Sofka Technologies: We make IT Simple, Together
While working together for large multinational companies that deliver software services to clients across the world, a group of forward-looking software professionals had the vision to build a firm that catered to the needs of the growing regional IT market in Latin America. “One of the biggest challenges we saw our former firm struggle with was to understand the requirements of its regional customers and offer them with better products and services that created superior business value. We wanted to build a venture that primarily addressed the issues these businesses faced instead of trying to force them to utilize services that were conceptualized for different markets,” mentions Otoniel Usuga, co-founder and COO of Sofka Technologies. This led to the inception of Sofka Technologies, a Medellin, Colombia-based IT services and software development enterprise in 2013. Today, Sofka is a leading expert in software development and quality assurance whose solutions and services ensure greater business efficiency for its clients. Sofka’s offerings enable faster project delivery, with better quality, less complexity, and optimized budget.
The name Sofka is a portmanteau of the word software and Kaizen—a Japanese productivity philosophy that stands for continuous improvement. Accordingly, the firm’s philosophy and core values are centered on bettering and finding new ways to develop software and provide clients with the best possible services via a talented team. “We do not want to differentiate ourselves in the market by price rather by the quality of the software and services we offer and our talented team,” says Esteban Alonso, CEO, Sofka Technologies. To that end, Sofka invests heavily in recruiting individuals who have the required skills and align with the firm’s values, and retains them by providing benefits, career plans, and training.
Maximize Technology Investments, Obtain the Best Value
The team at Sofka is passionate about co-creating software solutions that allow clients to achieve their strategic objectives, going beyond assigning a group of collaborators with a certain set of skills and knowledge. “We are motivated to participate in the identification of the best solution to resolve our client’s business challenges,” adds Usuga. The demands of the users of software solutions in terms of availability, performance, and security motivates the team to identify architecture designs and programming paradigms that allows them to offer the best experience to the end-user of the applications. “Consequently, we have been developing applications with clean and reactive architectures. We also offer responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-oriented applications, and self-contained, understandable, and maintainable applications that can evolve without complexity because we know that business needs are constantly changing,” mentions Usuga.
Within the IT space, Sofka’s services span agile software development, architecture definition, design and implementation, hybrid system integration (cloud-2-cloud, cloud-2-on premise, on-premise-2-on-premises), quality assurance, robotic process automation, IA, and SAP. Talking about the efficacy and benefits of these services, Usuga informs, “Understanding agile methodologies is simple but successfully implementing them is not an easy task. Most organizations do not always know where to start.” Sofka’s consultants have the required skills and experience to provide proper training and coaching to help such businesses leverage agile techniques to get their job done seamlessly and offer their products with higher quality and best business value delivered earlier. Agile software development is part of Sofka’s DNA, and hence, the firm adopts an agile framework, such as Scrum and Kanban, among others, to deliver best in class solutions to its clients. Sofka also offers consulting services to evaluate and define a company’s architecture for application and data and system integration.
Furthermore, as a part of its agile testing and automation services, Sofka offers businesses with the necessary framework to implement early quality assurance, with practices like test-driven development, behavior-driven development, automated functional testing, and exploratory testing. This allows organizations to be responsible for the quality from the beginning and achieve the goal that their products can be delivered in production earlier—and minimum errors.
The name Sofka is a portmanteau of the word software and Kaizen—a Japanese productivity philosophy that stands for continuous improvement. Accordingly, the firm’s philosophy and core values are centered on bettering and finding new ways to develop software and provide clients with the best possible services via a talented team. “We do not want to differentiate ourselves in the market by price rather by the quality of the software and services we offer and our talented team,” says Esteban Alonso, CEO, Sofka Technologies. To that end, Sofka invests heavily in recruiting individuals who have the required skills and align with the firm’s values, and retains them by providing benefits, career plans, and training.
Maximize Technology Investments, Obtain the Best Value
The team at Sofka is passionate about co-creating software solutions that allow clients to achieve their strategic objectives, going beyond assigning a group of collaborators with a certain set of skills and knowledge. “We are motivated to participate in the identification of the best solution to resolve our client’s business challenges,” adds Usuga. The demands of the users of software solutions in terms of availability, performance, and security motivates the team to identify architecture designs and programming paradigms that allows them to offer the best experience to the end-user of the applications. “Consequently, we have been developing applications with clean and reactive architectures. We also offer responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-oriented applications, and self-contained, understandable, and maintainable applications that can evolve without complexity because we know that business needs are constantly changing,” mentions Usuga.
Within the IT space, Sofka’s services span agile software development, architecture definition, design and implementation, hybrid system integration (cloud-2-cloud, cloud-2-on premise, on-premise-2-on-premises), quality assurance, robotic process automation, IA, and SAP. Talking about the efficacy and benefits of these services, Usuga informs, “Understanding agile methodologies is simple but successfully implementing them is not an easy task. Most organizations do not always know where to start.” Sofka’s consultants have the required skills and experience to provide proper training and coaching to help such businesses leverage agile techniques to get their job done seamlessly and offer their products with higher quality and best business value delivered earlier. Agile software development is part of Sofka’s DNA, and hence, the firm adopts an agile framework, such as Scrum and Kanban, among others, to deliver best in class solutions to its clients. Sofka also offers consulting services to evaluate and define a company’s architecture for application and data and system integration.
Furthermore, as a part of its agile testing and automation services, Sofka offers businesses with the necessary framework to implement early quality assurance, with practices like test-driven development, behavior-driven development, automated functional testing, and exploratory testing. This allows organizations to be responsible for the quality from the beginning and achieve the goal that their products can be delivered in production earlier—and minimum errors.
Test automation is a key element in agile development since it significantly increases the test coverage and time to market, while at the same time, lowers implementation costs and achieves a true integration between applications and modules, becoming an important enabler for continuous product delivery.
Assuring Quality and Timely Delivery
To further elaborate on their value proposition, Alonso cites the success story of a large health insurance company in the Latin American region that wanted a software application, which would allow its clients to keep track of patients’ health at the comfort of their homes. Sometimes patients do not necessarily have to be hospitalized but doctors might need to monitor and coordinate their care from the home-care setting. To provide this service and stay informed about the health of such individuals, the insurance company needed a software solution, and Sofka’s team collaborated with them and helped them create an efficient application. Today, the application allows the client to take care of over 3000 people in different cities in Colombia. At the same time, the client has also added additional capabilities to the software. For example, to avoid people going to the hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, this service allows collecting samples from home. “We are passionate about the complete experience in the construction of their technological solutions. Which is why, we at Sofka believe that the participation and collaboration of our clients—during the entire process of building a solution— is of vital importance to achieve the final objectives,” remarks Usuga.
Continuous Improvement for a Better Future
Innovation is at the heart of Sofka’s strategy. Driven by passion and commitment, the company intends to continue building software in an incremental and functional way, where businesses can quickly obtain the benefits of the solutions and achieve the highest customer satisfaction in all its projects. Alongside, Sofka also has plans to expand its geographic footprint across other Latin countries and the U.S. On the technology front, the firm is currently working on integrating innovations such as automation and AI to its offerings in order to help its customers to be more productive in their business by identifying and resolving business inefficiencies. “We are already working on prototypes and have a dedicated team for this,” states Alonso. “We envision ourselves to be the leaders in lean-agile software development in Latin America, consolidating a talented, best trained, committed and highly motivated team.”
Besides, the company also offers a robust and proven customer service product, Hibot. A SaaS and multi-agent platform, Hibot allows the inclusion of messaging tools, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Apple chat, to the omnichannel communication strategy of any company, regardless of its core business or size, integrating human agents and Chatbots. Hibot is in charge of managing communications between these social media platforms, consolidating and redirecting them to the chat channels served by the agents. Hibot is currently being used by more than 1400 agents across 17 countries in LATAM (including, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Perú, Republica Dominicana, Uruguay and Venezuela) and two countries in Europe (Spain and Portugal), processing more than two million conversations per month close to hundred milliom messages during the current year.
We do not want to differentiate ourselves in the market by price rather by the quality of the software and services we offer and our talented team
Assuring Quality and Timely Delivery
To further elaborate on their value proposition, Alonso cites the success story of a large health insurance company in the Latin American region that wanted a software application, which would allow its clients to keep track of patients’ health at the comfort of their homes. Sometimes patients do not necessarily have to be hospitalized but doctors might need to monitor and coordinate their care from the home-care setting. To provide this service and stay informed about the health of such individuals, the insurance company needed a software solution, and Sofka’s team collaborated with them and helped them create an efficient application. Today, the application allows the client to take care of over 3000 people in different cities in Colombia. At the same time, the client has also added additional capabilities to the software. For example, to avoid people going to the hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, this service allows collecting samples from home. “We are passionate about the complete experience in the construction of their technological solutions. Which is why, we at Sofka believe that the participation and collaboration of our clients—during the entire process of building a solution— is of vital importance to achieve the final objectives,” remarks Usuga.
Continuous Improvement for a Better Future
Innovation is at the heart of Sofka’s strategy. Driven by passion and commitment, the company intends to continue building software in an incremental and functional way, where businesses can quickly obtain the benefits of the solutions and achieve the highest customer satisfaction in all its projects. Alongside, Sofka also has plans to expand its geographic footprint across other Latin countries and the U.S. On the technology front, the firm is currently working on integrating innovations such as automation and AI to its offerings in order to help its customers to be more productive in their business by identifying and resolving business inefficiencies. “We are already working on prototypes and have a dedicated team for this,” states Alonso. “We envision ourselves to be the leaders in lean-agile software development in Latin America, consolidating a talented, best trained, committed and highly motivated team.”
Company
Sofka Technologies
Headquarters
Medellin, Colombia
Management
Esteban Alonso, CEO
and Otoniel Usuga, Co-Founder and COO
Description
Sofka is a leading expert in software development and quality assurance whose solutions and services ensure greater business efficiency for its clients. Sofka’s offerings enable faster project delivery, with better quality, less complexity, and optimized budget. The team at Sofka is passionate about co-creating software solutions that allow clients to achieve their strategic objectives, going beyond assigning a group of collaborators with a certain set of skills and knowledge. Within the IT space, Sofka’s services span agile software development, architecture definition, design and implementation, hybrid system integration (cloud-2-cloud, cloud-2-on premise, on-premise-2-on-premises), quality assurance, robotic process automation, IA, and SAP
