An interview with Nikolay Kurayev, CEO of ScienceSoft: Moving beyond the technical side of IT service delivery is at the core of our approach. We take responsibility for digital transformation and business process optimization, plan continuous quality improvement and TCO decrease.

ScienceSoft is a US-headquartered provider of IT services and custom software solutions with offices in the USA, EU and Eastern Europe.

In April 2019, the company stepped over its 30-year threshold. During this time, The company has managed to change their business course entirely and has scaled tenfold. eBay, PerkinElmer, Ford, Leo Burnet, IBM, Walmart, Nestle, eBay, NASA JPL, along with other influencers, rely on ScienceSoft’s solutions in their daily operations.

Nikolay Kurayev, CEO of ScienceSoft, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company

set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

Back in 1989, ScienceSoft was launched as a company to create a software product that would simulate the way a person thinks and innovates drawing on the theory of inventive problem solving (TIPS). Continuing the work in this direction, we started the project on the development of inventive software powered by semantic search.

However, soon, we understood that being 100% focused on product development was a somewhat risky endeavour. Expansion in sales was impossible since the product wasn’t for mass consumption, it targeted a limited group of top engineers only. Thus, in the late 90es, we started to shift the focus to IT services.

ScienceSoft quickly got a foothold in the market of custom software development. Gradually, the company’s offering embraced big data and data science, IoT, information security, enterprise application services and managed IT services. Besides technical skills, we constantly perfect our domain-specific knowledge in such areas as manufacturing, healthcare, retail, logistics & transportation, telecoms, and more.

What challenges did you face in your initial years?

Introducing innovative software into the enterprise environment appeared to be at least twice harder than it seemed first. To implement such software, companies need to change their business processes, and this is not something large enterprises would easily do. This is what is now known as “digital transformation”, and it was not a widespread concept back in the 90es.

What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

Earlier, our customers were mostly technical people closely familiar with available technologies and tools. Now, decision-makers are business people with no or extremely limited experience in the technical field.

To bridge the gap between business and technology, we now have a strong BA team, one of the largest departments in the company. They help to translate the needs of non-technical customers into detailed software requirements and ensure effective communication between business people and development teams.

A company’s behavior is as important as its economic performance or the quality of its products. How do you interpret this saying?

Cooperation that is governed by contracts and SLAs is not free from potential ambiguity and controversy in the interpretation of certain terms and conditions. In such cases, the value we can deliver to our customers is our top priority.

Is your company a leader or follower?

ScienceSoft is a combination of both. In what concerns best practices, we follow the market trends. At the same time, we constantly update the technologies and processes, and, as true leaders, we provide our customers with cutting-edge IT-driven innovations.

Is it true that striving for both ethics and success in a business is a tough feat?

Sacrificing ethics for success is always a short-term strategy. Long-term success builds on healthy business ethics.

If you have to list five factors that have been/are the biggest asset to your organization, what would they be and why?

I’d rather confine myself to the following three:

• customers’ trust;
• top managers and all departments promoting the company’s growth;
• experience in end-to-end software development.

Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

I hope ScienceSoft will be perceived as a quality mark that guarantees a high standard of digital everything services.

https://www.scnsoft.com/services/software-development-outsourcing

Nikolay Kurayev: An Inspiring Leader

Nikolay Kurayev  has been leading ScienceSoft since 1999. He has scaled the company tenfold and started many new directions at ScineceSoft, including big data, data science, IoT, information security, enterprise application services and managed IT services. Nikolay holds a Master’s degree in Physics and has 12 research publications on computer modelling.

“The commitment our team lives by is to deliver safe, stable and productive IT solutions to solve our customers’ business challenges.”