Promote International

Jon Serrander, Promote International CEO

What is Promote?

Promote International is a fast growing technology company within the corporate education sector that develops a world leading platform for high performance learning. Promote’s platform is built around research on corporate training programs globally, and is used by training companies and HR departments in over 30 countries.

How does Avidity and Promote cooperate?

Promote has chosen to work with Avidity through so called integrated outsourcing. This means that a team with a mix of competencies from Avidity’s Brazilian office takes part in the everyday development of Promote. Developers from both teams are completely integrated and work together as colleagues, not only on development but also on maintenance of processes, development environments and application hosting.

Why did you choose to work with Avidity?

We knew Avidity’s founder Gunnar Hansson from the technology scene in Stockholm, for instance from Computer Sweden’s annual list of Sweden’s best developers. When Gunnar founded Avidity and started hiring great developers, we began cooperating primarily around defining requirements, development processes and technical architecture for Promote. When Avidity opened their office in Brazil, we chose to integrate some of their developers in our team.

What are the advantages of outsourcing?

For Promote there are several big advantages of using Avidity:

Access to technical skill

Most technology companies in Stockholm struggles with finding good developers. By cooperating with Avidity we gain access to skill we would otherwise have difficulties finding here. The competency of developers in Brazil are equal to that of Sweden, but access is better.

Team size adjustments

Promote is expanding, and we are therefore investing heavily in the development of the platform. At times we need to adjust the pace either to help our customers implement Promote or to better expand into new markets.

Avidity’s ability to help us adjust the number of developers who work in the platform is invaluable, especially when we later have to quickly speed up development again to add new features.

14 hours working day and summer becomes winter

Porto Alegre in southern Brazil is 4-5 hours behind Sweden, depending on the time of the year. This means that the development team’s working days becomes longer with Avidity. By integrating our communication platforms and working with agile processes, both teams are aligned as to what needs to be done so the development doesn’t stop when the developers in Stockholm leave for the day.

Another benefit of working with Avidity is the ability to continue with development during the European holiday season. For Promote and its international customers is important to have ongoing support available throughout the summer months of July and August so our developers can enjoy a well-deserved break knowing that the project is being looked after.

Know-how

It's important for us that our platform is experienced as modern and recognisable. Avidity helps us with that by bringing experience from their other projects and industries into Promote.