Telecoms Case Study

Name Your Number

Name your Number recently utilised Gödel's skills and experience to help complete a major international project. NYN work with mobile phone operators worldwide, helping them to monetise their phone number pool as Attiq Qureshi, Chief Technical Officer explained,

“We help mobile operators utilise their entire number pool and make it available to the whole of the addressable market. To do this we provide an interface to their POS system in-store and an online tool that enables customers to enter information such as date of birth, name, memorable important number, hobby and their job. Our application then searches their database of numbers and presents the customer with a list of numbers that match these criteria. The operator can then charge a premium for these numbers as they are of value to the customer.”

Expertise and experience

NYN had initially gone live with their application using in-house resource and an external organisation. But, during 2009 work on a new project in Europe with a major client made them realise that they did not have the capability to meet the demand both in terms of resources and technical expertise.

“We knew we needed to find a partner that could help us with this”, said Attiq “and fortunately Gödel were a known entity to our managing director and the senior management team.”

Gödel is a leading provider of high quality software development services for businesses in the UK, Europe and North America and it was this expertise that provided a perfect fit for NYN’s requirements as Attiq explained. “Firstly, they were the right size. They were large enough to have the resources and technical expertise to meet the peaks of our demand but at the same time were small enough that our project really mattered to them. Finding this right level is always difficult when you are partnering with an external organisation on mission-critical software applications. It also meant that we could engage with their senior people whenever we required.

“Secondly, we needed to move quickly and Gödel were adaptable enough to pick up the project ‘mid-flight’ and take it forward. We were working to challenging timescales and with evolving requirements and our partner needed to buy-in to these demands.

“And last, but not least, they have got a very good, commonsense methodology that helps to guarantee project success.”

Dedicated team

Gödel provided design, development, technical and project management resource largely through their nearshore team based in Minsk as Neil Turvin, director at Gödel explained. “Typically there are cultural and time zone differences when companies outsource software development, but by being nearshore, in Europe, these are removed at a stroke.

“This means that we can provide all the cost advantages of outsourcing to a dedicated team, but with none of the associated problems. As well as offering UK-based management we also provide our customers with a state-of-the-art video conference link which means that they can access their team in Minsk whenever they want.”

Gödel started work on the project in October 2009 and were critical in ensuring the project went live at the start of 2010 as planned. “Their flexible approach enabled us to build a team that exactly met our requirements in a short timescale. It simply would not have been possible to recruit the staff and meet the deadline otherwise”, said Attiq. “What’s more is was cost-effective to do it this way!”

New product design and development

With the project now completed NYN’s relationship with Gödel has evolved as Attiq explained. “Initially, they were brought on board to help with a specific project. But, I was so impressed with their capabilities that I have now retained them to work with us on the design and development of our next generation product.”

Neil Turvin concluded, “We understand that resource requirements change during a project, that is why our flexible approach enabled NYN to tailor the dedicated team to exactly match their initial project requirements and then after this was completed to work with us on new product development.

“By enabling additional resources to be quickly and easily added or removed, it ensures that our dedicated teams deliver the highest possible resource efficiency to our clients. Furthermore, the knowledge and understanding of NYN, their markets and customers that Gödel staff have acquired is not lost for future projects. This provides all the benefits of recruiting staff internally without the usual costs and time delays – the best of both worlds!

“I am looking forward to working with Attiq and NYN in the future.”