Near-sourcing to the Balkans appears to be successful for HintTech

28 July 2009 - HintTech, the ICT service provider from Delft in The Netherlands, has announced today that its facility in Serbia will expand due to strong growth in business activities and a robust increase in the number of employees. HinTech continues to grow steadily despite the economic crisis.

HintTech, which focuses on software development (.Net, Java and Tridion), project management, application management and information security, took over the software development firm from Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, over one and a half years ago. An expansion is now following with the incorporation of an adjacent office. Even the construction of a whole new office building is on the agenda. The introduction of flexible workspaces that will accompany this is an innovation and novelty in Novi Sad.
According to Patrick Dekker, director of HintTech, at the time of the takeover there were a range of factors indicating that the takeover would be a success: ‘Of course we did not decide without careful deliberation and consciously selected the Balkans and not India, for example. A good relationship with our clients is crucial for the success of a project. Therefore it is necessary to be literally and figuratively close to the client.
Our developers empathise much better with clients and its working method and wishes, because there are less cultural differences between The Netherlands and Serbia than between The Netherlands and the Far East. The fact that there is no time difference and Serbia has well trained IT experts in general ensures that we can link up quickly.’
In view of the strong growth in business activities and the increasing number of employees in the facility in Serbia, the takeover decision has proven as the right one. HintTech also knows how to translate this success for its clients. ‘Thanks to near-sourcing we combine continuity, quality and security with low costs. Our clients appreciate this. We were also able to continue and develop relationships with existing customers and to create loyalty to us among new customers in the past year’, says Dekker. HintTech, which has realised profit growth of 625 percent over the past five years, has been able to ward off the consequences of the credit crisis successfully so far and is still aiming for substantial growth in 2009. Dekker: ‘In recessionary times we do well, because you must show your true worth. In 2001, a period in which many other young companies collapsed, we were able to achieve growth of over 10 percent. We also expect to be push ahead with our growth this year.’

About HintTech

HintTech is a specialist in e-business technology (.Net, Java platform, Tridion) and IT projects (development, testing, implementation, application management and quality assurance). The company was started in 1997 and works with innovative and proven technologies and methods. HintTech provides qualitative custom solutions for its clients. For Tridion, Microsoft, Sun J2EE and IBM WebSphere, HintTech is an advisor as well as partner. HintTech counts Shell, Nuon, Fortis, ING and KLM as clients. It currently employs 113 people and has offices in Delft (Netherlands), San Francisco (US) and Novi Sad (Serbia). For more information: www.hinttech.nl.