How IT companies survive a year of crisis — the experience of Quantum
IT ClusterFor more than 6 years, our company has been developing custom software using the capabilities of advanced technologies (AI, machine learning, computer vision, blockchain, etc.). We solve urgent problems of any complexity and content: from specific for each business to global world ones.
Our high-tech solutions help companies worldwide gain essential insights and forecasts through data analysis, significantly reduce costs, and distribute the workload more efficiently through intelligent automation.
First of all, Quantum is a team of highly qualified specialists, true enthusiasts of their work, united by a common thirst for innovation. Therefore, another vector of the company’s activities is the training and mentoring of young professionals (university students) who have the opportunity to join real projects under the careful supervision of more experienced colleagues.
About the war
Helping the team to move through a full-scale invasion
No matter how much we talked about a possible invasion during the last year, we still did not expect such an insidious and brutal attack. Therefore, most of our employees who were in Kharkiv and the region at the time needed urgent assistance with evacuation away from the front line.
During the first days, most of the team left their native Kharkiv and settled in safer regions, including Lviv, where the company was sheltered in the office of a partner company. It is also worth mentioning the story when our colleague left her car to an employee, who managed to take the whole family to the western part of the country. Even then, we were sure that our people could not but win 🙂
Fortunately, all our clients are on the side of Ukraine and understood the need to relocate the team and their families, and it gave us some time to move and settle in a new place. The company also managed to keep all jobs for the specialists who, unfortunately, temporarily found themselves under occupation.
Opening of new offices
Subsequently, we decided to provide the Lviv unit with its own space. We have opened an office where the team can work during the blackout, thanks to a generator and Starlink satellite Internet availability. We are working on the same solution for our colleagues from the capital.
Also, since we had several employees in Poland, we took the vector to expand the team in this direction. We understand that many Ukrainians are now in Poland, so we are happy to hire new specialists and offer internship programs for young professionals.
Charity and contribution to our victory
Before the full-scale invasion, we joined in social projects and charity initiatives. At this stage, we are actively purchasing and delivering humanitarian aid and organizing collections at the request of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We join our colleagues’ and friends’ collections and have a good tradition – the company contributes to each collection with an amount twice as much as the amount donated by our employees. Therefore, we all are motivated to work better to donate more.
Project MineFree
In addition, we are also involved in helping with what we do best – technological support. This spring, we were honored to join the development of a mobile application initiated by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SES) – MineFree.
The application allows you to notify the SES about detecting explosive and suspicious objects on the territory of Ukraine. It provides access to a map with marked areas that could potentially be contaminated with explosive objects. The application also contains materials on the safe handling of suspicious items found on the territory of Ukraine.
Life of Quantum
Internal education
Despite the obstacles, Quantum continues to organize corporate education, including tech lectures, workshops, business English classes, etc. One example of the educational program is DevTalk lectures, where our experts share the latest experience from their research with the team.
Also, we have continued the process of professional development of the team. We create our professional development plan for each company engineer, which includes a cross-section of knowledge and technical certification.
In addition, our engineers regularly share and gain knowledge at international technical summits, hackathons, etc.
Team building activities
In between work and volunteer work, our team, from time to time, conquers the peaks of the Carpathians or meets during small team-building activities after work.
We believe that it is vital for the team to find the opportunity and strength for mental recovery at any time, and we support this. Meetings in the team’s warm circle help us relax, clear our minds after a week of hard work or bad news, and continue to conquer new peaks with new strength.
Our product – GeoAP
We also continue implementing ideas and developing our products. Since many of our projects are based on satellite data analysis and practical insights from this information, we objectively assess how valuable information can be obtained in this way and how it can be interpreted. Therefore, at the moment, we are actively developing our platform for geoanalytics – GeoAnalytics Platform, or GeoAP.
GeoAP allows you to automate the processing of satellite or drone images as much as possible, thereby saving time for specialists. In addition, the platform enables you to upload and process your data, deploy existing or custom ML models, and visualize the insights obtained on the map.
We have made GeoAP as easy to use the platform as possible, so we hope that it will become a valuable tool for environmental organizations, as we are developing models that will help with the identification of environmental problems, such as illegal deforestation, an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, flooding of territories, etc.
Collaboration with Kharkiv IT Cluster
Thanks to Kharkiv IT Cluster, we create collaborations with leading technological universities in Ukraine and provide students with the opportunity to gain new knowledge of Big Data through the company’s courses and pieces of training within the framework of educational programs.
One of the successful examples of collaboration is a completed course on Data Engineering for NTU KhPI students during the war.
Kharkiv IT Cluster is a promising platform for the effective synergy of business, government, and IT education. Together we help the military, citizens, and IT community in this challenging time, develop education and build the future of IT business in Ukraine and the world together with Kharkiv IT Cluster.
