Start from a cold call. It was summer of 2018 when LTE had been finalizing one contract and we had been conducting dozens of cold calls to dispose of resources expected to be released. Our focus was at the United State or EU companies. Because it is much predictable for Ukrainian teams to work on these markets. Then I got a request from Singapore. This guy, Jeremy Tan, told me that his client needs performance test engineering. And we can take part in this competition. But, how to react to a request from Singapore? The same question had his client as well, how to work with a team in Ukraine? We started long on-line negotiations. I knew there is not only my team in this raising. After a few video-calls with Jeremy and his client, we finally defined our experience in running performance testing from scratch, it is what the client really needed. In November 2018 we traveled to Singapore
The contract. Historically Ukraine and Singapore have strong diplomatic relationships. Nevertheless, the contract's statements should be compliant with regulations both of Singapore and Ukrainian laws, which are a bit different (there are more regulations in Ukraine, to be honest). Jeremy is in one's element in Singapore laws, so we passed this step confidently. The first payment had been processing very slow because the bank required a lot of confirmations (against money laundering and regions under sanctions) before sending money to the new correspondent overseas. There is one way to pass this - good coordination from both sides.
Together to grow. When you start something from scratch, the initial step requires a lot of expertise. It is important to choose the right approach and build the framework which best fits a company. But the next step is to scale and grow. After the LTE team built a framework and set a repeatable process of performance testing including CI/CD, we started a transition phase. The transmission from external experts to the internal team on the client-side. In fact, a performance engineer is a rare expertise in Singapore. Most of the candidates are expats. To mitigate this we decided to invite interns from local universities for an internship as a performance analyst. This idea came true in April 2020 even during the lockdown, I think they are the first on-line interns ever, but they are!
Conclusion. Asia and Singapore is an amazing place to grow for an IT services company. There are a lot of startups that need professional services like Performance testing, capacity planning, infrastructure cost optimization e.t.c. And we found not only a client but a friend Jeremy Tan, a trustful partner in Asia who is fetching the best talents in the world to make Singapore stronger.