An Interview with Alex Moskvin, Plexteq OÜ Founder and CEO: ‘We Stand Behind Our Products and Services, and Provide Consistent Service’

“We are always learning, improving and striving for the bleeding edge of technology while taking on technical challenges that others don’t even dare to try.”

Technology is evolving faster than ever before. Business owners must be willing to adapt to changes in tech if they want to stay competitive. To do that, though, you must first keep yourself abreast of the latest trends.

In light of the above-mentioned scenario, we are thrilled to present Plexteq OÜ.

Plexteq is digital consulting and software engineering company. It focuses on professional consulting and end-to-end software engineering services primarily in the SaaS domain. The company was incorporated in 2014 and is headquartered in Estonia with R&D office in Ukraine.

Alex Moskvin, Plexteq OÜ Founder/CEO, 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?

Plexteq emerged following the success of several open-source projects developed in my spare time. I was always trying to master my software development skills in various areas, and developed a real-time network packet analyzer tool for Linux, which I published on GitHub. Later, a few companies asked me to modify the code to fit their specific needs, and some of those companies also required consultancy in software development and architecture domains. We started working together and created a set of products to help our customers succeed. The team started to grow, more prospects and exciting projects came in and the momentum continues to rise.

At the moment, Plexteq offers high-quality services in software engineering, software architecture, DevOps, quality assurance and data engineering to build and deliver next-generation products and digital experiences.

How successful was your first project roll on? Share the experience.

The first project involved adjusting our open-source product for a large US company specializing in network security. They needed a tool to identify specific network traffic by fingerprint and in real time. We worked together with their engineering leaders, carefully planned everything, and agreed to follow CMMI Level-3 to ensure the product was developed in an expected, defined, and predictable way. That project was a success in terms of timelines, budget, and customer expectations, giving us a solid foundation for long-term business relationships based on mutual trust. The key factors that made our first project successful were the relevant technical skills we possessed, our efficient communication strategy, the use of Agile practices and the CMMI development model we adopted.

What challenges did you face in your initial years?

There are always challenges when developing or scaling a business. At Plexteq, we see challenges as opportunities that can help us learn, benefit, and become stronger. I would say that one of the most significant challenges we faced was building and adjusting our processes in a way that would allow us to scale the company without sacrificing the quality of deliverables. To tackle this, we made a sensible bet on proactive, educated, highly skilled and self-driven engineers and teams. Eventually, that bet paid off, because our teams are distinguished within the industry for being autonomous, business driven, and capable of scaling quickly to benefit our clients.

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

We interpret this saying to mean that corporations, in addition to pursuing profit through fair competition, should benefit society at large. In general this means demonstrating social responsibility: creating value and making the world a better place. At Plexteq we achieve that through our principles of customer satisfaction, by fostering diverse values and teamwork, by creating a safe, healthy, and fair work environment that respects human rights, and by prospering with the community. One of the ways we prosper with the community is by encouraging our engineers to actively contribute to open-source projects, thus allowing the world at large to benefit from our technical expertise.

Is your company a ‘leader or a follower’?

Simply put, followers do their jobs and nothing more. No matter how good they may be at those jobs, it rarely occurs to them to go beyond their basic functions. Leaders, however, are driven to add value, and they do so whatsoever opportunity arises. Plexteq is absolutely a leader, always exceeding expectations – for every customer we serve and with every product we work on.

Here’s an interesting example: A few years ago, one of our customers started getting a massive denial-of-service attacks that were literally ruining their business operations. We offered to help, and our SysOps/DevOps teams re-built their infrastructure and improved their software in just a few weeks, making further attacks ineffective and thus pointless. We stepped in immediately, identified the critical issue, and solved the problem, thus saving our customer’s business. That’s what leadership means to us.

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

The most important asset at our company isn’t something you can put your hands on. It isn’t equipment or data, technology or intellectual property. The most valuable part of Plexteq is the people – the human capital and, in particular, our passion and willingness to change the world through technology. Other important factors that are assets, however, would be our knowledge-centric corporate culture, the technical communities we work with, competition in the marketplace and globalization in the IT domain.

What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

There are multiple components that have established our company’s reputation:

• Ethics: We treat our people well and have talented and educated employees. Our engineers all possess bachelors, masters or Ph.D. degrees.
• Leadership: We are leaders rather than followers, and we are innovative.
• Customer focus: We care about and are strongly committed to our customers.
• Quality: We offer high-quality products and services.
• Reliability: We stand behind our products and services, always offering consistent service.

Are there any factors that have played key roles in shaping your organization’s roadmap?

Innovation, curiosity and competition have determined our roadmap. These characteristics are in our DNA. We are always learning, improving, and striving for the bleeding edge of technology while taking on technical challenges that others don’t even dare to try. We share knowledge and expertise and we invest in our colleagues’ hard and soft skills to make sure they have whatever they need to be the top performers in the market. This allows us to meet our goals of supporting sustainable company growth as an innovative solutions provider with our own SaaS products and a set of open-source initiatives.

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

I definitely see us continuing to be a successful, professional consulting and end-to-end software engineering service company with our new offerings in IoT, Big Data and machine learning domains.

Alex Moskvin: A Brief Background

Alex Moskvin, Ph.D. in Information Technology, has 16 years of experience in software development. Mr. Moskvin has worked as an assistant professor in one of the leading technical universities in Ukraine. He is highly experienced with architecting, building and maintaining high-volume, low-latency distributed data processing applications.

Mr. Moskvin has co-authored more than 20 scientific publications.

“We offer high-quality services in software engineering, software architecture, DevOps, quality assurance and data engineering – to build and deliver next-generation products and digital experiences.”