Opening a technology operation in a new country can look relatively straightforward.

Choose the market. Set up the infrastructure. Recruit engineers.

Those are usually the easier parts.

The harder bit is building a team that actually becomes part of the company. Finding the right people, giving them meaningful work and making sure the new operation doesn’t end up as a satellite somewhere on the edge of the organisation.

When it works, what starts as additional engineering capacity can become a real technology capability.

That experience is part of the foundation Globawise is built on.

Building from the ground up

The experience behind Globawise spans several technology businesses and different stages of growth. Earlier in their careers,Alexander Drangajov and Rob Wirszycz helped establish the Sofia operation of Reflective Solutions, a UK performance-testing software company with operations in London, Boston and Sofia. The Sofia team became its R&D operation, developing technology used by international customers including Vodafone, Nissan, AIG and Virgin Atlantic. Reflective Solutions was later acquired by SPO Global, with software development continuing from Sofia.

Alexander later co-founded and led Questers, where the same experience of building technology capability in Bulgaria continued with international companies, including Javelin Group, the UK retail strategy and digital transformation business. Dedicated engineering teams were built in Sofia and later Plovdiv, working as part of Javelin’s wider organisation. Javelin was subsequently acquired by Accenture in 2015, providing the foundation for Accenture’s technology presence in Bulgaria, which has since grown to more than 1,700 employees.

Another was Ocado Technology, which established its Sofia engineering operation through a build-operate-transfer partnership. The team worked on robotics, machine learning, simulation, data science, warehouse control and other parts of Ocado’s technology platform. It grew to nearly 100 people in little more than a year before the team supported the spin-out into the standalone Ocado Sofia centre.

Today, Ocado describes Sofia as an important part of its global organisation, working across engineering, product, AI, machine learning and data science.

What these experiences have in common is not simply that the teams became substantial. It is how they got there. They started with a focused requirement and relatively limited upfront commitment, then grew as the delivery worked, the results became visible and confidence increased. That kind of organic growth reduces the risk of entering a new market: prove the capability first, then invest behind what is working rather than building a large organisation on assumptions.

Start small and start with the capability you actually need. Find the right people for a real problem, integrate them properly into the organisation and let the operation grow from demonstrated value.

That also means giving the new team meaningful work. Good engineers are much easier to attract when they’re being asked to solve difficult problems rather than simply absorb tasks from somewhere else.

And local doesn’t have to mean separate. You need enough infrastructure and leadership on the ground to make the operation work, while keeping the people close to the wider technology organisation.

Sometimes that grows into a larger dedicated team. Sometimes the requirement stays small and specialist. And sometimes, as with Ocado, the client ultimately wants to own the capability directly.

The tools have changed. The problem hasn’t.

AI is changing how much engineering capacity companies need and what individual engineers can produce. We think that makes the traditional outsourcing proposition based on adding ever more developers increasingly questionable.

It doesn’t make specialist expertise less important.

Companies looking at a new technology location still have some fairly basic questions. Can we find the expertise we need? Can we attract the right people? Can we make the team work as part of our organisation? And how much do we really need to invest before we know this is going to work?

Those questions are part of why we built Globawise the way we did.

We help companies establish and grow specialist technology capability from Sofia, whether that starts with one expert, a small integrated team or eventually something much larger.

There doesn’t need to be a grand commitment on day one.

Start small. Build something that works. Grow from there.