The Zagreb-based technology firm Serengeti is focusing on developing its business west, not east.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 5th of January, 2020, the first Croatian software company, which the dominant, Indian outsourcing model turned upside down and made emerge as the third fastest growing technology company in Central Europe has maintained its impressive high growth rates.
Zagreb's Serengeti, which employed 80 software professionals back in 2018, will conclude this year with more than 170 employees, 140 of them are in development alone, with revenue expected to grow by as much as 50 percent. According to Fina, Serengeti concluded last year with a massive 35.4 million kuna in revenue, and this year, with the currently projected growth, it expects revenue above 50 million kuna.
Zoran Kovacevic, director of development at Serengeti, says they aim to grow to 500 employees in the next three to five years. In doing so, he emphasises that this will be mostly influenced by the trend of business development on more western markets.
"We grew last year because of the significant influx of new clients, both in Croatia and Europe, especially the DACH region, Benelux and Scandinavia, because there is a great need to develop IT solutions everywhere, as between 60 and 80 percent of companies cannot find the right experts on their own markets,'' says Kovacevic.
He added that Zagreb's Serengeti has found its market space in software development services that include a very wide range of emerging technological trends: machine learning, IoT, augmented reality, computer visions, cloud, microservices, automated testing and DevOps. He stated that they opened an office in Amsterdam a year ago.
"It just isn't possible to succeed today if you don't have a global perspective,'' Kovacevic says. He points out that this is the natural evolution of their business and the plan of the business owners started to realise six years ago when they got their first customers in Western Europe.
"Now that growth is accelerating, in 2020 we're opening an office in Germany and we're considering opening some more offices abroad," Kovacevic says. He explains that their plan is to become a significant player at the European level, and potentially globally.
"However, I think it's important that from the beginning, the emphasis is placed on developing business westward, not eastward, such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, because that seems to us to be a more stable development path in the long term," Kovacevic says.
In development, he explains, Serengeti is growing strongly through software development projects in industrial manufacturing, then in the healthcare, automotive and financial industries, and then in logistics and energy. The Croatian software company mainly develops and maintains core systems in the insurance, banking and card business in the financial industry. They help banks to transform themselves technologically towards open banking by moving them to the so-called microservice architecture and cloud. Regarding software development in industrial production, Serengeti works for the Austrian company Fronius.
The company develops and manufactures welding stations used by several well-known car manufacturers in its product lines, and has expanded from battery manufacturing to the production of key equipment and solutions for solar power plants. "We're working on a solution that further facilitates the development of a robotic welding station in line with Industry 4.0 trends, as well as a solution that integrates individual components of solar power plants into one globally integrated system," says Kovacevic.
In logistics, they work with KNAPP to operate a warehouse management system that uses robots, artificial intelligence, IoT and augmented reality, where the goal is to make the entire warehouse fully automated. In addition to working abroad, Serengeti has also managed to develop part of its business in Croatia.
"We've grown locally in public and financial sector jobs, with over half of our employees working in the financial sector, and in this industry, we've grown into one of the leading IT companies in Croatia," Kovacevic points out.
He adds that they have worked on large scale public sector IT systems and development projects and are working with Fina and APIS IT in these types of jobs. He points out that such jobs are done solely through a public tender and are very carefully selected. Kovacevic explains that they see their role in such jobs as a kind of socially useful work, "because with the rich experience and knowledge we've gained on numerous domestic and foreign projects, we can help in the effective computerisation of public administration."
"We're almost exclusively submitting to tenders that are defined to allow for great advancements in our level of quality of service and delivery,'' he adds.
He states that they also cooperate with Mercury Processing International and RBA here in Croatia.
"It was attractive to us to engage in projects where we used a complete cross-section of open-source technologies, event-driven design and microservice architecture, all using the DevOps approach and achieving continuous integration (CI) and even continuous deployment (CD) practices. These practices, such as Facebook, can quickly release new software releases, and this offers them, among other things, unprecedented benefits in realising new functionality and managing IT security risks,'' concludes Serengeti's Kovacevic.
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