Interview with Ivor Baksa - CEO at Triple Innovations

 

 

Software development technologies and frameworks have been competing with each other for decades. Their constant progress is the reason behind innovative projects, genuine solutions, and eventually optimized processes. 

As the founder of Croatia’s leading company in software development, I feel you can share insightful information about how things really stand in the tech industry both locally and globally. Moreover, I am sure that Triple Innovations has progressed enough to showcase some of its world-class projects and lead the way in the software development stage and not only.

But, let’s start with your story and background! 

Please tell us about yourself. Your childhood, education, up to professional development and how did you come to the current stage?

As a child I wanted to be a priest, as a teenager a pharmacist, and when I started computer science university a writer which I did as amateur for some time in my life. Finally, I figured out I can have all three if I become CEO of a software development company! Now, I influence and carry my vision to Triple Innovations team, preaching about wonders of software and our goals and culture like any good priest, I have chance to cook together with team software that heals over complicated processes and people aches behind them lowering their stress hormones, and I get to write every day (articles, e-mails, solution designs, spread-sheets, code, documents etc.). Dreams do come true … 😉

To accomplish that I studied software engineering, started working as software developer in a small company, then in a big one, became senior, then a software architect and a team leader, finished leadership program, opened my own company, more coding, less life, had to employ bunch of people, manage them, manage projects, learn something about sales, marketing, laws, accounting, finances, negotiation, leadership ... Along the way I acted in a local amateur theater, won few awards, directed a play and this is a thing that improved my public appearances I end up doing occasionally, and especially my management skills (if you think managing software project or company is hard, try to write and direct meaningful play with seventeen amateur actors).

Currently I’m student of MBA Executive program (I’m halfway through), I smile and love with my two kids and my wife, work hard, play hard, taking care of my team, strong lifting in the morning at the gym, writing articles in the evening ..

Triple Innovations is an interesting choice for a company name! What’s the story behind it? 

From a three-legged stool. What does a three-legged stool have to do with software development you may wonder? To be completely honest I stole the idea from my father; he wanted to open a company and name it “Tri B” (tri is Croatian word for three) and has told me about the three-legged stool. Three-legged stool is a wonder of design, you can sit stably on it on any uneven surface. Each of the three B letters in “Tri B” had some meaning behind it, one was a second name Bakša, the others I cannot recall. I just said: “Dad, sorry, but this is silly, legs are not in the shape of a letter B.” Wait a minute … Letter I, that would be the thing. He never opened a company “Tri B”, lucky me, so we didn’t have any family quarrels about branding. Stability part triggered me most as core value in tree-legged stool.

When I was starting business and had to choose a company name, I only needed to fill three letters I. Then it came to me … As world is not perfect like an uneven floor, and goal of any software is to describe and automate parts of our world, I had vision of three points of stability where Innovation (of automating and advancing the real word), Integration (with surrounding world and systems) and Information (as final value that software provides us) are three legs that make software solution stable in a sense of what we try to achieve with it. Company started as Triple I (Innovations, Integrations, and Information), then after while we only kept Innovations, because I got too many questions why I named company Triple I, and what does it mean? It seems I did not quite accomplish avoiding that question, so I still occasionally bother people with this long bedtime story … 😉 

Together with your team, you’re providing quite a lot of services. From Web Development to .NET and up to Cloud solutions. Did you plan from the very beginning to provide this range of services, or some of them appeared on the way?

The only plan ever, to be honest was evolution. Advancement in our knowhow, toolset, work-life balance, stability, bringing more value with directed effort. Range of services we provide came along the way from evolutionary approach, and we plan to evolve it further in the future. For example, we are dealing mostly with complex business problems (like BSS systems), delivering solutions for our clients and we were in a search for the best technical solution which could bring most value from declarative part (not coding the parts of software that have been coded for thousand times in the past) but still can sort out most complex (non-configurable) problems using our software engineering skills. That is why we invested learning the Salesforce platform. With Salesforce we solve standard part of project with configuration and most complex part with coding which allows us to bring real value fast. For most complex solutions, which need custom made approach, like SaaS applications we use Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure, .NET, and web development toolset where we provide turnkey services. In short, our clients provide requirements for their dream home (software) and we deliver them exactly what they dreamed with key in their hands. How we do it? With constant evolution of our core IT knowhow and learning different platforms and technologies.

Croatia is already an important hub for IT companies in Europe. Is there an association, technological hub, or community that helps the development of the IT industry? Or, is it just an organic and competitive environment that makes Croatia what it is today?

It is very organic and most of the community is built by company owners and tech enthusiasts, who are organized in multiple associations, startup hubs, they organize multiple hackathons, conferences, meetups … Croatia is a 3.5 million people in size, and we have two unicorns (Rimac, Infobip), multiple companies with renowned software products that are used in the whole world and many service providing companies. Croatian largest and most renowned public university is electrotechnics and applied computer science university, our largest private university is tech university, our biggest LinkedIn influencer is a tech guy and community, and companies did it on their own. There are 5.069 IT companies in Croatia, only in 2021 513 new companies were founded with 3.000 new employees in the sector and during that year exporting of goods and services has rose 35% with the average pay increase of 30%! We are small county and community to be competitive, world is our stage, and we really help each other a lot along the way to success, not treating each other’s as competition but as leverage. Triple Innovations is pretty active in community, both online and on live events.

Triple Innovations delivers projects since 2013. What market/region are you focusing on, and do you plan to expand to other markets?

Yes, around 350 projects done so far. When we talk about expansion, we are aiming at western big Enterprise companies for which we can bring a real added value, and markets usually emerge from activities of these global players. It is surprising how many markets these companies cover. Mostly we work with companies from DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and US/Canada. We would like to extend more in DACH area, western Europe, and increase our future efforts in US and Canada. 

What challenges does Triple Innovations face right now (if any), and what opportunities does it have, in terms of business development? 

Our biggest challenge right now is placement of our products in international markets to enterprise companies, especially our SaaS CPQ (Configure Price Quote) Product Offer Calculator solution. We have developed B2B CPQ solution targeting primarily Telco industry, but it can also be used in other verticals. Challenge is to keep level of services in parallel with product development and not to grow too much in size as we really like the culture and dynamics that we currently have as well as agile approach we can bring to our partners as medium size company. 

From a sales process perspective we had challenges to set sales process up so marketing and sales work closely with the same goals as they are doing now. Now we have a great small team that are organized in a manner of business developer (for opening sales and collecting leads) – business development manager (closing the deal part), they execute the outbound part (direct sales) and for the inbound part we have marketing specialist. 

We are targeting many re-seller partners and end clients with Offer Calculator CPQ product, have multiple discovery meetings and we have multiple opened opportunities for both Azure and Salesforce services. 

Staying on the business development topic, if Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, or Gates would choose to invest in Triple Innovations, would it help? Who would you choose? Why?

These guys could help definitely! I would choose Bill Gates for investment or better to say Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as I think guys from Microsoft envision software engineering best of these four and could understand our mission and products. We also build products upon Microsoft Cloud infrastructure so they could help a lot with that. I would choose Elon for the all-night beers!

If you had the opportunity to go back in time, what advice would you give to Ivor Bakša from 2012?

Employ and grow better software engineers than you are earlier; this would allow you to spend more time with your loved ones, invest more time in non-IT knowhow (accounting, finances, economics, HR); this would help you to define and achieve goals easier.

Thanks for this insightful interview, Ivor. Like always, it has been a pleasure to have you share parts of your professional life and thoughts about business development! I'm sure that our readers would find this article as informative. Wish you all from Triple Innovations good luck with your projects and a fruitful upcoming 2023.