An executive conversation with Vladimir Kuzmenko

SVP Sales & Business Development 

HQ: St. Petersburg, Florida

Vladimir Kuzmenko

One of the projects we were proud of is our partnership with CarSoup, a fully-equipped system that assists more than 20,000 dealerships across the U.S. to provide a user-friendly car-buying experience with the most extensive selection of local vehicles and dealers online. This system has two key components: a search engine and a data load system. Its previous system had limited productivity capabilities and couldn't handle huge user volumes. So, after considering all the client's requirements, we chose a technology that allowed us to come up with the right performance indicators to meet their desired outcomes.

The main challenge was the need to transfer data into CSV format -- an inventory-list of 6.5 million of vehicles per day. When we started our operations, the download time could reach up to 12 hours for the client’s target data. Using asynchronous data processing allowed us to reduce the time spent on load to about an hour. Moreover, the volume of data has also increased. As a result, our work exceeded expectations, and the client has a decent margin for future growth.

Another vector we specialize in is digital transformation. Together with marketing agencies, we help our clients switch from offline sales to online stores. Our experts develop a migration strategy and support the client at each stage. A great example is our client VOID & Wearcolour, a sport clothing brand, for which we created a website on Magenta with a user-friendly UI/UX and connect them to the local payment systems.

Success Stories

Since the world is accelerating, the speed of operations (buying, processing, shipping) is essential to gain online customer loyalty. This requires a high level of automation. E-commerce automation is about giving people the most important thing you can: time. We build more efficient processes by automating manual work and working on the stability of the system.

For example, the CarSoup platform we've built is for selling and buying vehicles. Initially, the client's idea was to create a website for selling a variety of products targeted to each customer's country of origin. After careful consideration, the client decided to create a whole platform where many dealers could sell vehicles. The flexibility of our approach allowed us to expand the capabilities of the app with minor changes. The platform now provides for the ability to register as a dealer, who now has an admin panel, where he could add vehicles, view user's statistics, etc. The user could buy cars from different dealers and view exclusive private-seller listings. As a result, the codebase quality control and maintenance allowed us to enhance the platform possibilities quickly and without extra time

Unleashing the Power of Automation

One of the key success factors in Ecommerce projects is UI/UX -- users want everything to be as quick as possible and won't deal with complex interfaces. They want to buy a product in two clicks using a smartphone, for example. So, it's essential to pay the highest attention to ease-of-use during design.

Using an API and auto-scaling allows us to approach the varying number of active users flexibly. We analyze what time of day, what holidays, or days where the solutions will have an influx of users, and our managed server infrastructure is always configured for the capacity to support incoming data flow. Also, doing so allows for not exceeding the rapid response threshold for a single second (and most often even a millisecond). The user is able to shop fast and easily through an application. Our database clusters can process and store gigabytes of data while maintaining a fast response to user activity.

Complex architectural decisions are made in several stages. First, we discuss with the client how they see the outcome of our work; for example, what is their definition of success. Sometimes we help the client form this vision and along the way, identify hidden problems and suggest solutions to overcome them. After several discussions, our business analysts work out the specific requirements for precise functionality implementation of the technology then our technical experts start working on architecture, identifying and assessing any technical risks or hurdles to overcome.

The NIX team often resorts to an iterative development process -- it is an approach that ensures convergence of the final decision to the set goals through consistent clarification of requirements and development artifacts. With each new project, we always start with an audit to ensure the efficiency of business processes, learning code quality, and finding the priority directions for the required work.

Many things that we encounter during the work process can’t be identified at an early stage. When we first roll out an MVP (or even PoC) and receive feedback from users, we enhance the system performance and update its functionality. We build up functionality while the project is evolving and becoming more user-friendly, thus meeting the clients' needs

Building for the Present & Future

NIX is a team of more than 2,000 world-class specialists, who are skilled in software engineering, design, QA, management, business analysis and other specialties. Each team member has proper technical background and domain expertise in their specialty. They are not afraid to voice their opinion, which helps bring the client the most suitable solution.

When collaborating with clients, our team becomes a natural extension of the client’s onsite team, and we work together to reach a common goal, while achieving the client’s values.

All of our team leads are certified with the appropriate domain of knowledge; for example, project managers and business analysts have SAFe 4.5 certificates; tech leads possess Salesforce certificate for Platform App Builders, AWS Solutions architect certificate, Microsoft professional certification, ISTQB advanced level security tester certificate, among others. Moreover, our experts regularly attend the top conferences and educational events in their domain of knowledge to add to their expertise: WWDC, KotlinConf, ETC, Spark+AI Summit, JSConf EU, Laracon conference, etc.

Thanks to the unique scalability method, our team can expand or shrink at any time, start a project from scratch or join an active one at any stage. Our team is passionate about what they do, so all clients can be sure that we will focus on them to learn about their needs, goals and vision. We are always happy to take on new projects and have the resources for an immediate start.

Functioning as Client’s Extended Team