Episode 1: HSO International

Welcome to the OntargIT podcast series where we have insightful conversations with experts from the world of business and technology. In the first episode, we introduced you to Walter, the managing director from HSO International. HSO is our valued partner that brings extensive expertise and experience in the field of Microsoft Cloud solutions, and we are excited to have Walter join us today. Okay, let’s get started!

Good morning, my name is Glib, I am the delivery manager at OntargIT. Today we are talking with Walter, who is the managing director at HSO International, the company that we are partnered together to deliver and support Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions for end customers. Before we dive deep into details about our partnership, Walter, could you briefly introduce yourself and tell a bit more about your role and HSO in general?

Thanks for having me, Glib. Great to see you and all the brave people in Ukraine that we’re very much backing up from both a personal and business perspective. As for myself, I’m a managing director at HSO International and have been working with HSO for more than 18 years. Although our company dates to the 80s, we started focusing on Microsoft in 2003, and since then, we’ve grown to over 2,000 people globally, specializing in Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Azure Services, and data analytics.

I first met your founder, Volodymyr, many years ago at a Microsoft conference, and we always had a friendly relationship. However, we didn’t do much business together at that time. But when the war broke out, we took quite a few Ukrainians on our team and provided housing and support. We also reached out to Volodymyr to see if there was anything we could do to support your company, as some customers were withdrawing due to complexity, fear, and delivery uncertainty. Since then, we’ve been working together very successfully and happily, and we have good cooperation.

In general, what kind of services projects do you cooperate with OntargIT? How did you foresee it and how is it evolved now?

I know OntargIT as a full-service provider, we started out with many services. Given the current situation, many of these services have been more than just support. At HSO International, we have big programs and international customers globally, which require continuous improvements and a consultative approach. Later we extended to more consultative roles within our global projects. While leading local workshops without travel is difficult, we have one of our architects leading the workshops, and OntargIT people can pick up from that and work within the team to perform their consultative work. This approach has been working very well for us.

As an international company, whose employees speak different languages, are in different places and work remotely most of the time, can you describe partnership with some targets through this point of view? Do you notice any difficulties?

As an international company, we’re already working in a very international team with over 30+ nationalities and 20-25+ languages, being now more than 250 people. This means that we are used to working in an environment, where everybody is slightly different, but cooperative. The attitude to work in such team must be intrinsically motivated. It’s probably a bit more challenging than a local project, but people, who want to do this, are the kind of people that we like to work with. They like the challenge, and they like new things coming from an international perspective. We have seen this working very well with OntargIT people as they blend in easily. It helps that we have a mix of Ukrainians, Polish people, and even some Russian people within our team who have been living here for more than 10 years. It’s war, but you can’t ever relate to specific people in that sense. On a human level, we work very well all together in a very collaborative spirit.

Okay. It’s also nice to hear. One other question that we discussed a little bit in the very beginning, you decided to start working with OntargIT, a Ukraine based company, just after the war started. So, the question is why? Because from other businesses’ point of view it is quite risky now.

There was some uncertainty at the time, and it was unpredictable what would happen. Especially in the first six months, we were on the top of our toes, and our main concern was the well-being of the people and teams in Ukraine. Despite all the war activities and impacts, OntargIT managed to keep delivering, and the people were very dedicated with all the support they delivered. Despite the war they kept on doing a perfect job, which was super impressive, we admired it a lot. Now, despite the ongoing conflict, there’s still some missile attacks and network or energy fallout, but the situation has improved, and things seem to be getting better and more predictable. The delivery is normal and up to par with what we would expect, so it has worked out from a business sense very fine.

I know we tried our best to manage this power supply issue, but there is a question I should ask. Did you experience any significant disruptions because of that? There are maybe situations where people were not present at a meeting or something like that.

There may have been some small things happening, but no bigger pull-outs. The delivery has been very predictable and solid, despite the world being unpredictable due to various factors such as COVID-19 and the ongoing war. So, there has been no big impact on our business.

Thank you very much for that feedback, Walter, it is nice to hear. Now let’s talk a little bit about the services we did for you. So, we ourselves, when we talk about partner services, we emphasize that our professionals in Dynamics 365 are experienced in various industries. So, besides technical and functional knowledge, have you got business related insights from our partnership? Where people know the business processes, industries, methodologies etc.

I also asked around for some individual feedback. Indeed, besides the technical skills, of course, that is different per resource, there were some examples, where OntargIT people were also used for specific process knowledge. In service management knowledge we have 1 consultant, who is very specialized in this area. Service management often is a big part of our manufacturing implementations. We have quite some consultants there, but obviously, we were lacking in terms of capacity. So, it was perfectly filled in with an OntargIT resource. Sometimes, especially in this virtual world, I think that it has become much easier to work online. Like I said, OntargIT resources blend well within the teams. They are not only involved in technology and development, but also in design and process conversations.

We’re also saying that most people that are working with OntargIT are doing services for end customers. The opportunity we find with partners in general is the lack of resources of professionals in that area. So, digital transformations are going, ERP implementation projects are going. We saw that in our country, we saw it around the world as well. As far as I understood, the initial need, why you were looking for the partnership, is to be able to timely deliver the service and projects to customers. So, to find the right professional is not as simple as you might initially think.

It takes a kind of personality to work within HSO International. Our standards and requirements are high, and our structure and levels of quality are much higher than those of other partners. It also means that the consultants, who enter our projects, need to perform to a surface standard, because otherwise it doesn’t work. OntargIT people have that sense of quality. We work in a super structured way with standard working practices across the board to keep our global projects under control. Otherwise, things get messy, especially with global projects that go out of hand quite quickly. So, we must apply a lot of rigor and structure. One of the feedback points is that OntargIT people are adapting well to those standards, which is important for us.

In our services, we have SLAs that should comply with the project’s budget and timeline.

Yes, we have a very detailed DevOps way of working, which includes a lot of pre-templated implementation tooling. We work with many cultures across the globe, some of them may not understand, but for major international projects, we know that it is necessary to run these big programs and have this rigid structure. OntargIT people blend in perfectly and understand why we do this. That’s important for us to keep the quality at the same level.

During the partnership you blend the teams, and all employees, whether they are partners or parallel employees. All follow the same processes and standards, which works well from what I see. There’s no need to separate by different kinds of services.

Everybody is part of the same team. We all work in the same way, and there’s no distinction, you’re correct here.

Let’s also talk a little bit about end customers and Microsoft in general. In your opinion, how do you see the future of Microsoft solutions for businesses? What value can these technologies bring and how can they develop further?

Microsoft’s core business has always been Office, operating systems, networks, and databases. Business applications are also very much at the core. Only in the 80s and 90s it wasn’t recognized as such, but the amount of business processes that were running on Access and Excel was already enormous. With the addition of Dynamics 365 F&O, Microsoft now has a more standardized product offering to compete with SAP and Oracle. Moreover, with the Power Platform, which I always call Microsoft Access on steroids in the Cloud, Microsoft addresses the white space between standard applications and pure customized solutions, allowing users to work in a secure way with structured data, and build their own less standardized business processes. I believe that this gives a powerful platform approach, and that Microsoft will keep investing in this area, and keep winning more deals. You’ll never be 100% market share, but the momentum is there. Microsoft, in combination with the strength of Azure Cloud and data analytics, is the best bet of all tech companies, and I feel confident with our commitment to it.

Exactly, there’s a really good analogy I heard from Microsoft, when they described Power Platform, is that in the business ID landscape there is always the top of the iceberg, where we have that big application like ERP, CRM etc. But there is also the bottom of the iceberg that has a lot of non-structured solutions, like you mentioned. But they still need to maintain the governance and security of that application. This is where the Power Platform shines.

There’s always so much to find in companies when you start digging in, and especially now with the importance of privacy and security, bringing them under a better technology umbrella is crucial. Furthermore, there’s a real war going on, but also a cyber war. We don’t even capture like 5% of what is probably all happening there, behind the scenes. That’s also the reality which won’t go away next year. From that perspective, Microsoft technology is perfectly equipped for businesses to be that core in the customers technology stack.

We also have that situation in Ukraine. Before, companies were asking about what on-premises solution they can implement to manage the security and everything on their side. But right now, the war shows that there is a very high level of cyber security required and companies are starting to think that they should move to the Cloud. Because they’ll still have access anywhere around the world, even if they move somewhere else. Also, Microsoft provides the right tools and technology to really have a higher level of that security and privacy to comply with the current modern needs.

Yes, very confident in the market, and very confident in Microsoft, for sure.

All right, Walter, do you have anything to add to all these topics we had a conversation about today?

Nothing really to add there. It’s super important to continue our great cooperation and our partnership in general. We’ll keep moving and we’ll keep supporting Ukraine in the broader sense. We enjoy our healthy and good business partnership, so thanks for that.

Thank you very much, Walter, for the partnership and the general support you provide. We are looking forward to more collaboration and mutual projects in the future. Thank you very much for the interview.

Super, you’re welcome, have a great day!

You too have a good day! See you later!