With over 15 years of experience as an executive in the Romanian IT industry, Mihail Raduta, Country Manager at Accion Labs Romania, sat down with Business Review to talk about the company’s recent entry on the Romanian market, its values and positioning, its goals and investment plans in our country and beyond, and, of course, the people and technologies that make up Accion Labs.
Business Review: You have recently launched operations in our country, so to kick off our discussion please tell us: what is Accion Labs and why Romania?
Mihail Raduta: Accion Labs is a a cloud and digital transformation services company that supports business development through emerging products and technologies. Our new centres in Romania will be integrated into Accion’s global offering and will focus on all areas of Accion’s services offering to customers in North America and Europe.
BR: What are your core values and market positioning strategy?
MR: Innovation: Strive to do things differently to achieve improved results and create a culture of creativity and innovation.
Value Creation: Enhance the brand value of Accion with our customers, employees, and investors.
Empathy and Respect: An environment that fosters collaboration, honesty, trust, and wellbeing.
Result Oriented: Sense of ownership, problem solving, better productivity, and focus on outcomes.
BR: What can you tell us about your plans in Romania, including the short, medium, and long term?
MR: In the short-term, we want to launch the centre with the core Management team and other team members in Q3 2022 and to build a centre of 100+ people in the first half of 2023. Then, we plan to build an Extended Development Centre focusing on Cloud and Digital Engineering services for a select group of customers.
As for the mid and long-term, say in the next 2-3 years, we want to build on the foundation to enlarge the development centre and serve as the hub for Accion’s delivery capability expansion in the Central and Eastern European regions.
We expect the Romania operation to be a significant part of Accion Labs’s global expansion strategy, mainly focused on Europe and the US markets.
BR: Who are the people at Accion Labs and how is the company investing in their development?
MR: Accion Labs Romania is a wholly owned subsidiary of Accions Labs USA INC., TA Associates, a Private Equity fund under the majority ownership of Accion Labs.
Regarding business growth, we plan investments of millions of euros to develop teams allocated on projects, attract 200 new employees to the company, as well as implement innovative technologies.
BR: What is your approach towards innovation, research, and development? What makes Accion Labs technologies stand out?
MR: A lot can be said about the fields in which Accion Labs is involved.
Among the areas in which Accion Labs has demonstrated its expertise at a global level, we can mention the healthcare system, artificial intelligence and machine learning, human computer interaction, and data analytics.
Healthcare:
- Secure healthcare management portal to access real-time diagnostics test results
The company wanted to develop a secure healthcare management portal that would allow users to access diagnostics test results in real time. Accion Labs was chosen as their technology partner for our solid product engineering background and deep expertise in the latest technologies including SAAS, Cloud, and Device Integration.
- Data Warehouse implementation for a large US-based Healthcare Payment Cycle Management company
One of the largest financial and administrative healthcare networks in the United States wanted to consolidate data from multiple business units into a company-wide consolidated Data Warehouse for their Business Intelligence applications.
Accion Labs built a Data Warehouse and consolidated data from multiple business units within the company to enable consistent reporting of KPI metrics. The client built multiple Business Intelligence applications that read data from this Data Warehouse, resulting in improved decision-making through actionable insights.
Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Big Data:
- How we built a powerful retail analytics engine for 30TB big data churns
Accion engagement has helped a tech company build a next-gen analytics platform that delivers better business outcomes with insightful data based on accurate predictive odelling. We achieved 5x performance improvements by re-engineering the entire data lake to the analytical engine pipeline. Also, the highly concurrent, elastic, non-blocking, and asynchronous architecture we designed reduced runtime to around 8 hours, from 30 hours previously (a saving of about 22 hours or over 70 percent) while processing 4.6 billion events.
- Data Analytics
One of the world’s most successful global asset management software companies was facing a problem of data flooding that was generating chaos across its technology infrastructure.
Accion engaged with this company to plan and implement their unique digital journey. The kick-off to the discussions happened with the scheduling of extensive deep-dive sessions wherein Accion engineers highlighted the problems with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), citing that over the years, RDBMS has been the first choice for most organisations to manage their data storage, but the fast-growing volumes of data have made it imperative for companies to build more robust data management systems that are able to handle the load. In this company’s case, the limited capability to integrate unstructured data from smart devices was choking up the system and needed a major overhaul.
