Our Clients Come To Us Because We Know Their Market: Softjourn, Inc

“Clients engage experts in the industry to help give them a leg-up on the competition and that is why our clients engage with us: Emmy Gengler, CEO Softjourn”

Softjourn, Inc. is a global technology services provider headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Established in 2001, the company has operations centers in Ukraine since 2005 and Poland since 2015. Softjourn provides technology solutions for the Cards & Payment industry, Media and Ticketing industries. 

Initially, the company worked with a network of software development partners from different parts of Ukraine. Each partner company had a different area of expertise and concentration, either technical or business applications, such as healthcare or financial services. 

By 2005, Jeff Kreuser and Emmy Gengler, the current CEO, decided it was time to collaborate more permanently with two new partners, Serhiy Fitsak and Bohdan Mykhailovych, both of whom were working with a Ukrainian software house providing banking solutions. That year, Softjourn opened its own office in Ivano-Frankivsk, where Fitsak and Mykhailovych were located. 

By 2013, Softjourn had 50 in-house programmers and a total staff of 77. As of the end of 2016, the company has grown to over 150 employees. Its main technology solution team is located at its Ivano-Frankivsk office. In 2015, Softjourn opened a branch office in Wroclaw, Poland. Over the years, Softjourn developed particular expertise in a number of areas, including ticketing and payment systems.

Interview Excerpts: Emmy Gengler  

How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?

Softjourn concentrates on very specific verticals such as cards & payments including prepaid cards, media solutions for video on demand, live video, live events and ticketing services. All of these verticals share similarities in that they are concerned with either high transaction volume systems or deal with a high number of concurrent users. Initially we focused on the financial services area as this was an area where I had significant experience as well as two managing partners in Ukraine also had heavy experience developing banking solutions. We then moved on to include ticketing services systems and later media solutions. 

What were the grounds on which you have expanded your company and its offerings over the years? And what are reasons behind your services’ popularity?

It’s not a matter of just knowing the industry, it is a matter of keeping up on how the industry is evolving, and how technology is changing and participating in the offerings of those industries. It’s not enough to know just one side or the other; either the business domain or the technology, it’s mandatory to know both. Clients engage experts in the industry to help give them a leg-up on the competition and that is why our clients engage with us. They come to us because we know their market, we know the trends in the market, and we look realistically at where and how technology can be applied to assist our clients in providing extra value to their clients, to help them build market share.

Not to be taken lightly is the emphasis on knowing where and when tech will make the most impact for our clients. For example, Blockchain and distributed ledger, certainly a popular topic, our clients are wondering how they can make the most of this technology, should they be exploring it, what use cases make sense for them. When we started to receive inquiries on blockchain from our clients, we determined that we needed real world experience with the technology, something beyond just creating a POC (Proof of Concept). To that end, we started to develop and have continued to develop, a blockchain ecosystem which aims to increase employee engagement and increase corporate social responsibility. We exhibited the ecosystem earlier this year at FinDEVr in New York. 

Developing this ecosystem has been critical in enabling Softjourn to be able to advise its clients on which use cases may be appropriate for them to test out blockchain, and which blockchain platform may make the most sense to use based on what scenario. 

What are the biggest assets to your organization? What would they be and why?

People are number one. I know everyone says that, but in a services firm, that is even more true. We strive to provide an environment where learning is prized, and not just the action of learning but the measured application of new methods, new technologies, etc. We also want people to share their knowledge. By sharing they undergo a deeper level of learning themselves. We have set up our Softjourn Leadership School via which we bring in third party consultants and guest lecturers, but we also encourage our own people to study new topics, apply new techniques or technologies and then share what they have learned. Maybe they developed a POC using a new technology, they can share their original idea, what they were hoping to achieve, and what they actually achieved. 

We have also engaged heavily in Design Thinking and studying its application to Softjourn’s services so that Design Thinking can be applied by anyone at any position. Even a Jr. developer can identify issues, apply empathy to further understand the problems, ideate with one or two others, test solutions and refine. They do not have to wait to apply this methodology only when they are put on a formal design thinking team or for large projects only. It becomes a way of working, a way of improving, no matter what they are doing. 

Another significant factor is the knowledge, the deep-rooted belief, and the actual experience that we can collaborate and add value for our clients no matter where they are located and no matter where we are located. And we can start adding that value before we may even meet in person. 

Additionally, a compelling factor is Softjourn’s focus on living the R&D way of life. For Softjourn, R&D is not a separate department where only certain Softjourners are developing POC’s, and where ideas are only being generated from one funnel. We have a continuous funnel of ideas that are being turned in to POC’s for existing clients, for base products that can be customized to fit our client base, new uses cases for technology like distributed ledger, voice services AI and more. Everyone is encouraged to make suggestions, and participate in seeing the results.

About the CEO Emmy Gengler 

Emmy B. Gengler has more than thirty years of IT solution development experience starting out as a developer after graduating with an Information Systems degree. She has more than twenty years of experience with virtual software development team management starting with Russia in the mid-90s. She has published papers and articles on Blockchain and its use cases, virtual dev teams and their management, and on Ukraine and the development of its Software Exports market. Ms. Gengler was a three-term board member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine; including two years as Treasurer. She holds a Bachelors degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA in International Business from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She currently sits on the board of a non-profit organization in Northern California and is an avid platelet donor at the American Red Cross (ARC).