Startup Flexibility on a Multinational Scale

The experience of around 10,000 IT professionals from sixteen countries, accumulated over two and a half decades across multiple industry sectors, will soon be available to Hungarian mid- and large-sized enterprise customers. Not because a new large company is entering the scene, but because an existing service provider is rethinking its operations and plans to make its competences directly available to Hungarian users.

◼︎ We grow with our customers

adesso, based in Dortmund (see the box „A little company history”) has been present in Hungary for 15 years. However, the Hungarian subsidiary (like its offices in Spain, Bulgaria or Romania) has operated as a near-shore competence center, with the Hungarian experts employed here – 70 people in 2024 – working exclusively on projects in the DACH markets (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

„This strategy has recently changed fundamentally. The new objective is to make the industry experience, knowledge and best practices gained in the German-speaking region available to users in local markets. I joined the company nine months ago, and my task is specifically to build up the sales team and processes in Hungary, to acquire new customers from among Hungarian companies,” says Anita Cseplész, Managing Director of adesso Hungary, who also holds the position of Sales and Marketing Manager.

The company believes that the Hungarian market is mature and has the potential to be delt with seriously. Digitalization in several Hungarian industy sector is higher than even the international average – the CEO cites insurance companies or even the public sector, which offer more in customer service than most of their counterparts in the DACH region. At the same time, several trends are expected to have effect in Hungary in which adesso has considerable experience, such as the development of „green” IT systems, digital transformation and SAP S/4 HANA migration.

It’s not just size that matters

And what knowledge and experience can adesso bring to the Hungarian market? Anita Cseplész highlights three areas that distinguish adesso from similar software development companies with an international background.

The first is the company culture, the values and the professionals who embody it. The style is informal, the organization is flat, therefore decision-making is simple and quick. „There are no rigid processes or rigid circles of authority. If a decision has to be made, we meet, discuss it and proceed in a transparent way, based on common sense. The company operates on a human scale, with several offices that are open to clients, and our colleagues are always available. We only like to work with excellent professionals, but we also do our utmost to make them feel at home in the company. For a long time now, we have been steadily increasing our turnover by 25-30% a year, and we can only do this if IT professionals are not only happy to come and work for us, but also happy to stay. We have a low turnover rate, and that benefits our customers,” says the head of the Hungarian subsidiary.

The second differentiating factor is adesso’s operating model, which Anita Cseplész describes as „small for a multinational, multinational for a small company”. What does that mean? Adesso has everything you could want in a multinational supplier. The company has reached a size where it can be relied on with confidence. It has financial stability: it can finance large projects if necessary, without fear of disappearing from the market in two years’ time. Nor is their expertise limited to one area: they have more than 25 years of experience behind them, with thousands of professionals in a wide range of industries and technologies.

But they do not have the rigid, siloed operating model often found in multinational corporations. „We can easily deploy any expert from any country on any project,” says Anita Cseplész, illustrating the difference.

Smart delivery

Anita Cseplész Anita graduated from the College of Foreign Trade and later studied law. She started her career selling complex enterprise systems at Unisys, but later held similar positions at Capgemini and HP. He then went on to coordinate regional sales of SaaS services for Elsevier and ArisGlobal, giving him an international perspective. He joined the adesso team in July 2023 to set the Hungarian subsidiary on a new course. „It is important for me to be able to go beyond sales, to create lasting value in this company culture that is very attractive to me, and to transfer my foreign knowledge and experience to Hungary,” he says of his new role.

The third differentiator, which the company calls the „smart delivery” model, comes from the above. This actually refers to the highly flexible customer service options that can be optimized in a number of ways.

One way is to optimize projects from a cost perspective, begins Anita Cseplész. If it is not a priority that everyone in the project should be Hungarian national and/or the working language is English, there is no obstacle to involve European nearshore (Romanian, Bulgarian or Turkish) resources in the implementation. In this way, cost savings of up to 20-30% can be achieved without compromising on quality. The people working in the nearshore subsidiaries have been trained on the same German, Swiss and Austrian projects as the Hungarians, and their knowledge, attitude, working methods and technologies are all EU-compliant.

The second option is to optimize the project to the size of the client. If necessary, they can provide one-man consultancy packages (adwise services) for smaller clients – for example, pre-implementation ERP consultancy or cloud maturity assessment – but if needed, they can deploy hundreds of experts for a client the size of Allianz or a BMW factory. Optimizing scale also means that projects can grow with the client’s needs, with virtually no upper limit on capacity. „We can start with a smaller client or task and as they and their needs grow, we can provide more resources – in fact, the company’s motto is ‘grow together’. After a pilot we have done in Hungary, there is nothing to stop us, for example, from rolling out the solution in other countries in the region,” says Anita Cseplész.

The third element of smart delivery is that the implementation models can be diverse. There is the classic project-based software development, where something has to be built to a given specification, by a given deadline and at a given cost – something that is declining in Western Europe. But increasingly, there is also the practice of „body shopping”: when a client needs an IT specialist with a specific skill set for a specific project, at a specific time. Either they can’t find them on the market or they don’t want to hire them because they can’t provide them with a long-term job – but adesso can easily lend one or more experts from its pool of thousands of employees.

Similarly, they can put entire teams at the disposal of their clients. In the managed capacity model, the customer tells adesso what skills they need and how long they need them, and then they use this committed capacity to manage the project in-house and carry out the development. „We have our own transformation methodology and training program to support our clients in their transition to agile or near agile operations,” adds Anita Cseplész.

From strategy to operations

adesso is not a typical software development company in that it can enter the value chain well before the actual development. This can start with a business consultation, it can include the breakdown of the business strategy into IT strategy, the transformation of processes and organizational structures. „This was originally the domain of large business consultancies, but in Western Europe there is a growing demand for this kind of service. Accelerated digitalization, or green IT, requires a new way of thinking, and here clients need partners who understand both the business needs and the technological answers to those needs,” says Anita Cseplész.

The next step is IT consulting, where they can translate the IT strategy into software architecture, specific business needs into IT requirements and processes, and provide recommendations for the development of ideal technologies.

Only then does the actual software development come into play, whether it is developing new solutions, migrating and/or integrating existing systems, or customizing off-the-shelf software. In this respect, it is very important that adesso is technology neutral and does not favor any single vendor or supplier, be it hardware, development tools or cloud providers. In Germany, the company is the third largest systems integrator and one of the leading mobile app developers. And after development and delivery, they can help with the design of the operational processes, and in some cases take over the actual operation from the customer – such as the SAP AMS service, which is provided from Hungary.

„Mostly, these were created when we had developed similar solutions for different customers for the third or fourth time, and we saw what there was a significant market demand for, what good practices were missing at the customers, and we created our own software for this,” says Anita Cseplész.

They also have AI

Adesso both uses and develops AI solutions. On the one hand, GitHub Copilot is available to all employees in the group: the intelligent programming assistant multiplies the performance of developers and takes problem solving to a new level.

The company has also created its own AI chatbot. The adessoGPT, based on the GPT-4 model, makes the entire intranet easily searchable and the web interactively browsable. Because it works in-house, the questions asked do not leave the company’s infrastructure. „In the field of Gen AI, we have implemented more than 300 successful projects and we are constantly exploring the latest application areas and industry use cases,” adds Anita Cseplész.

Bringing in industry knowledge

Adesso has already been present on the Hungarian market through the Hungarian subsidiaries of its international partners, but now they are acquiring new customers „in their own right”. On the one hand, they want to seriously build on the two competences in which Hungary plays a prominent role within adesso: SAP consulting and cloud. On the other hand, they are interested in all industries where the company has built up deep sectoral knowledge, such as automotive, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, banking and insurance, transport, utilities and retail.

„Of course, we are not only presenting generic solutions to the market, but also use cases that have already been proven in the DACH region. I am sure that these solutions will also be needed by Hungarian medium-sized companies sooner or later if they want to maintain their competitiveness,” says Anita Cseplész.

„The key is not so much technology as industry knowledge,” adds the head of the Hungarian subsidiary. Good technological knowledge is relatively easy to acquire – but how to apply it to a specific industry is another matter. The automotive industry doesn’t need the same data lake as the pharmaceutical industry, nor are the processes the same in manufacturing and insurance. These industry best practices will be brought to Hungary by adesso, as well as the knowledge of how to adapt solutions across different sectors.

Adesso Hungary also follows the international motto „grow together”, i.e. grow together with the customers. They do not think in terms of short-term projects, but aim for long-term cooperation and joint business value creation. One of the best examples is the Allianz Group, which has been relying on adesso’s expertise and solutions for more than two decades.

Attractive environment, exciting challenges

The plans for the domestic market are also ambitious: they want 20 to 30 percent annual growth that is typical globally. This cannot be achieved without quality professionals. The company has offices in three major Hungarian cities (Győr, Debrecen and Pécs) in addition to Budapest, making it easier to recruit talent from the countryside, and it is also focusing on university partnerships to attract good talent from there.

But you not only need to attract them, you also need to retain them, and adesso is doing a particularly good job of that. „We are aware that one of the most effective retention forces is exciting work, and we have no shortage of that: with cutting-edge technologies, our employees can carry out special tasks at the largest international companies,” says Anita Cseplész.

All this in an attractive office environment. Adesso works in a hybrid working arrangement, but everyone has access to spacious office space, German offices are dog-friendly and adesso offices have their own restaurant and café. In the Budapest office, everyone is in by common agreement on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a quarterly office breakfast is organized for all employees. An interesting feature of the latter is that everyone can go to the office of their choice, from Debrecen to Pécs or from Győr to Budapest, where there is a foosball table and a pleasant social area.