Cluj, January 2012. As of January 30, the ISDC BI centre becomes fully operational in Bucharest. With a start-up team of 5 highly experienced BI specialists, this centre represents the first step in substantially expanding the ISDC business in the region.

BI (Business Intelligence) was and remains one of the main strategic directions in the expansion of ISDC as a European IT services company. The new BI centre in Bucharest plays a key role in this growth process, considering that in 2011 the BI department of the Cluj-based technology centre of ISDC had an impressive growth of 200%, with the same trend applicable for 2012. This was triggered by the ever-increasing need of our customers for innovation, integration, and intelligent solutions. To support this ascending trend, the decision was to explore the BI market in Bucharest where senior specialists are more accessible and less scarce than in Cluj. Such an extension to the existing BI department of ISDC offers not only flexibility, access to a more scalable and more varied labour market, generous in additional specialties such as Oracle and SAP, but also a faster response time of ISDC to business requests coming from customers. They need easily deployable specialized domain knowledge and innovative solutions, delivered in an agile way.

Tibor Laszlo, Operational Manager ISDC, confirms the business ambition for 2012: “This centre is a small step if we refer to the current 5 member team but definitely a scalable step when we refer to our ambitious business development plans for the years to come. We intend to grow this team and reach 20 specialists by the end of this year. The initial team consists of 3 senior developers and 2 developers, all specialized in BI, who are assigned in development, maintenance and integration projects developed in Cluj for finance, healthcare, and eLearning customers. The plan is to grow towards more autonomy through independent development projects fully managed by this team, alongside distributed teams with colleagues from The Netherlands, Cluj and Bucharest.”

Still, Cluj remains the centre of the ISDC nearshore operations. The coordination as well as the project management, solution architecture, QA management and testing will remain located in Cluj. The Bucharest centre simply offers more favourable growth perspectives, as well as a competitive advantage in the development of the ISDC operations. “Our vision is to migrate Cluj towards a centre of excellence focused on management, solution definition, architecture and design, integration, while Bucharest and other future centres in Romania turn into technology centres delivering high quality solutions. We want to consolidate our existing competence portfolio covering major platforms like Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Cognos, but also keep a close eye on the market developments with regard to real-time BI, mobile BI, social and content analytics, big data solutions. Our ultimate goal is to innovate the business of our customers and do it in a smart way,” states Gabi Lupas, Head of the Operations.

The ISDC BI centre opened officially on January 2, 2012.