Aurimas Adomavicius is one of the founding partners of Devbridge Group LLC, a Chicago-based technology consulting firm that specializes in enterprise solutions, custom software development, user experience design, cloud services, and enterprise mobility. Since 2010, he has served as the company’s President focusing on company vision and business development.
Under his leadership, the company has doubled in size every year since its 2008 founding. While Aurimas’ main focus is on business development and strategy, he can still be found deep in the trenches, helping businesses design and implement result-oriented enterprise software solutions.
Aurimas, tell us about your firm.
Devbridge Group is an international software design and development company that builds comprehensive, custom solutions for enterprise mobile and web. The company has offices in Chicago and Kaunas, Lithuania and its 80+ employees combine engineering expertise with elegant design aesthetic to deliver exceptional results for category leaders in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and franchising.
Devbridge Group produces more than 100,000 engineering hours annually building custom cloud-based and mobile solutions for mid-market and Fortune clients. The company has extensive experience working with companies in the following industries: software, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, franchising and startups. Our long-term partnerships are built on trust and transparency. We follow a streamlined agile process, are committed to Responsive Design, and always pursue excellence in what we do.
Tell us about the challenges facing software companies today.
A big challenge is finding, and keeping, top talent in an increasingly competitive and saturated industry. Employees in the web/mobile space certainly do have options these days. We like to kid that “anyone that is any good already has a great job” when we start looking for new people, however there are still ways to attract great talent. Organizations often confuse perks with culture – they over-promote the ping-pong tables whereas true value for employees lies within professional growth, mutual respect, and an organizational belief that we do great work for great clients. Work that matters and improves things.
Another challenge lies in addressing physical and IT security. The media likes to overemphasize security threats such as heartbleed. Leveraging heartbleed to actually intercept customer data is a highly complex process and everyone is currently reacting in a preventative fashion vs. addressing an actual breach. We were not affected by heartbleed because we do not use open source SSL – the link that was actually compromised.
What is your firm doing to overcome these challenges?
With the technology space evolving at the current rapid pace security will remain a hot topic simply because breaches are sometimes difficult to predict. There are best practices that sophisticated firms like us employ to protect customer data when necessary – such as data encryption, prevention of SQL injection, keeping financial data within PCI compliant solutions, and so on. It is also very important for organizations to have a recovery plan in place, as well: assuming that the likelihood of a breach is possible, what means have been put in place to return business operations to normal?
To find and keep top talent, we have integrated ourselves into several universities and look for talent through our classes, engineering clubs, and professional events. We also believe that fast company growth opens opportunities for people inside the organization to take on more responsibilities and really challenge themselves. In summary – culture, professional growth, work that matters.
Subscription sales models are becoming more common in the software industry. Do you use a recurring sales model?
We build a lot of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms at Devbridge Group for our clients. All of those products utilize a subscription model for licensing the software. For example, a company called ServiceBridge provides a mobile application to field service technicians. The technicians are able to completely eliminate the paper trail by generating work orders on the field, capturing signatures, and generating invoices through email – directly on their mobile device. The software is sold as a service and each device has a recurring subscription.
What do you see as the benefits and tradeoffs of a subscription sales model?
There are no tradeoffs – only benefits to the owner of the software and the end clients. The SaaS model facilitates much simpler revenue stream planning. The organization can project revenue, measure growth, and calculate what portion of revenue should be reinvested into the product. The end customer receives value from a product that is continuously evolving. Both the vendor and the customer are in a relationship where dollars paid are generating direct value.
What do you consider to be software industry best practices?
Maintainability of source code. Too often do we see organizations invest millions of dollars into custom software that becomes unmaintainable due to poor architectural decisions and lack of planning. The product platform should be flexible and modular – allowing for easy maintainability, scalability, and future features.
