July the 29th, 2022 - The brand new Serengeti Split office has opened its doors and has been hiring local IT experts, a move which will hopefully further contribute to people remaining in Croatia and people from Dalmatia becoming employed in something other than tourism.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, after having opened offices in Zagreb, Bjelovar, Varaždin and neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as development centres over in Kenya and Serbia, the new Serengeti Split office has opened, where it sees great potential for further establishing the IT profession, developing innovative projects and attracting young experts from across the region; Cooperation with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Shipbuilding in Split is also planned through internships and scholarships.

Serengeti, one of the fastest growing Croatian software development companies, will start working at their new location on August the 1st, 2022, in their brand new office on the Riva in the very heart of the City of Split. Since its foundation back in 2007, Serengeti has grown organically in terms of revenue, number of employees and level of expertise, and is now one of the fastest growing Croatian IT companies for software development, with an average annual revenue growth rate of around 35%.

Serengeti's expansion further down towards the south of Croatia is motivated by the increasing volume of work in general, as well as work on projects for the global market, and it has all been planned since the beginning of this year. Serengeti recognised Split as one of the most promising Croatian cities with great potential for even stronger technological development. In addition, Serengeti wishes to motivate local young experts, software engineers, to stay here in Croatia. There are already seven developers working within the Split team, and by the end of the year they will employ a minimum of eight more people. Two and a half million kuna is planned for the salaries of these 15 employees this year alone.

As far as the further growth of the number of employees is concerned, cooperation with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Shipbuilding in Split is also planned in the form of professional internships, scholarships and employment of interns, as mentioned previously.

"We already have seven employees working in Split and they fit perfectly into our way of working. Since Split and the region where it is located are strong in terms of engineering personnel and there are excellent technical faculties there, we believe that we'll be able to significantly expand our engineering team and offer people work on large international projects. The new Serengeti Split office is an important pillar in our future development plans, which largely depends on the ability to attract and retain quality engineering staff," says Goran Kalanj, president of the board and founder of Serengeti.

Serengeti's developers in Split are currently working on the development of a tourist application (app) for one of the leading Croatian tourism companies, and in cooperation with colleagues from other offices, they'll also work on projects for other markets. With an already established position within the European Union (EU), Serengeti has been present on the American, Scandinavian and Israeli markets since last year, which is why this company is constantly growing in terms of the number of employees.

Thanks to challenging projects, expertise and experience from both domestic and global markets, investment in development and the family atmosphere that reigns in all Serengeti offices, the company is recognised as a desirable employer and will have more than 200 satisfied employees at all of its current locations by the end of the year.

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As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 13th of November, 2020, although the phrase "every crisis is an opportunity" sometimes sounds a bit odd when it comes to recognising the Croatian company Serengeti's Team Extension work model, the ongoing coronavirus crisis has really prompted many companies to recognise this model as an ideal business model.

In the first 10 months of this year alone, the Croatian company Serengeti, which deals with IT, successfully concluded 8 contracts with new clients, which is a step up from 2019, long before the pandemic hit. What is particularly gratifying is that Serengeti was able to sign a contract in early November 2020 with a client from California, which is the very heart of the global IT industry.

"This is a very valuable and large project that affects this industry on a global level. Given this, as expected, it's a very demanding project in the technological sense, it also means long-term cooperation. It's an e-commerce platform that deals with health services, which also includes integrated counselling of those interested in making the best choice for their healthcare. This includes the following functionalities related to B2C and back office: lead generation, connection to the contact centre, the content management of the portal, billing, as well as analytics and reporting,'' revealed Goran Kalanj, the CEO of the Croatian company Serengeti.

Although this isn't their first client from American soil, this contract is special because of the size and seriousness of the project they will be working on. Serengeti is known as an IT company that since its inception has been working on large enterprise projects and for companies that are leaders in their industries, whose products are used by millions of users around the world.

"For our model of work, this crisis has brought about one good thing, and that's that companies that were previously skeptical about remote working have now realised that this is a serious business model that has more advantages than it has disadvantages. This opened up an additional opportunity that we didn't want to miss out on,'' added Kalanj.

By the further expansion of Serengeti into the promising American market, their developers have the ability to work on global projects. The Croatian company Serengeti is otherwise continuously hiring new employees, and plans to hire new developers to work on various pieces of technology by the end of this year. This year, they launched two new development centres in Serbia and Kenya. In 2021, in addition to their offices in Zagreb, Varazdin and Bjelovar, they plan to open offices in Split and Rijeka.

The Croatian company Serengeti builds its expertise primarily in industrial production, finances, energy logistics and retail. They have helped many clients implement an agile way of working as well as advanced DevOps methodologies, automated testing, and advanced SCRUM practices. It's worth recalling that they also recently announced that they have started a collaboration with the American company Tricentis, a world leader in automated software testing, which is one in a series of very large projects.

On top of their business success, the Croatian company Serengeti is also distinguished by their enviable so-called ''work-life balance'' and nurturing the same core values; teamwork, agility, ambition and professionalism.

Additionally, work is continuing on improving the soft skills of developers to better fit into the client culture that is mapped to a particular project. Like many other companies, they have a variety of benefits, rewards and bonuses for their employees. However, the biggest reward is the customer satisfaction with their developers who regularly receive words of praise and very high ratings in periodic questionnaires as well as on external platforms like Clutch.

The Croatian IT scene has been recording significant successes lately, which is only confirmed by Serengeti, which, in addition to a significant number of new large projects, recently became a co-owner of the RedAI application, which uses artificial intelligence technology to analyse the situation on shelves in just a few seconds. Systematic business improvement at all levels and nurturing company values ​​are what have enabled the Serengeti to grow rapidly and work with companies that are true leaders in their respective fields.

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As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 9th of October, 2020, Serengeti, a Croatian consulting company that provides enterprise solution development services and is one of the largest such developer companies in Croatia, and Besplay Adria, a Zagreb-based startup that developed the RedAI application, recently signed a contract by which Serengeti becomes a co-owner of RedAI application. In addition, a collaboration with Tricentis, which has been recognised as a leader in automated testing by Gartner, Forrester and IDC, has been announced.

"By partnering with Besplay Adria, ie the co-ownership in the RedAI application, which is based on the application of advanced machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence, we've made a step forward into a new, attractive area. In addition, by including the RedAI application in our portfolio, we've entered the retail industry, which is recording its latest boom thanks to the application of innovative software solutions that allow both small and large players on this competitive market to be as agile as possible,'' commented Serengeti's CEO Goran Kalanj. He added "Serengeti has long been present on the market as a reliable partner for automated software testing, and cooperation with the world leader in this field, Tricentris, further confirms this and gives us the opportunity to apply our knowledge and best practices in this area in terms of further development and functionality of the software testing solution,''

"We're extremely pleased to be able to start a business synergy with Serengeti, which is established here on the Croatian market as one of the leading IT companies. Considering that the RedAI solution is also 100% made in Croatia, we're glad that in the future two Croatian companies will try to position RedAI commercially outside of our own borders, as well as continuously technologically improve the solution in the years ahead. FMCG/CPG is the primary industry where RedAI has proven to be a "must have" product for leading companies within the industry, but our goal is to offer complementary digital solutions in other industry niches and improve their business,'' said Domagoj Borsic, CEO of Besplay Adria.

''RedAI is an application that delivers current results on your device in correlation with your predefined KPIs. The user photographs the shelf or refrigerator with a mobile device or tablet with simple guidelines built into the app. AI software detects, processes and classifies each SKU previously defined by the client and delivers results to the user on site, as well as the management team, and compares compliance with established KPIs or contract terms with individual retailers,'' the director of Besplay Adria explained.

2020, although marked by the ongoing coronavirus crisis, is the year in which Croatia's Serengeti started a number of new projects on both the Croatian and foreign markets. In the retail industry it accelerated the implementation of advanced solutions. Numerous clients on foreign markets are the best proof of Serengeti's domain knowledge and the name of the company is known in the countries of Western Europe.

By taking over part of the ownership in the RedAI application, Serengeti has become an exclusive partner of Besplay Adria and will support this startup company in the further development of the application as well as its presentation in foreign markets. It is an application that uses artificial intelligence technology and is used by sales representatives to improve the sale of consumer goods. Thanks to this innovative solution, sales representatives can analyse a shelf in a shopping centre as well as products in refrigerators in the HoReCa sector in just a few seconds. The next step in the development of the application is 3D mapping of products within the application, which requires the further application of advanced and modern technologies.

Smart software testing is the next step in the field of automated testing where Serengeti will work with Tricentris in a way that their consultants will strengthen the existing team and develop new functionalities towards smart software testing solutions. Tricentris is a globally recognised company that has been at the very top of the software testing industry for several years in a row now, according to independent research. Their solution encompasses the entire process of testing software functionality from an end-user perspective.

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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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