Future Insight envisages a great future for the digitalisation of processes and activities within the public domain. Their platform helps people to make the right choices in projects involving the living environment, such as infrastructure, development and the repurposing of sites and buildings. In partnership with Levi9, vision and ambition are becoming a reality. ‘The partnership enables us to think big and also put our ideas into action,’ says CTO and co-founder Rick Klooster.

The company provides three separately developed software solutions designed to optimise collaboration and shape successful projects: Clearly.Projects for construction projects; Clearly.BIM for optimum viewing and interrogation of BIM models; and Clearly.3D-City for accessing 3D-city models (Digital Twins). All three involve software that brings together and makes available data from different sources.

‘This means that the parties involved in construction projects, works on physical infrastructure, or the life-cycle of a building can access the right up-to-date data and tools to enable smart collaboration,’ explains Klooster. ‘We have built our reputation on this. In 2022, Clearly.BIM secured us the Building Smart Award in Estonia, based on the implementation of a BIM-based planning permission process.’

With the assistance of Levi9 Technology Services, these solutions are being further developed and increasingly integrated. ‘Together, we’re building a growing ecosystem of all kinds of services,’ says the CTO. ‘This Open Urban Platform enables us to easily access specific solutions from third parties. Some of these relate to AI. As a result, we no longer need to develop everything ourselves, and other parties can serve part of their market using our platform.’

The Open Urban Platform is part of the Future Insights Clearly.Suite. It represents the combined vision and ambitions of CTO Rick Klooster and CCO Bas Hoorn. ‘It’s a dream that’s becoming a reality,’ says Hoorn, originally an engineer. For his part, Klooster has a lot of experience working with government. Future Insight has now become a genuine knowledge company with highly qualified specialists.

In anticipation of its rapid growth, Future Insight decided to expand its own development team with external knowledge and experience in 2021. Klooster: ‘The key aim is to achieve a stable and rapidly scalable platform. In view of the intended growth, we also aim to organise ourselves and our teams more effectively and professionally. That’s why we made the decision to have a partner develop our technology.’ Following a thorough search, Klooster and Hoorn came into contact with Levi9.

It has been a genuine partnership from the outset. ‘We have a similar culture and way of working,’ explains Albert Klingenberg, account manager at Levi9. ‘Future Insight are completely open with us about their vision and strategy. That’s reciprocated. This openness gives us the opportunity to keep each other on our toes and make real progress. Our people also really love working on the Future Insight platform.’

The founders are convinced that there are genuine global opportunities when it comes to sharing information in urban areas. For example, there are as yet no widely embraced worldwide standards when it comes to smart cities, buildings, areas, and infrastructures. With the help of Levi9, Future Insight is determined to and capable of playing a crucial role in this development. An important motivator in this is the desire to address this global social challenge.

It is also helped by the fact that government authorities across the world are increasingly open to the cloud. CTO Rick Klooster: ‘That will potentially result in an increasingly wider application of international standards in the future. It will then become increasingly easier even for smaller municipalities to engage and collaborate in an integrated way without any form of vendor lock-in.’

Future Insight has the wind in its sails. The company has doubled its staff numbers in the last six months alone. ‘Things are really moving, and we’re working on all kinds of things simultaneously and clearly proving remarkably successful. The people working for us based in Serbia are actually our development department. That’s where our ideas really take shape.’

Source: itexecutive.nl

For the last decade, five°degrees has been supplying leading financial institutions with a tried-and-trusted core banking product. Last year saw the launch of a completely cloud-native version that will enable customers to continue to meet ever-changing market requirements even in the long term. The partnership with Levi9 proved to be instrumental in the development of the new platform. ‘It was exactly the type of synergy we needed,’ confirm CEO Martijn Hohmann and CTO Jeffrey Severijn.

Instead of modernising the existing solution, the decision was made to redesign the new one from scratch. It is now ready for the market. ‘Unlike the old stack, the new ‘banking grade’ SaaS platform – known as °neo – is component-based,’ explains CEO Martijn Hohmann. ‘Over time, the number of building blocks will gradually increase. It will also become easier to link external services and ecosystems together.’

Five°degrees and Levi9 Technology Services have been working together for seven years, but the interaction has entered a new phase in the last four years. ‘At management and shareholder level, we’ve been considering how to get the most value out of our relationship for some time,’ says the CEO.

‘Levi9 is really determined to create value on the business side for customers, partly because that’s also interesting for their own employees.’ – Hohmann

Added value

‘Delivering value for business is the holy grail for developers,’ says CTO Jeffrey Severijn, who also has ultimate responsibility for the °neo platform. ‘Being able to offer employees a challenging working environment is important for Levi9. As far as our traditionally designed °matrix solution was concerned, our relationship was gradually entering the danger zone. Developers were just losing their enthusiasm for it.’

According to the CTO, there was also another factor at play, ‘Outsourcing partners are facing significant increases in salaries in their international branches caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. That eats into the price advantage. Companies like these now need to distinguish themselves in different ways. For example, through specific market or domain knowledge that we can make use of.’

There is added value for five°degrees if a player like Levi9, with six delivery centres in Eastern Europe, has experience with the Azure cloud, for example within a media company. ‘They can then discuss applying those competencies for other customers, which has advantages for everyone: partner, staff, and customers. It even opens up the potential of wider co-creation in the future.’

It was during a frank discussion with Levi9 about all of this that things started to move forward.

‘We had talks with various different players about modernising our existing core banking product, but we achieved very little. However, Levi9 came from a different direction and suggested adopting a totally different approach using the latest methods and techniques. That brought a fundamental change in our partnership – and one that added value for all of us.’ – Hohmann

Start-up strategy

Around 80 people – half of the total capacity – worked on °neo over a three-year period. The completely new platform features lower variable costs, offers much more flexibility and has an important role to play in the company’s global ambitions. Severijn: ‘Together, we approached it as if it was a start-up: from the initial design to a minimum viable product before going on to develop a technical MVP. All of it agile and focussing on the potential for rapid upscaling. Ultimately, it all turned out well.’

The partnership is based around the shared objectives that the two companies aim to achieve as a team. ‘It really is a joint initiative,’ say the CTO and CEO. ‘Our people sometimes struggled with that. It was no longer a case of “we ask, and they do what we say”, as you would approach it with development teams in India or Vietnam, for example. Everything is based on a relationship of equality.’

According to the management at five°degrees, this has brought out the very best in everyone, starting from a blank piece of paper. Severijn: ‘The contribution made by Levi9 was primarily technical: the Azure cloud, event-driven architecture, microservices, and so on. Our main focus was on the functional aspects. We then came up with a lot of great ideas together.’

Speeding up the process

Examples of this include work relating to Logic Apps for integrating apps, data, services, and systems using automated workflows in Azure. ‘During a demo with the key engineers from Microsoft, it turned out that we were further advanced than they were on some points,’ says Hohmann enthusiastically. ‘It was so good in fact that they even adopted some of our ideas.’

As for the partnership, the CEO is keen to stress how productive and enjoyable it is. ‘If people from Levi9 have ideas about how things can be improved, we’re always keen to listen. In return, we gave a presentation about the future of banking to their development team in Serbia.’

Jeffrey Severijn: ‘During the demos, members of the Levi9 team also made regular contributions. That helps create ownership and mutual understanding. Even when there are challenges, if something takes slightly more time, or if the requirements are unclear. The fact that we already knew each other allowed us to speed up the process that little bit. Ultimately, developing a new relationship always takes time – but we understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses.’

‘All in all, it was exactly the synergy we needed to make a success of the °neo project,’ concludes CEO Martijn Hohmann. ‘I’d even go so far to say that it would have been impossible without it.’

Source: itexecutive.nl

Incision has become a worldwide success with its video-based education and training for operation room personnel. Now, alongside its trusted e-learning environment, Incision has launched a new digital assistant, developed in partnership with Levi9. This tool went from idea to market in record time. ‘We started in June 2021, and four months later, it was live,’ says Raimo van der Klein, Chief Product & Technology Officer. “And a year later, we were already running pilots in American hospitals.’

The mobile app is a strategically important expansion of the Amsterdam scale-up’s existing e-learning platform. ‘Now we can offer users direct support before and during the surgery,’ says Van der Klein, who stepped into his role as CP&TO two-and-a-half years ago. ‘This new digital product is crucial for the relationship with the end user.’

Incision Academy has been around for a while, offering e-learning accredited by international medical associations to train medical professionals in operation room-related activities. Now, the new Incision Assist tool gives those professionals direct access in the operation room to all relevant information: instructions, manuals, requirements, and the personal preferences of the performing surgeons – and all this for a wide range of procedures.

Co-creation

Incision Assist was developed in record time in a process of co-creation with Levi9: from concept to worldwide market launch in under one year. ‘The challenge was that there was relatively little we could reuse from our existing e-learning environment. And on top of that, with Assist, we’ll become part of the digital infrastructure of the hospital, so part of a strongly regulated IT environment. That requires enterprise-grade software.’

Incision was founded in 2014 by Dr Theo Wiggers and a group of investors. It is now a cutting-edge collective of driven doctors, software developers, marketers, and professionals working to grow the business from its home base in Amsterdam. ‘We believe in sharing surgery-related knowledge and skills and making them available to everyone,’ says Van der Klein.

The newly developed app will be a boon to students, personnel in training, and temporary staff in particular. ‘With Incision Assist, we can help operation room staff with any process and any procedure, in a uniform way. Its advantages are better preparation, reducing risks, improving team functioning and, ultimately, better medical outcomes. In combination with Incision Academy, this gives us a rock-solid proposition.’

Increasing impact

About the co-development process with Levi9, Van der Klein says, ‘They had also been involved in the development of the existing e-learning platform. From the moment that we decided to increase our impact in the digital domain, we worked out the best approach in a very effective dialogue. The goal was to, in a relatively short amount of time, put out a product that was at least viable, and that we could then scale up to the highest quality requirements fast and efficiently.’

Incision and Levi9 as partners went through a hyper-fast learning phase in a working process in which they used feedback from customers and users to add more and more features to the app. ‘At this point, we’re going forward with the expansion and upscaling of the platform based on modular technology.’

Van der Klein calls the joint development process a transformation within a scale-up. ‘And that in an industry that’s super-complex, that’s struggling to fill jobs right now, that’s heavily regulated, and that has extremely high standards for security. Because of these challenging and above all complex dynamics, we knew we needed a technology partner that could give us the right people, quality, and working methods. Without Levi9, we’d never have been able to do this as well or as fast.’

Source: itexecutive.nl