’s Tech Doc Festival serves as a great allegory for the way we approach work at Levi9. It was always paramount for us to give our team the room to think outside the box, to expose themselves to new ideas and a better way of working. We feel it is the only way to keep thriving through the new challenges and to take advantages of the opportunities ahead. Our team members know they are part of a big family at Levi9 and that they will always be encouraged to think for themselves, to figure out the best way to provide solutions for our customers.
This is what we want to know, our customers’ needs, but most importantly, what they want to achieve. Where will be the next Tech Doc Festival? A beach in the Balkans? In a forest weekend getaway? We don’t know. Future will tell. One thing we can be sure of: a growing family of levi niners will be there to celebrate with us!
Games, workshops and trivia nights: Cybersecurity is fun.
Cybersecurity is not a sexy subject. It’s a lot of risk assessment, a thousand rules about what you can and can’t do – not exactly the first thing you want to tackle when you are building a business.
That said, it is important today more than ever to protect your assets and make sure your defence is up – this is why we made it simple. We have three groups of experts : A risk and compliance team; a blue team that builds up walls around your systems to protect your data; a red team that tries to penetrate your defences and makes sure your protections are impervious to attack. They are Levi9’s specialists when it comes to cyber self-defence and they have you covered when it comes to ensuring your system’s safety – but we don’t stop there.
Since cybersecurity is everybody’s concern, we found a way to teach our developers about the best ways to protect themselves and our customers from security attacks. Because an attack on our customers is an attack on us, and we don’t take that kindly.
We came up with games, contests and workshops to get our team acquainted with the cybersecurity rulebook. Secure9 takes place during the whole month of October, where our team will be welcomed to security attack simulations, social experiments, trivia nights and crash courses with our security specialists. We let them try their hand at hacking themselves, just so they realize how easy it can be. We even try to send them phishing e-mails to make sure they stay on their toes!
Everybody from the team got really excited about the Secure9 event and is much more sensitized to the importance of cybersecurity, now that they’ve experienced attacks firsthand. Now they have tools to protect themselves at home, but also a keen eye to assess risks and analyze if our customer’s system is ready to put up a fight. Much more interesting than reading through a thick rulebook.
What that means is that we’ll always be striving to promote the best practices when it come to security and always go the extra mile to ensure your company if safe. From customized training for your team to developing unique system architecture with the most optimized defences for your needs.
Seeing the immense success Secure9 had with our team, we are planning to extend the invitation to our customers next year. You too can learn a trick or two!
Tatyana van Witzenburg Security Officer
The key to success? Sitting down for coffee
You won’t see Levi9 chase after new customers. Neither will you see us selling our services on TV or handing out flyers in the street – certainly not considering Dutch weather. We do not feel advertising and agressive sales is the path we want to take. We’d rather invest all our energy providing the best service to our customers and make sure they only have good things to say about us. By doing that, our customers become our ambassadors; they’ll tell their network about us, they might even take us along when they change company.
That’s how we grow – through quality relationships and striving to give our customers the best IT services they could get.
What do we do different? We ask questions. How are you doing? How’s the family? (We are very friendly indeed) But mostly, we take time to sit down and ask our customers about their company and their goals. We need to know how their business is doing, who are their competitors, what is their market, when do they plan to expand, why do they need us?
I personally always take the time to sit down with our customers and make sure to ask questions relevant to their situation. By understanding the way they see the market and their vision for the future, we often offer solutions that our customers didn’t consider yet. This allows us to come up with technical and organizational improvements and make sure they really serve our customer’s agenda. We don’t deliver standard software, we want to make sure you end up with software, which is beneficial for our customers and their end users.
To find a company that focuses a lot on close customer relations and is so keen on having face to face meetings is rare nowadays. But it’s only through getting to know our customers inside out that we can offer them services that will help them grow. Also, by understanding the journey they are about to take and validating a plan of action with them, we make sure we are on the same page when it comes to supporting their endeavours.
These interviews and workshops we have with our customers’ team are our best tools to bring impactful improvement to their businesses. So let’s sit down for coffee?
Debby Jansen CCO
The Levi9 Story
Let’s be honest, these days the IT industry is so competitive it feels like the World Cup. So competitive that outsourcing work to foreign countries is a popular way to get the best developers on the field, meaning there’s a growing gap between IT specialists and their remote customers. Result: developers working on projects with no knowledge of their customers’ real needs, no transparent communication and no constant alignment. In a nutshell, IT services that are not optimized for your company’s challenges and objectives. Well, that’s not how we feel the game should be played. We are about making people happy – developers and customers.
We build bridges between people, get our developers to challenge our customers and ensure the services provided would be fine-tuned to their needs; to build a company with a human dimension where Levi9 and the customer can really be in touch every step of the way. Like the Shoemaker-Levy9 comet that collided with Jupiter and changed space forever, we want to make an impact and shape the future: Technology services with people in mind; Effective and impactful services that feel like a warm hug.
In 2005, Levi9 started investing in talented IT specialists in Eastern Europe, an untapped resource that allowed them to thrive during the industry crisis by offering high quality IT solutions while never compromising on innovation and reliability. Still today, after an exponential growth and the arrival of new management, these are values close to our heart. The strategy is clear: Make an impact with technology services on business. Keep an open line of communication between the customers and the specialists. Customer intimacy is key and personal development for our levi niners.
It’s simple: no cookie-cutter IT solutions. We are feedback-hungry to keep improving our methods and understanding the customers’ needs. We use the best communication tools to build quality relationships and only take on projects we know we can achieve at the highest standard. This is why we have been keeping loyal customers for years, some of them liking us so much they took us along in their new business ventures.
How do we get the best developers in the industry? We offer unparalleled grow opportunities and a real chance to achieve a work-life balance. 200 new specialists every year who share our values, pride themselves into building quality relationships with our customers. We invest in our people, because their success is ours and your success is theirs. This is the ecosystem we spent 15 years building and we’d love to have you join the party.