Challenges As Business Growth Points

• What has changed in your company since the beginning of the year?
• How have customer demands changed?
• What has come into the limelight?
• Has anything changed in your relationship with customers and partners?
• Did you have to downsize or, quite the opposite, increase in headcount?
• What lessons did you learn from this year?
• Were there any upsides to the pandemic for IT and infopreneurship other than a motivating kick in the butt?

Vyatcheslav Fokin, Key Account Director, Cinimex

Marked by the pandemic, 2020 was a difficult year, which had impact on many companies, including Cinimex. It showed that circumstances can be unpredictable, and it is important to be ready for anything and think clear without panicking. We were able to quickly adapt to new challenges, mobilize our resources and, thus, maintain sustainability and our growth rates.

In 2020, implementation of turnkey IT projects continued to be our core business, and to support it, we reinforced the role of our regional branches. Access to the project team in Moscow used to be a priority for customers, but these days, telecommuting has become a de facto standard in the IT industry. With that in mind, among other, Cinimex opened a third branch office in St. Petersburg.

2020 solidified the trend of banks opting for in-house development. In response to new trends on the market, we have expanded our scope of business, thus, one new service we started to offer is preparing customer teams. We have won new contracts, and we have been optimizing our internal infrastructure to make sure we can deliver on this new line of business.

This year had no serious financial impact on our business. As usual, the company achieved its performance goals slightly ahead of time. Given the specifics of the challenges we help to address, this is not the first crisis for Cinimex. We help our customers with such pertinent issues as regulatory requirements or business functionality of their apps, i.e., something the bank cannot go without, no matter how bad the economic situation could be. This is what allowed us to remain resilient in the times of crisis, and even deliver the anticipated growth. We signed new customers both from our traditional sector – finance, and from new sectors, such as, manufacturing industry, which is in line with the company’s strategic development goals.

Our relationships with customers hasn’t changed, but their format did. Face-to-face meetings and contacts are kept to a minimum. This is not that important when discussing project details, but it is a big deal when it comes to building a rapport with a new client. The emotional aspect is an important part of human interaction, and it is difficult to get across via telecommunication channels. Besides, all the industry events have gone online. Obviously, we participated in them and even organized our own online events. Many interesting talks have taken place on the virtual platforms. However, an important part of offline events was meeting people with a similar job, values and beliefs as you. Informal networking helped to create a synergy in the professional community, which you don’t get in online events.

As for our relationships with partners, the restrictions didn’t really change anything. We have well-established communication processes with our old partners, such as IBM or Red Hat. However, despite all the challenges, for us this will also be a year when we found new partners – we reached an agreement with SAS and Cloudera.