Unleash the Power of Software Testing with OPTiiM

“Software testing proves the existing of bugs not their absence.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra

The testing services market remains fragmented worldwide. Regional players have emerged with large resource bases but they still service limited geographies. Consolidations will be inevitable in the long run. The situation in the smaller Project Portfolio Management (PPM) market is similar. Regional players compete for the local business. Based out of Istanbul, Turkey, OPTiiM delves deep in to the PPM market by building its own PMO practice based on a practical understanding of what kind of processes can work in various verticals, and what kinds simply cannot.

The company focused initially on the application testing and project portfolio management market. It took a couple of years to convince customers that OPTiiM could deliver with relentless quality. Undergoing an acquisition with a new strategic partner, the company expanded its horizons to new offerings and new markets. However, the OPTiiM team learned that sticking to your core values is more important than anything, so the company ended its partnership with its investor after 2 years. It was this difficult choice that propelled the company into the explosive business growth it enjoys today.

OPTiiM’s Testing Services
“Our first business line is Application Testing. Today we offer a wide range of services such as Manual Sourcing, Test Automation, Performance Testing, Security Testing, Service and Network Virtualization,” said Levent Ozalp, CEO. “OPTiiM has further enhanced its customer delivery with our own OPTiiMize Test Automation Framework which we apply equally well with all leading testing vendor products. Similarly, OPTiiM Perform Assure provides extra safety for your applications by identifying and resolving the performance issues that we find with all leading vendor tools. Beyond testing, we have reached out to the adjacent Application Migration space. We provide vertically specialized teams in billing, core banking, CRM, ERP and more- who take full responsibility to plan and execute application migrations for large telecom and finance customers,” he added.

OPTiiM is also active in the Project Portfolio market. It deploys PMO best practices and automates them with market-leading tools. For the past few years, the company has scored again a number of clients in the telecom, banking and e-government sectors. Interestingly, its PPM practice also gave birth to the product Mortfolio: a roadmap planning automation that addresses the need of fast, nearly continuous planning in strategic departments. Mortfolio now has 8 paying customers in 1 year with many more in the pipeline, including its first US prospects, major $5B+ corporations.

Revenue Model
OPTiiM has a short-term and long-term services revenue streams. Short term services include product implementations, trainings and troubleshooting. Long term service contracts span more than 12 months and include staff augmentation, support and managed services. It sells software licenses of its own Mortfolio. Selected 3rd party vendor solutions are also resold by the company. OPTiiM drives this revenue with its direct sales operations in its local market and through channel partners around the world. While initially focused in EMEA region, OPTiiM now actively seeks to extend its reach North America, and Australia.

Market Positioning

In Services Area: OPTiiM proved a success in its region by seeking out considerable customer problems and offering a new approach to solving them. Its strong, knowledgeable, sizeable team is a big asset. Also, OPTiiM cares greatly about customer satisfaction in any engagement. This sets the bar higher for competitors to enter.

“Our frameworks help us accelerate the delivery and differentiate our offering. Our cloud based testing services are the way forward to further scale our services. In terms of product development, we feel Mortfoilo can be a game changer for us. We are carving a new market segment for ourselves, “strategic planning automation” and we play almost alone there. We believe it can be a global success if play our cards right,” said Levent.

Addressing Industry Pain Points OPTiiM addresses a wide variety of pain points in the industry as listed below:

Test Automation: Most customers have bad experiences in test automation as they did not think how to manage fast application development cycles and update their automation scripts. Hence, most of them lost money on test automation.

Performance Testing: Most customers lack knowledge in this area as the performance problems span across IT silos. You have to have both horizontal analytical skills and in-depth experience to successfully identify and remove bottlenecks. You need to master various tools, and various optimization techniques to be effective. Most customers do not have such expertise in-house.

Project Portfolio Management: There has been always a barrier between IT and business when it comes to project execution; OPTiiM always brings both sides to the table. Most customers believe that PPM is only food for large enterprise IT shops. OPTiiM proved that wrong. Even IT organizations that have a small size of 30-40 people can benefit from PPM.

Mortfolio for Strategic
Planning Automation: Companies do their annual planning on spreadsheets. This is a very time consuming, and error prone exercise, which can be very costly in schedule and budget overruns due to bad planning. OPTiiM takes the guess-work out by enabling executives to generate their compliant plans automatically.

Product & Services Overview

• Mortflio – Strategic Planning Software. Automated.
• OPTiiMize – Test Automation Framework.
• Manual Testing Services
• Test Automation Services
• Datacenter Application Migration and Application Migration Testing
• Performance Testing
• Service and Network Virtulization
• Project Portfolio Management – Design and Implementation
• Source Code Security Testing
• Customer-Facing Portal Development
• IT Service Management

Robust Customer Base
The company has a very strong customer base in the telecom and finance industry but it also has customers from other verticals as well. Some of OPTiiM’s notable customers are Ericsson, Shell, Emirates, Societe Generale, Regus, Vodafone, etc.

Case Studies

• Vodafone Datacenter Migration Project – OPTiiM has been commissioned to migrate over 150 critical applications for the 3rd telecom operator with XYZ subscribers. OPTiiM has delivered vertical application specialists and horizontal process specialists to ensure the success of the entire exercise, spanning over a year.
• Shell – end-to-end application portfolio management: After successfully putting their project portfolio under control, Shell needed to reign in also their application portfolio. OPTiiM assisted Shell in their selected vendor implementation.
• Etisalat UAE: Their first objective was to establish governance over the IT demand and project management process. OPTiiM assisted in the process design and automation tool deployment. The sales and marketing departments saw the value of the IT deployment and expanded the usage of the platform to support the over product lifecycle process tin the organization. Now the company’s PPM serves the entire process across marketing, IT and engineering with over 1500+ users.
• Unicredit Bank, Turkey: OPTiiM has facilitated over 1,000 users with PPM deployment for IT project portfolio management. IT PMO has been awarded to become bank’s enterprise PMO with this success. Unicredit are also the company’s first customer for Strategic Planning Automation product and have been running with it over a year now. They reported three times decrease in schedule variance, and 9% decrease in budget variance as a result of adopting Mortfolio in their strategic planning process.
• Zain Telecom Customer Portal and e-Shop: OPTiiM developed a full telecom customer self-service portal bundled with a fully-fledged e-shop. It is completely integrated with backend systems such as Billing, Active Directory for access control and CRM for product catalogs.
• Cigna Insurance: The company implemented project portfolio management processes and tools within an IT organization of 40 people. With the success of the implementation, customers decided to use PPM for all projects of the company in its 2nd year.

Future Road Map
The company is planning to make Mortfolio, its product for Strategic Planning Automation, a global success. It wants to expand its geographical coverage to the US by establishing local presence and partnering with suitable channels. OPTiiM also would like to offer cloud-based software testing solutions in the near future.

“We implement your PPM tool of choice. We have been at it for 10 years now. Our clients come from various verticals, and we have learnt their business alongside ours – whether it is finance, or telecom, or e-government or industry.”

Meet the Leadership Team

Levent Ozalp is a serial entrepreneur. He created 3 startups in Turkey, from military tech to system integration. Having launched OPTiiM just 3 years ago, it now boasts 90+ employees and customers all over Turkey, Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Daniel Lorer has been running with OPTiiM international since its inception. He had earlier founded and exited B2B start-up FBP France. Daniel had formerly served with HP Software and Mercury Interactive in EMEA.

Hakan Turgut handles OPTiiM enterprise sales in Turkey. His 30 year career span took him to sales executive positions in IBM, CA and Nortel. He brings maturity and wisdom to the team.

“We have chosen to build our methodology from IT. We have come to realize that IT is the fastest adopter of PPM technologies, at least in our EMEA geography. So we make PPM a quick win in IT, and then we take it further to marketing, sales, even PMO departments.”