Lessons learnt during my 18years long journey leading Cytech to the international market

1. who we are and what we DO
A journey through time
looking back and moving forward

2. What we do

3. What we doWe build software products for telecoms focusing on quality and efficiency
3
mCore
Modular software platform for
Mobile Marketing, Messaging
and Payments
Dashboards
Business Intelligence and
Analytics platform for Telecoms
ProSMS
Web SMS Software for SMEs in
Greece and Romania

4. Who we are
Small agile team of professionals with expertise in software development, DevOps, product
development and technical support. Passionate people who love to learn new things and
share knowledge and experience.
4
Software Dev
We craft software with passion
in an agile way so we adapt to
changing needs
Product Dev
We design and build our
products based on customer
needs following lean practices
DevOps
We design the automated
mechanisms to operate and
maintain our software

5. What we achievedWe managed to expand to 15 counties with almost the same team size
5
Thailand
Mobile Marketing
Runs successful campaigns
for big retailers
Mobile Payments
Offers an alternative and
modern way to pay via mobile
Norway
SMS Wholesale
Transports huge
volumes of SMS
Brazil
Kenya
S.Arabia
Ghana
Greece
VAS and PSMS
Runs VAS for social media
and int'l football clubs

6. How we did itWhat really helped us expand to more and bigger customers all over the world maintaining our flexibility
6
2014
2015
2010
K8s
CI/CD
Cloud
SaaS
2017

7. 7
2014
2015
2010
CI/CD
• Automated testing, integration
and delivery
• Release every two weeks
• Installations update in 1 day
Cloud
• High Availability, Fail over, no
hardware maintenance
• Release every month
• Installations update takes 3-4
days.
SaaS
• Common Infrastructure with no
real automation
• Release every two months
• Installations update takes a week

8. More free time
To develop new features or spend
with friends and family
Happier Customers
Competitive advantage and
selling point especially for big
customers
Sleep at night
Be sure that everything works
well and less incidents and
technical support
8

9. Lessons Learnt

10. 10
“A good idea is about ten percent and
implementation and hard work, and
luck is 90 percent.
Guy Kawasaki

11. the
teamThe right people make
the best products and
have fun in the process
cloning effect
Diversity in terms of skills, mindset,
gender stimulates creativity
multiple disciplines
Companies and products need all sort
of different people
compatible mindset
Don’t underestimate the way of
thinking and the personality

12. team
diversityProducts need knowledge
and experience in many
different areas
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 all the above are marketing
no they are not!
 business strategy
isn’t optional otherwise you go with the flow
 product development
is crucial and hard to do it right
 software products
are not about software development

13. objectives 2016
Clear goals
• Goals has to be unambiguous
and visible to all.
• Transparency and team
involvement make uncertainty
and nervousness disappear.
where we want to go
• Company-wide and high level
• Teams and People can relate with
them
• They need time to be reached but
they can also be changed
key
results
are we moving to the
right direction?
• Measurable
• Checked often
• React early
• Evaluate them every quarter
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14. 
PROCESS
Create a process
to deal with
changes.

Try things
Create an
environment for
experimentation

Create time
Experimentation
needs time and
often leads to a
failure

Involve Everyone
You never know
where a good idea
will come from

Don’t overdo
You are not
Google. You
cannot afford too
many changes
Embrace
changeEverything is always
under continuous
change, products,
market, processes , skills
14

15. NEXT STEPS

16. mCore
dashboardsBusiness Intelligence
Software for the
Telecoms Market
data visualisation
Real time charts and dashboards help
understand the status or the issue
decision assistant
Recommendation engine so business
decisions are taken based on data
Data Analysis
Mobile messaging and payments data
are ingested and normalised

17. Game on board
Voice Assistant for board games
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reading rules
No time to read the rules. Spend
your limited time in playing the
game
talk to players
Publishers get real time
feedback from the players and
have analytics about the
gameplay
no more disputes
Ask Leo and he will solve the
argument immediately

18. Vagelis Antoniadis
Contact me on
18
www.cytechmobile.com
twitter.com/vanton_
www.linkedin.com/in/vanton
vanton@cytech.gr
www.cytechmobile.com
Science and Technology Park of Crete, Heraklion, Greece
Phone: +30.2810.314127 - Email: info@cytechmobile.com