Sympa

“The genuine partnership we’ve built with Mallow helps us on our path towards growth”, says Arttu Heikkilä, Sympa’s VP of Engineering.

Arttu Heikkilä is experienced in directing programme development, and is accustomed to creating solutions with the professionals in his own product development team. As an accomplished director in a product development organization, Heikkilä is also experienced in obtaining consultation from dozens of both foreign and domestic providers. Just over a year ago, in charge of developing Sympa – an HR system undergoing rapid growth and internationalization – Heikkilä  was facing a difficult problem.

“We were in the midst of extensively modernizing the Azure environment, and we needed in-depth expertise. Our own team was tied up in other projects and we needed an experienced Azure architect to help us”, says Heikkilä.

Mallow was able to help Sympa with problems they had encountered in their programme development. Heikkilä had been about to sign a contract with another Azure consultant, who had had to withdraw, but had advised him that Jani Nevalainen, Mallow’s Azure architect, may be the man for the job.

”We discussed our needs with him and I asked him to examine the situation himself and start thinking about tailored solutions for us. I’ve not often assigned tasks of this size to anyone, but here, our collaboration worked.”

Result – a genuine partnership

Nevalainen says that when he began the assignment, never at any point did he see that it as a hit-and-run style task.

“It’s no wonder that Sympa is growing so fast on several European markets. I’ve never before seen such a dynamic and comprehensibly customizable HR system. In programming, dynamic means complex. It means that things aren’t resolved by individual magic tricks, but that every aspect of the architecture is modernized”, says Nevalainen

Mallow began the project from a DevOps perspective, but as the tasks went through the Azure environment, they soon became about creating and implementing a new architecture. Thus, the Mallow team has now moved on from the infra creation of its early days to product development, and both Sympa’s performance and its Azure costs are considerably more reasonable.

”It’s been great to be involved in a project in which the customer has so resolutely renewed and modernized their own product development process and their product”, says Nevalainen.

Heikkilä looks back on the beginnings of the partnership:

“Jani joined our team and was able to show us solutions that worked for us. With his suggestions, our collaboration got off to a productive start.”

We’re more than a year down the line and we’re still working together. Sympa now uses modern Azure blocks and Azure enables the efficiency and actions that Sympa needs to run its operations. Heikkilä says he’s also been pleasantly surprised that through its network of contacts and experience, Mallow has opened doors to Microsoft. Through a reinforced partnership, Sympa now receives more help than before from Microsoft. Indeed, Heikkilä describes the collaboration with Mallow as a genuine partnership.

“Sympa and Mallow have formed a genuine partnership, and we’re now on a joint journey. We’ve been able to agree on things and our own team’s skills are constantly developing. Our confidence in our collaboration is strong, and we feel that Mallow genuinely thinks about things from our perspective. This is quite rare in consultancy organizations.”