With more than 50 years combined experience as consultants working with clients throughout the world to orchestrate software solutions, Branden Dekenah and Tim de Boer realised that something was missing. In the race to capitalise on the hype and sales surrounding a new breed of SaaS solutions, consultancies were increasingly reverting to “solutions-based” strategies rather than starting from the perspective of understanding a client’s problems, and crafting a solution from there.

So, it was a natural extension for them to create a consulting organisation that worked in the way that they would like if they were the client. In early 2019, Interfuze Consulting was created to fill that niche. Today Interfuze has enjoyed steady growth and is continuing to grow organically with Branden as Managing Director and Tim as Director.

With his long experience as a solutions architect, development manager and technical consultant, Tim has had exposure to many software development methodologies and techniques. In around 2007, as development manager with a Perth geoscience company developing advanced interpretation software, he had his first experience of blending an in-house development team with remote team members from an offshore provider and was immediately impressed with the results. “It was certainly not easy at first” Tim says, “but the results came, and it turned into a long-term arrangement”.

Later, with Empired, Tim implemented a similar solution and was introduced to Mitrais by a colleague as a source of the quality remote developers for his team that he was looking for. Visiting the Bali headquarters, he was impressed with the speed with which he could interview and assess candidates, the resulting quality of the team and how well they integrated into his local team.

So, when he came to develop strategies for his Interfuze Consulting clients, it was no surprise who he approached for the blended Agile team he required. His client set Interfuze quite an aggressive challenge, he says – “to accelerate the delivery of their cloud product’s internationalization from six months to six weeks!”. And it worked! “Key to hitting that target was a swift ramp up of the productivity of our Mitrais nearshore delivery partners” he says.

Tim has written a great series of blog posts on his “secret sauce” in leveraging maximum performance from his blended Agile team, and it boils down to fully utilising today’s best practices and tools including DevOps, Cloud tools, and collaboration methods. And while every project potentially has its own set of challenges and obstacles, Tim finds that his “secret sauce” is a great starting point.

At its heart, a great deal of it is common sense. “It’s no secret that open and reliable communications is key to offshoring, and it’s surprising how small the barriers need to be to tear that all down” says Tim. “I can honestly say that after a few minor hiccups, not I, or anyone I know on both teams, was ever left wanting for comms. And the number of independent connections being made between onshore and nearshore team members was very encouraging”.

It’s always great to hear from clients who have managed to create success in their projects, and even better when it’s built on leveraging the services Mitrais provides. As Tim says, “For as long as Mitrais continues to be able to provide the quality developers that I am looking for in such a timely manner, we are expecting the long-term relationship to continue”. At Mitrais, we certainly look forward to continuing to work successfully with Tim, Branden and Interfuze in the long term.