The challenge
In late 2006 a Swiss IT consultancy — part of a larger German group — approached us with a problem. Their end client, a Fortune 500 energy-services company with operations in more than forty countries, needed an enterprise resource management system. Materials, procurement, suppliers, project resources — all of it had to be visible, auditable, and accessible across the globe. The consultancy had the domain expertise; what they needed was a dedicated engineering team they could rely on for the long term.
How we worked together
We assembled a core team of ten engineers on .NET and SQL Server. The working rhythm was daily — email, video, and instant messaging across the time difference — combined with Agile delivery so that shifting priorities never waited for a quarterly planning cycle.
The first year was about trust. The consultancy's engineers flew to our offices; ours flew to theirs. Engagements that start as "you build what we specify" rarely stay that way if they work — and by year two, our team was not just implementing requirements but helping to shape the solution architecture alongside the client.
The core team composition did not meaningfully change over the years. Russell Yu and Paul Wang — the senior engineers who carried the team from day one — stayed on the account throughout. That kind of continuity is rare in outsourced engineering, and it was the single thing the client valued most.
Outcome
The system grew to serve more than 4,000 people across the client's global operations. Our team received repeated performance bonuses and the kind of reference that is hard to manufacture: the Swiss consultancy eventually disbanded its own internal development organization and handed all engineering work to us. After a decade of collaboration, the relationship was less vendor and client and more colleagues who happened to work at different companies.
The engagement concluded in 2016 when the client was acquired and the business reorganized. The system we built together remained in service.
Our team members and the client's people rotated through each other's offices. They were good partners — and, genuinely, friends.
The most expensive mistake in software services is the one the client cannot see: turnover. Keeping the same ten people on a mission-critical system for a decade was not a cost-saving strategy. It was the entire strategy — and it was what eventually convinced the client to retire their own R&D and trust us with everything.