We founded our office in Tallinn in November 2017 when the headcount of the whole Solita was 650. Now in April 2019 we are 12 in Tallinn and over 800 in the whole company, so growth has been the main keyword when it comes to IT and Big Data systems development.
Since from the beginning we have been in the Metro Plaza office building in the center of Tallinn. This has proved to be a good choice. The port is close, so our colleagues from Finland can visit us easily and it is easy to reach our office by public transport or bike, so we can avoid sitting in traffic jams in our cars.
From the beginning of 2019 we rented additional space in our office and now we have a suitable kitchen/room for holding morning seminars. These we have done a lot. Every month we host a few of these events, where Solita’s experts from Finland, Estonia and Sweden tell about different technologies and projects.
For example here is our Chief Security Officer Antti Virtanen telling about secure programming…and as usual, the first row is empty.
Besides organizing our own seminars, we have taken part in bigger conferences and seminars. The latest one was North Star AI where we were present with our own booth and our Data Scientist Mikael Ahonen presented the machine-learning project for Business Finland.
Multi-site, multi-language
Besides growth, the biggest changes for Solita during this time have been the adoption of multi-site working methods and the gradual shift to becoming an international company. Working with Nordic companies in different parts of Sweden, Finland and other countries from Tallinn have become a standard way of things for us. Similarly, interviewing candidates from all around the world, in English, over video is now a usual part of our recruitment process.
Framery meeting rooms (in the picture) and “phone booths” and Cisco video devices are important tools for supporting our multi-site teamwork.
Technology and skills
We have now three teams in Tallinn: Data Engineers, .NET developers and Cloud Engineers. Our main technical focus is building systems on public clouds (MS Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud). We focus on these technologies because we see that the organizations are gradually moving to them. Maybe Finnish organizations are a bit ahead in this, but the Estonian and Swedish ones are following fast. There is no question that the public cloud systems will be soon used by most organizations in The Nordics and Baltics. They are just so much better.
Another important angle of our work is data platforms, big data, machine learning, integrations and data pipes. Becoming data driven is another thing that most large organizations are now focusing on and there is a lot to gain in doing so.
The plans ahead
As we see the need for cloud based IT and data systems rapidly growing in the European organizations then we plan to grow accordingly. We will continue hiring good experts in Tallinn and in our 8 other offices. We learn, teach and spread the word of data, design, IT and cloud systems. Because we believe that technology makes lives better for us humans. If you want to join Solita please see our open positions www.solita.fi/en/careers
