How Skillwell helped us to secure our first IT assignments in Finland

As an expert software house specialised in e-commerce and e-business solutions, Unity Group served hundreds of clients in Poland and in few other European countries. Having uninterruptedly operated for over 20 years (go ahead, call us dinosaurs!) and employing more than 200 IT specialists, some time ago we started to crave working with organisations from the Nordics. And then we came across Growthsetters and Skillwell who helped us to make it happen. 

But before we tell you our story, let us explain who we are and explain briefly why we were so excited about Finland.

Unity Group in a nutshell

Founded in 1997, we've successfully delivered over 500 IT projects, some of which you can check out on our website. We also have a proven track record of providing remote development teams, with our folks contributing to growth of companies and startups, such as Lesara - the German agile retail pioneer.

Located in some of the largest Polish cities, our team currently comprises over 50 Java developers, 40+ PHP developers, 20+ SharePoint, .NET & Kentico specialists, 10+ front-end developers, 10+ system &DB admins, 10+ system analysts, 10+ e-commerce SEM specialists, 10+ project managers & SCRUM masters plus some more QA engineers and IT generalists. 

We constantly train our people and are always on the lookout for even more experts, so we're geared up for a variety of business requests. Unity Group also actively participates in the local IT networks, so it helps us to quickly scale up and respond to your needs (within reason, ofc). 

Why a Polish software house like us would be interested in the Finnish market

Yup, we all loved our Nokias when we were younger, but joking aside.

While Bloomberg Markets repeatedly names Finland as one of the most innovative economies, Forbes lists it as one of the best countries for business. We're well aware that such rankings never tell you all the truth, but it still sounds promising, both in terms of scope and quality of IT projects.

And then in summer 2017 we got to learn that according to the Finnish Information Processing Association (TIVIA) report, Finland has an immediate need for a few thousand more software developers. With the anticipated 7% annual sector revenue growth, the country will lack over 15k IT professionals by 2020, leading to about €3-4 billion in lost GDP per year.

As grim as these stats may sound for the economy of Finland, they're somewhat promising for foreign software development companies like us. 

And this is how we went about it

With this inspiration in mind, we started to look for partners in the area in mid-2017. To cut a long story short, we were lucky to come across Growthsetters based in Jyväskylä. Juha, Harri and their team immediately seemed to be a perfect fit for us for their strong understanding of the Finnish market, enterprise digitalisation challenges and sales know-how. As a result, we signed a cooperation agreement in autumn last year and started working together.

We didn't have to wait long for our new partner’s team to embark on their research and send us requests from relevant Finnish companies looking for talent in our areas of specialty.

That's how we got in touch with Prasos, whose story you can read here. Our PHP and front-end developers have supported the Coinmotion platform since autumn 2017. We're very happy about this cooperation, not only because of the quality of communication, but also because it’s a first-hand blockchain & cryptocurrencies experience. And seems that Prasos team is pleased with us, too.

And since we’re already discussing a few more ideas with Finnish organisations, we’re almost certain that there’s plenty of great projects awaiting us due to Skillwell, especially as it promises to automate much of this ‘matchmaking’ work. 

Therefore, we look forward to receiving even more valuable leads in the Nordics and we’re already prepping up to respond to all types of assignments, including one-offs and short-term ones. Kippis!

Ewa Balazinska, Marketing Project Manager, Unity Group