Schiphol, 23 june 2015 – Ekipa.co, the global marketplace for software teams, got funded with 100.000 euros from private investors. The founders and its investors saw that with the growth in enterprise usage of Saas and cloud products, software development services should be available from the cloud too.
For decades, the IT industry has been dominated by giants like Accenture, IBM, Cognizant. Governments and private companies spend millions on IT projects that do not deliver on expectations. Ekipa.co, an Amsterdam based international marketplace for software teams, was started to change exactly this.
Ekipa.co – The global marketplace for software teams
An online platform enabling organisations to find and hire vetted software teams from all over the globe. In the US, online marketplaces to find skilled individuals like Odesk, Stackoverflow and Linkedin are on the rise. Hiring a complete expert team ‘from the cloud’ wasn’t possible, until now.
And then there was Ekipa, launched earlier this year. A marketplace that brings together demand for building software and teams that do just that. Clients may submit a variety of requests, from a mobile app, responsive webshop to niche technologies like Ruby on Rails or Python. Within 2 months, 100 teams from the Netherlands, India and many Eastern European countries, have registered.
Specialist IT knowledge is the key
IT giants can do ‘anything and everything’, but it would be against the laws of statistics if the best teams were always found within their organizations. Companies seem to settle for working with allround teams while there’s probably a much better specialist team outside the giant. On top of that, money is spent on long RFP cycles and on managing ‘risk’ by selecting the usual suspects (did anyone ever got fired hiring IBM?).
Teams that are experts at building the solution a client needs, for a similar company, build better software, do it faster and cheaper. Ekipa offers organisations a convenient way to find those expert teams, along with customer reviews and vetting and…. quality controls in place that favor only one of the participants in the software development game, the client.
Ekipa will do for the IT consulting industry what Airbnb did for the hotel industry. In just a few years, Airbnb could offer the same amount of rooms as the large hotel chains. Ekipa plans to grow the team database to match the quantity that companies like Accenture and IBM offer and is set on surpassing them in quality of services..
The last barrier to global outsourcing is gone
“As with all market disrupting startups, the power of the reviews and vetting are of the utmost importantance for customers”, according to Hugo Messer, Ekipa’s CEO. With the search function, a customer gets an overview of teams that have built solutions for companies in the same industry and technology.
The vetting gives customers the confidence that they work with professional teams that know what they are doing. Moreover, Ekipa supports the collaboration that is established through the platform with additional services. We remove the last barrier for people to outsource their software development globally”.
The first user experience of 22 Times
The market has noticed the launch of Ekipa. Today, over 20 companies have placed a project-request. Recently, the first Ekipa booked its first deal. “Through Ekipa I got four international software teams presented. I selected two that match our vision and the specific project requirements. The experience of the team as well as the engagement of Ekipa gave us the confidence that we have found the best software team at short notice”, according to Erwin Moojen, CEO of 22 Times.
Posts by SpeakBindas Editorial Team.