Sucess Story
IT Specialist Rental
Simple business solution makes RINF join the galloping IT market
Gartner Group is an American consulting firm whose opinions are not subject to discussion. When its Vice President, Adrian Quayle, announced at this year's IT fair in Frankfurt that the whole sector will be looking for IT specialists in Poland, Aleksander Lewicki and Tomasz Podoba could only congratulate themselves. Lewicki and Podoba are the owners of RINF. Two years ago they left fuel giant BP and began to lease IT specialists. RINF employs the specialists permanently and leases them to corporations to perform specific tasks. The company has already signed several contracts ranging from PLN 50 thousand to a few million.
It all began in Frankfurt, 2003. That June Lewicki and Podoba sold their Ford Focus and for the money they received, they went to Cebit with 10 IT specialists they had recruited through want ads. They returned from the trip with a stack of 50 business cards, representing some of the biggest IT companies. A key contact was from Siemens, who told RINF that their Software Development Center in Wrocław was looking for IT specialists. They would be assigned to the 3rd generation cellular phone project scheduled to be launched to the market in two years.
After a few weeks of making phone calls I finally managed to make an appointment with a person responsible for the project - says Lewicki. Olaf Dicker, from the mobile telephone department at Siemens sought over 100 specialists. He gladly agreed to the RINF's offer of leasing their ten specialists to him. He had nothing to lose. The project was so technologically advanced that the IT specialists had to get additional training at Siemens before they could begin. The partners followed the professional approach: they hired headhunters and screened 200 candidates. It paid off - the references from Siemens helped establish further contracts with e.g. Comarch and IBM.
Today the company is based in Wrocław and employs 200 IT specialists. Each has a fixed salary from PLN 3 to 60 thousand. The customers pay RINF for the actual hours of work. They pay the market rates. - This is the best way as in this business it is difficult to determine the costs of the project. Its completion may take even a few months - explains Andrzej Klesyk, Head of Polish branch of Boston Consulting Group.
RINF is ready for large projects such as servicing telecommunications firms, shipping companies or financial institutions. The owners of the company are not interested in simple service of servers or assistance for workers whose computer crashed (help desk). They prefer the more complicated projects, and the challenge of finding the right people to do the job. The more complicated contract, the higher risk of not finding the right people. Usually leasing IT specialists from RINF lasts from a few months to two years. It can happen - like at Siemens - that they stay for good. - That is why in order to survive we have to have specialists with all possible programming languages - explains Podoba. By the end of the summer RINF will have opened 15 regional offices to track and catch the best IT specialists in the market.
Quayle was right - there will be enough work for them. One of the leading American IT companies has already placed an order with RINF for the development of telecommunications software (they may not mention its name before the completion of the order). Another contract is being negotiated with a Danish telecommunications firm. It is also possible that people from RINF will work for Motorola Software Center in Cracow. Within a few months 700 employees will be recruited there making Cracow the second biggest software development division, after Bangalore in India. Who would have thought that Poland could become an IT Eldorado on such a scale? Well, Lewicki and Podoba did and today they are reaping the harvest.